The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  “Rose of Sharon’s nowhere near the highway,” Roland said, taking a long draw on his cigarette and tapping his ashes into an ashtray shaped like a glacier. So this must have been part of what they’d been talking about earlier, planning to ambush me with questions.

  “I just drive some days,” I said, which had been true before the accident. Once I’d driven all the way to Thunder Bay, Ontario, and back with no destination in mind, the radio turned up, windows down, my body fueled by gas station cinnamon bears and Mountain Dew. “No maps. Just go where the road leads me.”

  A look passed between the men. The light in Elijah’s eyes darkened, like he had come to some regrettable decision. Smoke seeped from Roland’s nostrils. I thought I would remember this moment for a long time afterward, the light coming through the curtains, the sharp scent of tobacco, the hooch swimming in my brain.

  “I don’t understand why you’re here,” Elijah said.

  “I don’t know why I’m here either,” I said, trying to cut him off, since I was worried about where he was headed with this. “Or any of us.”

  “Don’t go getting all existential on me,” Elijah said. His eyes narrowed as he watched my face. “You surprised I know what that means? My certificate may have come in the mail but I studied philosophy. There are existential paradoxes even in the Bible. When God asks Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac, as a test of his faith? There is a teleological suspension of morality in that moment. God has asked him to do an act he knows is wrong, wicked, and personally harmful. But what would you do for God? Who or what would you sacrifice? Could you sacrifice a child? Who? You ever had to sacrifice anything in your life?”

  I burped more hot air, the home brew turning to acid in my larynx. What kind of man has an affair with a married woman without giving a thought to the damage he might do to another? What good had I done in my meager, selfish life? By spreading the flyers on campus, I had only added more evil to the world. I couldn’t stay still because of the tension in the room. I tried to meet Elijah’s gaze and figure where he was heading with this. “That’s a terrible thing for God to ask,” I said, hoping to keep us on this subject.

  Roland shifted in his seat. He looked impatient to return to the interrogation, if that’s what this was. He stretched one arm across the seat behind me, ready to hold me here.

  “Isn’t it, though? There are a good many atheists who would agree with you, Meshach. Who cite that very passage as one reason they lost their faith. Who put themselves in the place of God. But to think that way also means reading the Bible without any sense of context or history. At the time God asks this of Abraham, the Israelites are surrounded by pagans who regularly practiced child sacrifice. The Amarites killed their own children on altars. You’ve heard the rule, show don’t tell? Every good storyteller knows it. Well, if God exists, it stands to reason he knows how to spin a good yarn. He wanted to make an example so that every generation going forward never practices such a sacrifice. He tells the story for the sake of the children. Isaac is spared by the appearance of a lamb.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my thinking wobbly from drink. The home brew sloshed in my brain and stomach like flaming lighter fluid and words slurred in my mouth. I thought of Maura’s nightmares that these trailers would bust loose from their log foundations and slide all the way down the steep hill into the river. The small enclosed room rocked like a ship in the morning wind. “Seems like He could’ve just told people, don’t kill your own kids and most would have gotten the point.”

  Roland tensed, but Elijah smiled, warming to the game. Hope rose within me that I had distracted him from his original line of questioning. “Where is your sense of drama, Meshach?” he said. “Isaac is spared by the appearance of a lamb. Generations later, God will sacrifice his own son on the altar. For all our sins. Yours. Mine. The Lamb of God is another name for Christ. Are you beginning to see how showing it as a story invites the reader into it, makes us all part of one tapestry of faith? Because the wages of sin lead to death, and death is coming, and soon. I would not want to find myself on the wrong side of the path.”

  Roland tapped out more ashes, his cigarette drawn down to the filter. The faintly chemical odor added to my nausea. “Meshach,” he said. “Such a curious name. Never met anyone with a name like that before.”

