A Convergence Of Birds by Jonathon Safran Foer Read Free Book Online Page A

over the Midlands and the South, he presumes to some kind of power, making us invisible and yet at the same time even more spiritual than ever, more abstract, more distant, more creatures of the mind than of ritual, splendor, office.
    It is like being made obsolete, he tells his creaking bones, remembering only too well the crippled joiner’s instructions: “You will not stand, Father, you will have to contain yourself at the crouch, there can be little easing once you have been installed. To make your little place any bigger would be to expose you.” He is a priest-shrinker, as alive in his trade as the old word for plough in such a word as carucate, which means as much land as you might reasonably plough in a year. In a way, Father Garnet broods in his cramp, our Little John is the ideal candidate for these cubbyholes, but he has no need, can go abroad as he pleases, more or less an upright dwarf, bubbling with good humor and perhaps more than a little amused by the spectacle of us all crouched until doomsday. He is almost a sexton of the living, omitting only to smooth the earth over us at the last and no doubt tempted sometimes to seal us in with trowel and mortar, which, if we do not burst out while the seals are still soft, encases us forever. Between cramp and suffocation, we have a poorer life than we envisioned, far from the august panoply of the high-ranking prelate. Father Garnet, the ranking Jesuit in England, tries to soothe his mind with his own name, derived from the word pomegranate, the color of whose pulp approximates the stone. No use. The sheer inappropriateness of light hidden under a bushel provokes him and makes his stomach queasy, a fate little eased by recourse to the drinking tube that enters his hideaway from behind the wardrobe outside. A small pan, a slight tilt to the feeder, and water can reach its priest: anything that will flow, soup or gruel, just to keep body attached to soul. Father Henry Garnet of Heanor, Derbyshire, thinks of himself as a light.
    Now he is trying to work out which is better: being alone in the hole or having another priest for company: Father Oldcorne, as on other occasions, or Father Gerard, as on a few. There is certainly more talk, he decides, but of such an abortive, thwarted nature it were better to keep still. Perhaps the pallid patter of the inward voice consorts best with secret living on the run from King James’s hunters. For those eligible to have women with them—if any—it might be better, he reckons: not so much cuddling as meeting head-on a different point of view; after all, those bearing within them the secretest hiding place might better adjust to circumstances and so cheer up anyone with them. A Jesuit, he tells himself, should be able to reason the pros and cons without too much trouble, but he finds his mind blocked, twisted, perversely longing for daylight, sleep, a reassuring companion voice. Instead, he hears the echo of a refrain voiced by Little John Owen:
    Him that can’t stand it tight
    May never see the morrow’s light.
    Small consolation, that. Imagine, then, the confessional even smaller than usual, even for the recipient, with the confessee granted room to squirm about during the painful act. What then? Should the priest freeze in there, shocked by what he hears? Should he practice in the confessional for the hole or vice versa? Has either any bearing on the other?
    If there is any moral to be drawn from recusants’ experiences of being hidden, it is that it is better, if you intend to hide, not to do so on your own premises—or on those of anyone else. Best go to Saint Omer with Father Tesimond. Or, if that proves impossible, make sure you deal with a country house that has no servants in it and is not located in any of the English counties. It is not that Robert Wintour and Stephen Littleton on the run, camping out in barns, washhouses, seed stores, stables, and byres, were found by a drunken poacher, whom they had to gag and