The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  The pale oval of the woman’s face appeared. She blinded me when she turned on the porch light. “I have a gun,” she said in a shaking voice, “and I will not hesitate to use it if you try to get in this house.”

  “Please,” I said. “You have to help me.”

  At World’s End

  When the ball dropped on Times Square there was a single moment when I caught myself not breathing. Just one split second when I found myself praying that it might really be true. I knew that I was thinking with the part of my brain still under the strange spell of Rose of Sharon’s apocalyptic teachings. I wanted all the sickness of this world wiped away—the world that had killed Maura and Elijah and Roland and left a little girl orphaned—and for a better one to take its place. Maybe in some ways that’s what happened. Inside of me.

  I watched the ball drop from my mother’s living room in Mount Greenwood. She rose and cinched the belt of her bathrobe tighter. “Let’s go make some noise,” she said, which is something we’ve done ever since I was a boy old enough to stay up until midnight. My mom rummaged in the kitchen and got out some pots and pans for each of us and lugged them to the back deck overlooking the cemetery. A cloudy night with ever-present drizzle dripping from the bare trees.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready,” I said, and drew in a deep breath. “Ready to sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t hear the false joviality in my words and was grateful she laughed. “You and your poetry,” she said, and we commenced with such a clatter to wake every sorry soul that had already gone to bed, bored by the passage of yet another year, a clatter to wake the dead on Judgment Day. We banged those pots and pans and hooted like two fools, my voice more like a wolf pup yipping than a barbarian yapping. A neighborhood dog yowled in response and was joined by several others in chorus. Down the street someone laid on his horn. I hollered with all the breath in my body, the names of the dead rising up inside me, all my pain and frustration contained in the sound. My pots clanged together, a tinny ringing. When we finally ran out of breath, the world seemed too silent, the darkness too vast.

  “Fucking Y2K,” I muttered, for it was clear the world would go as it had before.

  “Well,” my mother said, ignoring my profanity. She clinked one of her pots against mine. “We gave them heck.”

  We trudged back inside and put away our sundry noisemakers. My mother yawned and apologized for it. In her bathrobe and slippers, her hair prematurely silver, she looked older than she was. I know I looked the same. I felt like I’d lived ten years in the space of one.

  “You go on to bed,” I told her. “I’m going to stay up a little longer.”

  My mom nodded, her eyes watering. There were a thousand unasked questions behind those eyes, but she let me be. I loved her for that. I had told the story too many times already to the police and Feds. Every time I told it I felt like some piece of me peeled away and died. My mom didn’t try to hug me, but she lingered for a minute, perhaps considering how to bridge the space between us. I hoped not to wake her up again, screaming with another nightmare, my fingers dipping into the back of Elijah’s skull, the weight of his dead body crushing me into the snow. “Good night,” she said at last and went off down the hall.

  I traipsed to my room down in the walkout basement. Maps of Middle Earth mixed with posters of Sarah Michelle Gellar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A boy’s room. The room of a stranger. Why was I still alive when others had died?

  I had brought my two computers back from the Kroll house and hooked them up again with the LAN line on a single Sauder wood desk, which sagged under the weight of those clunky monitors. The only refuge I had found after coming home was in this game.

  I sat in my desk chair and booted up The Land. In the final scene, when the fool returns from the Land of the Dead, he learns of the queen’s public execution and how her body was left out as food for the crows. The fool has no choice but to lead his shadow army and make war on the king. In this version, you return as revenant and destroyer. You must burn down the old, sick world that killed your queen to make it new again. I played the game out and the screen lit up with the final triumphant image, a painting I had digitized, The Land bathed in gold.

  “In another world,” Elijah had once said, “Hitler gains admission to art school and never goes to prison or writes Mein Kampf.” I was only able to sleep again at night when I dreamed up other worlds, a different ending for each of them.

  In the story I told myself, Elijah takes Sarah with him and moves to a new town. Maura gets away and stays on the move, never settling in any one place too long. Maybe you have seen her at a bus station or a park bench, a new guitar and case beside her, and have been struck by the shifting light in her eyes. The light holds her face in such a way that she reminds you of someone you knew, so you sit and listen to her sing a hymn so sad and sweet that you can dream of a world where there is no death any longer. Perhaps you tell her that her name is written down in the book of life and are surprised when she weeps. In this moment you have touched something vulnerable inside her. For if the dead are all around us, wearing the faces of strangers, perhaps only in this way can they be held.

  The morning I appeared at the door of the woman’s farmhouse she hadn’t called the police right away. She hadn’t wanted any trouble between her and the “crazies” on The Land, so she drove me to hospital herself, carefully spreading newspapers so I could lay down on the backseat of her station wagon. I would end up spending the next two days in the Aurora Bay hospital I already knew so well, recovering from hypothermia and telling the feds what I knew.

