All Things Bright and Strange

by James Markert

  His stomach growled, and his thoughts went elsewhere.

  He still had leftover pork in the icebox.

  He swung his feet from the bed and left his room, closing the door on his snakes as they tried to follow. If there was one thing he liked more than the formation of the Bellhaven Church of God, it was pork. He sat at his kitchen table and ate what was left of the last roasting, knowing he still had three full pigs smoked and salt-cured in the basement. He’d promised his flock a pig roast, and he was determined to give them a feast of all feasts. He hoped the smell would lure the lost town folk so he could evangelize them. Help them get born again and heal their pain. Watching the new ones speak in tongues excited him almost as much as a good pork feast. He’d even take his chances with those Latter-day Saints or that new group of Bible kids going door to door and witnessing to people. He was so good at what he did, he knew he could make them see the light. The one true light.

  His mouth watered at the thought of the skin charring on the spit, the grease-and-bubble dripping to the grass below. He’d already decided he’d have the pig roast on his new lot. It was only grass now, with a sign that read The Future Home of Bellhaven Church of God. But soon its steeple would soar taller than the synagogue and mosque on either side of it.

  He’d met both of those men, the rabbi and that black Moslem leader without a face. That mask was enough to scare anyone on the right path, if not for his preaching being on the completely wrong path. Mohammadism had no place here in Bellhaven or even in the States, for that matter. All that praying like they did to some God named Allah, bowing and babbling about that Moslem bible of theirs. What did they call it—the Koran? It was enough to make his blood boil.

  And Judaism, with all that weird talking and those strange rituals. The fact that they believed Jesus was just some Jew and nothing more. It was blatant blasphemy. Jesus was Christ, plain and simple, and one day he’d come knocking on their door again. Except not on any Jewish or Moslem door, that was for sure. But what needled Bannerman even more than all of that was the fact that neither one of them ate pork. And here he was planning a grand pig feast right smack dab in the middle of both of them.

  He laughed so hard his side ached when the idea hit him.

  Wasn’t it custom to give new neighbors a welcome gift? Or maybe it was the other way around and they were supposed to gift him? Either way, he knew what needed to be done. All those rules about cloven hooves and kosher meat and dirty animals chewing their cud or not, wallowing in mud and their own feces or not—it all was nonsense to him.

  Pork tasted good, and he thought it silly not to eat it.

  One pig was enough for his roast; he’d hold back the biggest one. The other two pigs in his basement, for an idea as good as this, could be given away—presents for his new neighbors. He’d give them a couple of knives and forks too.

  The pigs were heavy, so he’d have to make two trips, but that was okay. It was drizzling outside, and the wetness just might feel good on his face.

  It was the perfect plan.

  But first he needed to feed his snakes and put some rain gear on.

  Gabriel sat at the kitchen table, her chair situated so she could watch Ellsworth paint in the other room. It wasn’t so much that she liked to watch him paint—his painting was a new thing she wasn’t so sure about. It was more that she’d always liked to watch Ellsworth do anything. It wasn’t really a matter of talent, though Ellsworth certainly had some. She’d never seen anyone throw a baseball like he could. But it was the other things about him that made him special in her eyes, things not grounded in ability but instead heightened by the unexplained.

  Raphael had stopped playing the piano ten minutes ago and was snoring on the couch. She could hear brush strokes against canvas and wondered what Ellsworth was painting this time. Probably another horrific image from the war, although she liked to imagine he was painting her in a pretty dress.

  She liked to imagine she was pretty in the first place.

  In the front pocket of her overalls was a bundle of old newspaper clippings Ellsworth had thrown in the trash after his mother died. His mother had saved them since Ellsworth was a little boy, back when he was called Michael, and Ellsworth had thrown them away. But Gabriel had rescued them from the trash without him knowing and had kept them now for years.

  She patted them in her pocket, imagining them warm against her chest. She didn’t need to take them out. She’d long ago memorized them, and she didn’t want to risk him suddenly coming in for a nip of Old Sam and seeing them spread out on the table like she sometimes did in the solitude of her own home, trying to make sense of it all. Trying to make sense of the other things.

