Fortunately, however, this feat was not to be accomplished. Jacob Moon was a grim man and also, as I have said, most characteristically a pragmatic man. He did not smile so much as, at moments of gaiety or high mirth, he grimaced. As, for instance, when once a donkey wandered into the prison from the street and soon had lost itself in the maze of corridors and common rooms and stairways, and as it was encountered suddenly and all out of any familiar context by one prisoner after another and one guard after another, discoveries that brought one prisoner and guard after another to the chief jailor’s office to report its, the donkey’s, presence, soon there had gathered at the office nearly all the prisoners and all the guards and assistant jailors and staff and even a few visitors, and still one or two more prisoners trickling in to file the identical report, that there was a donkey in the prison. The atmosphere of the gathering was jovial and easy, almost that of a holiday (for it was a particularly wintry day and the event was doubtless more diverting than if the prisoners had not felt quite so confined by the snow and cold), when at once the door to the street swung open and the chief of administration for all prisons entered, and he naturally demanded to know why the entire population of the prison had gathered here before him, to which Jacob Moon in all sincerity answered that it was because an ass had come in off the street, which statement caused a long, hearty chorus of laughter from all, even from the chief of administration himself, once it had been given him to trust that no one had intended any slight to his dignity or reputation for excellence, not to say brilliance. I myself, as the wave of laughter commenced to wash over the group, had quickly looked over the sea of faces to that of my jailor, so as to determine how he would express himself, so that I could know how I wished to express myself, and I saw his somber face spread tightly into the grimace of a man who hears laughter but no joke, and immediately I formed my face similarly. Not, I hasten to add, before I had first studied the face of the chief of administration, to be positive that he had heard and accepted the joke good naturedly.
By so great a distance was I by then lost from my old forthright self, the man who once had defied the might of the justices of this land, who had let himself be set up as an example for his brethren, so that they would know how to resist the coming pressure against their faith, by so great a distance had I drifted from that man, that I now slinked invisibly through a crowd of laughing men before I myself dared merely to let even a grimace modelled after my jailor’s grimace cross my face and thus allowed myself, disguised, to join them. I was like a jackal lurking at the edge of darkness, just beyond the circle of firelight, sneaking around that edge, always peering in but always taking cowardly care never to be seen itself.
Guilt is not so much the cause of such aberrant obsequiousness and affectation as it is the result of a prior loss of unity. It is the rip in the fabric of the carefully, deliberately woven spirit of the man of faith that occurs when he misplaces or weakly gives up his faith. Where before there was a whole, a unity, there are suddenly two separated pieces, two distinct cells, and then where there were two, there are suddenly four, then eight, and so on, as the man stumbles through blocks of time, dividing and sub-dividing like an amoeba drifting through a pool of stagnant water. Obsequiousness and affectation, therefore, though they characterized all my different selves at this time, took slightly different forms with each presentation, so that, with my jailor, at least in the mornings and evenings, I was dry, dour, detached, and concerned with the kinds of events that concern engineers and administrators, but with each of the several other prisoners I associated myself with I was, in one case, as giddy and silly as an adolescent fop, even dressing up as a well known actress one morning and walking through the exercise yard presenting forged autographs to some of the simpler men, and in another case, with like-minded men, I was physically tough, stoical, disciplined, and scornful of physical weakness or disability in others, and in yet another, philosophical, meditative, pursing my mind and time thoughtfully before problems in history, language and mathematics. I was not aware at the time of any particular hierarchy among these personalities, because I was not aware at the time of any hierarchy among the models, but before long I had found myself in a sufficient number of situations where two or more of these models were in dark competition for my slavish imitation, so that I could see I was responding indeed to an hierarchy among them. At the bottom were those prisoners who were the least threatening to me physically, the weak and infirm and the principled non-violent ones, and of course my wife and her cousin Gina, and just above that level were the prisoners whose physical violence seemed to be structured on certain principles of self-defense, which made their violence somewhat predictable, and above these figures were the guards, and then the assistant jailors, and at the pinnacle, the dour figure of the chief jailor, Jacob Moon. It was with yet an additional burden of shame, then, that I came to know how utterly devoted to life had I become that I would curry favor most from those who posed the greatest threat to my life and least from those who were the least threatening to my life. I knew then that I was a lost soul, of the type that can no longer save itself but instead must be saved, if at all, by virtue of some will other than its own, which is to say, by the power of grace. I would be saved now only if the dead themselves wished it.
And so it came about that there was given to me at this time a long dream one night late in the first winter of my imprisonment, in which there spoke to me both my father and his brother my uncle, the man who had taught me my skills as a coffin-maker and who, at my father’s request, had constructed my own coffin, the very one I had passed on to the saintly John Bethel some seven or eight months before. If in life we are to be touched and directed by a will other than our own, it will most likely happen while we are asleep, for sleep is as like unto death as a footrace resembles flight. Thus, in miming death, I was drawn into a passive openness to the dead and the wisdom thereof and the enactment of their will, so that my father and his brother were able to come and speak to me and I was able to hear. The encounter took place in the kitchen of the house where I had been born and raised to the time when I left and went off to live with my uncle, there to learn from him how to make coffins. My father was as he had been during my earliest childhood, very large and looming, with a broad, almost sarcastic smile, and my uncle was as he had been when I had worked with him later, my own size, solemn, bearded, and infinitely patient. We three were seated at the kitchen table, my mother was somehow present in the room but remained silent and out of sight during the interview. My father towered over my uncle and me, though we were all three seated at table as if after a pleasant meal, with dishes and cups and various implements scattered before us. Here follows the sense and direction and much of the tone of the statements given me by these two men:
Father, in a sarcastic tone signifying disapprovaclass="underline" We hear lately that you have allowed your attention to wander. We suppose that this is a result of some wonderful understanding you have recently come by, an understanding which supercedes our own. Perhaps you believe your new perspective unique, and if not unique, then perhaps you think it valid and ours invalid. For we, after all, are but the dead, and you are the living.