This, from “Something Wicked This Way Comes:”
We got to help her, Jim. Who else would believe? If she tells anyone, ‘I’m Miss Foley!’ ‘Get away!’ they’d say, ‘Miss Foley’s left town, disappeared! Go on, little girl!’ Oh, Jim, I bet she’s pounded a dozen doors this morning, wanting help, scared people with her screaming and yelling, then run off, gave up, and hid under that tree. Police are probably looking for her now, but so what? It’s just a wild girl crying and they’ll lock her away and she’ll go crazy. That carnival, boy, shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen. Only we hear, Jim, only you and me, and right now I feel like I just ate a cold snail raw.
Eerie, that. “That carnival, boy, shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen.”
Evil sees us. Evil uses us. And once our utility is gone, evil abandons us, and it doesn’t care in what form we’re left.
So we have to listen. We have to be not too scared to listen. We have to be like Charles Halloway, father to the boy speaking in this passage:
"Now look [he says to his son Will] since when did you think being good meant being happy?”
“Since always.”
“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love son, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit out appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.
“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you lie awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need to tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and way off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what the clock ticks, that’s what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay, but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don’t you? Don’t think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you’ll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it’s a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choked on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.
“Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will, thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself tow falls out of three, I figured I couldn’t marry until I had licked myself good and forever, Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That’s you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, no, and sad, too, though you’re always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon saw you were wise, sooner and better, than I will ever be. . . “
Dad’s pipe was dead. He paused to tap it out and reload it.
“No, sir,” Will said.
“Yes,” said his father. “I’d be a fool not to know I’m a fool. My one wisdom is: you’re wise.”
Those who are good don’t leave themselves alone, or those who struggle with them alone either. They see – eventually, as Charles Halloway sees, that together we make perfection, and not just in children. The sooner we learn and re-learn and apply that lesson, the better.
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