Remorse

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 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “Gentlemen,” the loud voice said. “We have a deal. We’ll send it out to market this Friday.” I drove home. I remember the boys were outside playing. Penny was standing in the kitchen. “How was your day?” she said. “Hm. Okay.” “Good.” “We got our price.” She smiled. “Of course you did.” I went for a long run. Then I took a hot, hot shower. Then I had a quick dinner. Then I tucked in the boys and gave them a story. The year was 1773. Privates Matt and Travis were fighting under the command of General Washington. Cold, tired, hungry, their uniforms in tatters, they camped for the winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They slept in log huts, wedged between two mountains: Mount Joy and Mount Misery. Morning till night, bitter cold winds sliced through the mountains and barreled through the chinks in the huts. Food was scarce; only a third of the men had shoes. Whenever they walked outside, they left bloody footprints in the snow. Thousands died. But Matt and Travis held on. Finally, spring came. The troops got word that the British had retreated, and the French were coming to the aid of the colonists. Privates Matt and Travis knew from then on that they could live through anything. Mount Joy, Mount Misery. The end. Good night, boys. Night, Dad. I turned out the light and went and sat in front of the TV with Penny. Neither of us was really watching. She was reading a book and I was doing calculations in my head. By this time next week Bowerman would be worth $9 million. Cale—$6.6 million. Woodell, Johnson, Hayes, Strasser—each about $6 million. Fantasy numbers. Numbers that meant nothing. I never knew that numbers could mean so much, and so little, at the same time. “Bed?” Penny said. I nodded. I went around the house, turning off lights, checking doors. Then I joined her. For a long time we lay in the dark. It wasn’t over. Far from it. The first part, I told myself, is behind us. But it’s only the first part. I asked myself: What are you feeling? It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t relief. If I felt anything, it was… regret? Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million. I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For days he walks the Ridings and sees him, sometimes, soaring over the trees in distant, expanding circles. His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free, thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die. Should fate see fit to deliver the bird back into his hands, he vows, he should treat him differently: as a partner not his slave. His remorse is bitterly deep. He is lonely without Gos. He misremembers Blake. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite. Later that afternoon I walked with Mabel up a narrow lane to a nearby farm. I’d had permission to fly my hawks there years ago. Did I still? Probably not. I didn’t care. There was something splendid in the thought that what I was doing was surreptitious, underhand, slightly criminal. I raised my binoculars and scanned the fields. No tractors, no farm-workers. No dog-walkers. No one out for an evening stroll. And so off we crept, Mabel and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits used to be. We sneaked around the corner of a blackthorn thicket. There. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood: three of them in silhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun, crouching to feed. And next to them, a cock pheasant, ankling his way slowly past. Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way around to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush. The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant, too, crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For days he walks the Ridings and sees him, sometimes, soaring over the trees in distant, expanding circles. His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free, thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die. Should fate see fit to deliver the bird back into his hands, he vows, he should treat him differently: as a partner not his slave. His remorse is bitterly deep. He is lonely without Gos. He misremembers Blake. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite. Later that afternoon I walked with Mabel up a narrow lane to a nearby farm. I’d had permission to fly my hawks there years ago. Did I still? Probably not. I didn’t care. There was something splendid in the thought that what I was doing was surreptitious, underhand, slightly criminal. I raised my binoculars and scanned the fields. No tractors, no farm-workers. No dog-walkers. No one out for an evening stroll. And so off we crept, Mabel and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits used to be. We sneaked around the corner of a blackthorn thicket. There. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood: three of them in silhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun, crouching to feed. And next to them, a cock pheasant, ankling his way slowly past. Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way around to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush. The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant, too, crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Howard sat. It was wildly uncomfortable. He got up and examined the seat. There was something beneath the cushion. He reached under it and pulled out a thick pile of papers. He asked White what it was. White looked worried. It was the manuscript to a book he had written about hawks, he explained. He did not want it published because after it was written he became a good falconer, an authority on the subject, and there were things in it that were embarrassing to remember. Besides, the hawk had been lost. Howard leafed through the first few pages and was intrigued. He took it upstairs and read it overnight. In the morning he insisted on taking it back to London, for he was sure it should be published. White balked at the idea, but as the weeks went by, Howard and his friends persuaded him, and he consented to its publication on one condition: that he could write a postscript explaining how he ought to have trained the hawk, in the light of his later experience. When The Goshawk was published in 1951 it was not a bestseller , but it brought an extraordinary number of letters from readers. Some were congratulatory, others strange: one offered White an eagle. Some disliked the book greatly. And one of these letters White never forgot. It touched a very raw nerve. It was from a man who said that he had for thirty years lectured on birds and watched them all his life. ‘ How you can talk of love for a bird after subjecting our wonderful predatory birds to such torture is beyond a normal mind,’ the letter ran. ‘Is there not enough cruelty in the world without adding to it for one’s amusement or hobby?’ ‘This letter put me off food for three days,’ White later confessed, ‘though I answered it with several pages of affection, apology and explanation.’ He waited for a reply. When it came, White wrote, the letter-writer ‘used the word “normal” five times, concluding with the pronouncement that he did not wish to hear from me again. It seemed polite to leave it at that.’ I’ve moved back to the city, to a little rented house in a street near the river with a small sunny garden that ends in a tangle of briars. Cats stalk the pavement outside, there are pigeons all over the roof, and it’s good to be in a house that I can call my own for a while. Today I’m unpacking boxes and stacking books on shelves. Three boxes down, five to go. I open the next box. Inside, on top of the other books, is The Goshawk . Oh , I think, as I pick it up. It is strange to see it again, because I’ve not thought of White for a while. As I grew happier his presence receded, his world more and more distant from mine.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  No. ‘Were you killing yourself?’ No. ‘Were you sorry?’ Yes. But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret for the animal. I felt sorry for it. Not because I felt I was better than the animal. It wasn’t a patronising sorrow. It was the sorrow of all deaths. I was happy for Mabel’s success and I mourned the individual rabbit. Kneeling by its corpse I’d feel a sharp awareness of my edges . The rain prickling on my collar . A pain in one knee. The scratches on my legs and arms from pushing myself through a hedge that had not hurt until now. And a sharp, wordless comprehension of my own mortality. Yes, I will die . I learned that momentary shouldering of responsibility that allowed me to reach down and administer the coup de grâce to a rabbit held tight in Mabel’s feet. A part of me had to click into place and there was another part of me I had to put far away. There’s no better phrase than the old one to describe it: You have to harden your heart . I learned that hardening the heart was not the same as not caring. The rabbit was always important. Its life was never taken lightly. I was accountable for these deaths. For the first time in my life I wasn’t a watcher any more. I was being accountable to myself, to the world and all the things in it. But only when I killed. The days were very dark. They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery. The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  On his accession, he took the title Devanampiya, “Beloved of the Gods,” and continued to expand the empire, which now extended from Bengal to Afghanistan. In the early years of his reign, Ashoka had lived a somewhat dissolute life and acquired a reputation for cruelty. But that changed in about 260, when he accompanied the imperial army to put down a rebellion in Kalinga in modern Odisha and had an extraordinary conversion experience. During the campaign, 100,000 Kalingan soldiers were killed in battle, many times more had perished from wounds and disease afterward, and 150,000 were deported to the peripheral territories. Ashoka was profoundly shocked by the suffering he witnessed. He had what we might call a “Gilgamesh moment,” when the sensory realities of warfare broke through the carapace of cultivated heartlessness that makes warfare possible. He recorded his remorse in an edict inscribed on a massive rock face. Instead of jubilantly listing the numbers of enemy casualties, like most kings, Ashoka confessed that “the slaughter, death and deportation is extremely grievous to Devanampiya and weighs heavily on his mind.”97 He warned other kings that military conquest, the glory of victory, and the trappings of royalty were fleeting. If they had to dispatch an army, they should fight as humanely as possible and enforce their victory “with patience and light punishment.”98 The only true conquest was personal submission to what Ashoka called dhamma: a moral code of compassion, mercy, honesty, and consideration for all living creatures. Ashoka inscribed similar edicts outlining his new policy of military restraint and moral reform on cliff faces