All Things Bright and Strange

by James Markert

  Gradually Ellsworth and his three angels pushed the beast back, all of them swinging their fire at once. The beast broke apart, hissing, reforming, beaks and talons and broken red feathers scattering like dust, then gathering again. But they were making headway. They were backing the beast down. They were almost to the burning chapel.

  Voices sounded from the open door. Raphael’s parents. Uriel’s mother. Old Man Tanner. Gabriel’s father. Ellsworth’s parents. Eliza. All inviting them to come in and kneel upon the healing floor one last time.

  “They’re not real,” Ellsworth screamed, swinging at the beast. “Not real. Don’t listen!”

  The beast broke apart, arms and legs and head, but then fluttered back together, chirping and clacking against the chapel’s exterior. The chapel’s stained-glass windows shattered, and fire shot through. The roof buckled. Ellsworth swung with everything he had, blinded by flapping red wings.

  “Hold,” he screamed to the others as he took another step toward the chapel. “Stay back. I’m going in alone!”

  He swung another violent cut with his sword. Bird wings scattered, singed, as he staggered across the threshold.

  Beams burned all around him. Statues stood charred. Tiles from the mosaic floor popped and blackened. The figures in the bas-relief turned gray, then black, then orange as the walls were engulfed.

  Push’m back, Michael.

  Ellsworth gave one last plunge into the cardinal birds that remained, and then the roof caved in. Heat charged. Suffocating smoke and flames licking orange and red consumed him.

  He heard Eliza’s voice. Michael . . .

  Blinding light. He walked toward it willingly.

  The buzzing drone was over.

  The woods basked in silence. The cardinals had returned to the sky.

  Ellsworth blinked heavy eyelids. Butterflies flashed across his vision. They’d pulled him from the chapel, which was a smoldering heap now, a tarred black mound of wood and stone spiraling dark smoke into an azure sky. The people, his people, crowded around, watching him as he lay on the deadfall. He couldn’t move. Their voices were whispers.

  He can’t die. He won’t die. You watch and see. He fought back the beast. He saved us from the woods. He defeated the dragon.

  “Michael?” Gabriel hovered above him, her face angelic in the coppery white glow.

  Ellsworth smiled. “Gabriel.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Michael, stay with us now.”

  Raphael stood next to her, eyes darting across Ellsworth’s burned body as if unsure how to proceed.

  “Don’t,” Ellsworth said to the boy. “Don’t try. Not this time.”

  Raphael knelt and put his hands on Ellsworth’s arm anyway. “But Mr. Newberry . . .”

  “Keep throwing that baseball,” he said to the boy. “Promise me.”

  Raphael nodded.

  Ellsworth located Gabriel again. They locked eyes, and he grinned. “There’s a door in the floor, Gabriel.”

  “Michael . . . what?”

  His heart plodded, thumped intermittently now as Anna Belle’s face came into view. Her beautiful face. He felt pressure against his hand. Felt her palm there, her interlocked fingers, and somehow he could hear her heartbeat.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare die on me now, Michael Ellsworth Newberry.”

  He didn’t mean to laugh. But it was odd how sometimes things came full circle. “Oh, Anna Belle. Reckon it’s as good a day to die as any.”

  AFTER

  Bellhaven wept, but not for long.

  As the new sheriff, Gabriel didn’t let them. Ellsworth wouldn’t have approved. He’d died to save the town, and he’d done so willingly, knowingly. So they put his body in a casket Omar built and buried him in the Bellhaven cemetery next to Eliza and Erik.

  Gabriel announced Anna Belle Roper as her new deputy, and together the women breathed fresh air into a town reeling from another tragedy. Star badges pinned to their uniforms, they were the first to test the woods after the chapel burned. Blooms still painted the landscape like magic, but the air was different—a good different, just air plain and simple. They passed the yellow trees with no event and even took several long breaks to test what standing still would feel like. Again, nothing. At the clearing, the dying trees had stopped their march outward. Birds sang and twittered, but most of the cardinals had gone. The chapel was a mound of sooty black; not as high as Gabriel would have thought. But then, Anna Belle reasoned, the debris could have sunk deeper to fill the holes underneath.

