An Honest Ghost by Whitaker Rick

Author:Whitaker, Rick [Whitaker, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Jaded Ibis Press
Published: 2013-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

36.

“It’s because”—Joe caught his breath—“like the book puts it: ‘Whosoever shall say unto this mountain be thou removed into the sea an’—uh-uh, yeah—‘an’ shall not doubt that those things which he hath sayeth shall come to pass, why, man, that guy is gonna have just exactly what he sayeth!’” He was leaning over the table, his hands clenching it, and trembling. As it happened, Joe had a truly sardonic sense of the absurd, and he was—as I would later learn—a deeply humane person. “God seeks people, good people, of course, he doesn’t need the wicked and capricious—especially the capricious, who decide one thing today and say something else tomorrow.” Perhaps this willingness to question certainties and prejudices just ran in the family. “I notice that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling,” he complained. It felt like an episode in a dream, arbitrary and drenched with emotion.

Youth is a dreadful condition, I thought. He has a way of making everything I do seem unimportant. I turned away and straightened the unmade bed. I wobble a bit when I stand. He was right. It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy.

“To the Renaissance!” he kept shouting.

That sort of thing is all right up to a certain age, no doubt, but if something isn’t done to divert him, there is a good danger of his developing into a long-haired and anaemic ascetic.

“Just because it’s Italian doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable.”

How many people have had so understanding a father?

“Pah!” cried Joe, in deep disgust. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having them, those we spent with a favorite book. “And she ain’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise.”

Quoting gets on my nerves.

Childhood seldom interests me at all. Had he been suppressing it? He began to wake in the night; the worried thoughts which came disturbed him, and in the morning there remained a residue of the night’s unease.

He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary. “Father,” returned Joe, “I know what I say and mean—well, better than you do when you hear me.”

But I reflected that surely I had always known him to be a performer, even if the mechanics of the performance had been invisible to me. It is bewitching. Aloud, I said: “The unforeseen is what is beautiful.”

What I needed in the end was just to love the child. How I long to surrender!

“How did that damned thing get in here?” he asks.

His mother is there. I couldn’t have dressed her up better myself.

“Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.” She stared at him pensively as he exhorted her, pleaded, warned her.

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