The Crossing(54)

He drew slowly on the cigarette. He studied the rising smoke. As if in its slow uncoiling lay the lineaments of the history he told. Dream or memory or builded stone. He tapped the ash into the bowl.

The people of the town came and they stood about. At a certain distance. They were interested to see what God would do with such a man. Perhaps he was a crazy person. Perhaps a saint. He paid them no mind. He paced and muttered into his bible and he thumbed the pages. Overhead in the vault were frescoes depicting the very events he pondered. On the west wall of the dome the clay nests of golondrinas mortared up among the fading vestments of the saints. From time to time in his circling he’d pause and hold his book aloft and thump at a page with his finger and address his God at large. This is what they saw. An old hermit. A man with no history. Some said a holy man come among them and some a lunatic and many were scandalized who’d not heard God addressed before in such a manner. Not seen God bearded in his very house.

It seemed that what he wished, this man, was to strike some colindancia with his Maker. Assess boundaries and metes. See that lines were drawn and respected. Who could think such a reckoning possible? The boundaries of the world are those of God’s devising. With God there can be no reckoning. With what would one bargain?

They sent for the priest. The priest came and spoke with the man. The priest outside the church. The solitary parishioner within. Beneath the shadow of the perilous vault. The priest spoke to this misguided man of the nature of God and of the spirit and the will and of the meaning of grace in men’s lives and the old man heard him out and nodded his head at certain salient points and when the priest was done this old man raised his book aloft and shouted at the priest. You know nothing. That is what he shouted. You know nothing.

The people looked at the priest. To see how he would respond. The priest studied the man and then went away again. The conviction with which the old man spoke had jarred his heart and he weighed the old man’s words and was troubled because of course the old man’s words were true ones. And if the old man knew that then what else must he know?

He returned the next day. And the day after. People came to attend. Scholars of the town. To hear what was said on either side. The old man at his pacing under the shadow of the vault. The priest outside. The old man thumbing his book with a terrible dexterity. Like a moneycounter. The priest countering from those high canonical principles to which he gave such latitude. Both of them heretics to the bone.

He leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette. He held up a finger. As if to countenance caution. The sun had entered the room by the south window and certain of the cats had risen to stretch, to rearrange themselves.

With this difference, he said. With this difference. The priest wagered nothing. He’d nothing at hazard. He stood on no such ground as the crazed old man. Under no such shadow. Rather he chose to stand outside the critical edifice of his own church and by this choice he sacrificed his words of their power to witness.

The old man by whatever instinct stood on ground at once blessed and fraughtful. This was his choice, this his gesture. All agreed his testimony was a powerful one. The strength of his conviction was plain to them. In his words there was little measure and little of restraint. In his new life the libertine was out. Do you see? By his arrogance he had engaged the living thing. On that perilous ground he had made of himself the only witness there can ever be and if some saw in his eyes the rapture of madness what else would one look for in one who had enjoined the God of the universe on ground of that God’s own choosing? For that is always the nature of such ground, perilous and transitory. And it is indeed so that you must make your case there or nowhere.

And the priest? A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man. Something of a philosopher. Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all. He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So. The priest in the very generosity of his spirit stood in mortal peril and knew it not. He believed in a boundless God without center or circumference. By this very formlessness he’d sought to make God manageable. This was his colindancia. In his grandness he had ceded all terrain. And in this colindancia God had no say at all.