He Considers Not the Lilies but Their Excellencies

Thin gruel, shallow graves, whiskey watered down, the ne’er-do-well and good-for-nothing crowd of cornerboys and gobshites were among Argyle’s manifold perturbations. Worse still, the episcopal vexations: their excellencies, eminence and graces, red-cassocked dandies and mitered wankers, the croziered posers in their bishoprics with their Easter duties and Peter’s pence, their ledgers full of mortal, venial sins— keepers of the till and tally, bankers of indulgences and dispensations; their bulls and bans and excommunications, nothing but contumely and bamboozles. For all their vestiture, rings and unctions, preaching to bishops, like farting at skunks, was nothing but a mug’s game to the sin-eater, so in earshot of them mum is what he kept. Still, he thought there might be something to it: a life apart from this life where the souls long dead and gone were neither dead nor gone. Some days he felt so happily haunted, by loving ghosts and gods upholding him. Some days he felt entirely alone.