TWO

I learned about the Book from my father, who was a mighty man before the Lord and had visions and spoke in tongues, and was the best clammer out of Tippietown on Long Island like his father before him. And he loved me best of all his sons, like Israel loved Joseph, because it was written, Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age.

In his prime he could tong nine bushels a day all by himself in the boat, and that was more than any clammer in Tippietown or even Islip. But when he got old and it pained him to straighten his back and pull up the haul with the tongs he took me along to help. I was the only son left to him then. I was the one stayed when all the others went. Two killed in the first big war, and one on a freighter that went down off Sable Island, and one going off to California but never letting us know if he got there or not, and two marrying Islip women and casting out their father from their hearts like the mockers and scorners they were.

So I was the only one left, and I went out with him in the boat to take my turn at the tongs and to do all the raking because that was beyond him altogether. And while he was resting he would read the Book to me and exhort me, not that I understood much what with all the pride and ignorance burning in me like sulphur. I was with him the first time Ithuriel came, and I saw it for myself. My father was sitting in the stern of the boat reading the Book to me while I tonged, and all of a sudden he stopped reading and I turned to see what was wrong. He put down the Book and he stood up, his arms out, his face turned up to the sun so you’d think it would sear the eyeballs out of him, and he spoke in tongues and cried with the tears running down his cheeks. Louder and louder he spoke, with the spit and foam coming to his mouth and dripping from it, and I watched him not knowing what to make of it and so scared I didn’t have strength to close the handles of the tongs I was working in ten foot of water. Only when he made a move to the gunwales like a man set to go overboard I let go the handles and grabbed him, wrestling with him like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord until he was quiet again and laying on the bottom of the boat.

It was afterward he told me how Ithuriel came to him while he was reading the Book. He came all in a golden glory with his face in the middle of it, and he said, “Do you believe?”

And my father said, “I believe.”

And Ithuriel said, “If you believe, then walk on the water,” and my father started to do it, but I stopped him.

After that I was afraid to have him go out in the boat with me, because I was still a doubter. And like all doubters I was torn by my doubts. I thought, if it wasn’t Ithuriel but just something in my father’s head like bothered other Averys before him, then I’d be standing there in the boat watching him drown in front of me. But if it was Ithuriel, and I tried to stop my father from doing what he was told, then the sin was on me and I would be struck down for it.

So the easy way was not to let him go out in the boat with me again, and he never did. He stayed home with the old lady and tried as well as he could to steer away from her angry tongue and the hatefulness of her. There was a time long before when she found that he sometimes slept with whores and from that day on she used that sin like a stick to beat him with. And for all she went to church every Sunday she snarled at him for his praying and fasting and exhorting, telling him that his own father had prayed himself into the crazy house, and telling him she’d see him there soon enough, too.

It happened that way in the end, because I was weak enough to let it happen. Because Ithuriel came to him again and again to test him, but there were only mockers and scorners around who didn’t understand.

And one day Ithuriel said to him, “Do you believe?”

And he said, “I believe.”

And Ithuriel said, “Then cast off your garments and walk naked on the streets that all may see. Because I will be in your body, and they will look upon me.”

So my father did, and the police caught him like that not far from the house, all the women around screaming and with their hands over their eyes though, like as not, there wasn’t one of them didn’t know what a man looked like. Then they put him in jail, and the only reason they let him off easy was because the judge was Fred Duane who was half kin to the Averys. He was a mocker and a scorner like the rest of them, but he had a good heart and blamed it on Prohibition and bootleg liquor, saying no man could drink the rotgut he had to nowadays and stay in his right mind, making a joke of it so that everyone in the courthouse laughed.

But the next time it happened, Ithuriel came to my father right in the middle of Tippietown on shopping day, and this time there were no jokes. Fred Duane called in the doctor, and after a time he and the doctor came to the house and sat down to talk to my mother and me, saying we ought to sign a paper to put my father away before there was real trouble. My mother signed it, but I didn’t want to, and for three days and nights I held out until she wore me down and I did sign it, and he was taken away.

He didn’t live long after that. He died inside the year, and near the end whenever I went to see him on visiting days he got so that he didn’t know me from anybody else. He just sat in a straight-backed chair staring up at the sky through the window with a glory on his face. Then he died and was buried, and when I saw my mother crying at the funeral, I cursed her to her face before everyone, because she had killed him.