and colossal cylindrical pillars throughout the length and breadth of his empire.99 These edicts were intensely personal messages but could also have been an attempt to give the far-flung empire ideological unity; they may have even been read aloud to the populace on state occasions. Ashoka urged his people to curb their greed and extravagance; promised that, as far as possible, he would refrain from using martial force; preached kindness to animals; and vowed to replace the violent sport of hunting, the traditional pastime of kings, with royal pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines. He also announced that he had dug wells, founded hospitals and rest houses, and planted banyan trees “which will give shade to beasts and men.”100 He insisted on the importance of respect for teachers, obedience to parents, consideration for slaves and servants, and reverence for all sects—for the orthodox Brahmins as well as for Buddhists, Jains, and other “heretical” schools. “Concord is to be commended,” he declared, “so that men may hear one another’s principles.”101

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And then I’d reach down and put my hand on the bunched muscles of the rabbit, and with the heel of one hand at the back of its head where the fur was soft and tawny, I’d pull once, twice, hard on its back legs with the other, breaking its neck. A fit of kicking, and the eyes filming over. I had to check the rabbit was dead by very gently touching its eye. Everything stopping. Stopping. Stopping. I had to do this. If I didn’t kill the rabbit, the hawk would sit on top of it and start eating; and at some point in the eating the rabbit would die. That is how goshawks kill. The borders between life and death are somewhere in the taking of their meal. I couldn’t let that suffering happen. Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human. Kneeling next to the hawk and her prey, I felt a responsibility so huge that it battered inside my own chest, ballooning out into a space the size of a cathedral. For years I’d explained that I’d rather eat hawk-caught food than things that have had a blind and crowded life in a barn or battery cage. One minute the rabbit is there, twitching its nose in a field that smells of nettles and grassy roots, then it is running, and then it is caught, and then it is dead. I’d told people that there are no injuries in hawking: either things are caught or they escape, and I’d told them, too, that nothing is wasted: everything the hawk catches is eaten by the hawk or me. If you choose to eat meat, I’d said, this is the best way I know to get it. But these arguments seemed petty now, and pointless. They had nothing to do with what it was like. To be there, with a hawk and a caught rabbit that twitched and kicked and died. And the world biting into me. The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away. ‘But how could you?’ people asked. Someone said it was a way of destroying the world a piece at a time after my father’s death. ‘Were the rabbits you?’ another asked. No. ‘Were you killing yourself?’ No. ‘Were you sorry?’ Yes. But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret for the animal. I felt sorry for it. Not because I felt I was better than the animal. It wasn’t a patronising sorrow. It was the sorrow of all deaths. I was happy for Mabel’s success and I mourned the individual rabbit. Kneeling by its corpse I’d feel a sharp awareness of my edges. The rain prickling on my collar. A pain in one knee.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty herself gave another little ‘Oh,’ and then a nervous smile. ‘It’s Flo,’ I said, ‘who’s the socialist, and who has got me into all this ...’ As I spoke, Florence took off her hat: immediately, Cyril began pulling at the pins that fixed her hair, and twisting the curls about his fingers. His tugs made her redden. I watched her for a little longer, then saw her look again at Kitty; and when I turned to Kitty herself I found that her eyes were upon me and her expression was rather strange.‘I cannot stop myself from gazing at you,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. ‘When you ran off, I was sure, at first, that you’d be back. Where did you go? What did you do? We tried so hard to find you. And then, when there was no word of you, I was sure that I would never see you again. I thought - oh Nan, I thought that you had harmed yourself.’I swallowed. ‘You harmed me, Kitty. It was you that harmed me.’‘I know it, now. Do you think I don’t know it? I feel ashamed to even talk to you. I am so sorry, for what happened.’‘You needn’t be sorry now,’ I said awkwardly. But she went on as if she had not heard me: that she was so very sorry; that what she had done had been so very wrong. That she was sorry, so sorry ...At last, I shook my head. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘What does all that matter now? It matters nothing!’‘Doesn’t it?’ she said. I felt my heart begin to hammer. When I did not answer, only continued to stare at her, she took a step towards me and began to talk, very fast and low. ‘Oh Nan, so many times I thought about finding you, and planned what I would say when I did. I cannot leave you now without saying it!’‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I said in sudden terror; I believe I even put my hands to my ears, to try to block out the sound of her murmurs. But she caught at my arm and talked on, into my face.‘You must hear it! You must know. You mustn’t think that I did what I did easily, or thoughtlessly. You mustn’t think it did not - break my heart.’