Excerpt from The New Suffolk Hymnbook - “Piety”
Today’s Cape Times published an excerpt from my novel in its Review section, running the first few pages of Chapter One (”Jonah“). The Review ’s headline, “Fascinating novel takes look at scholastic life”, is somewhat off-target, given a conventional reading of the term “scholastic” - but I clearly can’t have any quibbles with the phrase’s other adjective.
The Review is unfortunately not online, so can’t be linked to. The newspaper paper had three excerpts to choose from; here is one of the two that weren’t published:
Excerpt - Chapter Five, “Piety”
- A rising black executive, Piety, drives to the country in search of an illegitimate son, staying overnight at a Suffolk B&B.
As he turns to the showerhead and allows the warm water to patter his eyelids, his cheeks, his mouth, he remembers an evening when he and Gayle sat watching a show which featured survivors of torture. He wipes his eyes and stares down at his feet, big brown feet planted near the drain. The water steams into his scalp. The man who impressed Piety the most told the journalist that during his torture, when his fingers were broken and his testicles were shocked, when he was suspended by his wrists for hours, he said to himself that this was not the worst, that the worst was coming, still coming. His strategy workedâ€?for each successive ordeal he tricked his body into believing that the state of torture was status quo. He was not broken. He is now a relatively important politician. The water dribbles down the tile in beads. Piety contemplates the man’s quietly aggrieved face for several minutes without thinking another thought. Then with a jolt he perceives that he is on the verge of sleep. He turns off the tap. It is time to call Gayle. He towels himself, leaves his clothes aside for dinner, and tramps wet-footed to the phone. The shower has further thickened the air. The window, steaming at the edges, shows deepening dusk. He dials, listens, and remembers what the workman at the tree said. We’ll have to cut those wires. The phone is dead.
He lounges on the left bed with the Reader’s Digest edition of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice bound in one volume, telling himself, only half-jokingly, that he did not drive by accident into a different universe when he left the city. At dinnertime Mr. Tienappel, thick and rosy in tweed, literally buttonholes him into a study before he reaches the diningroom, and comes right out with it. It is not often that we have a black staying with us, he says. Would you like a Schiedamerâ€?an apéritif? Piety declines. Mr. Tienappel shrugs. Ja, blacks, whites, to me the same. He has owned this farm for seventeen years. He came here first as a tourist. But when he saw how many others were coming as tourists, he knew hew was in business. Have you seen our tree? You have no German? Ah. There is a word for that tree in German, it does not translate into English.
And what are you going to do now, asks Piety mildly.
Do you hear that? The dinner bell. Follow me.
The ornate, mirror-polished diningroom table is set for three but heaped with food for a half-dozen. Roast, ham, turkey, potatoes, cooked carrots and beans, a salad as bushy as a floral arrangement, three types of bread, covered gravyboats and butterdishes, beetroot slices, mashed pumpkin and�soup first, declares Mrs. Tienappel. The maid ladles cold pink soup into his soup plate.
You understand that we have skipped a bit of ceremony for only one guest, says Mrs. Tienappel.
Of course.
Mr. Tienappel asks him what he would like to drink. Just water. She and her husband exchange glances.
I was talking of our tree, says Mr. Tienappel.
Oh yes. Do you know the history of our tree?
Wait. Our guest was commenting. Please continue. They look inquiringly over their spoons.
I was asking what you are going to do now.
Ah, yes. Well. Why do you ask?
Piety says, The tree�. And stops, sick with epiphany.
Yes?
Don’t you know why the phone lines are down?
No, Mr. Tienappel smiles. The phone lines are down?
Why did Eunice not tell us, says Mrs. Tienappel, looking sharply for the maid.
Piety has arrived, a sooty suitcaseless devil, to consummate all the hausfrau’s expectations of calamity, to stoke Herr Tienappel to immolation, and to reap among the souls of this place.
What is the matter with the tree, Mr. Tienappel demands with sudden alarm.
Last night it was struck by lightning. It has�it fell, on a telephone pole.
They sit upright and mute in their chairs as if bound and gagged by a burglar. Then Mr. Tienappel jumps up. He is not much taller, standing. What? He shouts. His eyes grope at his wife. Thenâ€?I’m going! He shouts, and crashes out of the room. She remains bolt. Her mouth begins to work. She mutters, first under her breath, then aloudâ€?Wait, then she shrieks itâ€?Wait! and leaps and runs out the opposite door. Moments after, she is flying back through the dining room, shrieking in German now and laden with camera equipment. A motor roars. Wheels tear at gravel. The sound quickly diminishes to a drone and disappears.
The feast in front of Piety assumes the rankness of carrion. He has not eaten lunch, or even a real breakfast. Like a marathon runner’s, however, his body seems shored against exhaustion, paying hunger no heed. He has indeed been running a marathon, measured out by a ponderous celestial bureaucrat. All your life, he tells himself. Marathoners run marathons inside marathons. Today has been only a hill. After today you will continue to run and run. He returns to his room without sampling from the table, lies on his bed and tries to rest.
But now, unlike in the shower, his body keeps vigil against rest as well as hunger. After night’s total enclosure of the Tienappel farm, he is still staring at the bright ceiling, watching his thoughts like flotsam in a stream. The curtains remain open. Chill presses in from the window. He decides he wouldn’t mind watching television, that it wouldn’t be an acknowledgement to Tree Haus of any receipt of hospitality to watch TV. He wanders down the abandoned hall, pausing as he reaches the diningroom from which master and mistress have fled. The maid is sitting where he sat, a plate of food under busy attack by her knife and fork. She looks up, her cheeks like the mumps, and winks violently.
He finds the television and the news, watches in the dark. The window behind the television seems a stained glass pane of dark purple. He remembers last night, the mindless comfort of a soundless TV, and presses MUTE on the remote control. The byline reads, Cusco, Peru. Five students sit around an Indian whose crumpled hat obscures his face. Thenâ€?Ollantaytanbo, and a panned shot of an archaeological dig. Prague. A verdigris dome. Politicians standing and shouting. The lower half of the purple window flashes. Piety squints. London. A billboard announcing Anthony Slate in Milton’s Isle. A scene from the play. The window flashes againâ€?another night lightning storm moving in, like the one that felled the tree. Piety vaguely wonders why the house has power, but no phone service. Perhaps the Tienappels use a generator. Arles, France. A painting of a park in which a faceless scarecrow inclines his head toward a newspaper. A man re-enacting the scene in the real park. Verona, Italy. A statue seeming to float on a carpet of water which pours over its pedestal. Low mountains. Peasants. The window pane doesn’t flash, but glows for several moments and darkensâ€?headlights. The return of the Tienappels. Piety stands by the curtains watching. The TV is not bright enough to illuminate the roomâ€?they will not see him. But it is not the Tienappels. The driver’s door opens and two heads bask in the map light’s glow. A sandy-haired white man who was driving, a black man in the passenger seat. The two men alight. The driver puts his arm around the black man’s shoulder, which is clearly a poor shoulder, dressed shabbily and exhibiting the deference of the country poor. Then the passenger door thumps shut, the light is snuffed, and all Piety can make out is a lump hulking toward the gloom of the pasture. He strains to keep up, betting on the odds, and when it happens it catches them just before they round the corner, and his retina is burned with the negative image of two toppling men, their arms tight around each other, in camaraderie or struggle he couldn’t say.
