The Recognitions Read Online Free PDF Page B

to tell you, she commenced, and when Gwyon looked satisfactorily alarmed she went on, —Your son has learned, somewhere, to swear. It's scarcely surprising, with a grandfather who talks to him just the way he talks to his cronies in the saloon, and fills him full of all kinds of drivel . . . She went on to explain that she had taken a toy away from Wyatt every time this happened (being lenient), until he was left with only one, a cloth rabbit. (For the truth of that, the words which cost him those treasures were darn and heck: she seemed to know their euphemistic derivation well enough.) —And then, the last straw, I ... I can scarcely repeat his words. Though Heaven knows how they are engraved on my memory. He knew I was in the room, he was sitting on the floor with his last toy, this rabbit, and he said . . . your son said, as clearly as I'm speaking now, he said, "You're the by-Goddest rabbit I ever damn saw!" At which, hearing herself speak this, Aunt May almost sobbed crying out, —What kind of a Christian mi ... mish . . . minister do you think he will make? 
    Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighed heavily in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family "less fortunate than we are"), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carriage barn with —Nyaa nyaa, suckinyerma's ti-it-ty . . .) Wyatt was taken to a dark corner, where he later reckoned all Good works were conceived, and told that it was the Christian thing to surrender his portion. So he entered his fifth year hatless among crepe-paper festoons, silent amid snapping crackers, empty of Christian love for the uninvited who asked him why he wasn't having any cake. 
    On Sunday mornings he would sit tugging buttons or strands of horsehair from the pew's upholstery, trying to work out a way to circumvent surrender of the coin in the wet palm of his hand. But the untoward moment always arrived, heralded by a voice singing, he believed, from Heaven, —All things come of Thee O Lord and of Thine own give we back to Thee. He later learned that it was no heavenly voice at all, but Mrs. Dorman, a dumpy deep-chested boarding-house keeper, strategically placed somewhere up in the vicinity of the bell tower. The rest of the congregation was being victimized by this ruse, and he might have enlightened them but for the prospect of the yellow bar of laundry soap. And aside from the actual buying power of five cents, it was the notion that it had once belonged to the Lord he resented: what use that covetous heavenly host could have for a nickel . . . —Praise God from whom all blessings flow, burst the choir, and the money was carried away in a wicker basket never to be seen on earth again. 
    Now, even before the day was out, Wyatt was back staring through his window. After the near-silent midday meal, Aunt May sent him to his room for singing an indecent song. 
    —Singing? Gwyon demanded. 
    —He was humming it. 
    —But . . . humming? How ... 
    —He knows the words well enough. It's a saloon song, he learned it from that . . . that dirty old man. 
    The Town Carpenter had left his daughter's upbringing to an aunt and a silent cousin named Mary. He was a floridly untidy fellow, lopsided from pushing a plane, so he said, and could usually be found in the Depot Tavern when his working day was done, around eleven in the morning. Some years before, his own mother's death had robbed him of his main occupation: retrieving her from the foot of the granite Civil War monument in the center of town where she went when the house oppressed her, and squatted there in any weather cross-legged under a blanket. The Town Carpenter's one accomplishment to date had been fathering Camilla. As for the course of