“Yes, I’m so glad. Drink this before it gets cold.”
He waved it away. “Oi suspicioned all the time as that be the right religion. No hell at all, ye just goos to sleep, and when the New Jerusalem comes down for they righteous, ye don’t git up.”
“You’ll wake up—you and your mother,” she assured him, standing her jug by the stove.
“That’s what Mrs. Flynt says. ‘Ye ain’t done no harm,’ she says, ‘and when the trumpet blows for the saints, your bones will git their flesh agen, same as now.’ ”
There was little enough on them to go through eternity in, she thought, gazing at his shrunken arms, which he had left outside the coverings in repudiating the tea. “Won’t that be wonderful!” she said, the tears in her eyes.
“That’ll be wunnerful wunnerful,” he agreed. “That fares to be what Oi calls a real heaven—your own body, not a sort o’ smoke-cloud ye wouldn’t know was you ef you met it, your own flesh and blood, livin’ on this lovely earth with the birds and the winds and the sun and the water, all a-singin’ and a-shinin’ for ever and ever. And no bad folks ne yet angels to worrit ye, no liddle boys to call arter ye—why it’s just ginnick! Oi reckon Oi’ll choose this same old spot.”
“Yes, it’s a lovely spot,” said Jinny, but she wondered whether he had not made his own version of Martha’s New Jerusalem, which she herself had always understood to be more jewelled than natural.
“Your mother will be able to see it too,” she added gently, as she put the tea to his lips.
A beautiful smile traversed the sunken features. But suddenly a frenzy of terror swamped it. He sat up with a jerk that dashed her jug to the stove, shivering it into fragments. “But ef Oi waked, Oi’d need my money agen!” he shrilled.
What Jinny always remembered most vividly, when she recalled this tragic moment, was the red lettering on the sacks he lay on, exposed by his upright posture.