ALSO BY MICHAEL BIBLE
Empire of Light
Sophia
Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City
Simple Machines
My Second Best Bear Rug
Gorilla Math
The Ancient Hours
Copyright © Michael Johnson Bible, 2020
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: December 2020
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201 and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781612198644
Ebook ISBN 9781612198651
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944084
Book design by Richard Oriolo, adapted for ebook
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Michael Bible
Title Page
Copyright
Harmony: 2018
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Iggy: 2006
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Farber: 2005
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Cloud: 2019
Chapter 1
A Note About the Author
HARMONY
2018
1
WE WERE INNOCENT. Believed we were special. Drunk every weekend at the mall. The world was in our hands. Time didn’t matter. Love was a given. Death was afraid of us. Now we’ve got gray in our beards. The sky bruises purple. The mall is dead. We’re the old men we promised we’d never become. Spending our days in the corner booth at the Starlight Diner arguing life’s vagaries. Our town, Harmony, is typical. Just like yours. Full of saints and sinners you can’t tell apart.
On late summer Sunday afternoons the light spills over the old clock tower and projects a shadow on the square as big as a mountain. The florist, Floyd Williams, lines his windows with orange gladiolus the size of antique sabers. He has a scar from a fistfight with his youngest son that started over his drinking. Ben White helps Sue Meadows from her car so she can get her back pills. He’s sleeping with a man in Greensboro that his wife doesn’t know about. The fiddle shop is opening. Doug Lightfoot is helping Mary Beth Taylor get her tuning just right. Last year Doug got Mary Beth pregnant even though he’s twice her age. Drove her to Charlotte to get it taken care of. Bud Rogers, the football coach, picks up his car from the body shop. Has a long talk with Theo Knight about the Panthers’ chances this year. Bud sells a little weed on the side mostly to kids from Harmony High School. Theo spends his evenings weeping about his wife who went missing ten years ago.
We found an old picture from our eighth-grade class trip to city hall. Iggy stands apart from the group. A bright October day. Orange leaves fall down behind us. Mrs. Maple’s red hair up in a bun. Most of us wear school hoodies except for Iggy. We’ve tried to understand why he wore a yellow rain jacket on a sunny day. Was it a sign? We studied his face for something, anything, that might show us what he would become. That trip to city hall was supposed to teach us about the history of Harmony. We took a bus downtown from school that morning. Ate ham sandwiches and green apples for lunch.
Harmony is older than America, Mayor Presley told us. He was a fat, bald man with a tightly trimmed beard. A lifelong bachelor, his family had been in Harmony for over a century. Raised sheepdogs as a hobby. When you drove by his house late at night the blue light from the TV was always on.
As we toured city hall, Mayor Presley told us the story of how German and Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania began to settle in this part of North Carolina as early as 1753. They grew crops in the fertile soil with fresh water from the Bluebird River. There was a log cabin that housed worship on Sunday and would one day become the site of the First Baptist Church of Harmony. In 1850 a brick factory arrived founded by JC Pearl that still operates to this day.
At the end of the tour we sat in a semicircle around Mayor Presley in his office with the giant town seal above him. A few of his dogs lay at his feet.
Maybe you could tell the students about our economy, Mrs. Maple said.
Of course, he said. Harmony is one of the largest producers of tobacco in the foothills.
We remember the next part clearly. Mayor Presley went into his drawer and pulled out a leaf of dried Carolina tobacco and passed it around and we smelled it and passed it on. It was light brown and fragile. When it came to Iggy he took out a Zippo lighter and lit it on fire. Mrs. Maple blew it out. She grabbed him by the arm and they went into the hall. Mr. Presley looked at the half-burned leaf and opened a window.
Now boys and girls, he said. I want you to go around the room and promise me that you will never smoke.
We all promised except for Amanda Armstrong. She started crying.
I won’t, she said. I won’t promise.
Smoking’s so bad for you, Mr. Presley said.
My daddy’s a farmer, she said. If everybody quits we’ll go broke.
We looked to Mr. Presley to see what he had to say about that. He smiled.
There are plenty of smokers in China, he said.
Won’t the Chinese get cancer, too, Amanda asked.
Mr. Presley laughed.
I’m only worried about the boys and girls here in Harmony, he said. I’m not the mayor of China.
Just then Mrs. Maple came back in with Iggy.
I’m sorry I burned up your leaf, he said.
That’s OK, Mr. Presley said. I forgive you as long as you promise you’ll never start smoking.
Iggy looked at the ground and nodded.
I plan on quitting soon, he said.