  “Probably plugged it up good too.”

  They sat on a log inside the clearing, sharing a canteen of water and listening to creek water spill over rocks. The sun beat down with hints of summer. A deer scampered in the distance, and a yellow warbler sang from a nearby bough. Just a pleasant spring day. They sat for ten minutes before moving on. Gabriel wondering if Anna Belle had been waiting for the same thing she’d been waiting for—Ellsworth’s voice to come forth from that tarry heap of burned chapel. But that was jingle-brained thinking that needed to be unthought.

  Before leaving the clearing, Gabriel approached the heap and spotted a blue tile somehow spared from the mosaic floor. She pocketed it, and the women returned back to town.

  When it came time for the yellow trees to be splashed with fresh paint—an annual chore—Gabriel ordered them all cut down instead. She told them there was no need to fear the woods any more. So they felled all the yellow trees in two weeks and chopped them into firewood.

  By the end of summer all the earthquake-damaged houses had been repaired. Lou Eddington had the top of the hill cleared, and the framing of his new house began soon afterward. He was proud of his new design, which included only one story and ramps for his wheelchair. He gave Anna Belle his bright red Silver Ghost and made her promise not to dent the fenders. He also asked if she would ever consider courting a man who’d never walk again, and she said, “I reckon anything is possible.”

  Omar took charge of building the new town hall. They’d leveled the old one, and the new one was finished before the fall leaves turned. The first party held there was a big one. They named the town hall after Ellsworth—Newberry Hall—and hung his sword horizontally above the front entrance. It became custom to touch the blade on the way out.

  Raphael did what Ellsworth had asked of him and kept pitching. His fastball picked up speed every month, according to Omar, who’d assumed the role of playing catch with him. It was a Sunday thing they’d do, and Anna Belle would watch them throw and bring sweet tea when they were parched. She officially adopted Raphael a week before Christmas.

  The next year the flowers bloomed in their typical seasonal patterns, and Ned Gleeson was back to making his birdhouses again.

  Gabriel awoke on the one-year anniversary of Ellsworth’s death with an idea to finally tear down the slave houses behind the hill. But first she and Anna Belle and Raphael placed flowers at Ellsworth’s grave, and everyone in town paid their respects. They held a nondenominational service in the town hall and then partied most of the day away.

  That evening as the sun went down, Gabriel told Anna Belle she was going to the slave houses and asked if she wanted to come along. It was time for them to be leveled once and for all, but first she figured she’d case them out.

  She had gone in there a handful of times over the years to see if she’d see anything like what had happened when she and Ellsworth were nine. But it had been several years since she last ducked inside that cold threshold, and she hoped this time would be different. Some questions needed answers, and this one had all but burned a hole in her gut.

  Sheriff and deputy approached the first slave house together, with Raphael a few yards behind them holding a lantern.

  Anna Belle said, “Remember the time we were all set to go in and kill all the masters? Ellsworth had that stick you’d carved and pretended it was a sword.”

  “And everyone turned tail—”

  “Except you and Ellsworth.
”

  “I’ve never told anyone this, but he went in. By himself.” Gabriel eyed the doorless opening. “Wait here.”

  “Gabriel? What happened? Did something happen when he went in?”

  Something happened all right. She took the lamp from Raphael. Then she stepped up the concrete stoop, felt the rotted wood around the doorframe, and ducked inside. Cobwebs festooned the ceiling, blackened by years of candle smoke. A bird’s nest took up half the tiny broken window. Leaves, dirt, and bird droppings covered the floor. She stood, hands on hips, surveying the dank interior. Wind entered behind her and nudged a thicket of wet leaves, exposing an uneven floorboard. She squatted down, brushed away dust and leafy filth. The boards were warped and splintered, rotted in parts, but something else caught her eye. The boards in the middle of the floor looked different than those around the edge—not only their color but the way they cut into the other boards. There was a three-foot-by-three-foot square where the gap in between the boards was wider.

