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Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There’s the always preexisting, and having no end. There’s the notion of being all powerful—because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “Bloody Timmy’s in the well!” I flew down the steps and ran for the path, barely registering the Major’s startled oath behind me.
But the thing about being a soldier is that someone’s tellin’ ye what to do, from the moment ye rise until ye fall down at night. Who’s to tell these poor wee gomerels which end o’ the cow to milk?” “That would be you, I expect,” I said to him.
Real danger had its own taste, vivid as lemon juice, by contrast with the weak lemonade of imagination.
“You haven’t met my aunt Jenny, but believe me, she could have civilized Adolf Hitler, if she put her mind to it.
Why d’ye talk to yourself?” “It assures me of a good listener,” I said tartly,
No man is really at his best with someone else’s hand up his arse.
“The Lord’s will—” he began stubbornly. “Was it the Lord’s will that your cow should fall into the gorge and break her leg last month?” I interrupted him. “Because if it was, then you presumably ought to have left her there to die, rather than fetching my husband to help pull her out, and then allowing me to set her leg. How is she, by the way?” I could see the cow in question through the window, peacefully grazing at the edge of the yard, and evidently untroubled either by her nursing calf, or by the binding I had applied to support her cracked cannon bone.
“I have lived through a fucking world war,” I said, my voice low and venomous. “I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army, been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked. And I have fucking survived!” My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop it. “And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and wiggled them?!”
People often say that women forget what childbirth is like, because if they remembered, no one would ever do it more than once.
“All I want,” she said softly to the dark, “is for you to love me. Not because of what I can do or what I look like, or because I love you—just because I am.” “Perfect, unconditional love?” he said just as softly. “Some would tell ye only God can love that way—but I can try.” “Oh, I have faith in you,” she said, and felt the glow of him reach her own heart.
I had realized many years before why “patients” are called that; it’s because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are not sick.