Ms. Rivers still works here at the Starlight as she did back then when we’d smoke Camel Lights by the pack after a high school football game. Some of us had crushes on her, she was only a few years our senior. But now she’s old like us. Still here. Stuck in this town. As she refills our coffee, talk returns to Iggy as it so often does on afternoons like these. Someone retells the story of the incident when we were kids back in the nineties. The summer before our freshman year. Iggy was always part of our group until then. We’d all gotten onto sports teams or started bands and Iggy was still playing chess by himself and taking piano lessons. One of us, we don’t remember who, came up with the nickname “Cheese Grits.” We’d decided that Iggy was cheesy and the name seemed to fit. When we’d call his house his mom always said he wasn’t around. We figured he was up in his room hiding. Late that summer we got into someone’s dad’s whiskey collection and at midnight went out in the neighborhood to pull pranks. We rolled the Spencers’ house and dumped all the outdoor furniture into Dr. Johnson’s pool. We raided the Mumfords’ garden and took huge bell peppers to Iggy’s house. We left them on his front porch with a note. Looking back we don’t remember why we thought it would be funny to do this, except that we were teenagers and drunk. The note said we’d kidnapped Iggy and if they didn’t give us one thousand dollars they’d never see him again. Throughout the next afternoon, still hungover, each of us got a knock on the door from Iggy’s parents. Iggy’s mom wore no makeup as if she’d been crying all morning and his father w
as dressed to work in the yard. They told us that all summer Iggy had been saving up money from mowing lawns. He’d taken his cash downtown to buy a video game but on the way there he was assaulted. His money was stolen and he was left for dead in an alley. He was in the hospital for a week and had been at home recovering for months. What we didn’t know, couldn’t have known, was that morning when his parents found the note, Iggy had gone out for the first time since he was beaten up. They thought the attackers had kidnapped him. Finally, to their relief, he walked through the door hours later. Iggy told them he thought he knew who’d done it. As his parents sat with us in our kitchens and living rooms, we admitted it was us. Told them it was supposed to be a joke. That we had no idea about the attack. Our parents made us write letters to Iggy telling him we were sorry, but who knows if he read them or not. After that we tried to call him a few times to hang out, put the whole thing behind us, but he never talked to us again. We’d mainly put him out of our minds after that. He became a character in stories from our youth even though we sometimes still saw him around school. Heard rumors about him and his friends Paul and Cleo. We lived separate from him and believed, naively, that he too was having a normal high school experience full of keg parties and weekends at the lake. Perhaps he was, but we didn’t really think of him again until after graduation and that morning at the First Baptist Church.
The fire was already out when the news trucks arrived. The governor came shortly after. Then senators and congresspeople and finally the president, too. They made speeches. Made promises. Raised money to rebuild. Then the president left and the governor left and the congresspeople left and the news people packed up for some new tragedy. For days an eerie silence filled the town. No one knew exactly what to do. Some of us from Iggy’s graduating class gathered to discuss things in a corner booth at the Starlight Diner. That was eighteen years ago.
Some have called him a monster, a terrorist, a psychopath, but he was also just a kid. We’ve found it impossible to reconcile those facts. In the intervening years we’ve questioned why Iggy had such disregard for life. Each of us lost something that day and the grief still haunts us. But what was most damaging was our ignorance, our inability to conceive of such brutality. A privileged existence that protected us from seeing the true nature of things. We’ve tried to piece back together time itself, to find some way to undo it.
Tragedy tends to follow similar trajectories. A pattern we’re now all too familiar with. The horror of the incident. Brief hours of confusion and grief, followed by days of anger. Weeks of outrage. Some blame violence in movies or video games. Some blame mental illness. Thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers. Raise some money. Change is now. Marches and petitions and speeches. Then nothing. Then more nothing.
We could talk all night, but Ms. Rivers is kicking us out.
You know the bars are open late, she says.
We don’t like the bars, we say. Full of young folks.
We tip her well and as we leave there is one last memory from that eighth-grade trip. Later that day we toured the county jail with the sheriff. Mrs. Maple joked that he would come arrest all us kids if we talked in class.
Which one of these kids is your worst, the sheriff asked.
Mrs. Maple looked us over and smiled. She pointed at Amanda Armstrong. She was wearing pigtails with bows.
I can’t arrest such a pretty girl, he said. How ’bout this little troublemaker?
He grabbed Iggy and put him against the wall and handcuffed him. We howled with laughter. Iggy was kind of smiling too at first. It was all in good fun. Then the sheriff put him in a cell and locked it. We thought that was even funnier and we all laughed harder. The sheriff escorted us out of the room and left Iggy in there for a minute alone. The look on his face when we returned. We’ll never forget it.
2
ANOTHER NIGHT AT the Starlight Diner and Ms. Rivers takes our orders. The horizon is a black sliver against the sun. All our old mysteries unite. Our coffees get cold. We call our wives and tell them not to wait up. We present our latest research to the group. Harmony had a much darker history than the one we were told. On that eighth-grade trip Mayor Presley left out the Molasses Massacre. We found that there were many other stories the town fathers wished to remain forgotten.
