*
As Elf and the convict walked into the yard, they passed Body and Soul, the most unhappily plighted couple on God's earth, arguing next to the toolshed. Soul like a righteous husband said: I want to go to Las Vegas and prove I am cured; but Body responded: No no no. You always take me with you and you leave me so damaged. We need to stay home this time. Because the proof that you're cured is that you don't go there at all -- not that you go there and try to resist what you never should have gone near in the first place. Now with a rote anger Soul scolded his spouse: You're always trying to tell me what to do. Even when you're quiet it's such an aggressive and *muddy* quiet.
Body folded her wings and was quiet.
Elf grabbed Dave's arm and pointed to the back fence. Who is that up ahead?
That's the Nazi Kommandant's wife, Dave said. She was in our Bible study. She's not really in a coma, I guess. She's still alive, it looks like.
The woman lay huddled, clutching her thighs. She wouldn't move or look up at them or at anyone in the yard. She was still a fervent woman of faith, so it was said, but now the edges of the cross she held were biting into her hand. In her appearance of despair perhaps she was trying to mimic one of the Holocaust victims that her "set", as if deliberately, had know nothing about at the epoch when knowledge would have been more historical, more useful, more fruitful. Now in its belated form the knowledge still cut her but without offering any healing. It couldn't. And it is said that suffering is in fact objective, exists outside any given human conscience and so *will* be experienced, like it or not, if not at the appropriate time, then with great futility at another time that you wouldn't choose. But it must happen. Because God would never be so cruel as deliberately to withhold the gift called suffering from any of his creatures. So much for the pitiful shivering woman.
Psalms stood like people on the side of the path. Different psalms would speak on different days (such as Psalm 104 which falls always on the 20th evening of the month). There was no doubt that Psalms were calling to you as you passed. "My foot stands on level ground." One prayed for this to be true. "Righteousness and peace have met together."
Finally, the two of them reached the mudpool near the cyclone fence. It shifted and moved. A woman lay floating face down.
That's Duessa! Elf cried.
She was very beautiful, with her look of wounded youth, slender, having eyes close together and a rather sharp jaw. Her mane was luxuriant. There was a physical resemblance to the girl, to Elf, which the girl herself trembled and rejected. As Duessa turned toward the pilgrims, her center activated but her leg sank deeper into the mire, the quagmire, all the way to her hip. Please help me, she cried.
I don't want to be the way I am. Not only filled with doubt but enjoying my doubt, luxuriating in it. It's beginning to harden and I have no future.
Her eyes closed down on the convict like a pair of tongs. He began to pull her out of the swamp, selva pantanosa, while Elf stood irresolute. There! There now! With a slap her leg pulled itself loose. It was the most beautiful leg on the planet earth. This was Dave's first temptation of the three to come. He backed away and closed his eyes. Far far away, next to the back door, the anchoress stood ringing her bell. She was crying: Children! It's time to come in now!
When Duessa heard the sound she shivered and ran away. She climbed the back wall to the school, even naked as she was, then she ran away into the night. So the first temptation had been survived.
*
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