The Triumph of the Lesser God

The sun was rising even as the moon squatted pale and fading on the western horizon. Pinks and lavenders were rising from behind the cabin, birds tittered and barked, and the trees and distant hills were becoming distinct.

Gramma Greer continued: After the doctor left, Daisy sat by John and gazed long on his fevered face. She held his hand, which was hot and cold and then hot again, as his young man's body was consumed by rot and poison. And there she contrived much madness—she cursed God in her heart, for the Greatest God—the God who is both like a red-throated hummingbird and a dawn-pink mountain, the King of the Little Kingdom who reaches down to us with hands of Beauty—seemed indistinguishable from the Lesser God of Hell and blood and fulsome cant. Her John—truth-seeking, lantern bearing, and fearless before grim orthodoxy—had cloven the two Gods. But as she watched John lie in vacancy, the Two Gods monstrosized back into One.

John's face reminded her of a new diary her father had given her on her eighth birthday; the cover was tooled leather, and she could tie the diary shut with two strands of ribbon stitched into the cover. When she opened the diary, the pages were fresh and unmarred for they were blank and waiting for a future as yet unwritten. John's face bore the blankness of an open diary, and he could not speak out of the vacuity of his pain to bless her or smile upon her or give her peace. All that waited for him was the black ambiguity of death and perhaps retribution for believing what seemed right to him with his limitations and logic and love for her. Or perhaps not: perhaps Paradise even now bloomed before him with beckoning gates, and the Savior was striding out to take him by both hands and say, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for speaking truly of me and for me, for I went back to my Father to support Him in His old age, and you people below can't hear me anymore. Even my biographers could not free themselves of their own limitations and logic. And as for their love of Beauty—where is it? Where are the lithe, alluring ankles of girls playing by the river? Where is the weasel waist of Alison? Or the reproachful eyes of Beatrice? Juliet's witticisms? Aphrodite's crazy desire? Oy, vey!

"Don't get me wrong: I changed the water into wine at the marriage feast and so made passing allusion to the conjugal embrace. But who was the bride and where were her soft brown eyes? I told them—don't forget the eyes of the bride! Would they listen? No! John the Beloved Disciple upbraided me and said that calling attention to the bride's eyes would be too Greek. Too Greek! I said. You boys are writing the whole New Testament in Greek! You can throw in a little Plato but not a little Homer? John the Beloved refused me, in the way that devout men have been refusing me ever since. But you, John Garfield, heard me loud and clear. So thank you, John! Well done, good and faithful servant."

But John's face was blank like a new diary, and Daisy could read nothing there except the terrible intimation that the Lesser God was using every arrow—time and disease and pain—to destroy John and her and their Great Supposal, killing them all for some inscrutable purpose the preacher had said was for her own good. Her disappointment and fear and rage fed the Lesser God, who raised his dark head among the stars and smote with his mighty axe the base of the Greatest God and sent Him toppling like a shallow rooted oak wherein nested two hatchling sparrows peeping for their mother. Thereupon, her mustard seed of faith became like a fly speck deposited by the Lesser God: a dead dot.

Yes, the Lesser God filled the cabin like the stink of John's leg until Daisy's madness was complete. She fancied that there was but One God, who gave us freedom and so was pleased to break us. Daisy refused to pray—she had stopped playing that game when she rose from kneeling by her father's deathbed. She refused to mourn, for her mother remained in memory as a dark caution against grief. Daisy became, in fact, a Refusal or an Abnegation, and her beautiful face was like unto a mask. So, when I suggested to her that it might be more loving to end John's suffering, she listened with a ready ear. "But I can't do it," she said. I said that somebody would come along. She suggested MacPherson, and I said, "No, he ain't fit for it." And then she mentioned you, William Crawford; she said you looked with unconcealed longing through her window and might see in John's death your own opportunity. I told her, "No, honey lamb; don't be thinkin' like that. Don't be thinkin' 'bout usin' yore beauty for untoward ends. You got to consider William Crawford in all this, too." But she smiled a wry smile and said, "From now on I'll do what I damned well please with what I've got. The only thing worth doing is living and dying by our own lights, for therein lies all the power we have . . . against Him—the God John said could not be." So she set her face like flint against me and against the Greatest God and even against John, for in her distant, amber eyes, John in his dying had diminished to a symbol of a sullen Universe, bewildering in its infinite proliferation of meaningless signs and vaguely hostile to human existence.

"Whoa," said William Crawford. "I had no idear."

"'Course you didn't; how could ye? But I've told ever'thing truthful as I can. Now let me tell you who's in that there grave."