Free This Is Not for You by Jane Rule Page B

Judas:
    “Can anything clear me in my own eyes? or release me from the horror of myself? I tell you, there is no escape from God’s innocence.”
    And on into the last paragraph:
    “We are Cain and Abel, we are the betrayer and the betrayed, gaining, with an awareness of our double nature, humility and—perhaps—salvation. Let us pray.”
    Yours was the prayer before the benediction.
    “O life-giving sun, offspring of the lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven!… By the path of good lead us to final bliss… Deliver us from wandering evil…”
    After all these years, your voice is what I remember more than my own. They were the last prayers I ever offered. And you offered them, your own and your first. If I had not so certainly turned away from the Church then, would your own detour have taken so many years? Probably I had nothing to do with it.
    “What a performance,” Sandy said, as she shook hands with both of us after the service. “I wish I wanted to be saved. What I ought to do is write a couple of hymns. I could get along without ‘Once to Every Man and Nation.’ When you’re ordained, Kate, that’s what I’ll do.”
    “A safe promise,” I said, being pleasant, waiting for some reference to my other talents.
    “That was a great concert last night,” you said.
    “Well, I passed,” Sandy said quietly, “on the strength of Bach and Bartok. I wish you’d both been around for a drink afterwards, but I knew you had this to do this morning.”
    “Why don’t you come drinking with us after my show?” you suggested.
    Sandy looked at me, and then she said, “I’d like that, but I’ve got to go to Los Angeles. Maybe some time before it’s all over…”
    That night I went to find Sandy. She was in the living room of her dormitory, talking with a couple of friends.
    “Hi,” she called. “We were just arguing about your sermon. These people don’t want Cain and Abel one nature. They want the sheep and the goats separated.”
    “You’re really a Zoroastrian, aren’t you?” one of them asked.
    “No,” I said. “Just a bad Christian. Have you got an hour or so, Sandy?”
    “Sure.”
    We excused ourselves.
    “Where do you want to go?” she asked.
    “Anywhere that’s private.”
    “Let’s drive then.”
    After we had left the campus and the town and were driving in the hills above the city, I was not sure I could or would say anything. Perhaps I had never intended to.
    “What do you want from me, Kate… anything?”
    “Just this probably… getting out. That was bad this morning.”
    “So was the night before, mostly You can’t mind much about that. “You did what you thought you had to, didn’t you?”
    “I think so.”
    “Well, that’s enough. I’m glad you came. There’s something I wanted to say to you, and I couldn’t have unless you’d come. I’ve been trying to figure out ever since that night what it was between us that made everything so bad, even what was good. I sat there in chapel this morning, ready to be furious, you two all dressed up in tents, going down the aisle like a couple of newlyweds, and I thought what a mucked-up fucking waste it was. I still think so. But that’s not it. While you were up there doing it, it was like me the night before: no mistakes, but nothing else either, except once or twice. And I thought, ‘I know what’s wrong between us. We’re friends, and I didn’t know it.’ Then afterwards, when you were just waiting for me to take a crack or try to make time with Esther, I saw that you didn’t know it, either. So I think you’re out of your head, and you think I am. It doesn’t matter. I could have a drink with you and Esther. It would be okay. Yes?”
    “Yes,” I said, but I felt just a little the way I did when all those glasses began to fall, sad, helplessly sad.
    I wonder if the reason so many adolescents love Fitzgerald is that he never outgrew that kind of sadness. It takes some measure of innocence to mix honor and