‘Why did you do it, then?’‘Because I was a fool! Because I thought my life upon the stage was dearer to me than anything. Because I thought that I would be a star. Because, of course, I did not ever think that I would really, really lose you ...’ She hesitated.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And then - well, we kept it quiet, but I was rather ill.’ She hesitated. ‘I was to have a child ...’ The thought was horrible to me, in every way. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. She shrugged. ‘Walter was disappointed. We have quite forgotten it now, however. It only means that I am not quite so strong as I once was ...’ We fell silent. I looked for a second into the crowd, then back at Kitty. She had coloured. Now she said: ‘Nan, Bill told me, when he met you that time, that you were dressed - well, as a boy.’ ‘That’s right. I was. Quite as a boy.’ She laughed and frowned at once, not understanding. ‘He said, too, that you were living with a - with a -’ ‘With a lady. I was.’ She blushed still harder. ‘And - are you with her still?’ ‘No, I - I live with a girl now, in Bethnal Green.’ ‘Oh!’ I hesitated - but then I did what I had done with Zena, two hours before. I moved slightly into the shadow of the tent, and Kitty followed. ‘That’s her over there,’ I said, nodding towards the seats before the platform. ‘The girl with the little boy.’ Annie and Miss Raymond had moved away, and Florence sat alone now. As I gestured to her she looked over at me, then gazed gravely at Kitty. Kitty herself gave another little ‘Oh,’ and then a nervous smile. ‘It’s Flo,’ I said, ‘who’s the socialist, and who has got me into all this ...’ As I spoke, Florence took off her hat: immediately, Cyril began pulling at the pins that fixed her hair, and twisting the curls about his fingers. His tugs made her redden. I watched her for a little longer, then saw her look again at Kitty; and when I turned to Kitty herself I found that her eyes were upon me and her expression was rather strange. ‘I cannot stop myself from gazing at you,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. ‘When you ran off, I was sure, at first, that you’d be back. Where did you go? What did you do? We tried so hard to find you. And then, when there was no word of you, I was sure that I would never see you again. I thought - oh Nan, I thought that you had harmed yourself.’ I swallowed. ‘You harmed me, Kitty. It was you that harmed me.’ ‘I know it, now. Do you think I don’t know it? I feel ashamed to even talk to you. I am so sorry, for what happened.’ ‘You needn’t be sorry now,’ I said awkwardly. But she went on as if she had not heard me: that she was so very sorry; that what she had done had been so very wrong. That she was sorry, so sorry ... At last, I shook my head. ‘Oh!’

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  A year later, and I still burned with the memory, the anger and resentment I’d felt at that moment, Marcus calling me out in front of Reggie like that. But he’d been right to do it, hadn’t he? He had caught me in a lie. Two lies, really—the lie I had told about Tim and the lie I was telling about myself. In fact, that whole first year seemed like one long lie, me spending all my energy running around in circles, trying to cover my tracks. Except with Regina. That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie. Even that first time we met, the day she walked into the coffee shop and found Marcus giving me grief about my choice of reading material. Marcus had waved her over to our table, rising slightly to pull out a chair. “Sister Regina,” Marcus said. “You know Barack, don’t you? I’m trying to tell Brother Barack here about this racist tract he’s reading.” He held up a copy of Heart of Darkness, evidence for the court. I reached over to snatch it out of his hands. “Man, stop waving that thing around.” “See there,” Marcus said. “Makes you embarrassed, don’t it—just being seen with a book like this. I’m telling you, man, this stuff will poison your mind.” He looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m late for class.” He leaned over and pecked Regina on the cheek. “Talk to this brother, will you? I think he can still be saved.” Regina smiled and shook her head as we watched Marcus stride out the door. “Marcus is in one of his preaching moods, I see.” I tossed the book into my backpack. “Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.” Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it?” “Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—” “Because …” “And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.” “And that’s important to you.” My life depends on it, I thought to myself. But I didn’t tell Regina that. I just smiled and said, “That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Just one more time. But he cannot do it. He knows this pigeon. He had tamed it. It had sat companionably on his finger . It was his friend. His world is broken; he is breaking his Word. It is brute cruelty. He cannot do this any more. He remembers a passage in Blaine’s book on capturing hawks while they sleep, hugs the soaking pigeon to his breast and leaves Gos to nightfall. He returns with a ladder , a rope, a torch and the salmon rod he’d used once before to hook Gos down from a tree. He stands under the tree, trembling with hope of success, when Graham Wheeler , the farmer’s lad who had come to help, runs up. Gos takes fright and slips from the tree into darkness. For days he walks the Ridings and sees him, sometimes, soaring over the trees in distant, expanding circles. His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free , thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die. Should fate see fit to deliver the bird back into his hands, he vows, he should treat him differently: as a partner not his slave. His remorse is bitterly deep. He is lonely without Gos. He misremembers Blake. