Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She began to pace restlessly up and down the room, as had ever been her wont in moments of emotion. Her face grew ominous, heavy and brooding; the fine line of her mouth was a little marred; her eyes were less clear, less the servants of her spirit than the slaves of her anxious and passionate body; the red scar on her cheek stood out like a wound. Then quite suddenly she had opened the door, and was staring at the dimly lighted staircase. She took a step forward and then stopped; appalled, dumbfounded at herself, at this thing she was doing. And as she stood there as though turned to stone, she remembered another and spacious study, she remembered a lanky colt of a girl whose glance had kept straying towards the windows; she remembered a man who had held out his hand: ‘Stephen, come here. . . . What is honour, my daughter?’ Honour, good God! Was this her honour? Mary, whose nerves had been strained to breaking! A dastardly thing it would be to drag her through the maze of passion, with no word of warning. Was she to know nothing of what lay before her, of the price she would have to pay for such love? She was young and completely ignorant of life; she knew only that she loved, and the young were ardent. She would give all that Stephen might ask of her and more, for the young were not only ardent but generous. And through giving all she would be left defenceless, neither forewarned nor forearmed against a world that would turn like a merciless beast and rend her. It was horrible. No, Mary must not give until she had counted the cost of that gift, until she was restored in body and mind, and was able to form a considered judgment.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  saw what the old man had shown me that I hadn’t been able to recall until now—how each thought and action fueled the momentum of the story, how vulnerable we were to forgetting, all of us. The final bell rang and I barely made it to my room, where I summoned a bit of soberness to save my life. I brushed my teeth so I wouldn’t smell like a drunk. “Breathe,” said the dorm assistant, whose job it was on Friday and Saturday nights to go to each room and smell each girl’s breath for alcohol. She stood poised with her pen, ready to make a mark against my name. I admired her clean life. Her parents showed up every weekend to take her home, and returned her with chili and fresh bread. She stayed on the safe side of rules. I breathed. Then breathed again easily when she marked me present and sober. No one had seen Lupita. Georgette floated into our room. “By the way,” she said coolly, “Mrs. Wilhelm is looking for you. She wants you to come to her office.” I was still drunk when I entered Mrs. Wilhelm’s office, though I had learned to hide it. Lupita was sobbing. Mrs. Wilhelm looked disappointed. “I want to go home. I want to go back to Venus,” Lupita cried as she buried her face in her arms. I had failed to warn her in time, and I had failed the trust of Mrs. Wilhelm, who was the only person who had ever stood with me against the lies of my stepfather. Now Lupita would get sent home, not to Venus but to the father who had been sleeping with her since she was ten. “Were you with Lupita tonight?” Mrs. Wilhelm asked me. Immediately I thought of Georgette, the snitch. But I knew that wasn’t really what mattered. The truth was a path clearer than anything else, a shining luminous bridge past all human failures. I could see the old man on the moon who always demanded nothing less. “Yes, I was with Lupita,” I confessed. I knew I was most likely dooming myself to the house of my stepfather. “Go take care of her,” Mrs. Wilhelm said. “I will talk with the two of you tomorrow when you’re sober.” Then she slapped each of us with a month of restriction. “I need you here so I can keep a closer eye on you,” she said. I led Lupita back to her room. All night I held her while she cried for her mother, for home, all night, as we flew through the stars to the planet Venus. WEST West is the direction of endings. It is the doorway to the ancestors, the direction of tests. It represents leaving and being left and learning to find the road in the darkness.

• From Trash (1988)

  I n college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him. It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys. “You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The final bell rang and I barely made it to my room, where I summoned a bit of soberness to save my life. I brushed my teeth so I wouldn’t smell like a drunk. “Breathe,” said the dorm assistant, whose job it was on Friday and Saturday nights to go to each room and smell each girl’s breath for alcohol. She stood poised with her pen, ready to make a mark against my name. I admired her clean life. Her parents showed up every weekend to take her home, and returned her with chili and fresh bread. She stayed on the safe side of rules. I breathed. Then breathed again easily when she marked me present and sober. No one had seen Lupita. Georgette floated into our room. “By the way,” she said coolly, “Mrs. Wilhelm is looking for you. She wants you to come to her office.” I was still drunk when I entered Mrs. Wilhelm’s office, though I had learned to hide it. Lupita was sobbing. Mrs. Wilhelm looked disappointed. “I want to go home. I want to go back to Venus,” Lupita cried as she buried her face in her arms. I had failed to warn her in time, and I had failed the trust of Mrs. Wilhelm, who was the only person who had ever stood with me against the lies of my stepfather. Now Lupita would get sent home, not to Venus but to the father who had been sleeping with her since she was ten. “Were you with Lupita tonight?” Mrs. Wilhelm asked me. Immediately I thought of Georgette, the snitch. But I knew that wasn’t really what mattered. The truth was a path clearer than anything else, a shining luminous bridge past all human failures. I could see the old man on the moon who always demanded nothing less. “Yes, I was with Lupita,” I confessed. I knew I was most likely dooming myself to the house of my stepfather. “Go take care of her,” Mrs. Wilhelm said. “I will talk with the two of you tomorrow when you’re sober.” Then she slapped each of us with a month of restriction. “I need you here so I can keep a closer eye on you,” she said. I led Lupita back to her room. All night I held her while she cried for her mother, for home, all night, as we flew through the stars to the planet Venus. [image "border-orna.eps" file=Image00006.jpg] WEST [image "crazy%20brave%20symbols" file=Image00013.jpg] West is the direction of endings. It is the doorway to the ancestors, the direction of tests. It represents leaving and being left and learning to find the road in the darkness. [image "border-orna.eps" file=Image00006.jpg] [image "6749.jpg" file=Image00014.jpg] ne night as I raced down the sidewalk at Indian school to a dance at the canteen, I accidentally ran smack into an older Cherokee student and fell. He helped me hobble over to the porch of the boys’ dorm.

