The Lion shall lie down with the Lamb

Helen Brain

I believe laws are made for the common good, and that all responsible citizens should stick to them. That includes things like paying your taxes. Everyone should pay the taxes due so that the government can build roads and clinics, hospitals and schools, and support important things like the Gender Commission.

I believe in human rights, and support for the outcast and deprived. And children's rights. I'm very strong on children's rights.

Everyone should pay their taxes, so that we can create a new and better order for our children, who are the future of our country.

I believe in other things too - like the power of prayer, and the importance of the family. Not everyone is lucky enough to grow up in a Catholic home like I did, with a hardworking dad, and a stay-at-home mom, and a whole table of growing kids, all bright and athletic and awfully fond of each other.

We were a close family. And mom and dad taught us always to choose the narrow way. They went to mass every Sunday, no missing for any reason at all. Non-negotiable. And every night without fail mom knelt down at the side of her bed, under the rosary that she had entwined around the bedpost, and said her prayers, on the rug where her knees had worn two little patches of bare thread.

The family who prays together, stays together, and every night we all held hands around the table and said grace together before we tucked into the delicious meal mom cooked.

Dad always paid his taxes. He was very committed to keeping the law. He believed it was God's way.

I'll give you an example.

Once there was a dreadful drought, and the town was placed under water restrictions. We were only allowed to run baths that were four inches deep. So dad used to measure them and make sure they were no more than three and a half inches deep. That's the kind of man he was. If we did something wrong, and he had to beat us, then he would give us an extra couple of thrashes to make up for the times we'd sinned and he hadn't caught us.

Of course, God also dealt with our sins. Once a month we all lined up outside the wooden box in the church, and one by one went inside and made our confessions, meekly kneeling on our knees before Father, who was God's representative on earth, and one of the successors of St Peter, who holds the keys to heaven. Afterwards we really did feel relieved and set free from our sins that weighed us down like millstones around the necks of drowning men.

Mom was a pillar of the church. She even got a medal from the pope, although that was more than twenty years later, after the last of us seven kids had left home, and she was able to devote all of her time to good works. Mom was a good woman. She knew right from wrong, and she made sure we knew it too. She used to point out to us people who were wrong, so that we too could learn to know right from wrong.

But this is a far cry from taxes. Let me get back to taxes. Paying tax is like putting your pocket money into the tin with the purple picture of Jesus' suffering face on it, during Lent. My Lenten Sacrifice. It is sacrificial giving. It's meant to hurt. Otherwise it's not doing you any good.

And you have to grow in goodness. If you don't, the nun who teaches you will tell Father at the church, and Father will tell Lucy, Perpetua and all the saints, and they will tell the martyrs, who will tell the Prophets, the Apostles, the Patriarchs, the Disciples and Our Blessed Mother herself, who might just tell God and then all hell will break loose. Literally.

There will be Lakes of Brimstone and Everlasting Fire that no extinguisher will ever be able to put out. Gibbering clubfooted ghouls and demons, tormentors, torturers, all manner of pox and scurvies, twisted limbs and leprous digits, foul discharges from no longer private orifices, pimples oozing black pus, snakes and worms, cannibals and savages and all the souls who disobeyed Christ the God of love.

And only our Blessed Mother can save us. Mea culpa mea culpa, save me, miserable worm that I am, foul creation, spawn of Satan, slimier than a frog's egg, foul-breathed, fungus-ridden, moral degenerate, I am not worthy. I beseech you, Blessed Mother, have mercy on my soul and release me from my place in hell.

I took great care to learn my catechism lessons well. How to baptise heathen children at the point of death, so their unbaptised dying would not weigh on my conscience. How to make my last thought at night one of repentance, so that should I die in the night, I would go straight to heaven.

Except the one terrible sin that hung around my heart like the iron weights on my mother's kitchen scale. I have never told anyone. Good people don't let their thoughts dwell on ugly or evil things. They meditate on all that is good, pure and lovely.

My brother chose the narrow way. The very narrow way, so small it was not even a way yet, more like tiny path, a hardly visible footpath, perhaps just a trail of breadcrumbs, such as Hansel left when he was abandoned in the depths of the forest.

My brother, in spite of all my parents' impeccable teaching of the way and the truth, was a bad penny. He was born evil. Corrupted. He was predestined to hell, in spite of all the hours my mother spent working the rosary through her manicured fingers with the French half-moon nail polish.

Yes, he liked the narrow way. He liked to slip through the cracks.

And what's more, he didn't pay his taxes.

And that's why I'm handing him over to the Receiver of Revenue Fraud Squad. He doesn't know. It is a deadly secret. And he is out of the country, of course, because there is a warrant out for his arrest on tax evasion charges.

But he will be back soon. Perhaps for my father's funeral. Dad is old and frail, but as eager as ever to keep the way, the light and the truth.

There is a small reward for turning in tax offenders - a percentage of the amount due - which I will give sacrificially to people who need it more than I.

I could put it in my Lenten tin with the purple face of Suffering Christ on it. It could take the word to poor native children in Rwanda, dying of AIDS. Or I could give it to the Gender Commission, to further the rights of women in the new South Africa.

I could use it to pay my therapist. It has cost me a lot, this insistence on the narrow way. I was very small when my narrow way was forced open to become the broad way. And my parents turned away their faces.

I could never confess something as shameful as this to the priest, me, a five-year-old, he the venerable and powerful representative of Our Lord on earth. And that means I am thoroughly on the road leading to hell and perdition, lakes of fire, spawns of Satan. My sins are unconfessed and unforgiven.

The saddest part is that even in the afterlife I will not be able to escape from my brother. We will go to hell together as we did, back then in 1966, when I was 5 and he was old enough to know better.

Perhaps our afterlife will be one eternal intertwining of the strong and the weak. The lion and the lamb lying down together. One long ripping open of the narrow way.

It's a shame really, but that is the way in loving Christian families like ours. Someone has to carry the rap, the scapegoat for the sins of the community.

I could tell all. I could go to confession and tell the priest the nature of the millstone that threatens to drown me in the lake of fire. But then he would know the truth about our perfect family. And my parents and my loving siblings would be embarrassed. The pope might take back his medal. The truth would be out. My mother would be no better than the people she pointed out to us as inferior. People would say my father had been weak - he hadn't been firm enough with us or beaten us hard enough. Perhaps some sin had slipped through unpunished.

The secret, of course, is that I, like my brother, am a bad penny. Pure evil. Perhaps he corrupted me. Anyway, I am predestined for the crimson lake. So I may as well turn him in.

Actually, it serves many purposes all at once. The taxes due to the government get paid. He is punished for his iniquity. I can send the reward money to the starving AIDS orphans in Rwanda, and lots of members of the 28 gang will get to explore his narrow way, nightly, one after the other. The lamb will lie down with the lions.

Helen Brain is a writer of childrens' books and has published 14 of them, but this is only the second time she has been brave enough to bring her writing for grown ups out of the closet. She lives in Cape Town with husband and three sons, and teaches part-time at St George's Grammar School.

LitNet: 24 March 2005

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