Page 245 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 233

“Listen to me,” Cyril Prosper said. “What drives Karg so crazy
that all the priests on the faculty are getting so afraid of now? Read-
ing. Books. Being intellectual, radical, prideful, undocile. It’s all the
same serpent to them. Dryden undermined a good thing.” He looked
very stern, and I wondered whose side he was on. “Anybody,” he said,
“caught thinking now is suspect because somebody once who was
thought to be thinking was that forbidden word that doesn’t exist.
Cribbing ideas wasn’t even thinking. It was memorizing.”
“Doesn’t that last part sort of cancel out their major premise?”
I asked.
“How?”
“I mean if he wasn’t thinking in the first place, then what does
being that word...”
“You can say that word, Ryan.”
“...that word have to do with thinking in the second place. He
wasn’t thinking at all.”
“But he was clever,” Cyril Prosper said. “The Reverend Chris-
topher Dryden was the epitome of everything clever. That really
scares them. You’ve got to give him credit for that. He sure as hell
was clever. ‘The ssserpent in Eden,’” he said, imitating Rector Karg,
“‘hath many ways even unto the days of our own.’”
A thin stiletto voice cut into our laughter. “I’m surprised. I didn’t
think Catholics could quote Scripture.” Edith Berrengar, that girl,
had followed us, smoking, her black dress flecked gray with tiny ash.
She was alone. Chuckie and the rest were lost in the crowd.
How ugly she is, I thought, how very horsy, how kind of...attrac-
tive, sexy even.
“Your persuasions, your persuasions,” she continued. She ges-
tured toward Misery’s huge red-brick buildings. “I’m glad, really so
glad to see the priest-factory. Where they take men and wrap them
in the sweet bosom of God.”
“Your terms sound mighty religious,” Cyril Prosper kidded. He
thought she was joking.
“Religious!” Her laughter cracked dry, crumbling down. “Chris-
tamighty. I got tired waiting for the new revelation by the time I
got to be twelve. These two here,” she waved a gesture of brace-
lets at Lock and me, “haven’t reached twelve yet. I can tell. Oh,

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