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite. Later that afternoon I walked with Mabel up a narrow lane to a nearby farm. I’d had permission to fly my hawks there years ago. Did I still? Probably not. I didn’t care. There was something splendid in the thought that what I was doing was surreptitious, underhand, slightly criminal. I raised my binoculars and scanned the fields. No tractors, no farm-workers. No dog-walkers. No one out for an evening stroll. And so off we crept, Mabel and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits used to be. We sneaked around the corner of a blackthorn thicket. There. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood: three of them in silhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun, crouching to feed. And next to them, a cock pheasant, ankling his way slowly past . Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder . I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For days he walks the Ridings and sees him, sometimes, soaring over the trees in distant, expanding circles. His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free, thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die. Should fate see fit to deliver the bird back into his hands, he vows, he should treat him differently: as a partner not his slave. His remorse is bitterly deep. He is lonely without Gos. He misremembers Blake. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite. Later that afternoon I walked with Mabel up a narrow lane to a nearby farm. I’d had permission to fly my hawks there years ago. Did I still? Probably not. I didn’t care. There was something splendid in the thought that what I was doing was surreptitious, underhand, slightly criminal. I raised my binoculars and scanned the fields. No tractors, no farm-workers. No dog-walkers. No one out for an evening stroll. And so off we crept, Mabel and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits used to be. We sneaked around the corner of a blackthorn thicket. There. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood: three of them in silhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun, crouching to feed. And next to them, a cock pheasant, ankling his way slowly past. Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way around to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush. The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant, too, crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “I … the records are all at the downtown office,” Mr. Anderson stammered. “Filed away, you understand.” “Do you think you can get us a copy by next week?” “Yes, well … of course. I’ll see what I can do. Next week.” When we got outside, I told Sadie she had done well. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” “I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough.” A week passed. Sadie called Mr. Anderson’s office: She was told that the results would take another week to produce. Two weeks passed, and Sadie’s calls went unreturned. We tried to reach Mrs. Reece, then the CHA district manager, then sent a letter to the executive director of the CHA with a copy to the mayor’s office. No response. “What do we do now?” Bernadette asked. “We go downtown. If they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them.” The next day we planned our action. Another letter to the CHA executive director was drafted, informing him that we would appear at his office in two days to demand an answer to the asbestos question. A short press release was issued. The children of Carver were sent home with a flyer pinned to their jackets urging their parents to join us. Sadie, Linda, and Bernadette spent most of the evening calling their neighbors. But when the day of reckoning arrived, I counted only eight heads in the yellow bus parked in front of the school. Bernadette and I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit other parents as they came to pick up their children. They said they had doctors’ appointments or couldn’t find baby-sitters. Some didn’t bother with excuses, walking past us as if we were panhandlers. When Angela, Mona, and Shirley arrived to see how things were shaping up, I insisted they ride with us to lend moral support. Everyone looked depressed, everyone except Tyrone and Jewel, who were busy making faces at Mr. Lucas, the only father in the group. Dr. Collier came up beside me. “I guess this is it,” I said. “Better than I expected,” she said. “Obama’s Army.” “Right.” “Good luck,” she said, and clapped me on the back. The bus rolled past the old incinerator and the Ryerson Steel plant, through Jackson Park, and then onto Lake Shore Drive. As we approached downtown, I passed out a script for the action and asked everyone to read it over carefully. Waiting for them to finish, I noticed that Mr. Lucas had a deep frown carved into his forehead. He was a short, gentle man with a bit of a stutter; he did odd jobs around Altgeld and helped out the mother of his children whenever he could. I came up beside him and asked if something was wrong. “I don’t read so good,” he said quietly. We both looked down at the page of crowded type.

