We’ll go to church together -‘
We got there early and sat down at the front, facing the pulpit. Briney caught Dr
Zeke’s eye and held it, all through the sermon, Sunday after Sunday.
Dr Zeke had a nervous breakdown and had to take a leave of absence.
Briney and I did not work out all our rules for sex and love and marriage too
easily. We were trying to do two things at once: create a whole new system of just
conduct in marriage – a code that any civilised society would have taught us as
children – and simultaneously create an arbitrary and utterly pragmatic set of rules
for public conduct to protect us from the Bible-belt arbiters of morals and conduct.
We were not missionaries trying to convert Mrs Grundy to our way of thinking; we
simply wanted to hold up a mask so that she would never suspect that we did not
agree with her way of thinking. In a society in which it is a moral offence to be
different from your neighbours your only escape is never to let them find out.
Slowly over the years we learned that many Howard families had been forced to face
up to the fact that the Howard Foundation programme simply did not fit the
Midwestern Bible belt… yet the majority of Howard candidates came from the Middle
West. Eventually these conflicts and contradictions resulted in most Howards either
dropping out of organised religion, or paying it lip service as Brian and I did,
until we left Kansas City in the late thirties and quit pretending.
So far as I know, there are no organised religions in Boondock, or anywhere on
Tellus Tertius. Question: is this an inevitable evolutionary development as mankind
approaches true civilisation? Or is that wishful thinking?
Or did I die in 1982? Boondock is so utterly unlike Kansas City that I have trouble
believing that they are in the same universe. Now that I am locked up incommunicado
in what appears to be a madhouse run by its inmates it is easy to believe that a
traffic accident that hit an old, old woman in 1982 was fatal… and that these
dreams of weirdly different worlds are merely the delirium of dying. Am I heavily
sedated and on I.C. life support in some Albuquerque hospital while they decide
whether or not to pull the plug? Are they waiting to hear from Woodrow for
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authorisation? As I recall, I listed him as `Next of Kin’ in my wallet.
Are `Lazarus Long’ and ‘Boondock’ a senile fantasy?
Must ask Pixel next time he visits me. His English is scarce but I’ve no one else to
ask.
One fine thing we did even before we got our new house furnished: we got the rest of
our books out of storage. In the crackerbox we had been living in we had had room
for only a couple of dozen volumes, and that precious few only by storing them on
the top shelf in the kitchen, a spot I could reach only by standing on a stool –
something I did not risk when I was big with child. Once I waited three days for
Brian to come home from Galena, intending to ask him to reach down my Golden
Treasury for me – I could see it; couldn’t reach it – then, when he did get home, I
forgot it.
I had two boxes of books in storage, Brian had more than that… and I had
`inherited’ case after case of my father’s books. He had written to me when he went
back into the Army to tell me that he had had them packed and shipped to Kansas City
Storage and Warehousing – receipts enclosed. His bank was instructed to keep the
storage paid up… but if I wanted to give them a home, that would please him.
Perhaps someday he might ask for some of them back, but in the meantime treat them
as my own. ‘Books are meant to be read and loved, not stored.’
So we got our printed friends out of bondage and into the light and air – although