  The ATF did end up raiding The Land, going in at night, and managed to take Bjorn and others into custody without further loss of life. Mother Sophie was sentenced as an accessory to commit a crime, the money from Maura’s robbery recovered from her cabin, and Sarah went into foster care. The Feds found Maura’s body exactly where I told them they would. I had remembered how her spirit had come to me in the tree, smelling of ashes. They found her buried under the cabin Roland must have set on fire to cover up his crime.

  I never saw Arwen again, though I searched for news online. The articles I read in the Bellingham Herald detailed the testimony of Gabe’s partner and girlfriend, which ultimately helped put his killer away for life in prison. Arwen was not charged as an accessory to any crime, so far as I could see, so they must have cut a plea bargain deal with her.

  A couple of days after I arrived home in Mount Greenwood, Albert Kroll called and screeched at me through the phone. He was furious that a book had gone missing, a very important book. He didn’t say the title, but I knew he was talking about the Gemäldegalerie Linz. When he threatened to sue me over my failures as a caretaker, I simply said, “Maybe you should talk to your daughter.” He was still screeching threats when I hung up the phone. I was not surprised a week later when the online version of the Bellingham Herald reported an anonymous donation to the Whatcom Museum of an album featuring artwork stolen by the Nazis.

  The game didn’t get me the job I coveted at BioWare, but it became a small legend on the shareware scene. It would be a long time before I created another; in the early 2000s I followed the path of most computer science majors into the burgeoning telecom industry. I went where the money said to go, but programming and game design were in my blood already. I went on to found my own company, Golem Dreams, and to make games with overtly religious themes: as Noah you plot how to conserve resources and keep the animals on your ark alive (including creatures that never existed or were lost to time) as you search for land; as Moses you battle the Pharaoh’s sorcerers, turning the Nile to blood, before you lead the Jews out of slavery in Egypt; as young David, you slay giants and hide out in a cave as King Solomon hunts for you. These games were published under the Jewish idea of Midrash, a way of honoring ancient stories through imaginative retelling. I like to think that had
Elijah lived—the Elijah I came to know and not the one I had been expecting—he would have approved.

  The migraines never returned, but sometimes I still see an aura around people, and at the furthest corners of my eyes, a swirling of dark wings. The aura that surrounds people is a kind of liminal glow. It’s how I met my wife a few years later. She was in the campus library, books and notes scattered before her. The aura made her strawberry blond hair glow like burnished metal. It transfixed me and she must have felt my staring because she looked up from her studies, pale brow furrowing. “Can I help you?”

  I liked the sound of her voice, quiet and assuring. My ribs and hip had mostly healed, but I walked with a limp and would the rest of my life. I would never run again. I limped over and sat down across from her. She appeared to be a few years younger than me, her eyes a clear, cornflower blue. “My name’s Lucien,” I said. It wasn’t much of a line, but it was a start. “What are you studying?”

  “Angels,” she said. “Their hierarchy. It’s for a paper on Paradise Lost.”

  I nodded. This was a subject I knew well. “The poet Blake said that Milton did the devil’s work when he wrote Paradise Lost,” I said. “He made Lucifer too sympathetic.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe Lucifer is in the beginning, but by the end he’s a wretch. ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’ is not the speech of a hero. Even his best monologues are packed with self-serving lies. He’s an egoist who only causes harm unto others.”

  “In the beginning, he dreamed of a better world,” I tried to argue.

  “With himself on top. Typical dude stuff.” She laughed. “I’m Rachel, by the way.” She held out her hand. I took it and held on.

  Not a day passes when I don’t think of that winter. A season of omens and miracles. The winter when birds fell from the sky and an old woman laid her hands on the crown of my head and healed my pain with a touch. For a time, I walked with angels. For a time, I was haunted by demons. I no longer see them, the hole closing up in my skull, the cracked places healing over. I no longer see angels or demons, but I know they are there.

  There is a house in my mind where it is always winter and the snow falls without ceasing, a house perched on a cliff of anthracite above a boiling blue river. An ageless hound bounds ahead of me, leading me to the edge of the world. At night the stars are so close I can touch them like leaves, and ravens with forked tongues cry out from the pines in human voices.

  Years later I visited a koi pond at the Japanese Garden in Jackson Park after a bad cold snap. I remember thinking of the agate Maura had given me and that I had thrown away. I wanted to tell her about the smothering weight that pressed upon me for years after that winter. I wanted to assure her that down in the darkness, I had learned how to make light. The koi were there, muffled tongues of fire obscured by ice. It was true, what Arwen had told me. A koi can suspend its heartbeat to one beat per minute, burrow into the mud and wait for warmth again, a season of light. Dreaming in the mud, they survive the cold that presses upon them, stealing breath. And in that natal darkness, as the ice melts away, oh how they rise again into the shining.

  Author’s Note

  No church like Rose of Sharon existed in the Arrowhead region in the late 1990s. The monument to the Duluth lynchings was not defaced during this time. So, why is the novel set in Minnesota, a progressive state with a reputation for tolerance?