  There were deep shadows under Elijah’s eyes. He knocked his ring finger against the table. Why did he still wear his wedding band, if he knew Maura wasn’t coming back? “I think I know who you are,” he said, in a voice that sounded bruised by betrayal and hurt. “But I don’t know why you’re here.”

  “I think I’m going to puke,” I told them because I felt a hot wave bubbling up from my belly, an undeniable urge.

  Roland sprang into action, one hand hooking me under my left armpit, my bad side, and propelling me up out of my seat. Instant agony flared within my wounded body, but I couldn’t scream because if I did I’d retch everywhere. I gritted my teeth and swallowed down burning bile. Roland shoved me from behind, urgent to get me out of his tidy trailer. I fumbled at the latch, desperate, when he reached around me, one hand looped around my belt as if he was going to carry me out of here like a child in a sling. Somehow, I made it out the door and spilled down the stairs, not bothering with my boots as I went around the side of the trailer and heaved up the liquor, a hot, noxious stream gushing from my guts. Waves of it left my body, my stomach squeezing, until I was emptied out.

  I stood wavering, the cold biting my feet, my throat scorched. Both men had followed me out and now stood glaring at me, their eyes full of questions and doubts. Behind them, Mother Sophie had come out on her porch as if sensing the disturbance. Elijah fetched my boots and carried them over. He thrust them into my arms and marched me through the snow to my Continental.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It looked like Mother Sophie was headed this way, so Roland must have gone over to head her off.

  “You shut your mouth,” he said. “I don’t want her to know.”

  My hands were shaking as I tugged open the door of the Continental and climbed inside, setting my hiking boots on the floor. Elijah leaned in before I could close the door. I hunched into myself, expecting a fist that didn’t come. “I don’t think you should come around here anymore.” His voice was soft instead of angry, like he didn’t want Roland to overhear. “I don’t think it’s good for your health.”

  After peeling off my wet socks and tugging on my boots, I didn’t start the car right away. I felt exhausted and emptied out, a man in desperate need of water, but there was nothing in the car, not even gum to take away the bitter taste in my mouth. My throat ached, but at least I had time to think as I drove home. I knew even before I looked in the rearview mirror that Roland would be following me in his truck.

  I thought about driving straight to the airport in Duluth or the Cities and getting on board a flight to see my mom. Just get the hell out of here. How had things turned so suddenly? Elijah knew. He must have figured out who I was. Or had it been Roland? Maybe he had known all along or something else tipped him. But if he knew, then why had he let me go? One minute I was so deep in the inner circle I was standing at the firing range with them, and the next they were ready to nail me to one of the trees.

  I decided I didn’t have anything to hide. Let them follow me home. The strangest part to me was how Elijah had sounded protective even as he was dismissing me. Like he was warning me away. We aren’t done yet, you and I, I thought, as I led Roland to the place I lived now with my ghostly priestess and a dying German shepherd. There was no way to save myself, no place of safety for me anywhere on earth. Yet, I still didn’t have the answers I needed. I wasn’t going to run. She was my wife, he’d said. What did you do to her? Or did you put such a scare into her that she ran away, disappearing for good? I hadn’t forgotten that scene from The Turner Diaries, a woman brutally strangled for betraying the cause. I couldn’t get it out of my head
. I vowed they wouldn’t scare me away. Not yet. “I don’t want her to know,” Elijah had said of Mother Sophie, which made me wonder, what did the old woman know? I had to go back there, but first I needed a plan.

  The Trouble with Angels

  Roland followed me the whole way home and parked behind me in the circular driveway. I ignored his truck at first as I hobbled inside in search of Arwen. She didn’t answer right away when I called for her, but the house smelled fragrantly of baking bread, so she had to be here somewhere. How was Arwen always disappearing when I needed her most? Kaiser barked once in greeting down in the den, asking to be let out. When I peeked through the blinds I saw that Roland had left his pickup idling, a window down as he sat behind the wheel and drew on a fresh cigarette. I wanted someone to tell, but there was no one. I felt exposed and alone. I let Kaiser out of his kennel and coaxed him up the circular staircase before fetching the last remaining Dr Pepper from the fridge.

