don't, Sister Mary Philomel thought, not if that's the best you can do. She took the saint firmly by the shoulders and turned him back again.
* * * *
The nuns of Our Lady of the Way Hospital ("Our Lady in the Way,” Warren had first innocently called it; now all the Oliphants did, among themselves) were an Austrian order, established in the seventeenth century in the Czech lands of the Hapsburg Empire, which had just then been newly reconverted to the Catholic faith. Theirs was a teaching order from the first, entrusted by the Emperor with the care of the infants of Bohemian noble houses, many of them recently Protestant. (Pierce and the Oliphant children would commit to memory a fairy-tale version of this history as part of their lessons.) The order's full name was the Pacific Order of the Most Holy Infant, and they professed a special devotion to that manifestation of Jesus witnessed in Prague, a pretty child dressed in miniature crown and royal robes. In the tart-smelling entrance hall of the hospital, the Infant of Prague stood on a pedestal beneath a bell jar in his lace and silk ("like a collection doll,” said Hildy); and beyond Him, His Mother.
The mission of the Infantines was still what it had been, to establish the Faith in Protestant lands, though they no longer proselytized, and had mostly turned to Works instead at the suggestion of Our Lady (communicated to that nineteenth-century Mother Superior now in the toils of the beatification process). Still it might have been the old Imperial connection that drew them to Bondieu, for the first inhabitants of the tidy rows of houses built by Good Luck Coal and Coke had been (along with the mountain men drawn from all over the county) a band of Bohemian miners, recruited by company agents in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. It was for these men and their families (called variously Dutchmen or Polacks by the others) that a priest had first been sent to Bondieu, who with the help of the men had built the clapboard church in the holler, Blessed Sacrament, the odd one out among the seven churches of the town.
Pierce would sometimes in later years have a hard time accounting for his childhood circumstances, to himself and others: the extremes were too disparate, nuns and hillbillies, and his own and the Oliphants’ presence among them too anomalous. On Sundays from their hilltop they could hear the loudspeakers of the Full Gospel Church of God in Christ, which broadcast its service (songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning) to all the town. The volume was too high, the accents too strong, the theology too extreme for the children to understand more than a few words: still, Hildy wondered if listening weren't a violation of the rule that forbade Catholics to attend the church services of others.
"Anyway what right do they have to make everybody else listen?"
Pierce thought that what could be done was to get a helicopter, and equip it with a big loudspeaker at the end of a long wire; then on an overcast day (one of those days, say, when high-piled volumes of cloud fill the sky, parting now and then to let religious beams of sunlight fan out over the earth) fly the copter out from some hidden place, then up above the clouds, high up where its engine couldn't be heard. Then the loudspeaker, dangling far down, could suddenly announce itself as the voice of God speaking, and tell everybody to be Catholics.
"They'd believe that,” Joe Boyd said. “Oh sure."
"Anyway,” Hildy said, “it wouldn't be the same if you fooled them into it."
Pierce didn't see it that way. It seemed to him that once gathered into the one true flock, by whatever means, they could then come gradually to see the obvious rightness of its doctrines; in the meantime they wouldn't be in danger of dying outside the Church. It would have to be a helicopter, because helicopters can hover in one place. A job for the Invisibles.
"Anyway,” Hildy said, “if God wanted that he could do it
* * * *
The nuns of Our Lady of the Way Hospital ("Our Lady in the Way,” Warren had first innocently called it; now all the Oliphants did, among themselves) were an Austrian order, established in the seventeenth century in the Czech lands of the Hapsburg Empire, which had just then been newly reconverted to the Catholic faith. Theirs was a teaching order from the first, entrusted by the Emperor with the care of the infants of Bohemian noble houses, many of them recently Protestant. (Pierce and the Oliphant children would commit to memory a fairy-tale version of this history as part of their lessons.) The order's full name was the Pacific Order of the Most Holy Infant, and they professed a special devotion to that manifestation of Jesus witnessed in Prague, a pretty child dressed in miniature crown and royal robes. In the tart-smelling entrance hall of the hospital, the Infant of Prague stood on a pedestal beneath a bell jar in his lace and silk ("like a collection doll,” said Hildy); and beyond Him, His Mother.
The mission of the Infantines was still what it had been, to establish the Faith in Protestant lands, though they no longer proselytized, and had mostly turned to Works instead at the suggestion of Our Lady (communicated to that nineteenth-century Mother Superior now in the toils of the beatification process). Still it might have been the old Imperial connection that drew them to Bondieu, for the first inhabitants of the tidy rows of houses built by Good Luck Coal and Coke had been (along with the mountain men drawn from all over the county) a band of Bohemian miners, recruited by company agents in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. It was for these men and their families (called variously Dutchmen or Polacks by the others) that a priest had first been sent to Bondieu, who with the help of the men had built the clapboard church in the holler, Blessed Sacrament, the odd one out among the seven churches of the town.
Pierce would sometimes in later years have a hard time accounting for his childhood circumstances, to himself and others: the extremes were too disparate, nuns and hillbillies, and his own and the Oliphants’ presence among them too anomalous. On Sundays from their hilltop they could hear the loudspeakers of the Full Gospel Church of God in Christ, which broadcast its service (songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning) to all the town. The volume was too high, the accents too strong, the theology too extreme for the children to understand more than a few words: still, Hildy wondered if listening weren't a violation of the rule that forbade Catholics to attend the church services of others.
"Anyway what right do they have to make everybody else listen?"
Pierce thought that what could be done was to get a helicopter, and equip it with a big loudspeaker at the end of a long wire; then on an overcast day (one of those days, say, when high-piled volumes of cloud fill the sky, parting now and then to let religious beams of sunlight fan out over the earth) fly the copter out from some hidden place, then up above the clouds, high up where its engine couldn't be heard. Then the loudspeaker, dangling far down, could suddenly announce itself as the voice of God speaking, and tell everybody to be Catholics.
"They'd believe that,” Joe Boyd said. “Oh sure."
"Anyway,” Hildy said, “it wouldn't be the same if you fooled them into it."
Pierce didn't see it that way. It seemed to him that once gathered into the one true flock, by whatever means, they could then come gradually to see the obvious rightness of its doctrines; in the meantime they wouldn't be in danger of dying outside the Church. It would have to be a helicopter, because helicopters can hover in one place. A job for the Invisibles.
"Anyway,” Hildy said, “if God wanted that he could do it
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