All True Rites and Lawful Ceremonies
1983; University of Missouri; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mis.1983.0083
ISSN1548-9930
Autores ResumoALL TRUE RITES AND LAWFUL CEREMONIES / Jonathan Penner //?"· EACH," SAID PITT'S grandfather. J. He was close enough so that there was no mistaking the word, standing on a cottony cloudlet no more than fifteen feet away, his high black shoes on a level with Pitt's waist. He wore a rumpled, overlarge dark gray suit with a haze of ash on one lapel, apparently spilled from the briar pipe nearly hidden in his thick right hand. Seamed, pouchy face; wild white hair—he'd continued to age in the decades since his funeral. Even before Pitt opened his eyes, he knew he had been dreaming. But that made no difference at all. He knew what he had seen. He lay calmly in his double bed. From his wife's bedroom, connected with his by the bathroom they shared, came the soft, slow pulse of her snoring. By old habit he tried to synchronize his breath to it, but could no longer breathe that slowly without feeling dizzy. His room was full of light. Nearly seven: Pitt reached out to prevent his alarm clock from sounding. He could hear the weak-eyed man already gardening, squeakily unreeling the hose, telling the two Newfoundlands not to mess him with their bloody muzzles. They must have caught a rabbit. The girl without breasts was starting to move about in the kitchen. Pitt had felt for a long time that it would come to this. He was the president of a generating company that distributed power to three states, but in the last year his achievements had gradually ceased (as his possessions had done long since) to please him. His wife had been impatient, the few times he had started to tell her about it, declaring that she would not be made ashamed of what she was. His son was at prep school, and too young. June, his daughter, was at college. During her last Christmas vacation he had tried discussing it with her as they walked, awkwardly holding mittened hands, through the snow. But June had misunderstood and embraced him in pity, rising on the toes of her galoshes to put her arms around his scarf-wrapped neck. Following this dream of his grandfather, Pitt decided not to wait any longer. As the man who stuttered drove him down the wooded hillside to work that morning, he realized that he could start with the servants, who liked and admired him. That evening he met the four of them in the little apartment over the garage, from where, when their windows were open on warm nights, he heard the girl without breasts and the impotent man attempt to make love, then taunt each other. He told them about the age 94 · The Missouri Review of the stars, the still expanding universe, the dance that people danced in the bubble of foam they thought was the world. The man who stuttered watched him with small blue eyes unblinking as marbles. Pitt soon felt overcome by what he was saying, and had to leave, first giving each of them a twenty dollar bill. But the next evening he was with them again. He spoke of the infinite mass of things, tumbling and churning eternally, that sometimes produced particles having transient consciousness. Particles that called themselves alive, planted seeds, built houses, generated power. The impotent man shook his large-jawed head. The girl without breasts leaned forward, propping crossed elbows on crossed knees. Pitt fell silent, gave them money, and went away. Mixing drinks for herself and him, his wife asked what was going on. When he told her what he had told the servants, she said he was exhausted and wanted to call their doctor. Pitt wondered whether the servants, too, as he sat and talked to them, stout and rich and earnest, thought his mind was wandering. But in a few days the man who stuttered, driving him home up the hiU, asked with difficulty whether Pitt would talk to them again. By the roadside, as they reached the hilltop, Pitt saw the two Newfoundlands fade into the woods. Where they had been was a dead raccoon that they had been trying to rip...
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