  This I carried out to Roland in his truck. I knew he had followed me home to intimidate me, but I figured someone guilty would stay hunkered down inside the house. Would he ask about my name again, or threaten me? I resolved that I would not be afraid. I was a man with a Dr Pepper, a geriatric German shepherd, and nothing to lose. Halfway to his truck, I paused as a new thought struck me. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. This isn’t the first time he’s followed someone home. Maura, did this man know about us? I tried to keep my hand from shaking as I raised the Dr Pepper, my peace offering. A geek bearing gifts. But Roland didn’t wait around. He shook his head, flicked out his burning cigarette, and rolled up his window. Once he got his rig turned around, he peeled away.

  Growling, Kaiser lifted his back leg and loosed a stream of urine into the snow. I cracked the Dr Pepper. “I know,” I said. “That guy is going to be trouble.”

  I knew I’d be seeing him again and soon. I had to find out what happened to Maura, which meant I needed to go back to The Land, and when I did I would go to Mother Sophie. She owned the property and had founded the church, so everything began with her. She was a woman who held a healing fire in her hands, a woman who had told me about a living God who held me in His palms as a sparrow, a God who knew the number of hairs on my head, knew me when I was in the cradle of my mother’s womb, knew the lies and deceptions I would grow up to speak and loved me still. Of all of them, she was the one I felt I could reason with. I had to find out what she knew. But not yet. I needed to think this through and wait for early morning tomorrow when Elijah was likely to be out on a call.

  I found Arwen in the garage of all places. I hadn’t thought of checking there. She was dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, the hood up as she sat on the bottom step with the wounded raven in her lap. She must have caught it somehow, or trained it to feed from her hand. I remembered my dream, the swaddled bird, the blood after she split the tongue to make it speak. Arwen didn’t turn around at first. “You didn’t hear me calling?”

  When she did turn, her eyes glittered with tears. “Edgar’s dead,” she said, using the name I had told her about a few days before.

  I walked down the steps and sat beside her. She cradled the bird as though she held a child and not some wild creature. “We should have taken him to a rescue center,” I said.

  Arwen stroked the glossy feathers. “How? We couldn’t catch him once he got up into the loft.”

  The raven’s eyes shone white like river pebbles, filmed over in death, the terrible tongue with its dream prophecies sealed inside the beak. “I need to tell you something,” I said. I wished I had before. I spoke of the storm of ravens filling up the pines and their war in the snow, the carnage I’d seen, and how this bird had been the lone survivor. I told her about my sense of the evil driving them to slaughter one another in a time of famine and how sharing this story in the church had made me seem like some kind of prophet to the people at Rose of Sharon, one more proof the world was ending when we were living in a time of miracles and apocalyptic horrors.

  Arwen listened without commenting. She lay her head against my shoulder. “You’re a strange person,” she said.

  I had a difficult time arguing with her assessment. I had expected her to be angry that I had withheld such a story. Did that mean she believed me? Strange was a better alternative than crazy.

  “So you believe in all that Y2K stuff?” Arwen said. “You think the world is going to end because you saw some birds lose their shit?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “All I know is that I’m living in a world right now where things are happening that I can’t explain with logic and reason. I’ve just been trying to figure it out. There has to be some reason these things keep happening.”

  Arwen blew out an exasperated breath. “Maybe there isn’t any reason. Sometimes nature writes a horror story about the battle for survival. Things die. Especially when you’re trying to hold on to something wild. Something wild in a place where it doesn’t belong.” She rocked slightly on the step as she spoke. “Will you help me bury Edgar? I don’t want the wolves to get him.”

  We dug a hole for the raven behind the ruined rose hedges while a bitter wind nipped at our cheeks. Even a grave only two feet deep proved difficult as we hacked at ground caked with ice, my steel shovel chipping away at iron soil. The effort left me short on breath. “You want to say anything?” I asked Arwen when the hole seemed sufficient.

