THE MORNING WATCH
141
and careful as
if
Christ had never been crucified before, and could
never rise from the dead. Yet now that he desired to retrieve his
waking awareness he could not, but only knelt, sad, trying to taste the
peculiar quality of the night and to distinguish it from other auras
of momentousness, until, realizing how he had misled himself, he
gripped his hair and pressed
his
eyeballs the more tightly, repeating
in
his
heart: Jesus our Lord is crucified. Jesus our Lord is crucified.
He saw the Head.
Thrown with fury, a shoe struck the wall next Jimmy's bed:
the noise broke upon Richard with sickening fright. Then Hobe's
voice:
"All right some mothuhf--kin sonofabitch is agoana git the
livin s--t beat outn
him
if I find out who throwed that!"
"Shet yer God damn mouf," said a coldly intense, deeper voice
at the far end of the dormitory.
"Yeah fer Chrise sakes
shut up,"
said another voice, as several
neutral voices said "Shut up."
In the rigid silence Richard and Jimmy dressed quickly while
Hobe waited. Carrying their shoes they stole barefoot on tiptoe from
the room and along the hall and past the iron cot which had been
set up by the stairhead for this one night for Father Whitman. They
could just make out how he lay there in the dark in his long white
habit, giving off a current of silent and ominous power because they
could not be sure as they passed whether he was asleep or aware of
them; tlle clacking of
his
tin clock filled the pine stairwell with its
flagrant loudness. They tried hard not to creak the stairs. The pit
of Richard's stomach still felt as it did when, without being too mad
or too desperate to care, he knew it was impossible not to fight. By
trying hard he was able to restore whole to his mind the thom–
crowned image of his Lord, but now it was not as he had seen
it in prayer beside
his
cot but was very little different from a pious
painting he knew: the eyes rolled up in a way that seemed affected,
and in his cold sickness the image meant little to him. It was not until
they came onto the back porch that the open night put them once
more at their ease.
"Sonofabitchin mothuhf--kin bastud," Hobe said. "At shoe
bettah be gone by mawnin or
some
bastudly c--ksuckuh's agoana
be sorry."