  Gabriel took the pocketknife from her trousers, stuck the blade between the boards, and pulled. The old wood creaked, and one board cracked, but then the square of boards came up in one piece.

  A door in the floor.

  Gabriel fell back on her rump and laughed until her voice echoed.

  Anna Belle appeared in the doorway with Raphael. “What is it? Can we come in?”

  “Watch your step.” Gabriel pointed to the opening at her feet and smirked. “There’s a door in the floor. Ellsworth’s last words to me. I assumed he was talking about the chapel.”

  Anna Belle stepped closer and peered into the dark void. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll explain in a minute. Hand me the lantern.”

  Raphael picked it up and handed it over.

  Gabriel stuck her head down into the hole, and in the lantern glow she saw a ladder and a muddy floor—and dark openings leading both north and south. “Well, I’ll be . . .”

  Anna Belle knelt beside her. “What is it?”

  Blue Fire, the original sword she’d carved for Ellsworth from a tree branch, rested in a pocket of mud and slanted grip-up against the cold wall.

  “Blue Fire,” whispered Anna Belle.

  “He left it down there.” Gabriel shook her head knowingly. “The slaves built a tunnel connecting their houses, Anna Belle. That’s how he ended up in the third one.”

  “Who?”

  “Michael. Ellsworth. I thought he’d vanished. He played it off like he did.”

  “Gabriel, what are you talking about?”

  Gabriel shone the lantern in the opposite direction, and the tunnel, supported by a network of brick and stone, extended at least twenty yards under the hillside. “Toward the river. They were preparing to escape one day.” She came back up for air, feeling lightheaded, and sat back on her heels to catch her breath. Then she told Anna Belle and Raphael the story of Michael disappearing from the first slave house that day and emerging in a daze from slave house three.

  “So he was only play-acting?” asked Anna Belle.

  “Suppose so. I’d always assumed it was another thing unexplained from the woods. Another thing unexplained about him.”

  Raphael clapped and whistled, staring down into the door in the floor. “He got you good, Miss Fanderbink.”

  “Don’t call me that anymore. Please. What a stupid name. I always wanted to change it.”

  “Name is just a name, Gabriel,” said Anna Belle, reminiscing.

  “So what should I call you?” asked Raphael.

  “Gabriel will do. Just Gabriel. Reckon I don’t need a middle or last.”

  They laughed about it—about her name, about the door in the floor—and the laughter turned to tears. Felt good to let those clean tears drip down their cheeks and remember.

  Gabriel was about to stand when a cardinal bird showed up in the window. The arrival brought with it a palpable silence, aside from the fluttering of wings.

  The three of them watched the bird in awe, how it eased into the nest and stared at them, head darting side to side and up and down as if it had just jerked them a nod.

  Gabriel nodded back.

  And then the cardinal flew away.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1.Ellsworth Newberry was never able to have a son of his own. Describe different ways that Raphael helps fill the void, and compare his relationship with Ellsworth to Ellsworth’s relationship with his own father.

  2.The novel ends with the same basic line with which it begins: It was as good a day to die as any. Although the words are the same, discuss the difference in meaning as it pertains to Ellsworth’s mind-set at the beginning and end of the story. How does Ellsworth change throughout?

  3.How do hope and redemption play a role in the novel, specifically regarding Ellsworth and his past?

  4.Eliza, despite not being alive for the entirety of the novel, is a driving force for the narrative. Discuss her relationships and how they change the story.

  5.Throughout the novel, the theme of good versus evil permeates the narrative. With Lou Eddington’s chess sets as one example, discuss others that could also fit the bill.

  6.For 1920, and even today, fictional Bellhaven is a very tolerant town. Explain how tolerance and intolerance are portrayed as catalysts throughout the novel.

  7.Discuss how the topics of religion and gun violence in the story are similar or different than in today’s environment.

  8.After tragedy and the repercussions of the Great War, Bellhaven is a town in need of healing. From the old parties in the town hall to the daily gathering of war vets inside Ellsworth’s living room, how do food, music, and togetherness play parts in this healing process?

