I
A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a wide, smooth body of water between indolent, pastoral hills and fern-clogged, wooded shores musty with swamp bog or rotting second-growth.
Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes wallowing in the bogs along the shore.
They were pleasant, never-to-be-forgotten nights,—those trips down the river. To the dull, rhythmic knock of oars in creaky oarlocks, and the drip of warm water as we disturbed the far-flung expanse of fallen stars, we talked of many things. Our elders might have smiled if they had heard. But then, if our elders could have heard, we would never have given those long, long thoughts expression.
One sultry sunset we had gone down the river and were opposite Haskell’s clearing on our return, when Nathan, who was lying along the boat’s bottom, with arms behind his head, remarked in his slow, meditative way:
“Billy—did you ever wonder about the stars?”
“Not especially. What about the stars?” I asked.
“Did you ever imagine you were God, away above all the suns and worlds, looking down now and then at the earth? It would be an awful small place, the earth now, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose it would,” I agreed.
The boy was silent for several minutes. Then he continued:
“If some of those stars are suns—like I read in a book a while back—and each sun has its worlds revolving about it too, the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, isn’t it, Billy? It can’t be anything else!”
“Well, and what if it is?”
“If the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, think how much smaller we livin’ people must show up—down here on it. I don’t mean in size, Billy, I mean importance. Well, then, if you were God, away off up in the heavens, what would one little earth like this amount to, anyhow? Still less, what would any one person or persons amount to—you and me, for instance? If you or I wanted to go to the devil, be just as bad as we pleased, do anything we wanted, what really big difference would it make? Do you know, Billy, I don’t believe God gives any single person half so much attention, or cares half so much what becomes of him, as a lot of grown folks try to make out. It’s just conceit. That’s the word, Billy; conceit! Men like my father, for instance! They get the idea that God’s a whole lot like themselves. They think he’s got the time and patience to go sneakin’ around watching for folks doing things they’ve been told not to do. But somehow, when I lie out in a boat like this and think about the stars, I sort of see things different. Myself, for instance. And the minute I go back home and listen to Pa, I get my proportion all twisted. My sins are all big and important again.”
“But the Bible says the hairs of our heads have all got numbers on ’em,” I defended. “And no one goes out and shoots an English sparrow but what God sees it when it starts kicking.”
“I don’t believe it, Billy! Because if God did know the numbers of the hairs on everybody’s heads, what good would it do Him? And what if He does know when some one shoots a few birds? What’s the use of Him losing sleep over tiny, foolish things like those when it’s lots more important to keep that frail, pretty evening star hung up there in space? Seems to me there’s too many folks want to make God a cranky old man, always finding fault with people because they don’t do things His way—or a bookkeeper like old Joe Nevins at the knitting mills who almost wrecks the place if he finds two cents off in his balance.”
“And what kind of a person do you think God is? You believe there is a God, don’t you?”
“I like to think God would be a kind old man. His eyes would laugh when people take Him so serious, and think He’s as fussy as themselves. And He’d have long white whiskers that it’d be lots of fun to pull—so long as it didn’t hurt Him—much.”
“I’m glad you believe there is a God anyway,” I told Nathan, shocked with the lèse-majesté.
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t said I really do yet. Oh, Billy—we don’t know nothing about Him—not a single thing! Then why is it we keep fooling ourselves that we do? Why not be honest and say we don’t? If there is a God, don’t you suppose He’s wise enough and big enough so He knows we don’t know nothing about Him? Why is it such a sin to refuse to take everything on faith, like old Doctor Dodd is always shouting about, on Sundays? We don’t think it’s any terrible crime to ‘want to be shown’ in business or science. Why should it be in religion? If we’re honest and ready to believe the right thing when we’re shown it is the right thing, why shouldn’t that be enough?”
“You can search me!” I answered.
“Well,” continued Nathan, “I don’t know there is a God—and if there is and He’s Pa’s kind of God, I don’t want anything to do with Him. And if He isn’t Pa’s kind of God, then Pa’s all wrong about all the other things. And if Pa’s all wrong in the other things, then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in the first place and I’m not obliged to believe him in anything. Oh, Billy, I wish I could live in a world that would just be honest! I wish I could live in a world where people were brave enough to come right out and confess they don’t know anything—about God and religion, I mean,—but were willing to be shown.”
“Don’t you believe in the church and the Cross and everything,—and Jesus Christ?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Nat repeated angrily. “And I don’t believe any one else does, either, if they’d be honest. I’m sick of being ordered to believe things whether I do or not!”
“But if you don’t believe in the church and the Cross and everything, you’ll go to hell. The Bible says so.”
“I don’t believe there is a hell,” snapped Nathan. “Everybody tells us hell’s a place where the wicked burn forever and ever. Who’s the wickedest man in this town?”
“Why, Jake Pumpton over on the East Road, I guess. Or Mr. Gridley, he swears so much!”
“All right! Say any one of them! Now then, you know how hot the furnace fire is at the tannery in the winter? Never mind how rotten and wicked old Pumpton or Gridley are, could you shove ’em into that fire and see ’em writhe and shriek and burn?”
“No!” I protested weakly.
“Then you’re more kind and merciful than God. Yet you’re only human. According to the Bible, God’s worse than you. Because He would! Could you love anybody who’d shove a live man into the tannery furnace? No—of course you couldn’t! And if God does things like that, you couldn’t love Him and neither could I or any one, never mind how much you swore you could—or did! They’re lying when they say so! I’d hate and loathe a God like that—who’d even allow such a place. And I’m not afraid to say so, either. So I don’t believe there’s any hell because the kind of God who made that pretty evening star couldn’t roast folks alive any more than you or I.”
“Well, that takes an awful load off my mind, to know there ain’t a hell,” I declared. “Because there’s lots of things I like about Mr. Pumpton and Mr. Gridley even if they are Lost Souls.”
Suddenly Nat made a gesture of despair:
“Why? Why? Why—are we sent into this world, Billy? When we weren’t asked if we wanted to come into it in the first place, why are we scared and pounded and prohibited and lambasted, day after day and year after year, made to work, or get sick, or get well, or die—and so long as we say things with our mouths—we’ll be saved, and if we’re honest and won’t say ’em, we’ll be sent to roast in everlasting fire. Why is it, Billy? Why is it?”
I couldn’t answer. Of course I couldn’t answer. But I fancy that ghosts of the Pharaohs heard and echoed Nathan’s heart-cry from the night wind. Isaiah and Socrates and Napoleon listened and shook their heads sadly. The saints and the prophets sighed from the far-flung shadows and the infinite hosts of the dead were in atonement with two little boys blinking at the stars from a river scow in a New England summer night.