Sacrament

  She told him she’d just been speaking to the doctor and he was very optimistic about Hugo’s progress. Another week, she said, and he could probably come home; wasn’t that wonderful?

  ——

  It was raining now. Nothing monsoonal, just a steady drizzle.

  Will didn’t shelter from it. He stood outside with his face turned up to the sky, letting the drops cool his hot eyes and flushed cheeks.

  When Adele emerged she was in her usual post-visit flutter.

  Will volunteered to drive, certain he could shave fifteen minutes off the travel time and be back with the Simeon book before dark. She babbled on happily as they went, mainly about Hugo.

  “He makes you very happy, doesn’t he?” Will said.

  “He’s a fine man,” she said, “and he’s been very good to me over the years. I thought when my Donald passed away I’d never have another happy day. I thought the world was at an end. But you know, you get on with it, don’t you? It was hard at first because I felt guilty, still living when he was gone. I thought: That’s not right. But you get over that after a while. Hugo helped me. We’d sit and talk and he’d tell me to just enjoy the little things. Not try and understand what it was all about, because that was all a waste of time. It was funny that, coming from him.

  I always thought philosophers were sitting talking about the meaning of life, and there’s Hugo saying don’t waste your breath.”

  “And that was good to hear, was it?”

  “It helped,” she said. “I started to enjoy the little things, the way he said. I was always working so hard when Donald was alive—”

  “You still work hard.”

  “It’s different now,” she said. “If something doesn’t get dusted, I don’t fret about it. It’s just dust. I’ll be dust one of these days.”

  “Have you got him to go to church?”

  “I don’t go anymore.”

  “You used to go twice on a Sunday.”

  “I don’t feel the need.”

  “Did Hugo talk you into that?”

  “I don’t get talked into things,” Adele said, a little defensively.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, no, I know what you meant. Hugo’s a godless man, and he always will be. But I saw the suffering my Donald went through. Terrible it was, terrible, to see him in such a state. And I know people say that’s when your faith gets tested. Well, maybe mine did and it wasn’t strong enough, because church never meant the same to me after that.”

  “God let you down?”

  “Donald was a good man. Not clever, like Hugo, but good in his heart. He deserved better.” She fell silent for a minute or so, then added a coda, “We’ve got to make the most of what comes along, haven’t we? There’s nothing certain.” VII

  Will spent the rest of the evening with Thomas Simeon, burying himself in this other life as a refuge from his own. It was no use brooding on what had happened at the hospital, with a little distance (and a couple of heart to hearts with Adrianna), he’d be able to put the experiences in a sane perspective. For now, it was best ignored. He rolled a joint, pulled his chair over to the open window, and sat there reading, lulled by the spatter of the rain on the roof and sill.

  He’d left off reading with Dwyer moving from occult waters, where she’d plainly been out of her depth, back into the relative comfort of simple biography. Simeon’s ever-reliable friend Galloway reappeared at this juncture, having been moved by “the commands of friendship” (what had gone on between these two? Will wondered) to separate Simeon from his patron, Rukenau, “whose baleful influence could be seen in every part of Thomas’s appearance and demeanor.” Galloway, it seems, had conspired to save Simeon’s soul from Rukenau’s clutches; an attempt that, by Dwyer’s description, amounted to a physical abduction: “Aided by two accomplices, Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, the latter a disenchanted and much embittered acolyte of Rukenau, Galloway plotted Simeon’s ‘liberation’ as he was later to describe it, with the kind of precision that befitted his military upbringing. It went without incident, apparently. Simeon was discovered in one of the upper rooms of Rukenau’s mansion in Ludlow, where, according to Galloway: ‘we found him in a piteous state, his once radiant form much wasted. He would not be persuaded to leave, however, saying that the work he and Rukenau were doing together was too important to be left unfinished. I asked him what work this was, and he told us that the age of the Domus Mundi was coming to pass, and that he would be its witness and its chronicler, setting down its glories in paint that popes and kings might know how petty their business was, and putting aside their wars and machinations, make an everlasting peace. How will this be? I asked him. And he told me to look to his painting, for it was there all made plain.’