• From Trash (1988)

  “You are a pure fool,” she said. “Send back the wheelchair, but let’s keep the TV. It’ll give us something to watch when Arlene starts going on about how good Mama’s doing.” Mama had had three years of pretty good health before this last illness. It was a remission that we almost convinced ourselves was a cure. The only thing she complained about was the ulcer that kept her from ever really putting back on any weight. Then, when she was in seeing the doctor about the ulcer, he had put his hand on her neck and palpated a lump the two of them could feel. “This is it,” Mama had told me on the phone that weekend last spring. “I’m not going back into chemo again.” She had been serious, but Jo and I steamrolled her back into treatment. There were a few bad weeks when we wondered if what we were doing was right, but Mama had come through strong. I convinced myself we had done the right thing. Still, when afterward Mama was so weak and slow to recover, guilt had pushed me to take a leave from my job and go stay at the old tract house near the Frito Lay plant. “We’ll get some real time together,” Mama said when I arrived. “You need rest,” I told her. “We’ll rest.” But that was not what Mama had in mind. The first morning she got me up to drink watery coffee and plan what we would do. There was one stop at the new doctor’s office, but after that, she swore, we would have fun. For three days, Mama dragged me around. We walked through the big malls in the acrid air-conditioning in the mornings and spent the afternoons over at the jai alai fronton watching the athletes with their long lobster-claw devices on their arms thrusting the tiny white balls high up into the air and catching them as easily as if those claws were catcher’s mitts. I watched close but could not figure out how the game was meant to be played. Mama just bet on her favorites—boys with tight silk shirts and flashing white smiles. “They all know who I am,” Mama told me. I nodded as if I believed her, but then a beautiful young man came up and paused by Mama’s seat to squeeze her wrist. “Rafael,” Mama said immediately. “This is my oldest daughter.” “Cannot be,” Rafael said. He never lifted his eyes to me, just leaned in to whisper into Mama’s ear. I was watching her neck as his lips hovered at her hairline. I almost missed the bill she pressed into his palm. “You give him money?” I said after he had wandered back down the steeply pitched stairs. “Nothing much.” Mama looked briefly embarrassed. She wiped her neck and turned her head away from me. “I’ve known him since he started here. He’s the whole support of his family.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Sir,’ replied the maid, continuing to weep, ‘it concerns Ruggieri d’Aieroli. You know what a headstrong lad he is? Well, he took a fancy to me, and what with my fear of him on the one hand and my love for him on the other, a month or two ago I was obliged to become his mistress. When he discovered you were not going to be here last night, he talked me into allowing him into your house to sleep with me in my room. He said he was thirsty, but I hadn’t a drop of wine or water to offer him. I couldn’t go downstairs without being seen by your good lady, who was in the drawing-room, but I remembered having seen a bottle of water in your bedroom, and so I ran to fetch it, gave it him to drink, and put the bottle back again where I had found it. They tell me you’ve been playing merry hell about it, and I freely confess that it was wrong of me to do it, but then everybody makes a blunder occasionally. I can only say that I am very sorry, not only for doing what I did, but also for Ruggieri’s sake, because he is about to lose his life over it. I therefore beseech you with all my heart to forgive me and let me go and see what I can do to help Ruggieri.’ Angry though he was to hear what she had done, the doctor had difficulty in keeping a straight face. ‘You have been hoist with your own petard,’ he replied. ‘For you thought you had a young man who would shake your skin-coat well and truly last night, instead of which you had a slug-abed. Now go and see about saving your lover, and take good care in future not to bring him into the house again, otherwise I shall make you pay for it twice over.’ Feeling that she had emerged with flying colours from the first of her engagements, the maid hurried round as quickly as possible to the prison and wheedled the gaoler into letting her speak to Ruggieri. And after telling him what he was to say to the judge if he wanted to be saved, she actually succeeded in getting the judge himself to grant her a hearing. The judge saw that she was a tasty-looking dish, and thought he would have just one little nibble before listening to what she had to say. Knowing that she would obtain a better hearing, the girl did not object in the slightest, and when the snack was finished she picked herself up and said: ‘Sir, you are holding Ruggieri d’Aieroli here on a charge of theft, but you’ve arrested the wrong man.’

