No Resting Place Read Online Free PDF

opened the lower half of the door to show him in (he had muttered that he was there to see the minister, please, ma’am; would she be so good as to ask him to step outside? That she would not, for the minister was prostrated by the infernal heat, but she would ask him , please, to be so good as to step inside ) he had slipped past her as if afraid of contamination by her touch. (That, in fact, was exactly what he feared. For while it was over a week ago that he had been ritually scratched, and while he was now free to associate with women again, even to be touched by one, he was not yet used to this restored freedom. Besides, this one was an Yvwunega who would not have known what it meant to be scratched if she were told.) Putting the width of the kitchen between them, the boy said, “My business with the minister is just between him and me, if you don’t mind, ma’am.”
    Yet such a different impression had he made upon her husband, they might have been talking about not one but two boys. (In fact, they were. Actually, three.) Rather a sobersided little soul but perfectly polite, the Reverend Mackenzie found their young caller. Welcomed him here, hoped they were settling in comfortably, wondered if there were anything he might do to be of help. Then he stated his business. On his own, without his parents, he had come to ask to be baptized.
    Today? Now?
    If it was convenient with His Reverence, the sooner the better, for he was no longer a child but had reached the age of discretion and was now accountable for his sins. And there was no knowing when a body might die.
    It was not cant. The boy seemed to have thought quite seriously already about death and damnation.
    Impressed, eager to get started doing God’s work, the Reverend Mackenzie readily agreed.
    He knew a good place on the river for them to do it, the boy said.
    He must be from a family of Baptists. Now, the Reverend Mackenzie had always thought of nonconformists as misguided at best, nitpickers and hairsplitters, and, at worst, as outcasts for going against the kingdom’s established church. This boy brought home to him the fact that he was no longer in that kingdom. On the contrary, he was in the only former colony that had rebelled against the king, against an established church, and had won.
    Surprised at the ease with which he did it, the Reverend Mackenzie found himself thinking, well, better a Baptist than a heathen—although he was quite certain that no Baptist would have said the same for his own creed, and certain too that he himself would not have said it so easily anywhere else but here. One must trim one’s sails to the wind. His church had its tenets and its rites, and that these were the right tenets and the right rites he never questioned, yet here he was in this frontier outpost, the only Christian minister of any denomination—much like a general agent for several insurance companies, though the comparison was rather uncomfortably commercial. Sectarian differences seemed to lose here some of their importance. As a foreign embassy or a consulate sometimes handled affairs with the host country of nations with no representatives there of their own, so he now began to see his function. His bishop might not agree, but, yes, decidedly, better a Baptist than a heathen. The Reverend Mackenzie confesses that in that heat a cool dip while doing God’s work seemed to him a jolly good idea. He confesses even to having followed the boy’s example, stripping to the skin and enjoying a total immersion himself.
    The spot was one at which two rivers met and joined to become one big river. Any one of the three would have fulfilled their requirements, but the boy insisted on being baptized in the big river. It symbolized something for him.
    â€œI am like it,” he said with a solemnity that, in one so young, would have been comical had it not instead been impressive. “Two in one.” He did not volunteer to