  “Only one of these paintings was to be found, however, and it appears that Galloway took it with him when he and his fellow conspirators left. How they persuaded Simeon to leave with them is not reported, but it is evident that Rukenau made some attempt to get Simeon back and that Galloway made accusations against him that drove him into hiding. Whatever happened, Rukenau now disappears from this story, and Simeon’s left—which has less than three years to run—takes one last extraordinary turn.”

  Will took advantage of the chapter break to go downstairs and raid the fridge, but his mind remained in the strange world from which he’d just stepped. Nothing in the here and now—not the brewing of tea nor the making of a sandwich, not the din of raucous laughter from the television next door, or the shrill delivery of the comedian who was earning it—could distract him from the images circling in his head. It helped that he’d seen Simeon with his own eyes, living and dead. He’d seen the desperate beauty of the man, which had so fixated Galloway that he’d ventured where his rational mind had little grasp, to pluck his friend from perdition. There was something sweetly romantic about the man’s devotion to Simeon, who was plainly of another order of mind entirely. Galloway did not understand him, nor ever could, but that didn’t matter. The bond between them was nothing to do with intellectual compatibility. Nor, all smutty suspicions aside, was this some unspoken homosexual romance.

  Galloway was Simeon’s friend, and he would not see harm done to one he loved: It was as simple, and as moving, as that.

  Will returned to the book with his sustenance, unnoticed by Adele and, settling back beside the window (having first closed it, the night air was chilly), he picked up the tale where he’d left off. He knew, or at least thought he knew, how this story ended, with a body in a wood, pecked and chewed. But how did it arrive there? That was the substance of the thirty remaining pages.

  Dwyer had kept the text relatively free of personal judgments so far, preferring to use other voices to comment on Rukenau, for instance, and even then scrupulously quoting both supporters and detractors. But now she showed her hand, and it was no stranger to the Communion rail.

  “It is in these last years,” she wrote, “recovering from the unholy influence of Gerard Rukenau, that we see the redemptive power of Simeon’s vision at work. Chastened by his encounter with madness, be returned to his labors with his ambition curbed, only to discover that with all craving for a grand thaumaturgical scheme sated, his imagination flowered. In his later works, all of which were landscapes, the hand of the artist is in service of a greater Creation.

  The painting entitled ‘The Fertile Acre,’ though at first glance a melancholy night pastoral, reveals a pageant of living forms when studied closely—”

  Will flipped the page to the reproduction of the painting in question. It was far less strange than the Rukenau piece, at least at first glance: a sloping field, with rows of moon-sculpted sheaves receding from sight. But even in the much-degraded reproduction, Simeon’s sly skills were in evidence. He’d secreted animals everywhere: in the sheaves, and the shadow of the sheaves, in the foliage on the oak tree, in the cloak of the harvester sleeping beneath the tree. Even in the speckled sky there were forms hidden, curled up like the sleeping
children of the stars.

  “Here,” Dwyer wrote, “is a mellower Simeon, painting with almost childlike pleasure the secret life of the world; drawing us in to peer at his half-bidden bestiary.” But there was more to the picture, Will sensed, than a visual game. There was an eerie air of expectation about the image, every living thing it contained (except for the exhausted harvester) in hiding, holding its breath as if in terror of some imminent deed.

  Will returned to Dwyer’s text for a moment, but she had taken her critique off on a hunt for painterly antecedents, and after a few sentences he gave up and returned to the reproduction for further study. What was it about the picture that so intrigued him? It would not have been remotely to his taste if he’d simply happened upon it, knowing nothing of the painter.

