Daisy Chain - Chapter 2

The mentality of a man like Clive Benton was such that he had an uneasy awareness that he was inferior to others in ways that he could not explicitly identify. Troubled waters lay beneath his placid surface. He considered it only obliquely, as one might consider the dangers of an undertow. When Clive was a boy, there was a long stretch of beach where he swam alone and carefree. It stretched for miles from an offshoot, a narrow inlet to another waterway that branched off into a small gulf.

One day, without realizing the danger, Clive ran into the water near that offshoot and began swimming out from shore, something he often did. The current's overwhelming power shocked him and he found himself being drawn into the inlet, nature revealing its power and indifference in a terrifying way, as he watched the shoreline pass by �" or rather himself being rapidly carried along the water in such a way that the shoreline appeared to race by. He knew neither the physics nor the fundamental dynamics of why he was suddenly closer to death than he had ever been before or since.

Instinct and adrenaline were all he had, and with every fiber of his being, with every sinuous strand of will to live, he fought the current. It took him three minutes of all out struggle to reach water shallow enough to keep him from losing his footing. In the minutes before that he had struggled to a place that would have been easy for him to stand at further down the beach, in the water he was used to. But the closer he got to the inlet, the greater became the power of the undertow. And so, as a boxer who might be knocked down by an opponent far stronger than himself, he got up, only to be knocked down again.

There was nothing new under the sun that day, nor was there any mercy�"only his will to struggle and live. He had been taken by surprise to such an extent that he didn't think to pray, for prayer would have taken time and effort that he could not spare. When he stumbled upon the shore's soft sand, he was spent. No struggle in his life had been that ferocious. When he regained the strength to walk, he rolled over once so that he was covered in the powdery feel of the fine sand. It made him feel as if he were held in the grasp of someone far greater than himself. It felt divine, as if he was enclosed in the hand of God.

What lay in the undertow of his mind was something less terrifying than what he had experienced that day, but only so because he was able to push it away, to blur it into an indistinct jumble of thoughts that held nothing discernible enough for which he was aware of or consciously threatened. If he had known what monsters dwelt beneath the surface, it would have been the soul shattering knowledge that he was incapable of competing with the people he preached to if they played on an even playing field.

What he had and what would shame him if he was aware of it was a quick and somewhat easy way to not only become equal but superior to these people who were more favored by fortune than himself, those who had the good parents and the decent education of which he had been deprived. The longstanding sense of inferiority was more than a man with his unintended ambition was able to bear, and so he cheated. This was something that many people he crossed paths with in his ministry had done�"but they were usually aware of it, and of the consequences. They may have ignored the realization that they were one step from a lengthy prison term, but just as Clive had done they blurred the reality into smudge just as if they had used an office eraser to delete an unwelcome calculation.

Thus, Clive floundered with no internal guiding light or psychological insights of his own. Even his understanding of the Bible was rudimentary and shallow, the product of a man with little curiosity into the mind's and opinion's of others. Indeed, he had on two occasions made a serious effort to read Augustine and Aquinas, but having no one to guide him or the intellectual resources that other men spent on raising profit, Clive quickly found himself in over his head and dismissed the writings as "Just something Catholics believed." He managed to make himself believe that without knowing what it was he did not believe. He was vaguely aware of the irony, for if Clive had been favored by fortune his situation in life would have opened many doors. He was not a stupid man, he was simply an uneducated man who hated the hand he had been dealt.

Why Clive Benton did not attempt to provide his son and daughter with the things that he had been bereft of was the greatest sin and moral failing of his life. Clive had the not unusual condition of being at heart a selfish, self-centered man. Preaching the Gospel was the only way he had to rail against his misfortune and release his bitterness. And by doing so, he sowed the bitterness that would wound his son's soul in profound and far reaching ways.

In some ways, Clive was like a dog chasing a car, for he would not know what to do with it if he caught it. Henry witnessed this ridiculous and absurd situation and was well aware of his father's ineptitude, ignorance, and impotence. There were times when people did stop to hear out one of Clive's sermon's, and the Clive's distress was apparent to Henry, if not to the listener.

Specific and sincere questions were always met with either platitudes or pamphlets. What sometimes seemed like a genuine need for small gifts of a dollar or two were met with Clive declaring that he'd pray for the person to have better fortune. Clive winced at a response such as "Looks like you need it more than me. Pray for yourself."

Efforts from desperate people attempting to secure some moral support and perhaps a bit of guidance fared no better. Clive couldn't give what he didn't have. So no matter how desperately he had tried to stack the deck in his favor, he always seemed to come up a card or two short. He was a good listener, though. Henry was willing to grant his father that much.

Yet, it was Daisy who dispensed usable advice. Henry looked up to his big sister and realized that she had a much greater chance of escaping the circumstances into which he and she had been thrown. She did a lot of reading�"of what Henry rarely bothered enough to read the cover, and when he did it was meaningless to him: authors he had never heard of and topics that held no interest for him. Nevertheless, he believed that no matter how his future life went, Daisy would be a source of strength and a refuge in an indifferent world.