William Gass - Middle C

The kraut was red as a red wine, with a soft broad leftover taste. Joey could understand how it had become a comfort, not only taking his mother back to her farmhouse childhood but also soothing her tongue from a run of bad words and steering her thoughts from complaints. If Mr. Tippet cultivated his condition perhaps Joey could earn enough to buy some Berlioz, or maybe a hoe for his mother if she was going to dig in the yard. He did worry a little that they might want him to play difficult pieces that he had no previous knowledge of, but Joey remembered the tawdry services he had attended and believed the priest would just say “play” the way he said “dominoes.” Luxury lace is next, Miriam said. What’s that? What it says on the package. White, too. She looked, shook the packet — Alyssum, she said. Do you ever see pinks? Did she know he had pilfered them, Joey wondered, beginning to blush — I’ll … I’ll poke around.

Joey wheezed his way through several Sundays of early mass and shook off effusive compliments; meanwhile, at the other pole of performance, he managed to snitch some dianthus from a potting tray where there was a loose pile of seed packets still, and dwarf marigolds, too. Rakes, hoes, spades leaned against the shed wall tempting him into significant dishonesty, but he refused to surrender another inch of his already abbreviated virtue. The trips to and from school were a nuisance, but various parishioners did drive duty for him, full of curiosity about Augsburg and its quiet ways. Joey made up a life that was regular and serene yet far more interesting than the one he knew, since this college’s life seemed to have no real qualities at all, and his only anecdote was one he dare not tell on himself. He stayed at his mother’s over Saturday nights now in order to make early mass and be driven back to Augsburg for elevenses. More than once his chauffeurs observed with amusement how late Protestants slept in.

The grass in the Augsburg quad, the college catalog said, was the same grass that had spread its welcome across the colony’s common in its first days; and the main hall, of limestone and granite, had stood nearly two hundred years of student food and student chit and student chat and student sing-alongs at lunch on Sunday when visitors were frequent; moreover the light that fell through the chapel’s glass to stipple the floors and pews had fallen every day in the same way since the glass had been installed with evangelical ceremony and in exultant sunshine; so that when you walked beneath its principal line of stately, though now infected, elms, you heard in the moving leaves the hum of history, indeed history was where you were headed, for at the heart of the school, in the center of its campus, a large door, said to have been rescued from an abandoned Catholic church, had been stuck in a hunk of concrete that represented stone, and upon its crackled panels had been pinioned a symbolic copy of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in the shape of windblown bronze leaves.

Mr. Tippet had warned of his recovery and incipient return, so Joey’s month of work was nearly over when Joey was notified that the rector of Augsburg Community College was anxious to see him. Joey was scarcely aware there was a rector or any sort of pooh-bah higher than the dean or the chaplain who tended to preside over the school’s Sunday services. As a student he was in good standing, though not quake resistant, and he felt his organ playing, admittedly pissy at first, was now at least adequate to the four square tunes he was expected to perform. Surely, rumors about Madame’s defiled pillows could not have reached the rector’s distant ears, however large they might be. So Joey was at a loss.

He went without evident anxiety up a staircase protected by mahogany rails. A door on the first landing displayed a plaque below its frosted window that read DR. GUNTER LUTHARDT, RECTOR, splayed out in old German type. The name and title were gilded, but much of the gilt was worn, as though Dr. Luthardt had been in his position longer than paint; indeed he might have been there since the building was built for all Joey knew, and this time Joey’s considerable ignorance about everything near and far dismayed him, and he felt a flicker of resolve. Dr. Luthardt had black hair and a deep dark suit, and he was sitting in a high-backed dark chair in front of a window heavily draped, so his very white face glowed like a malignant moon. This effect was doubtless aimed at. His eyes were small and his lips were as thin as the edges of a letter slot. Through this slit his voice emerged like a blade from a block; its speech seemed to glint, although you couldn’t see teeth; it hadn’t a hint of accent despite the rector’s formidable look and Dutchie name.

Mr. Joseph Skizzen — Dr. Luthardt appeared to be looking at a piece of paper held just above the top of the desk — it has been reported to me that in a session of Lutheran Studies during your first semester here, you said that — ah — you wrote that — from what you’d read Martin Luther seemed awfully eager to get God on his side, and that’s why our namesake decided to become a monk … as a bribe — as you put it — to bribe God with his good behavior.

Gee. I don’t remember.

By becoming a monk in a monastery — it was reported to me — a monastery supported by a church that Luther later decided wasn’t worth much , and no place to go or be if you wanted to get right with God—

I just thought …

Since the church — what else is written here? — wasn’t right with God either—

Well, I guess I meant …

So his choice of monastery — hence his choice of church — to honor with his piety was the choice of the Devil’s as it turned out—

Dr. Luthardt’s voice came at him like something swung, and a corner of Joey cringed— and a sign he was a sinner not a saint . What do you say to this, young sir, that has been reported to me?

I don’t … he was more Catholic than most before he became a Lutheran. He was scared … his horse was frightened by a bolt of lightning, so he promised to behave … to be a monk … but the monks weren’t going to heaven just for beating their chests … Joey received the rector’s look like a slap to his face. I don’t remember what I said, he said.

You knew well enough then, didn’t you?

We are all sinners, sir, aren’t we?

Some of us sin more than others; some sins are small as rice, and some are more sizable; some sins are momentary as a sneeze, some are lifelong; some sins are made worse by their situations and surroundings, but others shrivel and become limp; some sins are normal and occur in the course of things, while some sins are aberrant, outlandish, and perverse; yet God can grant grace to the worst of us, forgive sins both grand and grisly; but for those who wallow in the wickedness of sexual desire, or sin outside the true church, there can be no salvation.

I suppose so, sir.

Suppose so …?

Suppose no salva—

Martin Luther was clothed in the grace of God; and when God chose him to become a monk he did so — you know very well and should have thought very long about it — in order that Luther should eventually learn the extent of the moral diseases that infected the Catholic church, and consequently be motivated to make his great protestation, for what do you think would have come of us had he not left the law and its secular license for the cell and its sacred walls?

Sort of a spy, then?

Of course not. He was aware of the maxim: Know your enemy.

And for those who don’t sin outside the church …

What?

But only sin in it?

Who?

Can there be salvation for them?

I just said, young sir, that God is grace, only God is grace, only God can purify, only God can steer us aright. Your mind is a mess, Mr. Skizzen. To be outside our church is itself a sin.