• From Trash (1988)

  Then, when she was in seeing the doctor about the ulcer, he had put his hand on her neck and palpated a lump the two of them could feel. “This is it,” Mama had told me on the phone that weekend last spring. “I’m not going back into chemo again.” She had been serious, but Jo and I steamrolled her back into treatment. There were a few bad weeks when we wondered if what we were doing was right, but Mama had come through strong. I convinced myself we had done the right thing. Still, when afterward Mama was so weak and slow to recover, guilt had pushed me to take a leave from my job and go stay at the old tract house near the Frito Lay plant. “We’ll get some real time together,” Mama said when I arrived. “You need rest,” I told her. “We’ll rest.” But that was not what Mama had in mind. The first morning she got me up to drink watery coffee and plan what we would do. There was one stop at the new doctor’s office, but after that, she swore, we would have fun. For three days, Mama dragged me around. We walked through the big malls in the acrid air-conditioning in the mornings and spent the afternoons over at the jai alai fronton watching the athletes with their long lobster-claw devices on their arms thrusting the tiny white balls high up into the air and catching them as easily as if those claws were catcher’s mitts. I watched close but could not figure out how the game was meant to be played. Mama just bet on her favorites—boys with tight silk shirts and flashing white smiles. “They all know who I am,” Mama told me. I nodded as if I believed her, but then a beautiful young man came up and paused by Mama’s seat to squeeze her wrist. “Rafael,” Mama said immediately. “This is my oldest daughter.” “Cannot be,” Rafael said. He never lifted his eyes to me, just leaned in to whisper into Mama’s ear. I was watching her neck as his lips hovered at her hairline. I almost missed the bill she pressed into his palm. “You give him money?” I said after he had wandered back down the steeply pitched stairs. “Nothing much.” Mama looked briefly embarrassed. She wiped her neck and turned her head away from me. “I’ve known him since he started here. He’s the whole support of his family.” I looked down at the young men. They were like racehorses tossing their heads about, their thick hair cut short or tied back in clubs at their napes. Once the game started they were suddenly running and leaping, bouncing off the net walls and barely avoiding the fast-moving balls. All around me gray-headed women with solid bodies shrieked and jumped in excitement.

• From Trash (1988)

  Which one was I? Survivors do hate themselves, I know, over the core of fierce self-love, never understanding, always asking, “Why me and not her, not him?” There is such mystery in it, and I have hated myself as much as I have loved others, hated the simple fact of my own survival. Having survived, am I supposed to say something, do something, be something? I loved my Cousin Butch. He had this big old head, pale thin hair and enormous, watery eyes. All the cousins did, though Butch’s head was the largest, his hair the palest. I was the dark-headed one. All the rest of the family seemed pale carbons of each other in shades of blond, though later on everybody’s hair went brown or red, and I didn’t stand out so. Butch and I stood out—I because I was so dark and fast, and he because of that big head and the crazy things he did. Butch used to climb on the back of my Uncle Lucius’s truck, open the gas tank and hang his head over, breathe deeply, strangle, gag, vomit, and breathe again. It went so deep, it tingled in your toes. I climbed up after him and tried it myself, but I was too young to hang on long, and I fell heavily to the ground, dizzy and giggling. Butch could hang on, put his hand down into the tank and pull up a cupped palm of gas, breathe deep and laugh. He would climb down roughly, swinging down from the door handle, laughing, staggering, and stinking of gasoline. Someone caught him at it. Someone threw a match. “I’ll teach you.” Just like that, gone before you understand. I wake up in the night screaming, “No, no, I won’t!” Dirty water rises in the back of my throat, the liquid language of my own terror and rage. “Hold me. Hold me.” Jesse rolls over on me; her hands grip my hipbones tightly. “I love you. I love you. I’m here,” she repeats. I stare up into her dark eyes, puzzled, afraid. I draw a breath in deeply, smile my bland smile. “Did I fool you?” I laugh, rolling away from her. Jesse punches me playfully, and I catch her hand in the air. “My love,” she whispers, and cups her body against my hip, closes her eyes. I bring my hand up in front of my face and watch the knuckles, the nails as they tremble, tremble. I watch for a long time while she sleeps, warm and still against me. James went blind. One of the uncles got him in the face with home-brewed alcohol. Lucille climbed out the front window of Aunt Raylene’s house and jumped. They said she jumped. No one said why. My Uncle Matthew used to beat my Aunt Raylene.