  This story started with a dog, or rather a husband and wife who asked me to care for their house in the country while they were gone for the winter. They gave me one strict instruction: make sure the dog survives. Over winter, the loneliest winter of my life, I did just that, and when the owners returned in spring they put the old dog to sleep. It’s not much as anecdotes go. I have never liked irony. Yet that winter haunted my imagination. Here I was out in the country, surrounded by wilderness, visited at night by coyotes. I hadn’t ever experienced such cold, or waded through such deep snow. I worried over their koi, frozen in the pond.

  A curious thing happens when memory mingles with the imagination. When I started this novel I meant to set it in the Inland Northwest, which was where I was living at the time I cared for that house. I wanted to set it there for family reasons as well. You see, the title for The Land comes from family history. My family knows the pull of the wilderness. In the 1980s my grandparents purchased heavily forested land in Northern California. The entire family, all six of their children, invested in the purchase of this land. Legend has it they were inspired by the publication of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book that predicted the End Times were upon us. I grew up hearing about the Great Tribulation from my grandparents, listened while great uncles debated gravely about the Mark of the Beast and the coming of the Antichrist. My grandparents named the property they bought The Land. It was meant to be partly a vacation spot, but also as a refuge against the Apocalypse. Later in 1999, as fears about Y2K spread, some members of my family looked again to the property as a place of safety. One relative talked openly about a man he knew who could dynamite the only bridges heading into Scotts Valley. While The Land as described in the novel bears a resemblance to the place we knew and have long since sold, I want to be clear that my family never belonged to any Christian Identity church. This novel is not about my family or anyone in it, but instead explores what happens when the fearful eschatology of dispensationalism intermingles with racist belief systems. As a Christian, I have long been concerned with how American Christianity has been co-opted by nationalism and other toxic ideologies. And while I have sometimes been accused of having an overly gothic mindset, if your grandmother reads to you from the Book of Revelation when you are a child, it does things to your imagination. I have kept the faith in my own way. Writing the novel allowed me to return to The Land.

  So, how and why did the novel’s setting move from the Inland Northwest to the Upper Midwest? In the mid-1990s the botched Federal raid of the Weaver cabin and the violent deaths of three people during an eleven-day siege had left enduring scars on the region where I lived. Yet as I did research, all signs kept pointing me back to the Midwest. Randy and Vicki Weaver were from small towns in Iowa and were married in Fort Dodge. The 1990s spawned the Posse Comitatus in North Dakota while the Aryan Republican Army was busy robbing banks across Ohio. Timothy McVeigh, who lived for a time in Michigan, committed the worst act of domestic terrorism the nation had yet experienced in Oklahoma City.

  Local research offered no reprieve. I discovered a Christian Identity church like the one described in the novel right over in Fridley, Minnesota, no more than ten miles from my home. (The church is no longer active.) I found out that Charles Weisman, a prolific publisher of racist propaganda for the Christian Identity movement, operated his press out of a home in Apple Valley, Minnesota. The white supremacists whom I had been ready to consign to the mountains of Idaho or to the Deep South? They were right here living among us, in our very backyard. As I wrote, I thought about how white supremacy and the violence such groups engender are a little like natural disasters. They only happen in other places, not where we live, and certainly not in the private spaces of our hearts. The more I read and researched, the more I knew I had to bring this novel home.

  For all these reasons, the setting moved to the wildest and most beautiful place I knew in Minnesota, the Arrowhead region. Meanwhile, as I wrote, residents of Grand Marais were unable to stop the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon cult from settling on a property west of town. It was another reminder of how this can happen anywhere.

  Dreamers and visionaries have long known the inexorable allure of the wilderness, a part of our American psyche. It’s The Land that calls to so many of us.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the writers of the Upper Mississippi Young Writer’s Association who saw early drafts and provided crucial feedback. Nick Healy, Roger Hart, Hans Hetrick, and musician Nate Boots are lifelong friends and wri
ters whose judgment I know I can trust. They helped me see early on that this was a story I needed to honor. I am likewise indebted to my campus writing group at Normandale, including Dan Darling, Loli Dillon, and Eric Mein, who inspired me to make some important revisions. Amit Bhati provided crucial advice about game development and programming in the 1990s. My wonderful agent, Laura Langlie, saw the novel when it was halfway done, and spurred me on to finish.

  I knew when I was halfway through the novel that I had to send this to my editor, Mark Doten at Soho Press. This needs to go to Mark, I thought. We worked together on my last novel, Little Wolves, and I felt strongly that sending this to Mark and Soho would also complete a Minnesota trilogy that started all the way back with my novel The Night Birds, set in 1862. There are few things writers appreciate better than the natural completion of a story arc. Mark Doten helped shape this novel into what it is. I’m grateful to him and to the entire team at Soho, including Rachel Kowal and many others.

  To my mom and dad and my siblings, who have been champions and great supporters of my work, and to many others in my family, I thank you.

  Last, but certainly not least, I need to make sure I thank the one who makes all of this possible, my wife, Melissa Jean Dahlke Maltman. A long time ago, she was my first reader, the one who nudged me to go back to graduate school, the one who helps me find the time to write and to create as we raise three daughters together. It’s a good life.

  —Tom Maltman