  The headlines ran through her head. “Bellhaven boy survives polio.” “Bellhaven boy miraculously defeats cancer.” “Bellhaven man strikes out Babe Ruth.” “Bellhaven boy survives . . .”

  Gabriel stiffened in her chair, thinking Ellsworth was on his way in, but he’d only cleared his throat. Bristles still brushed canvas in the other room. Not that it would have mattered; the newspaper clippings were still in her pocket. The only sin had been committed in her mind.

  She imagined being married to Ellsworth with an entire brood of kids. She’d been picturing it since she was seven, back when all of them would dare each other to go into the woods and Michael would be the only one to do it. In her head he was still Michael. Michael with the sword she’d carved from a tree branch, the sword he’d called Blue Fire. He’d wield it and pretend to be a knight.

  He’d held Blue Fire on the day they dared each other to go into the old slave houses.

  They’d all been around the age of nine—her, Michael, Calvin, Alfred, and Omar. Linda May and Anna Belle had watched from atop the hill. Their parents had told them to steer clear of the old slave houses, and they’d obeyed. Many in town thought those houses should’ve been leveled decades ago, but they’d left them up to remember the injustice of slavery, a reminder that nothing of the like could ever happen again.

  Michael had led the way that day with Blue Fire. The carved stick was no more than three feet long, more of a dagger than a sword, but it made Gabriel proud the way Michael cherished it.

  The plan was an imaginary one, of course; the slaves were decades gone. But the mission was to rescue every last slave from the evil Bellhaven masters.

  As they approached the first wooden slave house with its lone window and crooked concrete stoop covered in weeds, the others grew fidgety and began mumbling that maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all. That they weren’t supposed to be playing around the slave houses anyway.

  Calvin peeled off first, saying he was hungry for lunch, and Omar followed, dropping the stick he’d been pretending was a pistol. Alfred lasted another ten steps before claiming he was hungry, too, and thought he’d heard his mother calling him anyway. He ran up the hill and escorted Anna Belle and Linda May back home.

  Only Gabriel and Michael remained, and she wanted to turn around as well because the air felt queer. She thought she heard whispers coming from those shadowy, open-air houses. Folks said they always stayed cold and dark in there, no matter what the weather outside. But she stayed put with Michael. Didn’t want him to think her chicken.

  Michael held up a hand, and she halted with relief. He whispered a strategy: he’d go in first, alone, and if things were clear he’d call for her. But be ready to attack. I’ll need you by my side.

  Even now those words brought a smile.

  After a minute she called his name, but he didn’t answer. After two minutes she inched closer to the stoop and called his name again. Nothing. Not even footsteps or shuffling or the sound of his breathing.

  She gulped back her fear, climbed the stoop, and peered into the shadows to find . . . nothing.

  Michael was gone, vanished from that slave house altogether. The window was too high for him to have climbed through. And there was no other door.

  She fell back off the stoop and rolled in the grass, nearly
hyperventilating as she stared down the row of ten slave houses, one just as old and abandoned as the next.

  She heard his voice call her. “Gabriel?” It was distant, but somehow close enough to resonate.

  She waited, her heart pounding her ribcage. Where’d he go? “Michael!”

  And then Michael emerged, not from the first slave house, but from the third one down the row. His eyes were glazed. She ran to him, hugged him, asked if he was all right.

  He asked, “Where am I?”

  “In Bellhaven,” she answered.

  “They took my sword. I fought them back, but they took my sword.”

  With tears in her eyes she promised to carve him another. She took his arm and walked him home with full intentions of prying after dinner. She’d ask him exactly what had happened in that slave house. But she didn’t ask, and the next day he never mentioned it. He set out instead to scrounge up everybody for a game of baseball, like yesterday never happened. Like he hadn’t vanished and ended up two houses down from where he entered.

  It was the woods’ doing, she decided. She knew the Bellhaven woods could do strange things like that.

