under—if they remained, then (as he had phrased it, equal, many in Washington said, to the “blood-sweat-tears” speech of Churchill’s, decades before) “our patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic patterns survive because they can be learned by any replacement generation.”
The replacement generation, however, had not had the wherewithal to dig up the data-repositories, because they had a more important task, one overlooked by Lufteufel: that of growing food to keep themselves alive. The same problems which had lashed the Pilgrims, those of clearing land, planting, protecting crops and livestock. Pigs, cows, and sheep, corn and wheat, beets and carrots: those became the vital patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic preoccupations, not the aural text of some great American epic poetic stupidity such as Whittier’s Snowbound.
“I say,” McComas rumbled, “don’t send your inc; don’t have him do the mural at all; get a Complete. He’ll roll along on that cow-cart for a hundred or so miles and then he’ll come to a place where there’s no road, and he’ll go into a ditch and that’ll be that. It’s no favor to him, Handy. It just means you’re killing some poor limbless fart who admittedly paints well—”
“Paints,” Father Handy said, “better than any artist that SOW knows of.” He pronounced the initials as a word, as “sow”—the female pig—so as to plague McComas, who insisted it always be spoken as three initials or at least as “sow” to rhyme with mow.
McComas’s short-circuited red eyes focused malignly on him, and he searched for a cutting, tearing, oral return remark; while he did so, Ely said all at once, “Here comes Miss Rae.”
“Oh,” Father Handy said, and blinked. Because it was Lurine Rae who made into fact the dots, jots, and tittles of Servants of Wrath dogma; at least as far as he personally was concerned.
Here she came now, red-haired and so small-boned that he always imagined that she could fly … the idea of witches entered his mind when he saw Lurine Rae unexpectedly, because of this lightness. She rode horseback constantly, and this was the “real” reason for her springiness—but it was not merely the lithe motion of an athletic woman; nor was it ethereal either. Hollow-boned, he had decided, like a bird. And that connected once more in his mind women and birds; hence once more Papagano, the bird-catcher’s, song: He would make a net for birds and then he would make, someday, a net for a little wife or a little lady who would sleep by his side, and Father Handy, seeing Lurine, felt the wicked old ram-animal within him awake; the evil of substantiality itself manifested its insidious being at the heart of his nature.
Distressing. But he was used to it; in fact he enjoyed it—enjoyed, really, her.
“Morning,” Lurine said to him, then saw the Dominus McComas, whom she did not like; she wrinkled her nose and her freckles writhed: all the pale red, that of her hair, her skin, her lips, all twisted in aversion, and she, too, bared her teeth, back at him. Only her teeth were tiny and regular, and made not to grind—as for instance the prehistoric uncooked seeds—but to neatly sever.
Lurine had biting teeth. Not the massive chewing kind.
She, he knew, nipped. Knew? Guessed, rather. Because he had not really ever come near her; he kept a distance between them.
The ideology of the Servants of Wrath connected with the Augustinian view of women; there was fear involved, and then of course the dogma got entangled with the old cult of Mani, the Albigensian Heresy of Provinçal France, the Catharists. To them, flesh and the world had been evil; they had abstained. But their poets and knights had worshiped women, had deified them; the domina, so enticing, so vital … even the mad ones, the dominae of Carcassonne who had carried their dead lovers’ hearts in small jeweled boxes. And the—was it merely insane, or rather more perverted?—Catharist knights who had actually carried in enameled boxes their mistresses’ dried dung … it had been a cult ruthlessly wiped out by Innocent III, and perhaps rightly so. But—
For all its excesses, the Albigensian knight-poets had known the worth of women; she was not man’s servant and not even merely his “weak rib,” the side of him who had been so readily tempted. She was—well, a good question; as he got a chair for Lurine and poured her coffee, he thought: Some supreme value lies in this slight, freckled, pale, red-haired, horse-riding girl of twenty. Supreme as is the mekkis of the God