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Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty.
Amish overworked their animals, he knew. Fanatics. Hump their women standing up, out in the fields, wearing clothes, just hoist black skirts and there it was, nothing underneath. No underpants. Fanatics. Worship manure.
He asks for a glass of milk and to go with it a piece of apple pie; the crust is crisp and bubbled and they’ve had the sense to use cinnamon. His mother’s pies always had cinnamon.
“Promise, Harry, we’ll thrash out a way between us to help her.” “Yeah, but I don’t think I can. I mean I’m not that interested in her. I was, but I’m not.”
Tothero says, in a voice too loud, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that my greatest boy would grow so hard-hearted.”
“Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.”
“What do you do?” “I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five and dime stores.” “A noble calling,” Tothero says, and turns from the window.
Rabbit asks Ruth, “When’s your birthday?” “August. Why?” “Mine’s February,” he says. “I win.” “You win.” She agrees as if she knows how he feels: that you can’t be master, quite, of a woman who’s older.
“Why are you here?” “ ’Cause you caught me.” “I mean why were you in front of your home?” “I came back to get clean clothes.” “Do clean clothes mean so much to you? Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?”
“Of course, all vagrants think they’re on a quest. At least at first.”
“It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”
“The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.”
“I’ll tell you,” he says. “When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery.” The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool-water is sealed into her mouth. “If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”
I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.” “That’s an unusual view.” “Is it? It’s what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don’t know who’s supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.”
“Will you kneel a moment with me and pray for Christ to come into this room?” “No. No I won’t. I’m too angry. It would be hypocritical.” The refusal, unthinkable from a layman, makes Kruppenbach, not softer, but stiller. “Hypocrisy,” he says mildly. “You have no seriousness. Don’t you believe in damnation? Didn’t you know when you put that collar on, what you risked?”
Actually there’s no real bite in her attack. Nelson is there for one thing, and for another she is relieved he has come back and is afraid of scaring him off. For a third, your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something relaxing and even comic about them.
“He and I in some ways I guess are alike,” he says. “I know. I know.” Her odd quickness in saying this sets his heart ticking quicker. She adds, “But naturally it’s the differences that I notice.”
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass.
“Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.”