• From Trash (1988)

  I sat back on my heels and hugged my knees, humming. Revivals are funny. People get pretty enthusiastic, but they sometimes forget just which hymn it is they’re singing. I grinned to myself and watched the men near the road punch each other lightly and curse in a friendly fashion. You bastard. You son of a bitch. The preacher said something I didn’t understand. There was a moment of silence, and then a pure tenor voice rose up into the night sky. The spit soured in my mouth. They had a real singer in there, a real gospel choir. SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT . . . COMING FOR TO CARRY ME HOME . . . AS I WALKED OUT IN THE STREETS OF LAREDO . . . SWEET JESUS . . . LIFT ME UP, LIFT ME UP IN THE AIR. . . . The night seemed to wrap all around me like a blanket. My insides felt as if they had melted, and I could just feel the wind in my mouth. The sweet gospel music poured through me and made all my nastiness, all my jealousy and hatred, swell in my heart. I knew. I knew I was the most disgusting person in the world. I didn’t deserve to live another day. I started hiccupping and crying. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.” How could I live with myself? How could God stand me? Was this why Jesus wouldn’t speak to my heart? The music washed over me . . . SOFTLY AND TENDERLY. The music was a river trying to wash me clean. I sobbed and dug my heels into the dirt, drunk on grief and that pure, pure voice. It didn’t matter then if it was whiskey backstage or tongue kissing in the dressing room. Whatever it took to make that juice was necessary, was fine. I wiped my eyes and swore out loud. Get those boys another bottle, I said. Find that girl a hard-headed husband. But goddamn, get them to make that music. Make that music! Lord, make me drunk on that music. The next Sunday I went off with Shannon and the Pearls for another gospel drive. Driving backcountry with the Pearls meant stopping in at little country churches listening to gospel choirs. Mostly all those choirs had was a little echo of the real stuff. “Pitiful, an’t it?” Shannon sounded like her father’s daughter. “Organ music just can’t stand against a slide guitar.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure she was right. Sometimes one pure voice would stand out, one little girl; one set of brothers whose eyes would lift when they sang.

• From Trash (1988)

  It was the best moment I’d had in four years. Monkeybites I n college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him. It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys. “You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance.

• From Trash (1988)