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

  Such parishes, it is true, often fell to the charge of the orders, but also a large share of them to the charge of the cathedral chapters and bishops. Clerical incomes varied fully as much in those days as they do now, if not more. The poorer German priests received from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the incomes of more fortunate rectors and canons.1941 The Fourth Lateran made small salaries responsible for a poorly trained ministry. The clergy depended for their maintenance chiefly upon the income from lands and the tithe. The theory was that the tenth belonged to the Church, "for the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof." The principle was extended to include the tithe of the fish-catch, the product of the chase, and the product of commerce.1942 The clergy also received fees for special Sacerdotal services from baptism to burial and rites pertaining to the soul after death. Such fees became general after the twelfth century, but not without vigorous protests against them. The Second Lateran and other synods1943 forbade priests making charges for the administration of baptism, marriage, extreme unction, and other rites, and for sepulture. The ground was taken by Innocent III. that, while gifts for such services were proper, they should be spontaneous and not forced. The Fourth Lateran bade laymen see they were not overlooked. Priests receiving their benefices from laymen were likened to thieves who came not in by the door but climbed in some other way. The lay patron had the right of nomination—presentatio. To the bishop belonged the right of confirmation—concessio. Laymen venturing to confer a living without the consent of the ecclesiastical authority exposed themselves to the sentence of excommunication.1944 Stories were current of clerics who had bought their way to ordination and to benefices, who afterwards gnawed through their tongues in remorse.1945 The system of pluralities was practised in spite of the decrees of oecumenical and local synods.1946 The ideal of a faithful priest was not a preacher but one who administered the sacraments and other solemn rites upon the living and the dead. Restricted as the education of the priest was, it greatly surpassed that of his lay brother, and it was not so meagre as it has often been represented. There were writers who held up the ignorance of the clergy to scorn, but it is dangerous to base wide generalizations on such statements. Statements of another kind can be adduced to show that a class of priests had literary interests as wide as the age was familiar with. The schools that existed were for the training of the clergy. Synods assumed that clerics could read and prescribed that they should read their breviaries even while travelling on journeys. Peter of Blois urged them to read the Scriptures, which he called David’s harp, a plough working up the fallow field of the heart, and which he compared to drink, medicine, balsam, and a weapon.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My tail had mistranslated everything I’d told it. I’d wanted Ama’s wrists, wanted to break all the bones inside them. I tried to tell this to my mother, but she was bowed over Agong. She kneeled over him and spat on his chest, slicking the burn, trying to put out the pain. My tail was curdled stiff, lagging behind me while I tried to move closer, apologize. You hurt him, my mother said, speaking to the burn on his chest, ruby with her spit. I crawled forward to them, towing my tail behind me in the dark. It felt heavier, a moon tethered to the end of it. — Ama took my tail in her hands, tugged on it like a leash. I tried to keep crawling, to reach my mother huddling with her back to me, but Ama jerked me back. She could steer me with it, drag me out to the yard and bury me anywhere. When I told her to let go, she yanked back again, ripping out wisps of my fur. She sneezed, batting at the strands like dust. Pulling once on my tail, she brought me to my feet. See, Ama said. We’re the same beast. Ama stroked my tail-tip with her thumb. Bent her head and sniffed it. She asked if I knew the story of Hu Gu Po, a story about the cost of having a body. The cost was butchery. She said there were no tigers on her island and there had never been. The story had been born somewhere else, brought over by men and stuffed into the bellies of women who didn’t want it. The women gave birth anyway, to daughters that did not resemble them. — When I gave birth to my first daughter, Ama said, I saw her face and it was a soldier’s. No one in her tribe had ever seen a tiger, and when Ama first heard the story, she imagined that it walked upright. She imagined its skin was made of two textures: The orange stripes were fire and the black stripes were river, canceling out into smoke. My tail twitched out of her hands, singed by the heat of her palms. I was the beast she’d imagined: tail stubbly as a beard, my shadow big as a soldier’s. You have the blood of soldiers and slaughterers. You think you’re a different story from me? she said. I stood hunched, my tail so heavy I forgot how I’d ever been able to stand against gravity. I was tied to the stone of it. If she had thrown me in the river the way she had my mother, I would have sunk. The tail’s marrow solid as gold. I’d beach at the river bottom, live in the mud of all I’d done, eat what was thrown down to me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  For you to write back to me, Ama said. I dropped it back into the hole. I said I would never. She smiled, half her teeth missing, places for morning to pour into her mouth. She said the letters were meant for anyone listening, and I was the one who had been translating. I was the one who wanted to witness. I thought of everything I’d fed to the holes: Dayi’s goose, Ben’s birdcage, my tail. While