  But she also knew that Michael was Michael.

  As the days passed she promised herself that she’d ask him, but she never did, and he never offered. He never even brought it up. She wondered if there wasn’t a part of him that enjoyed her uncertainty about that day. Maybe that was his way of flirting with her.

  After time, she’d realized she enjoyed the mystery of it all more than the knowing.

  Gabriel sucked in a deep breath and exhaled until her cheeks puffed out. She knocked her knuckles against the kitchen table, realizing exactly what she had to do, what she should have been forging in her smithy long before now.

  His brushstrokes whisked canvas in the other room. Concrete proof that the Michael she knew was still alive after all of it.

  Michael . . .

  She’d get to work on it first thing tomorrow.

  At one time in his life, back when his wife and kids were alive, Lou Eddington had believed in God. But he wasn’t so sure anymore, and he wondered if that now made him an agnostic. Or was it an atheist?

  One thing he knew for sure was that he no longer needed sleep. What had it been now? Days? Weeks? And he didn’t feel the least bit tired. He looked a little different in the mirror—with the heavy bags under his eyes, the red splotches across his flesh, and the fact that his skin felt tighter than an overstuffed pillow and all-around bloated, especially around the neckline of his collared shirts. But then again that all could have been because the lighting was poor in the bathroom.

  Otherwise he felt swell, what Anna Belle Roper downstairs sometimes called peachy.

  Lou sat alone in his bedroom with the door locked. He’d invited several of the town folk over to dance with him in recent days, and now they’d begun to stay, to sleep over right there in his living room. He’d danced with them all, but so far none of them could hold a candle to Deborah, deceased now for what—going on three years? She’d been such a good dancer, so fluid you would think her feet never hit the floor. It was folly for him to think he could find another, and right now he just wanted to be left alone. They could sleep on his couches downstairs; he wouldn’t stop them. But tonight he wouldn’t bless them with his presence either. He didn’t like the way they’d started to fawn over him every time he entered the room, like he was some kind of something when he knew deep down, behind all this newly found energy and flare, that he was some kind of nothing.

  It was the house’s doing. Or, to be more precise, the woods’. Because whatever had come into the attic that day had come from the live oak trees. Or maybe from those old slave huts that needed to be leveled.

  Anyway, he was too busy playing chess to go downstairs with what Anna Belle Roper had begun calling his “flock.” So in his room he remained, orchestrating both sides of the chessboard and finding more pleasure with every move.

  He’d fallen in love with this house on the hill, only doubting the purchase of it once, when he’d ventured up into the attic on that first visit and felt whatever he’d felt and seen whatever it was he’d seen—or thought he’d seen. He only knew that ever since that visit to the attic, the house had called to him, seeped into him like water into dry-parched ground, and he had the feeling now that he couldn’t leave even if he wanted to. And he’d never gotten so much work done so fast. In the past it would take him months to complete a chess set, but now he was down to a week, two at the most. Take sleep out of the equation, and there was no limit to what he could get done.

  He only wished Deborah and the kids were around to see his newest pieces of work. They’d always been so fond of his craft—even his two little boys, who’d only just begun to learn how to play when they fell sick, all three of them at the same time. It haunted him still, seeing them overcome with weakness and nausea. And the pain—that had been worst of all. Lou couldn’t stand to see them in pain, and that was how he’d rationalized what he did in the end.

  What Deborah had begged him to do.

  He’d moved to Bellhaven seeking forgiveness, and that’s exactly what he’d gotten inside that chapel, that little sliver of bliss that had no rhyme or reason for being there. That memory lane where voices weren’t so dead anymore.

  They’d forgiven him. America Ma had told him so, and then she’d allowed him to speak with them. It was like she was some kind of gatekeeper, although she sounded more like some long-ago slave.

  Lou swallowed the lump in his throat and moved another newly carved piece on the board. Somewhere, buried deep, a tiny voice wanted out. It kept asking if what he’d done was the right thing or not. Whether coming to Bellhaven had been right or not.