  The only thing she complained about was the ulcer that kept her from ever really putting back on any weight. Then, when she was in seeing the doctor about the ulcer, he had put his hand on her neck and palpated a lump the two of them could feel. “This is it,” Mama had told me on the phone that weekend last spring. “I’m not going back into chemo again.” She had been serious, but Jo and I steamrolled her back into treatment. There were a few bad weeks when we wondered if what we were doing was right, but Mama had come through strong. I convinced myself we had done the right thing. Still, when afterward Mama was so weak and slow to recover, guilt had pushed me to take a leave from my job and go stay at the old tract house near the Frito Lay plant. “We’ll get some real time together,” Mama said when I arrived. “You need rest,” I told her. “We’ll rest.” But that was not what Mama had in mind. The first morning she got me up to drink watery coffee and plan what we would do. There was one stop at the new doctor’s office, but after that, she swore, we would have fun. For three days, Mama dragged me around. We walked through the big malls in the acrid air-conditioning in the mornings and spent the afternoons over at the jai alai fronton watching the athletes with their long lobster-claw devices on their arms thrusting the tiny white balls high up into the air and catching them as easily as if those claws were catcher’s mitts. I watched close but could not figure out how the game was meant to be played. Mama just bet on her favorites—boys with tight silk shirts and flashing white smiles. “They all know who I am,” Mama told me. I nodded as if I believed her, but then a beautiful young man came up and paused by Mama’s seat to squeeze her wrist. “Rafael,” Mama said immediately. “This is my oldest daughter.” “Cannot be,” Rafael said. He never lifted his eyes to me, just leaned in to whisper into Mama’s ear. I was watching her neck as his lips hovered at her hairline. I almost missed the bill she pressed into his palm. “You give him money?” I said after he had wandered back down the steeply pitched stairs. “Nothing much.” Mama looked briefly embarrassed. She wiped her neck and turned her head away from me. “I’ve known him since he started here. He’s the whole support of his family.” I looked down at the young men. They were like racehorses tossing their heads about, their thick hair cut short or tied back in clubs at their napes. Once the game started they were suddenly running and leaping, bouncing off the net walls and barely avoiding the fast-moving balls.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When it was time, Sir Guillaume sat down to table with his wife and the viands came; but he ate little, being hindered in thought for the ill deed he had committed. Presently the cook sent him the ragout, which he caused set before the lady, feigning himself disordered[255] that evening and commending the dish to her amain. The lady, who was nowise squeamish, tasted thereof and finding it good, ate it all; which when the knight saw, he said to her, 'Wife, how deem you of this dish?' 'In good sooth, my lord,' answered she, 'it liketh me exceedingly.' Whereupon, 'So God be mine aid,' quoth Roussillon; 'I do indeed believe it you, nor do I marvel if that please you, dead, which, alive, pleased you more than aught else.' The lady, hearing this, hesitated awhile, then said, 'How? What have you made me eat?' 'This that you have eaten,' answered the knight, 'was in very truth the heart of Sir Guillaume de Guardestaing, whom you, disloyal wife as you are, so loved; and know for certain that it is his very heart, for that I tore it from his breast with these hands a little before my return.' [Footnote 255: Or surfeited (_svogliato_).] It needeth not to ask if the lady were woebegone, hearing this of him whom she loved more than aught else; and after awhile she said, 'You have done the deed of a disloyal and base knight, as you are; for, if I, unenforced of him, made him lord of my love and therein offended against you, not he, but I should have borne the penalty thereof. But God forfend that ever other victual should follow upon such noble meat the heart of so valiant and so courteous a gentleman as was Sir Guillaume de Guardestaing!' Then, rising to her feet, without any manner of hesitation, she let herself fall backward through a window which was behind her and which was exceeding high above the ground; wherefore, as she fell, she was not only killed, but well nigh broken in pieces. Sir Guillaume, seeing this, was sore dismayed and himseemed he had done ill; wherefore, being adread of the country people and of the Count of Provence, he let saddle his horses and made off. On the morrow it was known all over the country how the thing had passed; whereupon the two bodies were, with the utmost grief and lamentation, taken up by Guardestaing's people and those of the lady and laid in one same sepulchre in the chapel of the latter's own castle; and thereover were verses written, signifying who these were that were buried therewithin and the manner and occasion of their death."[256] [Footnote 256: This is the well-known story of the Troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh or Cabestaing, whose name Boccaccio alters to Guardastagno or Guardestaing.] THE TENTH STORY [Day the Fourth]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Oh, may God give you His blessing!’ said the friar. ‘How nobly you have lived! And your restraint is all the more deserving of praise in that, had you wished, you would have had greater liberty to do the opposite than those who, like ourselves, are expressly forbidden by rule.’ Next he asked him whether he had displeased God by committing the sin of gluttony; to which, fetching a deep sigh, Ser Ciappelletto replied that he had, and on many occasions. For although, apart from the periods of fasting normally observed in the course of the year by the devout, he was accustomed to fasting on bread and water for at least three days every week, he had drunk the water as pleasurably and avidly (especially when he had been fatigued from praying or going on a pilgrimage) as any great bibber of wine; he had often experienced a craving for those dainty little wild herb salads that women eat when they go away to the country; and sometimes the thought of food had been more attractive to him than he considered proper in one who, like himself, was fasting out of piety. Whereupon the friar said: ‘My son, these sins are natural and they are very trivial, and therefore I would not have you burden your conscience with them more than necessary. No matter how holy a man may be, he will be attracted by the thought of food after a long spell of fasting, and by the thought of drink when he is fatigued.’ ‘Oh!’ said Ser Ciappelletto. ‘Do not tell me this to console me, father. As you are aware, I know that things done in the service of God must all be done honestly and without any grudge; and if anyone should do otherwise, he is committing a sin.’ The friar, delighted, said to him: ‘I am contented to see you taking such a view, and it pleases me greatly that you should have such a good and pure conscience in this matter. But tell me, have you ever been guilty of avarice, by desiring to have more than was proper, or keeping what you should not have kept?’ To which Ser Ciappelletto replied:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘As soon as you hear the bell ringing for matins, you may, if you wish, proceed to your bed and lie down, fully dressed, for a short sleep. Later in the morning you must go to church, listen to at least three masses, and say fifty paternosters followed by the same number of Hail Marys. Then you must attend unobtrusively to your business, if you have any, after which you will take lunch, and report at the church just before vespers in order to recite certain prayers, of which I shall provide you with written copies. (These are absolutely vital, if you want the thing to work.) Finally, at compline, you return to the beginning, and follow the same procedure all over again. I once did all this myself, and I assure you that there is every prospect, if you follow these instructions and put plenty of devotion into it, that before your penance comes to an end you will be experiencing a wonderful sensation of eternal blessedness.’ ‘This is not too heavy a task,’ said Friar Puccio, ‘nor does it last very long. It should be quite possible to get the thing done, and I therefore propose, God willing, to make a start this coming Sunday.’ After leaving Dom Felice he went straight home, where, having obtained the monk’s permission beforehand, he explained everything to his wife in minute detail. The lady grasped the monk’s intentions all too clearly, particularly when she heard about the business of standing still without moving a muscle until matins. Thinking it an excellent arrangement, she told her husband that she heartily approved of the idea, and also of any other measures he took for the good of his soul, adding that in order to persuade God to make his penance profitable she would join him in fasting, but there she would draw the line. Thus the whole thing was settled, and on the following Sunday Friar Puccio began his long penance, during which Master Monk, by prior arrangement with the lady, came to supper with her nearly every evening at an hour when he could enter the house unobserved, always bringing with him large quantities of food and drink. Then, after supper, he would sleep with her all night until matins, when he would get up and leave, and Friar Puccio would return to bed. The place where Friar Puccio had elected to do his penance was adjacent to the room where the lady slept, from which it was separated only by a very thin wall. And one night, when Master Monk was cutting too merry a caper with the lady and she with him, Friar Puccio thought he could detect a certain amount of vibration in the floorboards. When, therefore, he had recited a hundred of his paternosters, he came to a stop, and without leaving his post, he called out to his wife and demanded to know what she was doing.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Not knowing and not caring why he pitied, she wept, so that all he could do was to console her. They clung together like penitent children. ‘Anna, forgive me.’ ‘Forgive me, Philip—’ For in between quarrels they were sometimes like children, naïvely asking each other’s forgiveness. Sir Philip’s resolution weakened and waned as he kissed the tears from her poor, reddened eyelids. He thought: ‘To-morrow—to-morrow I’ll tell her—I can’t bear to make her more unhappy to-day.’ So the weeks drifted by and still he had not spoken; summer came and went, giving place to the autumn. Yet one more Christmas visited Morton, and still Sir Philip had not spoken. CHAPTER 14 1 F ebruary came bringing snowstorms with it, the heaviest known for many a year. The hills lay folded in swathes of whiteness, and so did the valleys at the foot of the hills, and so did the spacious gardens of Morton—it was all one vast panorama of whiteness. The lakes froze, and the beech trees had crystalline branches, while their luminous carpet of leaves grew brittle so that it crackled now underfoot, the only sound in the frozen stillness of that place that was always infinitely still. Peter, the arrogant swan, turned friendly, and he and his family now welcomed Stephen who fed them every morning and evening, and they glad enough to partake of her bounty. On the lawn Anna set out a tray for the birds, with chopped suet, seed, and small mounds of breadcrumbs; and down at the stables old Williams spread straw in wide rings for exercising the horses who could not be taken beyond the yard, so bad were the roads around Morton. The gardens lay placidly under the snow, in no way perturbed or disconcerted. Only one inmate of theirs felt anxious, and that was the ancient and wide-boughed cedar, for the weight of the snow made an ache in its branches—its branches were brittle like an old man’s bones; that was why the cedar felt anxious. But it could not cry out or shake off its torment; no, it could only endure with patience, hoping that Anna would take note of its trouble, since she sat in its shade summer after summer—since once long ago she had sat in its shade dreaming of the son she would bear her husband. And one morning Anna did notice its plight, and she called Sir Philip, who hurried from his study. She said: ‘Look, Philip!