Ama watched me, I thought of kidnapping the rest of her teeth, holding them hostage in my mouth. She’d have to beg me to return them to her, give her back the ability to speak. You’ll write back. I know you will. I said no, I didn’t have the history to forgive her, and Ama said, I never wanted you to forgive me. Weren’t you reading? Behind her, the garden hose spewed into the soil. She kneeled in the white, held out her palms. She said she must have dreamt of growing a tail just like this when she was a girl, but sometimes a wound skips a generation or two, appearing again in the body that is most ready to wield it. I said I never wanted to wield anything ever again, that I had seen Agong’s chest branded by me. You’ll write back, Ama said. Not because you’ve forgiven me, but because I will never hate you for what you’ve done. Because I’m the only one who knows what you’re capable of. She bowed her head like a knight in a fairy tale, all parody, and at the nape of her neck, there was a cowlick the same size and shape of my mother’s. It was like seeing again a species of bird you thought went extinct: I couldn’t stop myself from cooing down at it, petting it. With the tip of my soiled thumb, I touched the spot where her hair grew circular like my mother’s, the tip of the strand chasing its own root. I stirred the cowlick with my thumb and told her this was what my mother did before I fell asleep: She traversed my hairline with her finger, renaming my widow’s peak Papakwaka, every part of me a creation story. Ama didn’t raise her head, but I knew she was listening, the soil turning bright-wet as the whites of her eyes. From the front doorway, my mother’s voice threaded through the house and into the yard. She called to me in a voice so like Ama’s, I thought for a moment that Ama was speaking from outside her own body. But only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth. _

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority.51 Without a professional police force and modern methods of surveillance, public order was dependent on such spectacles. Utterly repugnant as it is to us today, killing dissenters was seen as essential to the exercise of power, especially when the state was still fragile.52 But the suppression of heterodoxy was not wholly pragmatic; an ideology that was central to an individual’s integrity also played a role. Thomas More, once a ruthless persecutor, would have taken the oath had he been motivated solely by political concerns; and Mary Tudor could have strengthened her regime had she been less zealous against Protestants. Yet heresy was different from other capital crimes, because if the accused recanted, she was pardoned and her life spared. Modern scholars have shown that officials often genuinely wanted to bring the wayward back into the fold and that the death of an unrepentant heretic was seen as a defeat.53 During the 1550s, the zealous inquisitor Pieter Titlemaus presided over at least 1,120 heresy trials in Flanders, but only 127 ended in execution. Twelve attempts were made by inquisitors, civic authorities, and priests to save the Anabaptist Soetken van den Houte and her three women companions in 1560. Under Mary Tudor, Edmund Bonner, Catholic bishop of London, tried fifteen times to rescue the Protestant John Philpot, six times to save Richard Woodman, and nine times to redeem Elizabeth Young.54 Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists could all find biblical texts to justify the execution of heretics.55 Some quoted scriptural teachings that preached mercy and tolerance, but these kinder counsels were rejected by the majority. Yet even though thousands were indeed beheaded, burned, or hanged, drawn and quartered, there was no headlong rush to martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees. Calvin inveighed against such cowardice, comparing closet Calvinists to Nicodemus, the Pharisee who kept his faith in Jesus secret. But “Nicodemites” in France and Italy retorted that it was easy for Calvin to take this heroic line while living safely in Geneva.56 Under Elizabeth I, there was a strong cult of martyrdom only among the Jesuits and seminarians training for the English mission who believed that their sacrifice would save their country.57 But recruits were also warned against excessive enthusiasm. A manual of the English College in Rome during the 1580s pointed out that not everybody was called to martyrdom and that no one should put himself at risk unnecessarily.58

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The moral is you can’t really save anything. My mother laughed and said listen, little anus, the story’s still singeing: The neighbor’s tree, the one that had once carried the monkey, burned down in a night. No one had seen anything or smelled any smoke, but one morning the tree had no torso. There wasn’t even a stump, just a socket in the ground that bled for a month. The same woman who did that, my mother said, threw us into the river. I said, Maybe she thought you were a fire. But I thought of what Ama had said: Maybe it was true that a mean thing could not be made good again. Maybe my tail had been corrupted into something that couldn’t be saved. I’d whipped it against Agong. Ama had walked me with it like a leash. I no longer knew how to hold it, and at night when it tried to cuddle against my leg, I swatted it away, orphaning it to the other side of the bed. After grinding the powder, my mother squatted next to the sofa. She propped up Agong’s head with a pillow and tried opening and closing his mouth with her hands. He won’t swallow, she said. She said she’d tried everything: pinching his nose shut, sugaring the spoon, tickling his throat. Agong, I said. If you don’t swallow, your stomach will get so light it’ll float out of your body. You need to anchor it with something solid. He was listening. He swallowed. I