The View from Castle Rock

Not a time to show German lettering, even spelling out holy texts. And not a thing to be mentioned for many years afterwards.
    Being in the church with this woman as guide gives me a slightly lost feeling, or a feeling of bewilderment, of having got things the wrong way round. The words on the wall strike me to the heart, but I am not a believer and they do not make me a believer. She seems to think of her church, including those words, as if she were its vigilant housekeeper. In fact she mentions critically that a bit of the paint-in the ornate “L” of Licht-has faded or flaked off, and should be replaced. But she is the believer. It seems as if you must always take care of what’s on the surface, and what is behind, so immense and disturbing, will take care of itself.
    In separate panes of the stained-glass windows are displayed these symbols:
    The Dove (over the altar).
    The letters Alpha and Omega (in the rear wall).
    The Holy Grail.
    The Sheaf of Wheat.
    The Cross in the Crown.
    The Ship at Anchor.
    The Lamb of God bearing the Cross.
    The Mythical Pelican, with golden feathers, believed to feed its young on the blood of its own torn breast, as Christ the Church. (The Mythical Pelican as represented here resembles the real pelican only by way of being a bird.)

    Just a few days before I am to have my biopsy I get a call from the city hospital to say that the operation has been cancelled.
    I am to keep the appointment anyway, to have a talk with the radiologist, but I do not need to fast in preparation for surgery.
    Cancelled.
    Why? Information on the other two mammograms?
    I once knew a man who went into the hospital to have a little lump cut out of his neck. He put my hand on it, on that silly little lump, and we laughed about how we could exaggerate its seriousness and get him a couple of weeks off work, to go on a holiday together. The lump was examined, but further surgery was cancelled because there were so many, many other lumps that were discovered. The verdict was that any operation would be useless. All of a sudden, he was a marked man. No more laughing. When I went to see him he stared at me in nearly witless anger, he could not hide it. It was
all through him,
they said.
    I used to hear that same thing said when I was a child, always said in a hushed voice that seemed to throw the door open, half-willingly, to calamity. Half-willingly, even with an obscene hint of invitation.

    We do stop at the middle house in Scone, not after visiting the church but on the day after the hospital phoned. We are looking for some diversion. Already something has changed-we notice how familiar the landscape of Sullivan Township and the church and the cemeteries and the villages of Desboro and Scone and the town of Chesley are beginning to seem to us, how the distances between places have shortened. Perhaps we had found out all we are going to find out. There might be a bit more explanation-the idea of the vault might have come from somebody’s reluctance to put a three-year-old child under the ground-but what has been so compelling is drawn now into a pattern of things we know about.
    Nobody answers the outside door. The house and yard are tidily kept. I look around at the bright beds of annuals and a rose of Sharon bush and a little black boy sitting on a stump with a Canadian flag in his hand. There are not so many little black boys in people’s yards as there used to be. Grown children, city dwellers, may have cautioned against them-though I don’t believe that a racial insult was ever a conscious intention. It was more as if people felt that a little black boy added a touch of sportiness, and charm.
    The outside door opens into a narrow porch. I step inside and sound the house doorbell. There is just room to move past an armchair with an afghan on it and a couple of wicker tables with potted plants.
    Still nobody comes. But I can hear loud religious singing inside the house. A choir, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Through the window in the door I see the singers on television in an inner room. Blue robes, many bobbing faces against a sunset sky. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?
    I listen to the words, all of which I used to know. As far as I can tell these singers are about at the end of the first verse.
    I let the bell alone till they finish.
    I try again, and Mrs. Mannerow comes. A short, competent-looking woman with tight grayish-brown curls, wearing a flowered blue top to match her blue slacks.
    She