  “No. I’m just pissed he’s dead.” She set the corpse in the hole. In his shallow grave, the raven was so dark against the whiteness of the snow all around. “Besides, you’re the prophet.”

  “Let’s get inside,” I said. “I’m cold.” On the way back after tamping down the ground, the shovel loose in my left hand, I pointed out the frozen-over koi pond and we stopped there. You could see their bodies encased in their icy tomb, a blur of orange inside a coffin made of glass. It was shaping up to be a melancholy afternoon.

  “Your parents didn’t say anything about tending them. They’re down there, a couple of fish popsicles.” The thought gave me an ugly premonition. In this part of the country when the snow melts, when sheets of ice sealing shut the lakes and rivers give way to running water, the springtime can reveal ugly, buried secrets. In the spring the land gives up its winter dead.

  “They’re down there in the mud under the ice,” Arwen said, bumping against me so we stood shoulder-to-shoulder. “But I don’t think they’re dead. Pond’s deep enough to keep it from freezing all the way. A koi can slow its heartbeat to a single beat per minute when it goes into hibernation.”

  “They’re alive?” It seemed impossible.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Winter can’t last forever.”

  I was no longer so sure about that.

  “And,” Arwen added, “not every miracle defies explanation. There’s a life force at the core of every being, stronger than any of us can realize.”

  Her hopefulness surprised me. I tried my best to argue against it. “We are also more fragile than we know. So easily snuffed out.”

  “Not the koi,” she said. “They’re aquatic life-ninjas, truly badass. You just wait and see.”

  As soon as we left the shovel in the garage and stepped inside we smelled smoke, an acrid scent. Then everything happened at once as the smoke detector in the hallway began to screech when smoke curling along the ceiling reached it.

  “Damn!” Arwen said. “I forget I had bread in the oven.”

  I went to get a chair to silence the alarm while Arwen hurried into the kitchen. In the chaotic moments that followed neither of us recognized the sound of the doorbell ringing. I thought the sound was inside my head, a remnant of my time at the firing range, or this alarm, so loud I could imagine my eardrums bleeding into my brain. I only knew what I was hearing when I saw Arwen hurrying down the hallway after I’d yanked out the battery. She glanced up at me, still stupidly standing on a chair in the middle of the hall. “I’m not here,” s
he said in a firm voice, and she disappeared into her room, closing the door carefully behind her.

  Roland must be back, and I would have to confront him alone. Kaiser barked downstairs, stirred up by the noise and smoke. The doorbell buzzed again, insistent. When I made my way down the hall and peeked through the peephole I saw it wasn’t Roland after all, but instead a police officer in Navy blues, a young man who didn’t look much older than me, his face freckled, his orange hair shaved to stubble. He held his hat in one hand and pressed on the buzzer with the other.

  I opened the door halfway, conscious of what the chaos inside must have sounded like to him here at the threshold. Downstairs, Kaiser continued to carry on, knowing a visitor was here.

  After the officer and I exchanged greetings, he said, “You’re the boy the Krolls asked to tend this place?”

  I nodded, though I didn’t like him calling me a boy. He had eyes like blue fire, like the twin flames of Bunsen burners. His shaved head and intense glower bothered me. He would have fit right in with the skinheads who had been coming and going on The Land.

  “Who else is there in the house with you?”

  “Just me and the dog,” I said. The lying felt like second nature by now. “What’s this about, Officer?”

  He craned his neck, trying to peer past me. “Mind if I come inside?”

  “Actually, I do.” Corny lines about asking for a warrant flitted through my mind, straight from television. “Look, I’m really busy right now.”

  He frowned, his whitish lips thinning. The splash of freckles across his nose and cheeks made him look young, I decided, but those eyes were cold and calculating. “Smells like something’s burning.”

  “I’m not much of a cook,” I said, “but I can’t see how that concerns the Aurora Bay Police Department.”