remembered the story of gegu: to cure your father by cutting your own flesh and feeding it to him. I glanced at my mother’s thighs, but they were the same size I remembered. That night I stayed awake to the soundtrack of my father’s voice saying thigh, saying knife, saying father. When I was tired of counting the leaks in our ceiling, I slipped off of the mattress and walked to the pantry, where my mother kept her toes in the cookie tin. The lid popped from its socket soundlessly and I looked inside, knowing already what had been taken. The tin was empty, rinsed clean, my mouth mirrored back at me. I thought of my mother in the kitchen, grinding out powder for hours. The pestle multiplying her toe-bones. To give something a new shape, she’d said. You have to break it. In the morning, Agong seemed familiar with himself, passing the mirror without spitting at his own face inside it. My mother gave him her hand mirror, introducing himself to himself, and Agong nodded . My mother pointed to herself: your daughter. Then at me: your daughter’s daughter. Agong agreed. He ate a frozen waffle with his fingers, the edges laced with ice.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I wanted to say I never meant to hurt him. She cut a hole in his shirt so that it wouldn’t chafe against his burn wound, a steak-raw stripe the length of my hand. Dabbing the wound with spit and mud from the yard, my mother told me not to touch it. It glowed like plum meat, stripped of its skin, pus drying into sap. I wanted to say that my tail had outgrown me, grown crooked like the roots of Duck Uncle’s tree that time our sidewalk split open and scabbed. Its reach was beyond this body, this city. When I tried to speak, my mouth felt full of bees. I didn’t know how to own what I’d done. My mother touched her knuckle to the back of my neck, told me to go away and sleep. She’d stay awake all night to watch him, to pad the sweat off his cheeks with her sleeves, to reel him in from dreams too deep. He reminded me of the neighborhood stray with a spotted face. It was incontinent, dragging a river of piss up the driveway. That night I dreamed of Ama in the yard, feeding chicks out of her left hand. With her right hand, she practiced the width of the hens’ necks. She dug into the soil, tore out white carrots that glowed like rib bones. She sat all night in front of the TV the way my mother did, face scabbed in blue light, watching soap operas about women who married their husbands’ ghosts when they didn’t return from war. In one of the scenes, the wife doesn’t want to sleep with her ghost husband, so she tricks him by dressing a dead goat in her clothes, tucking the goat into her side of the bed. But the ghost husband isn’t tricked. He gets revenge by cleaving the goat open and sewing his wife into its body. When the wife-goat is slaughtered and spit-roasted for a feast, no one ever finds out who they are eating. I woke, wanting to know the ending, but there was no one in the room to tell it. _ The verb cleave has two meanings: to split from and stick to. Another doubling: When my mother says mother she means the body that gave birth to her and the one that tried to kill her. In the kitchen, my mother’s cleaver was pinned above the sink like an earring, its shadow spanning the whole floor. I took it down, holding the wooden handle that still wore her hands’ heat.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben said I should stop lying. Before she could say anything else, my tail whipped forward, shifting me onto my toes. I obeyed its weight and moved toward her, pushing Ben with both my hands. Ben stumbled and went backward into the hole, landing on the pyre of two-by-fours. The breath tore out of her mouth. I didn’t remember calling down to her, but Ben said I did, and that’s how her father heard and brought his ladder, bringing Ben back up in a mulch sack. He laid her on the soil and slapped her face till her eyes came on again. I watched while my tail retracted, curled and beating at my lower back. That week, I stood again at the hem of the hole and begged her to push me in. Do it, I said. Ben wore a bandage around her ribs to make sure the bones clasped back together in the correct place. I’d watched her father cut it from a bedsheet. I spoke with my back to her, waiting for her hands to decide I was right, that I was a species she didn’t recognize. But she never did it. When I turned around, her bandage was undone and whipping the air like a wing. I couldn’t look at her face. Behind her, the sky was blue because I’d bruised it. Her voice had salt in it, a rasp I’d never heard before. The word I wanted was forgiven, but she never said it. I’d dreamed once of yanking the key off her neck, giving her my hands to wear instead. A bruise-necklace around her throat. I knew how to make jewelry of my cruelty. Each of my knuckles was named after an aunt I had never known, and Ben touched each one to her cheek. How many of me she had yet to meet. She knotted herself to the ground, fought her own stillness. The desire to see me hurt was defeated by the desire to not give me what I wanted. When she didn’t push me, it felt more like punishment than forgiveness. She pulled us both away from the hole and into the shade of the shed. Taking my wrists in her hands, I thought for a second she might twist them into wicks, bring me to my knees. I’d worship whatever pain she gave me. I’d be the saint of injury. But instead, she rubbed her lips against my knuckles, soaping them with her tongue. When she leaned forward, mending my lips to hers, I thought of tonguing out all her teeth and keeping them alive in my cheek, seeds of her mouth I could spit out and plant later. Her hand speared down my waistband, wrapped fast around my tail. I tensed, told her to let go. You once told me you didn’t want it, Ben said, twisting my tail until the bone creaked.