Russell Banks - Outer Banks

In those months of her instruction, which was the winter-time of my first year of imprisonment, my wife grew wan and sickly, as a consequence of her sufferings from the birthing of the child born dead the previous spring, and also from the sufferings wrought by the poverty of her life without the presence of a husband able to earn a living in the world. I do also fear that her daily journey to the prison, which was often a damp and chilled place, despite my efforts to warm the cell with the brazier that my new jailor had kindly supplied me, exacerbated her condition somewhat. So that by the middle of December she had gone to a pathetic thinness and her skin had come to be cracked and chafed by the wind and cold, and she was beginning to cough. Even so, each noontime when she arrived at my cell, often bearing freshly baked cakes or bread, she would smile cheerily and fill me with news of our dear children and the lives of our brethren in the faith, most of whom, by having watched me be overwhelmed by the power of the state, had either made their practices of worship invisible to the state or had chosen self-banishment and had gone out of the nation. (This was but one of the reasons why it was then so difficult for me to obtain a new coffin to replace the one I had made over to my saintly jailor, John Bethel.) However, many was the day when, at the arrival of my wife, I peered into her gray eyes and saw the suffering hidden there, and the sight, despite all my efforts against it, often brought me to tears.

After a short time my wife began to see the effect her wretched state was having on me, and so she struggled all the more bravely to disguise it, even to the extreme measure of wearing dresses that exaggerated and pointed with innocent directness to the few remaining curves and rises of her body. She took to wearing a dark blue wool dress that I gathered she had knitted herself during the long evenings alone in our cottage after the children had gone off to bed. This dress, unintentionally provocative, was designed to fit snugly around her hips and buttocks and to lift and round her small breasts so as to make her seem to me more healthy and jocular than in fact she was. I cannot say it forcefully enough, but let it be known to all that my wife in no way was attempting to encourage in me the lust that her presence in that knit dress soon began to provoke. So did I then believe, and so do I believe today. Let this account in no way besmirch her pure and devoted life, her noble death, and the majesty of her present and everlasting existence among the dead. Let it merely serve as a warning to those who, desiring to bring comfort and good cheer to the living, inadvertently wreak havoc and establish depression among them instead. We cannot provide solace for the living, no more than can we avenge ourselves upon the dead. Presence evades attention, absence invites it, and there is no choice, for there is but the acceptance of what is possible, or the denial. ( Trib. , iv, 13.)

If, then, my dearly beloved wife erred, she erred in this way, and given the brevity of her previous period of instruction in the faith, she was no more to be condemned for her actions than was my jailor John Bethel for his. And to be sure, if anyone is to stand condemned, let me be the one, for I was the only person, in both cases, who could be said to have been responsible for their instruction in the faith, for in both cases did I myself undertake their instruction. Yet I had mistrusted John Bethel’s pleas for the name of a coffinmaker, so that he could in life have practiced the uplifting rite of prayer, which would have opened him sufficiently unto the wisdom of the dead so as to have forbidden him from supplanting my death with his own that day in court. The result therefrom must be blamed on me. And I did pridefully assume that my young wife’s proximity to me day and night for the two years of our marriage prior to my arrest was sufficient instruction for her to know at once that whatever device she used to provide me with less pity for her, if it awakened in me appetites that drew my attention away from the dead and toward the living, then the device, regardless of her kind intent, was diabolical. No, I am the one who must be blamed for these two errors in faith. I am the one who has failed the terms of his calling and who, therefore, must beg forgiveness of the dead.

It thus happened that one particularly sour and chilled December noontime, when my wife came unto me and entered my cell, and when the jailor had left us alone and had returned to his post below, the close heat of my cell swiftly brought a blush to her face and encouraged her to unwrap her scarf and shawl, which revealed in the glow of the brazier and my reading candle an illusory fullness through her hips and breasts, an illusory healthy roundness to her arms, and great warmth of illusory color in her throat. I declare it illusory simply because I well knew that the woman had long been ill and pinched by pain and that in my absence she had been forced frequently to deprive herself so that the plates of my children, her step-children, could be filled. Further, I declare it illusory so that it may be known abroad that she did in no way provoke me or otherwise draw from me lustful ambitions. They existed prior to her arrival that noontime and they merely used her presence as an occasion to arise and make themselves known to us. The woman lived purely. She wished no more than to let me beget a new child upon her, a child of her own who would be able someday to tender proper mercy to her when she herself had joined the blessed dead. I, I was the one who had no pure thoughts that day, no thoughts of an unborn child coming to life so as to bless me in death, I was the one whose lust had no ambition other than its own satisfaction, a means with no end, a cause with no effect.

Therefore did I reach out and paw her soft body and draw her to me, and then did I wrench her dress from her body and expose her creamy surface to the flick of candle light and the steady glow of the reddened coals in the brazier, and then did I strip my trousers off, and pulling my wife down, did I cover her with my body and swarm over her for a great long time, until at last did I fall away and, exhausted, uncouple from her.

At first, my response to this act was, of all the possible responses then available to me, the weakest one. I strode down the path of least resistance, as it were, by simply refusing to acknowledge this lustful seizure and the seizures that regularly every afternoon followed it, like links in a binding chain, as being anything more than some natural expression of my body, no less natural than the continued growth of the hair of my head or the hair of my beard or the nails of my fingers and toes. This insistance upon the naturalness of my act was, of course, as the reader must know all too well, nothing but a means of construing the situation so as to be better able to repeat the act, over and over, day after day, until it had become a hideous habit and there seemed to be no way of separating the head of it from the tail. Each time after my wife had wrapped herself once again modestly in her scarf and shawl and had left my presence, I would groan aloud and beat my breast with shame, and each time, before long, I would start up with assurances that what I was doing was no more than any man’s body, so deprived by imprisonment, would wish him to do. I even contrived a clever guard against shame by wheedling out of my intelligence this argument: that to berate myself for having fallen into lustful copulation was to give an unnatural attention to things and events of this life, which was unnecessarily and sinfully to pull my proper attention away from contemplation of the dead. And like a true sophist, I even used scripture to woo me from self-disgust. Leave off undue fascination with and morbid examination of things of the body, I told myself, quoting the sacred book of Walter (x, 42). Thus did I not only debase myself, but I debased the words of the sainted dead as well. And all this in but the very beginnings of my period of transgression! I elaborate on and attend to it here solely that the reader will know that I too have been confronted by the forces of life that would demean and destroy our faith, and I too have walked across the barren desert of my own weakness and have come to the mountains beyond, and I have at last ascended those mountains. I have endured as all men may endure, if they will but will it.