• From Trash (1988)

  Margaret asked me the last time we went out to dinner together. “Lee wants me to talk to my therapist about how much I drink.” I’d shrugged. “Is it getting in the way of anything you want to do?” That was a silly question, since obviously drinking is getting in the way of her and Lee living happily ever after, which is the one thing Margaret is absolutely sure she wants to do. “Well . . .” She’d hesitated, then shrugged. “No more than working for a living and taking care of my mother.” Margaret works as the head teller at a midtown bank, a job that’s a little like living on the firing line in a small-arms tournament. She spends her weekends picking up after her mother, a beautiful but prematurely senile woman whose four married children have left her to Margaret to nurse and protect. “Mama shit on that blue chintz couch again last week, and you know how embarrassing that is for her. Took me three hours to get it even half clean. I’m thinking I may have to re-cover it, but then I suppose she’ll just have another accident. The doctor said I should have the furniture covered in plastic, that it’s just gonna get worse, but damn, I can’t do that to her. It took her so long to get some nice things, and she loves them so.” I didn’t tell her what I thought, that mostly Mama didn’t notice much of what she sat on anymore. It’s taken Margaret years to be able to afford to buy her mother the things they both always wanted, and it would break Margaret’s heart to give any of it up. Instead I’d changed the subject with a story about my mama’s attempts to get flowers to grow in her swampy yard. Margaret and I both know that some time in the next year she’s gonna have to give up and put her mama in a hospital of some kind. It’s one of the things neither of us discusses with Paula. If Paula were to make one of her righteous comments about Margaret’s mother and the wisdom of nursing homes, Margaret might do something sudden and terrible. “I only hope you know what you’re doing.” Paula slaps her glass down and glares at Margaret and me. For a moment I’ve lost the thread of the conversation, something I’ve been doing a lot lately. The fact is I have been drinking too much, and not sleeping and not eating, and half the time I can’t quite keep up with what’s going on around me. It’s as if I wander away in my mind.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  This time around, the team of shrinks assembled by the prosecution proved more persuasive than the shrinks marshaled by the defense, and Judge Steven Hansen ruled that Ron was now sufficiently competent to be tried all over again for slaying Brenda and Erica Lafferty. After Ron and Dan had initially been arrested, each of them had made a point of being exceedingly uncooperative with the prosecution. When questioned about the murders, the brothers never failed to be coy and evasive. From the time of their arrest through their 1985 convictions, neither man would confess to anything. By the mid-1990s, however, Dan’s attitude and outlook had changed. He accepted that he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars—indeed, he believed that his conviction and imprisonment were crucial components of God’s plan for mankind. As a consequence, Dan became quite willing—eager, even—to talk honestly and openly about exactly what had happened on July 24, 1984. According to Dan’s version of events—a narrative considered quite credible, for the most part, by almost everyone who has heard it—he was the one who cut not only Erica Lafferty’s throat but Brenda’s throat as well. Dan insists that Ron didn’t actually kill anybody. But even if Ron hadn’t wielded the murder weapon, Dan’s account clearly placed Ron inside the apartment when the killings happened. Furthermore, Dan now told—in sickening detail—how Ron had savagely beaten Brenda, ignoring her pleas for mercy, until her face had been transformed into a pulp of bloody, disfigured flesh. Dan’s vivid testimony left no doubt that both brothers were equally culpable for the American Fork murders. Once the jury had an opportunity to hear Dan’s testimony during the retrial, Ron would no longer be able to claim—as he had during his 1985 trial—that he’d known nothing about the murders. The retrial was scheduled to commence in March 1996. Ron’s attorneys were left with just a single legal option in their attempt to save him from the firing squad: an insanity defense—the same defense they had wanted to use during the 1985 trial but Ron had forbidden them to employ. As the trial date approached, Ron continued to tell anyone who would listen that he wasn’t the least bit crazy, but this time he stopped short of actively preventing his lawyers from arguing to the court that he was insane. Whether Ron lived or died would hinge entirely on whether a jury could be convinced that his religious beliefs—including his certainty that God had commanded the removal of Brenda and Erica Lafferty—were not only sincerely held but also so extreme as to be a delusional artifact of a diseased mind. Such a defense would unavoidably raise the same difficult epistemological questions that had come to the fore after the Tenth Circuit Court’s ruling in 1991: if Ron Lafferty were deemed mentally ill because he obeyed the voice of his God, isn’t everyone who believes in God and seeks guidance through prayer mentally ill as well?

• From Trash (1988)