  It was far too coy, with its prettified animals peering out from their bolt-holes in the paint. Coy, and unnaturally neat: the corn in military array, the leaves in spiral bouquets. Nature wasn’t like that. The most placid scene, examined by an unsentimental eye, revealed a ragged world of raw forms in bitter and unending conflict. And yet, he felt a kinship with the picture, as though he and its maker were, despite all evidence to the contrary, men of similar vision.

  Frustrated that he could not better understand his response to the work, he returned to Dwyer’s text, skipping the art critique—which was mercifully short—and moving on to pick up the biographical threads. Whatever she’d claimed about the mellower Simeon, the facts of his life did not suggest a man at peace with himself.

  “Between August of 1724 and March of 1725, he moved his lodgings no less than eleven times, the longest period he spent in one place being November and December, which he passed in a monastery at Dungeness. It is not clear whether he went there intending to take vows. If so, it was a passing fancy. By the middle of January he is writing to Dolores Cruikshank—who had been one of Rukenau’s cronies three years before but was now, in her own words, quite cured of his influence—and states: ‘I am thinking of leaving this wretched country for Europe, where I think I may find souls more sympathetic to my vision than ever I have found in this too rational isle. I have looked everywhere for a tutor who might guide me, but I find only stale minds and staler rhetoric. It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is in inconstancy. Did you ever meet a doctor of divinity who knew this simple truth; or if he knew it, dared speak it out? No. It is a heresy among learned men because to admit it is to unseat themselves from their certainties, and they may no longer lord themselves over us, saying: This is so, and this is not. It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So. There was one that we both knew who taught this truth, and I was too arrogant to learn it. I regret my foolishness every waking hour. I sit here in this tiny town, and look west to the islands, and pine for him like a lost dog. But I dare not go to him. He would kill me I think, for my ingratitude. Nor could I fault him for that. I was misled by well-meaning friends, but that’s no excuse, is it? I should have bitten off their fingers when they came to take me. I should have choked them with their prayer-books. And now it’s too late.

  “ ‘I beg you, send me news of him if you have any, so when I look toward the isles I may imagine him, and be soothed.’” This was powerful stuff, but difficult for Will to sympathize with. He had made his way in the world largely by defying tutelage, so this yearning for a teacher, so passionately phrased that Simeon might have been speaking of physical desire, seemed to him faintly preposterous. To Dwyer also. “It was,” she wrote, “an indication that Simeon was undergoing a profound psychological upheaval. And there was more; a good deal more. In a second letter to Cruikshank, written from Glasgow, less than a week later, Simeon’s overripe imaginings are running riot: ‘I heard from a certain source that the Man of the Western Isles has finally turned his golden architect to his purpose, and has the foundation of Heaven laid. What source is this, you ask? I will tell you, though you may mock me. The wind, that is my messenger. I have inklings from other sources, it’s true, but none I trust as much as the wind, which brought me nightly such reports of all our Certain One has done that I began to sicken for want of sleep, and have retreated to this foul Caledonian town where the wind does not come with such fresh news.

  “ ‘But what use is it to sleep, if I wake in the same state that I lay down my head? I must mend my courage, and go to him. At least that is what I think this hour. The next I may be of another opinion entirely. You see how it is with me? I have contrary thoughts on every matter now, as though I were divided as surely as his architect. That was the trick by which he turned the creature to his purpose, and I wonder if he sowed the same division in my soul, as punishment for my betrayal. I think he would do that. I think he would take pleasure in it, knowing I would come after him at last, and that the closer I came the more set against myself I would become.’

  “Here,” Dwyer wrote, “is the first mention of suicidal thoughts. There is no record of any reply from the pen of Mrs.Cruikshank, so we must assume she judged Simeon so far gone he was beyond her help. Once only, in the last of the four letters he wrote to her during his Scottish sojourn does he refer to his art:

  ‘Today I have conceived a plan as to how I may play the prodigal. I will make a portrait of my Certain One upon his island. I have heard it called the Granary, so I will make the painting surrounding him with grain. Then I will take it to him, and pray that my gift assuages his rage. If it does then I will be received into his house and will gladly do his bidding until I die. If it does not, then you may assume I am dead by his hand. Whichever is the case, you will not hear from me after this.’