  9.Throughout the novel, even though the town hall is dilapidated, how is it more than just a building? What does the town hall really stand for?

  10.Birds—cardinals, in particular—play a large role throughout the story. Discuss various ways the cardinal birds affect the narrative.

  11.How is the chapel, and the discovery of it, a catalyst for everything that happens in the novel, in both good ways and bad?

  12.The concepts of archangels and guardian angels are major themes in All Things Bright and Strange. Discuss any times when you may have felt someone was looking out for you in a similar way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All Things Bright and Strange has a great deal to do with birds. I thought I’d kill two with one stone here and combine a few author notes with my thank-yous! Like my previous novel, The Angels’ Share, this one is set back in history yet takes place in a fictional town. While being as historically accurate as I can to the time period, this gives me more freedom to create a bit of my own world and allow some of that supernatural in. In other words, this is one of those books that may not fit into a particular genre. Is it historical fiction? In a sense. Southern fiction? Sure. Commercial fiction? You bet’cha. Southern gothic? That sounds cool too! But basically, it’s just a story I wanted to tell, and hopefully, if you made it this far, you liked it.

  While the earthquake that takes place during the story is fictional, the great quake that leveled Charleston in 1886 was, unfortunately, quite real. At the time, as mentioned in the novel, no one had any idea how it could have happened—they thought earthquakes could happen only between tectonic plates and not also inside them. I read about this devastating Charleston earthquake, and the story started to evolve. I thought it would be fun to make up a new reason altogether for that earthquake, a supernatural reason, and that’s where the idea of the chapel came into play. I’ve always been fascinated by the live oaks in Charleston and Savannah, and how they’re almost magical in the way their branches twist and turn and grow every which way amid all that clinging moss. The mystically haunted Hoia Baciu Forest in Romania helped to inspire what would eventually become the Bellhaven woods. If you haven’t heard of that Romanian forest, google it—it’s fascinating! So I had these seeds growing for a story, and one morning I was driving and notice
d a tree with, I kid you not, at least fifty cardinals in it. It was winter, and so the tree had no leaves, yet it was bursting with red color. Equally as unbelievable, about fifty yards away from the tree of cardinals stood a tree that held about a dozen big black vultures. I nearly drove off the road I was so shocked, but by the time I made it home, I was already formulating this story about magical woods and birds and bright colors, and All Things Bright and Strange soon came to life.

  As usual, I may be two-finger typing these books by myself, but in the complete production process, an author is never alone. However, any mistakes are, of course, my own. I always get paranoid that I’ll leave someone out, so for all those I’m accidently forgetting, thank you! Instead of saving the best until last, what say we flip that trend and go ahead and thank my wife, Tracy, from the get-go! Thank you for eighteen years of paying for stuff I can’t afford to pay for—because I’m a writer. Hopefully, as the books continue to mount, that role will soon flip—because I’m a writer. And with a writer, you just never know what you’re going to get, so thank you for being so flexible and understanding of all the oddities of this soon-to-be lucrative business. ☺ Thank you to my parents for raising my siblings and me in such a loving and creative household. Your shout-out is on the dedication page, in case you missed it. Thank you to my siblings—David, Joseph, and Michelle—your names just might be showing up on the dedication page of my next book! So beware! Thank you to my cousin John Markert for supporting me from day one, from that very first terrible page I wrote twenty-plus years ago, and acting like there was hope for me. Craig Kremer, the perfect idea bouncer. To Gill Holland for reading that earliest draft, and for your constant support of my career. To Charlie Shircliff for letting me proof this book at your desk with that Michael the Archangel statue looking right at me. To my kids, Ryan and Molly, thank you for being interested in what I do—and keep reading! Speaking of reading, thank you to the following for reading all or parts of the book before publication: Tim Burke, Emma Markert, D’Ann Markert, Alex Markert, Rhonda Bunch, Phil Hoskins, Alden Homrich, Holly McArthur, Frances Ashbrook, Lee Ashbrook, Jeff Bunch, and Kathy Hoskins.