  My contempt, my terror, took over my life, because they were the first things I felt when I looked at myself, until I became unable to see my true self at all. “You’re an animal,” she used to say to me, in the dark with her teeth against my thigh, and I believed her, growled back at her, and swallowed all the poison she could pour into my soul. Now I sit and think about Bobby’s thighs, her legs opening in the dark where no one could see, certainly not herself. My own legs opening. That was so long ago and far away, but not so far as she finally ran when she could not stand it anymore, when the lust I made her feel got too wild, too uncivilized, too dangerous. Now I think about what I did. What I did. What I was. What I do. What I am. “Sex,” I told her. “I will be sex for you.” Never asked, “You. What will you be for me?” Now I make sure to ask. I keep Bobby in mind when I stare at women’s thighs. I finger my seams, flash my teeth, and put it right out there. “You. What will you let yourself be for me?” Muscles of the Mind I slept through one whole year of my life—the year I did not have the money to go to graduate school the way I had expected. Being awake would have meant making decisions, and I did not know what to decide. I did not know who I was supposed to be. I dreamed through that year, heavy-lidded and silent, though I went almost every day to work as a salad girl, pickle chopper, housekeeper, waitress, substitute teacher, counter girl, or line worker in a mop factory. I could do any of that again easily—make change with one hand while wiping terrazzo with another, keep grammar-school children at their desks, slice lettuce or pickles bracing the blade with the flat of my palm, rack up two hundred mops in an hour or scrub babyshit off crib slats—but I’ve lost the ability to sleep during the day. I wake at first light, even if I have blacked out every window in the room, no matter how late I got to bed the night before. It is as if I had slept myself out, used up that talent in that long terrible dragged-out year, and now I’m doomed to come awake early every morning, suddenly, completely, my heart pounding in my ears as if someone were screaming in the next room. “It’s your circadian rhythm,” Anna told me. “I read about it someplace—all about crickets singing at twilight even if you try to fool them into thinking it’s still daytime. You—you’re always gonna know when it’s dawn—a useful thing when you think about it.” “Uh huh.” I rubbed tired swollen eyes. “Well, tell me, do crickets ever sing at noon or nap when they feel like it?” “Don’t know.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Staring at the girl she would see the strange resemblance, the invidious likeness of the child to the father, she would notice their movements so grotesquely alike; their hands were alike, they made the same gestures, and her mind would recoil with that nameless resentment, the while she reproached herself, penitent and trembling. Yet penitent and trembling though Anna might be, she would sometimes hear herself speaking to Stephen in a way that would make her feel secretly ashamed. She would hear herself covertly, cleverly gibing, with such skill that the girl would look up at her bewildered; with such skill that even Sir Philip himself could not well take exception to what she was saying; then, as like as not, she would laugh if off lightly, as though all the time she had only been jesting, and Stephen would laugh too, a big, friendly laugh. But Sir Philip would not laugh, and his eyes would seek Anna’s, questioning, amazed, incredulous and angry. That was why she now went so seldom to the study when Sir Philip and his daughter were together. But sometimes, when she was alone with her husband, Anna would suddenly cling to him in silence. She would hide her face against his hard shoulder clinging closer and closer, as though she were frightened, as though she were afraid for this great love of theirs. He would stand very still, forbearing to move, forbearing to question, for why should he question? He knew already, and she knew that he knew. Yet neither of them spoke it, this most unhappy thing, and their silence spread round them like a poisonous miasma. The spectre that was Stephen would seem to be watching, and Sir Philip would gently release himself from Anna, while she, looking up, would see his tired eyes, not angry any more, only very unhappy. She would think that those eyes were pleading, beseeching; she would think: ‘He’s pleading with me for Stephen.’ Then her own eyes would fill with tears of contrition, and that night she would kneel long in prayer to her Maker: ‘Give me peace,’ she would entreat, ‘and enlighten my spirit, so that I may learn how to love my own child.’ 2 Sir Philip looked older now than his age, and seeing this, Anna could scarcely endure it. Everything in her cried out in rebellion so that she wanted to thrust back the years, to hold them at bay with her own weak body. Had the years been an army of naked swords she would gladly have held them at bay with her body. He would constantly now remain in his study right into the early hours of the morning. This habit of his had been growing on him lately, and Anna, waking to find herself alone, and feeling uneasy would steal down to listen. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards! She would hear his desolate sounding footsteps.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His constant and sole aim was the glory of God, and the reformation of the Church. In his eyes, God alone was great, man but a fleeting shadow. Man, he said, must be nothing, that God in Christ may be everything. He was always guided by a strict sense of duty, even in the punishment of Servetus. In the preface to the last edition of his Institutes (1559), he says: "I have the testimony of my own conscience, of angels, and of God himself, that since I undertook the office of a teacher in the Church, I have had no other object in view than to profit the Church by maintaining the pure doctrine of godliness; yet I suppose there is no man more slandered or calumniated than myself."1269 Riches and honors had no charms for him. He soared far above filthy lucre and worldly ambition. His only ambition was that pure and holy ambition to serve God to the best of his ability. He steadily refused an increase of salary, and frequently also presents of every description, except for the poor and the refugees, whom he always had at heart, and aided to the extent of his means. He left only two hundred and fifty gold crowns, or, if we include the value of his furniture and library, about three hundred crowns, which he bequeathed to his younger brother, Antoine, and his children, except ten crowns to the schools, ten to the hospital for poor refugees, and ten to the daughter of a cousin. When Cardinal Sadolet passed through Geneva in disguise (about 1547), he was surprised to find that the Reformer lived in a plain house instead of an episcopal palace with a retinue of servants, and himself opened the door.1270 When Pope Pius IV. heard of his death he paid him this tribute: "The strength of that heretic consisted in this,—that money never had the slightest charm for him. If I had such servants, my dominions would extend from sea to sea." In this respect all the Reformers were true successors of the Apostles. They were poor, but made many rich. Calvin had defects which were partly the shadow of his virtues. He was passionate, prone to anger, censorious, impatient of contradiction, intolerant towards Romanists and heretics, somewhat austere and morose, and not without a trace of vindictiveness. He confessed in a letter to Bucer, and on his death-bed, that he found it difficult to tame "the wild beast of his wrath," and he humbly asked forgiveness for his weakness. He thanked the senators for their patience with his often "excessive vehemence." His intolerance sprang from the intensity of his convictions and his zeal for the truth. It unfortunately culminated in the tragedy of Servetus, which must be deplored and condemned, although justified by the laws and the public opinion in his age. Tolerance is a modern virtue.