THE MORNING WATCH
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word; once again he wondered why, and stopped himself from won–
dering why because this was no time to. Don't take it literally, he
told himself firmly; but the literal words remained and were even
more firm: make drunk. Intoxicate. Good ole whiskey, he suddenly
heard in
his
mind, and he remembered how, drinking sodapop in
~noxville,
boys
slightly more worldly than he would twist the bottle
deep into the mouth and cock it up vertically to drink, and taking
it down, breathless, would pat their stomachs or rub them in circles
and gasp, "Ahhh, good ole whiskey!" But this wasn't even on
whiskey. On blood. Jesus' blood, too. His uncle had once sneered,
"There is a pudding filled with blood," scornfully exploding the first
syllable of "pudding," and Richard had been both shocked and
amused, and he was shocked to find that he remembered it with
amusement now. Forgive us our trespasses, he whispered, shutting his
eyes tight.
It
was only a hymn, and so it was not as bad to make
fun of as some things were. But the blood was "drawn from Em–
manuel's veins," so that did make it pretty awful. And his uncle
had said it with a kind of hatred which included much more than the
hymn: all of religion, and everybody who was religious, even his own
sister, Richard's mother, and his Aunt Patty, and him, Richard, and
his own sister. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us, he prayed, and pushed the matter out of his
mind. He does like us all the same, he reflected, same as grandpa does..
They just don't like the Church.
Passion of Ch--
Water from the side of Christ wash me; and he felt that his
thoughts badly needed washing:
Passion of Christ strengthen me:
Within Thy Wounds hide me, he thought swiftly and with
great uneasiness, hugging the ground and the leaf coverage as if
beneath the skimming of a bird of prey: but try as he could, the
image plunged and took him. An older boy, the only one Richard
knew who also liked to read, had with great sophistication and de–
light explained to
him
what was meant, in Shakespeare's
Venus and
Adonis,
by the words
he saw more wounds than one,
and
this
had
instantly become identical in his mind with a rawly intimate glimpse
he
had had, three or four years before, of Minnielee Henley when
they were climbing a tree; and now with these words
within Thy
