Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I had never been in a church before. There were not many people in attendance: just me, Lydia, Lily, Clever, Rita, the Lawrences, and several of the ranch workers. I was awed by the mysticism and magic of the ceremony. The costumes of the priest who delivered the homily and the men who walked up the aisle swinging jars of incense on thin golden chains, the recitations and chants in Latin, the beauty of it, all the colors and ornaments. I have never exactly wished that I was religious, but all the soul-stirring ritual of a Catholic funeral makes me understand something about it. How could anyone sit in a Catholic church and watch and listen with an open heart to the Requiem — the solemnity, the beautiful music, the Latin incantations — and walk away unmoved?

After the funeral we drove back home in a short chain of cars with the headlights on, where all that was mortal of Hilarious Larry was inhumed in a grave on the ranch grounds. Lily stood beside the grave in a black dress and lace veil while the casket was lowered into the earth and Father Malcolm scattered holy water from a wand and threw dirt on it as he said the Pater Noster. Afterward the others retired inside for the wake. There were cookies and punch. Lily did not join us. The small chapel the Lawrences had built for her on the ranch stood just a little off to the side of the big house. From the outside it looked like little more than a glorified toolshed with a cross on top of it. It was Lily’s space; I had never been in it. I saw her walk away from everyone else and enter the doors of the little chapel. After mingling for a while around the cookies and punch bowl at the wake, I wandered outside onto the back deck to have a look at the deep red light of the late afternoon waning on the faces of the mountains, still in my little black suit but with my black tie loosened, with a plastic cup of punch in my hand. My feet crunched in the grass as I approached the little chapel. I quietly cracked the double doors and slipped my head inside. It was a small, windowless room, but beautifully built, with planed and polished rosewood wainscoting on the walls and a wooden ceiling and floor, ambiently underlit with dim soft lights, and an altar at the far end of the room. At the altar, an especially gory and emaciated Jesus hammered to an elaborate cross tipped his curly-haired and serene head heavenward. Candles flickered and dripped wax over the altar. I saw Hilarious Lily kneeling on a red prayer cushion before the altar with a lowered head and shut eyes, fondling the beads of her rosary. She touched her long fingers to her shoulders, head and chest, shoulders, head and chest, making the sign of the cross over and over. I went out and shut the door behind me.

That night, after the wake, I followed Clever outside, and we walked together through a field of dry waist-high yellow grass, shushing all around us in the wind. I was drunk, quite drunk, a bit too much punch singing in my veins, and my head wobbled groggily on top of my shoulders. It was a new moon, giving us perfect darkness to see the stars in. We came to a point at which Clever decided — following either a random decision or some unknown or arcane cue that remained invisible to me — to suddenly flop himself down in the grass and look up at the sky. I dropped down next to him. We were close enough to the house that we could see the lights in its windows and distantly hear the humans talking, but far enough away that we felt quite alone together, out here in the night, lying in this field. We heard a wire-thin crackle of coyote laughter from somewhere far away in the mountains. We gazed up together at the thousands and thousands of stars exploding across the clear sky of that moonless Colorado night in spring. It wasn’t cold out, but it wasn’t very warm, either. I think I may have even caught a cold, lying drunk in the field with Clever that night. We watched the sky until we could see the dim dots of satellites traverse it in the spaces of darkness between the stars. It caused me to think about space and time and the universe. There are two kinds of awe, I thought, and may have said so to Clever, who may have looked at me, mutely shrugged, and looked back at the stars. One kind of awe is what I feel when I look up into a clear night sky like this one. The other kind of awe is what I feel when I listen to music, or see a painting that I love, or when I watch Lily kneeling on her prayer cushion before the altar, praying. One is an awe at nature, and the other is awe at the wild irrational beauty of the mind. Are these awes in opposition to one another? Or are they, in some terrifying, spooky way, somehow connected? Clever just shrugged. I believe that all our philosophy — I said to him, on a roll now — all our religions and even our sciences, every human attempt to understand or explain ourselves, the world and our place in it — all our inquisitiveness, our superstition, our fear, our arrogance, all the ways in which we defend ourselves against the awe an animal feels when he stares into a starry black night like this one, the terror felt by an animal smart enough to ask but not enough to answer — has its roots in our understanding of time. We are animals cursed with cognizance of death; we know we will end, and while we do not remember beginning, we know and must believe that we began, and this belief in our own beginning makes us want to find out what happened before we all began, and further it makes us want to know how everything began. What happened in the beginning? Imagine this (I said to Clever): it is night — a clear cool night like this one, a bleak and hard night of a long time ago. The wind ripples the grasses of the rolling plains, predators cackle forebodingly far away (or maybe near). A primitive man, exhausted deep in his bones from the endless labor of daily persistence, pokes listlessly with a stick at the orange embers crumbling in the firepit. Sparks crack, smoke wafts upward, bright spirals of light skittle up from the throbbing ashes. Nearby, a drowsy child looks up at him, his face red in the dim firelight. He is almost asleep, his eyes languid but full of idle curiosity. He points at the rocks and the trees and the fire, and finally at the looming vault of sky above them haunted with ribbons of starsmoke, and asks his father— How did all this come to be? And the primitive father can only scratch his head, clear his throat and say— Well, um, it’s, uh… (ahem)… It’s complicated. Gee, how do I put this…? — and then he proceeds to make something up, and he comes up with some crazy story that quickly spins into a mythos so bizarre and darkly beautiful that in time he’s even managed to convince himself of its truth. And the story begins: In the beginning… In the beginning. In the beginning was… In the beginning was a cosmic egg. In the beginning the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. In the beginning was chaos, and chaos gave birth to the earth, the sky, the underworld, love and darkness, and the earth lay in love with the sky and gave birth to the sea. In the beginning was the earth, resting on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. And what was the turtle standing on? Another turtle. And what was that turtle standing on? You’re very clever, young man — says the primitive father — but it’s no use, it’s turtles all the way down. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. In the beginning the entire universe was condensed into a single point of infinite mass, which suddenly blew up and made everything. And this was the beginning of time. The beginning of beginnings, the beginning of Beginning. In the beginning was word. A word, or the word? Just word, my son, this was a time long before definite articles. In the beginning, somebody said let there be light. And there was. How did he/she/it know the word for light? How could the word light preexist the thing light? How was the universe brought into existence by the utterance of a word?