In 1843, the Jones brothers (half-black, half-Cherokee) accidently spilled a barrel of molasses on a prominent lawyer, Don Sherill. Although Sherill forgave the brothers at the time, he recounted the incident later at a barbershop in town. A drunken mob formed among the patrons and they tried to take the Jones brothers from their home. They were injured in the melee but survived. They threatened to take Sherill and others to court. It was forbidden for a person of color to take a white man to court at the time, but even the thought of it enraged the citizenry. They formed a mob and hanged the two brothers on the oak tree in the very spot where our picture was taken outside city hall. Mayor Presley didn’t tell us that once freed from slavery, black residents of Harmony formed a neighborhood on the south side called Yellow Hill. In 1867, a blacksmith named M. Horice Warner was found to be picnicking on the hillside with a six-year-old girl and was accused of sexually assaulting her. He was taken from his home by a mob of hundreds and dragged by horses through the streets of Yellow Hill. Later people claimed the man was a friend of the girl’s father and the interaction was innocent.
The night goes on. Ms. Rivers lets us stay longer while she cleans up. Someone at the table brings up Iggy’s friend Johnny Nightshade. How his mother, Trudy, was fired from teaching in the public schools for praying in the classroom.
There’s a new court order that forbids it, the new principal, Doug Shepard said.
So what, Trudy said.
It’s from the Supreme Court, he said.
Principal Shepard was a tiny bow-tied man and liked to tell anyone who would listen how he graduated from Duke University with honors.
The Supreme Court is not the supreme being, Trudy said.
The story goes she knelt in his office and prayed out loud that the sinners in the Harmony public schools would not suffer long in the fires of hell—and then walked out. That Sunday, Pastor Green told the story in his sermon at First Baptist. Mrs. Gregory, the jeweler’s wife, put up funds to build a Christian academy downtown that fall. Trudy was their first hire.
For those who don’t want their children to be raised in a godless Marxist indoctrination factory, Trudy said.
Despite her cantankerous nature, reports from her classes at Harmony Christian Academy were generally positive. She could be a kind, sensitive teacher and in certain moods had enormous patience for her students. In class she was known for reciting long poems and monologues. She was so good at it that on the first day of school when she’d launch into Shakespeare students would turn around to see if she was reading it off the back wall. She taught many of our parents the classics. Some of our older siblings still remember her classes in the later years when she’d stopped making sense. She would mix her own biography with that of the characters in famous novels. It was like time had worked on her in a way we could never understand. As if the books she read were a series of misremembered tales and she was their heroine.
She was virulently antigay, not unheard of in the South in those days, but Trudy was over-the-top even then. Some of us suspected perhaps her husband was having an affair with Mayor Presley. They sang in the church choir and took cruises together. In her later teaching years, when progressive thinking was a bit less rare in Harmony, Trudy’s students would ask her about Truman Capote or Walt Whitman or Oscar Wilde. She would immediately launch into “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
After her husband died and she retired, she would ride to town on his motorcycle, a little Jack Russell in the sidecar. There was an unconfirmed rumor she’d been a stunt pilot’s girl in Arkansas as a teenager. Some kind of barnstorming show where she was strapped ha
lf-naked standing on top of the wing as the plane did loops and dives. Allegedly there were pictures.
Above all, through the years, she loved her son. Johnny was her only boy and our parents told us he was exactly the same when they were growing up together. Calling himself Johnny Nightshade even then. Same cabbie hat and soul patch. Carried his saxophone everywhere. They said during middle school he tried not to talk for a full week. Only used his sax to speak. It was funny at first, they said, but after a while it got super annoying. Honking all day like a goose through the halls.
As a mother of a child prodigy, Trudy would often say unironically.
When Johnny failed to gain admission to any of the famous music conservatories, she blamed the admissions people.
They held his love of Jesus against him, she told Ms. Rivers at the Starlight Diner one night. It’s better if Johnny stays right here with me.
And then there was the business of Iggy and Johnny playing music together. Of course there were whispers. A man as old as Johnny palling around with someone as young as Iggy. Trudy testified at Iggy’s trial about their relationship:
Johnny had all sorts of friends throughout the years. He was quite popular socially. And this boy Iggy, he was, well, kindly, lost. My Johnny gave the boy something to live for and the gift of music. Iggy was quiet, I remember that. I could barely hear him. Almost whispered when he talked. Johnny brought him home one night and I said this one needs to project his voice. The theater would be good for him.
When Iggy went away to the wilderness school, Trudy would write him and send care packages. She threw a dinner in his honor at the Starlight Diner when he came back to Harmony. In the months leading up to the incident, Trudy saw Iggy almost weekly at church. Johnny was starting a new modern music ministry at the time and they would stay late during rehearsals.
At trial Trudy was asked point blank if Johnny was homosexual. She said she would not dignify the question with a response.
I’m devoted to the First Baptist Church, she said. Christian women don’t speak of such things.
The Ancient Hours Page 1