  “This pitiful letter,” Dwyer here remarked, “was the last he ever wrote. It is not the last we hear of him, however. He survives for another seven months, traveling to Bath, to Lincoln, and to Oxfordshire, relying on the charity of friends. He even paints pictures, three of which survive. None of them fit the description of the Granary painting he is planning in his letter to Dolores Cruikshank. Nor is there any record of his having traveled to the Hebrides in search of Rukenau.

  “It seems most likely that he gave up on the endeavor entirely, and went south from Glasgow in search of more comfortable lodgings. At some point in the travels, John Galloway tracks him down, and commissions him to paint the house he and his new wife (he had married in September of 1725) now occupy. As Galloway reports in a letter, to his father: ‘My good friend Thom Simeon is now at work immortalizing the house, and I have high hopes that the picture will be splendid. I believe Thomas has it in him to be a popular artist, if he can just put aside some of his high-flown notions. I swear if he could he would paint an angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass, for he tells me he looks hard to see them, noon and night. I think him a genius, probably; and probably mad. But it is a sweet madness, which offends Louisa not at all. Indeed she said to me, when I told her he looks for angels, that she did not wonder that he failed to see them, for he shed a better brightness than they, and shamed them into hiding.’ ”

  An angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass, there was an image to conjure with, Will thought. Weary of Dwyer’s prose now, of guesswork and assumptions, he returned to The Fertile Acre and studied it afresh. As he did so he realized the connection between this image and his own pictures. They were before and after scenes, bookends to the holocaust text that lay between. And the author of that text? Jacob Steep, of course.

  Simeon had painted the moment before Steep appeared: all life in terror at Jacob’s imminence. Will had caught the moment after: life in extremis, the fertile acre become a field of desolation.

  They were companion creators, in their way, that was why his eye came back and back to this picture. It was painted by a brother, in all but blood.

  There was a light tapping at the door, and Adele appeared, telling him sh
e was off to bed. He glanced at his watch. It was ten-forty, to his astonishment.

  “Goodnight then,” he said to her, “sleep well.”

  “I will,” she said. “You do the same.” Then she was gone, leaving him to the last three or four pages of Simeon’s life. There was little of any consequence in the remaining paragraphs.

  Dwyer’s researches ran out of steam two months or so before Simeon’s passing.

  “He died on or about July eighteenth, 1730,” she wrote, “having reportedly swallowed enough of his own paints to poison himself.

  This, at least, is what is widely assumed to be the truth. There are in fact contradictory voices in this matter. An anonymous obituary in The Review, for instance, published four months after Simeon’s death, hints darkly that ‘the artist had less reason to die than others did to silence him.’ And Dolores Cruikshank, writing to Galloway at about the same time remarks that ‘I have been trying to locate the physician who examined Thomas’s corpse, because I heard a rumor that he’d found curious and subtle dislocations in the body, as though it had been subjected to an assault before death. I thought of the “invisibles” you told me be had been so fearful of when you’d taken him from Rukenau’s place. Had they perhaps mounted an attack upon him? But the physician, a Doctor Shaw, has disappeared apparently. Nobody knows where, or why.’

  “There was one final oddity. Though John Galloway had made arrangements for his agents to collect the body and have it removed to Cambridge; where he’d arranged for it to be buried with due honors, when they came to do so the remains had already been spirited away. Thomas Simeon last resting place is therefore unknown, but this writer believes his body was probably taken by land and sea to the Hebrides, where Rukenau had chosen to retreat. It is unlikely, given Rukenau’s iconoclastic belief, that Simeon was buried in hallowed ground. It’s more likely he lies in some anonymous spot. It is only to be hoped that he rests well there, the travails of his life ended before he had truly made any mark upon the art of his time.