‘Yeah but Father is that what you meant by God being a paradox? How he was so pleased to get a chance to nail his Son there that he even gave up his plan to fry the whole world in Hell?’
When the hands were finally under control, the priest said, ‘Let’s, let’s leave it at that for today, okay?’
When the little robot had slid from its chair and waddled out of the room, Father Warren shuddered. ‘Game position!’ What kind of world was it to make a child think like that? It was a cry for help from a fettered soul, for sure. Fettered in a broken body too the pathos of it reminded him of a passage in That Hideous Strength, a man experimentally about to trample a crucifix, arrested by the simple helplessness of the wooden figure:
Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, for all its realism, was inanimate and could not in any way hit back…
XVI
The Devil tricks us with puppets, to which he has glued angels’ wings.
The blizzard outside kept repeating all the long vowels to itself. Roderick was in his room reading I, Robot, wondering when the I character was going to put in an appearance. There must be one, because otherwise the author would have called it He, Robot, or They, Robots. He couldn’t imagine how it would feel, being hooked up to these three terrible laws of robotics, that –
The garage door creaked in a way that could not be the wind. Roderick crept downstairs and found Pa shivering and coughing in his workroom.
‘Pa, what are you—?’
‘Shh, don’t wake Ma. Do me a favour, son. Put my coat by the kitchen stove and dry it off, will you? If Ma finds it wet in the morning she’ll throw a tizzy.’
‘Well sure but — hey Pa how come you’re all dripping wet and your coat is still dry inside?’
‘Took it off. To uh, wrap some stuff I was carrying.’
‘What stuff, hey?’
‘Just stuff, spare parts.’ Pa suppressed a heaving cough. ‘Don’t say anything to Ma, okay? Our little secret.’
Roderick carried the wet mackinaw out of the room, but did not close the door quite shut. He put his eye to the crack and looked in.
But all he could see was Pa’s hand, hanging up a key under the picture of Rex Reason. He went back upstairs to say his prayers:
‘Our Father, if we have one, Who might be in Heaven, if there is one…’
There was an awful lot of God at school, but whenever Roderick tried to ask a question, Sister Olaf just looked cross and told him to take it up with Father Warren. So he tried working it out for himself.
The Holy Trinity must be a lot like in the Oz stories. After all, God was God the Father, but God was also the Holy Trinity, the place where He or She lived with two friends. Oz was just like that: it was this terrific wizard who could do anything, and it was also the place where he lived. Anyway, OZ = PA, that was plain, and nobody knew what Oz (or God) looked like.
God the Father was so wise that his wisdom turned into this pigeon called the Holy Ghost. Couldn’t that be the Scarecrow? Crows and pigeons being birds, and ghosts being scarey. The Scarecrow was always worried about fire, too, and didn’t Sister Olaf say something about the H.G. turning into tongues of flame? Well then.
The Father and H.G. loved each other a lot and had this Son, the one you always saw pointing to his shiny heart and smiling. That just about had to be the Tin Woodman. He too was a carpenter, and Oz gave him a heart made out of shiny silk. ,
Dorothy was kind of a problem until he read through his book of Bible stories. Because in this house at Bethany, God the Son was just sitting there when this woman came up and poured oil all over him — just the way Dorothy poured oil all over the Tin Woodman!
That just about settled it. Roderick didn’t bother much with the minor characters like Mary (= MA = Ozma), the story all seemed strong enough without them. Only one thing bothered him:
Oz kept acting like such a slippery character. It was almost as if he didn’t have any real power at all. As if he faked it.
Pa said there wasn’t any God, and both stories were hokum.
Ma said everybody was God, and no story was ever hokum.
Sister Oaf just got mad.
‘Blasphemy, and this close to Christmas!’
‘Well yeah I thought Father Warren was taking care of this kid. Been meaning to have another little pow-wow with him myself, Sister, only you know how it’s been what with trying to squeeze in a couple more basketball games before our Centre eats himself sick at Christmas and gets all outa shape, and what with trying to schedule early training for the baseball team. You know if I didn’t keep after these kids our whole sports programme would go right down the tubes…’
Sister Olaf twisted the rosary on her belt. ‘He seems to think he’s preparing for his First Communion right along with all the others, that’s the problem. Not even baptized, I wonder if he even understands what a sincere confession is, and anyway.’
‘Anyway?’
‘The poor little thing doesn’t even seem to have a mouth.’
‘He must eat somehow.’ Father O’Bride finished cleaning his rifle and squinted down the barrel at her.
‘Eat? I’m not so sure, Father. We never find him in the refectory at lunch hour, he’s always lurking around the playground by himself or just sitting reading the Bible — and once I caught him carrying out the garbage for Sister Mary Martha!’
‘Uh-oh, can’t have that. You put a stop to it?’
‘Of course, a child could hurt himself carrying those heavy cans. Besides, the Community agreed that since Sister Mary Martha is too old to teach, housework is her little duty. Her little cross. And she takes it up joyfully.’
Father O’Bride found such expressions embarrassing. He tugged at the neckband of his sweatshirt as though it were a tight white collar. ‘Little too joyfully, if you ask me. I mean, she keeps polishing that same spot in the hall out there, I darn near broke my neck on it this morning. None of my business, of course, up to Mother Sup — and of course we all think the Sisters are doing one heck of a great job here, batting a thous—’
‘Whether the poor little pagan eats or not, Father, he doesn’t seem ready to make his First. It’s hard to get through to him, he seems to get everything mixed up with fairy tales and robot stories and I don’t know what. When I started telling the class about the Flight into Egypt, he kept interrupting to ask about the Deadly Desert, and Dorothy and Toto — yes and wasn’t Bethlehem where the steel came from, the metallic conception he called it! The metallic conception!’
Father O’Bride hated dealing with out-of-bounds decisions like these. He looked up for inspiration, but saw only a poster advertising the sign of the cross. Superimposed on a boy was a baseball diamond. The legend said: BE SURE TO TOUCH ON ALL BASES. ‘Look, take him out of religion altogether for now, let Father Warren handle that department. Teamwork, right?’
‘All right, and—’
‘Who knows, kid might shape up by next season anyway. If not, well, we hold him in reserve, bench him but maybe let him work out once in a while with the A squad…’