  “How could it not?” he answered it aloud. “Look at me now.” He moved another piece, solemnly this time. My new fancy car, my freshly painted house on the hill. More people coming to dance with me daily.

  What did it all mean?

  He would have felt empty had his body not been so filled to near-bursting by whatever had entered him in that attic months ago, those seconds when he felt all tingly and dizzy.

  Across the room, flies—a good dozen of them—buzzed against the glass. He’d thought about shooting them with his rifle downstairs, but that might alter the delicate balance of things. Or imbalance of things.

  He moved another chess piece, a pawn, to the middle of the board. “Brother Bannerman likes his pork. He likes to eat with a knife and a fork.”

  He moved another piece, this one a rook. “Moses Yarney, old as sand, once had thoughts of killing a man.”

  Lou grinned, licked salt from his lips from where unknowing tears had settled in his mustache, and then touched another chess piece, this one a king.

  “Ellsworth Newberry got stabbed in the chest. Some still think him better than the rest.”

  CHAPTER 17

  In the morning sunlight, Raphael viewed the painting Ellsworth had done last night. The canvas depicted bloody body parts strewn across charred trees, coiled barbed wire festooned with dead soldiers, crows circling—or so Ellsworth said.

  Raphael looked suspicious. “If that’s what it really is, it’s disgusting.”

  “So is war,” said Ellsworth, full of energy and ready to face the day. “It ain’t neat.” He looked over at Gabriel, standing next to the front door. He was still a prisoner in his own house. And what was that gleam in her eyes?

  “Am I free to go yet?”

  “It’s your house. You can come and go as you please.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Where is it you want to go?”

  “Check on Anna Belle, then maybe Alfred and Omar. They haven’t been around for a few days.”

  Gabriel opened the door for him. “Go on.”

  “And what if I run for the woods?”

  “You won’t. Because you know now that it’s fool’s gold.”

  Ellsworth stepped out onto the porch, no longer craving t
he bliss the chapel offered, at least not at the moment, and somehow Gabriel knew that. She’d told him earlier in the morning that she liked the look in his eyes. The sturdy prewar look.

  Raphael followed Ellsworth across the street. “We should play catch today, Mr. Newberry.”

  Ellsworth grunted away that notion, then took in his surroundings. It felt good to be outside again. Every flower in Bellhaven stood perky from last night’s rainfall—so many bright, vibrant colors. The rain had knocked petals off like oil-paint droppings in the grass. Pink crape myrtles, blue hyacinths, and violet rhododendrons reflected majestically across a large puddle.

  “Danger can disguise itself in the most beautiful of things,” Gabriel had said of those voices in the chapel.

  Static crackled to his right. High in a sprawling live oak, Alfred sat on a thick limb with his radio, fooling with the knobs and wires.

  Raphael said, “What’s Mr. Dennison doing up there?”

  Ellsworth shook his head. “Alfred, what are you doing up there?”

  “Radio comes in clear as a bell up here, Ellsworth.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Just in the process of locating a station.”

  A stepladder leaned against the tree trunk. “You get up there all on your own?”

  “No. Omar helped.”

  “And he just left you?”

  Alfred nodded toward the street. “Had something urgent he needed to tend to.”

  “Well don’t try getting down on your own. We’re gonna run in and check on Anna Belle and then be back out.”

  Ellsworth knocked on Anna Belle’s door and got no answer. It was unlocked, so he let himself inside, calling her name as he passed through every room, his apology for taping her mouth shut on the tip of his tongue for the instant he saw her. Of course, she probably owed him one, too, for cutting up the only picture he had of Eliza.

  He recalled that sudden kiss Anna Belle had planted on his lips, reminiscent of the one she’d put on him in the ocean when they were kids, except this one had jostled him. He missed her voice, her constant blabbering. It shook him to realize he’d been so close to pasting her right there on the kitchen floor. It was the chapel’s doing. And now it was still doing it to her, turning the screws against the grooves.