by Laura Argiri
Table of Contents
THE GOD IN FLIGHT Laura Argiri
Copyright
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
About the Author
The God in Flight
Copyright © 1995 Laura Argiri. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in 1995 by Random House.
This edition published in 2016 by Lethe Press, Inc.
www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-59021-611-1 / 1-59021-611-3
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Inskpiral Design.
Cover art: Lane Scarano
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Argiri, Laura, 1958- author.
Title: The god in flight : a novel / Laura Argiri.
Description: Maple Shade, NJ : Lethe Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017104| ISBN 1590216113 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781590216111 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Teacher-student relationships--Fiction. | Gay college
students--Fiction. | College teachers--Fiction. | Gay men--Fiction. | New
Haven (Conn.)--Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3551.R4165 G3 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017104
I. A slap on the jaw
This story should begin in some sharp, visually violent way, like the crack of a brutal hand across a face, but does not. Instead, it rises out of the mist, like the young man traveling up Spruce Knob. In his hired carriage, he had ascended from the flowering trees and gardens of Charlottesville, through foothills and mountains and fog, to this colder and wilder Virginia.
A dozen miles or so before he reached his terminus, Simeon Lincoln left the mist behind and came into the unforgiving sun, feeling himself work harder to breathe. The mountain hadn’t a permanent frost line, but he thought that one would have suited it—some altitude above which was eternal winter, or at least eternal late-in-the-fall. At the end of this uphill trench of treacherous semi-frozen mud, there was supposed to be a village named Haliburton; an academy, the Haliburton Elementary and Latin School; and a headmaster’s position for Lincoln.
When he got there, he was struck at once by the absolute oddness of the town. In these altitudes, there were few settlements that could be called towns; the villages were mostly clusters of shack-cabins set on patches of forlorn mud, flanked by dormant kitchen gardens and ramshackle privies and guarded by growling gaunt hounds. Haliburton, by contrast, was a tiny but very formal town, six steep streets of houses, a pair of stores, a tavern, and a church and school in the middle. On the south side of town were fallow crop fields, neatly fenced with local stone. A leisurely ten-minute walk would have taken you from one side of the town to the other, from wilderness to wilderness. But the lack of sprawl, the dour geometric formality, struck Lincoln. The neat ugliness of it all suggested some finitude beyond journey’s end.
Though not a fey young man, he had a fey thought: “A bad place, this is. I wish I could leave.” And he had not even reached his destination.
His coachman had to stop and ask a local for directions to the mayor’s house, and the man climbed up on the box to direct the driver. Soon enough Lincoln was getting out before the biggest house in the village, also the highest one. From the yard he could see the whole view; from the highest inhabited spot in the Alleghenies, he looked down into a chasm of wilderness, a kingdom of trees. His bones ached from the long chill of his ride, so he stretched, hoping to steady his legs beneath him; then he went up the two or three steps and knocked on the door.
“Oh! You’re our new teacher! Please come in and get warm by the fire.”
Lincoln blinked, feeling slightly off balance. The person who admitted him was a tiny child, a boy with a headful of white-blond hair and a miniaturized maturity of bearing, like a little Tudor king in a portrait. Lincoln followed the creature into a parlor at the back of the house where there was, indeed, a fire. The room’s windows faced due west into the retreating sun, which stabbed in between the pines and hurt his eyes. The late light divided the chamber into sharp areas of brightness and darkness and made the oil lamp’s light dim and feeble. As his eyes adjusted, Lincoln took in the details of the heavy old furniture and the dry-rot smell of the drapes.
“I’ll tell your driver to bring your things in,” said the imp, and darted back porchward. When he returned, he stretched up a cold little hand and said, “I’m Reverend Satterwhite’s son. My name is Simion. I know yours is too, but I spell mine differently. I’m very glad you’ve come. I’ll get you some tea now.”
Peculiar, Lincoln thought. Where was the servant who should be doing this? Where was the host? At any rate, he eased his thin body gratefully into the cushions of a horsehair chair. The child returned, staggering under the weight of a loaded silver tea tray, his little mouth clenched with the effort. Lincoln got up and took it from him, wondering who let him take this load in hand and risk scalding himself.
“Thank you,” said the creature. “It is a bit much.”
Lincoln watched as the Reverend’s child lifted the pot lid, put the tea leaves in, and finally poured the tea. He’d never heard a child speak like this, nor seen one make tea, or for that matter, do anything with this kind of fastidiousness, this precision. Having ascertained Lincoln’s preferences as to milk and sugar, the child brought the cup over. Lincoln took it and studied him. He was the scrawniest thing imaginable; his little hands were mere bones and thin skin. They were not particularly clean, as though nobody took proper care of him. He was wearing an unbecoming brown suit in a strangely archaic cut, and the heaviness of the garments pointed up his almost supernal fragility and transparent look. Pale hair, pale eyes—gray eyes, eyes the color of April rain. Uncommon. His speech had an awful mountain twang that Lincoln had begun to hear from the locals he spoke with almost as soon as the terrain started rising, though it didn’t detract from the little thing’s miniature dignity. “I’ll teach him to talk like a gentleman,” Lincoln was already thinking.
“You’re from up North, aren’t you? The last teacher was from South Carolina, and we lost him. He didn’t hardly last any time at all.”
“He hardly lasted any time at all. How did you lose him?” asked Lincoln. He would not have been amazed to hear anything: that the man had fallen into a crevasse, been eaten by bears, or both.
But Simion said, “He was in a brawl. Don’t tell Father I said that, but it’s true. He was down at the tavern, and he got in a fight with Abner Haskins over whether Negroes are really human beings, and Abner hit his nose and broke it, and he decided that we were all savages and left. He was feckless. I hope you don’t go in for taverns. I’d started my Latin with him, and then I had to stop.”
“Latin? How old are you?”
“Six. D’you think we could start where he left off?”
Lincoln was silent for a moment, then set his fingertips charily to the top of the child’s silver-blond head and said, “No, I don’t go in for taverns, and I think I should very mu
ch like to take up your Latin where he left off. What have you studied, besides Latin?”
“Oh, writing and sums and geography and Scripture. I don’t write so very well, but I’m the best at all the rest of it.”
“Some modesty would suit you,” said the host from the door.
Lincoln started at the gravel timbre of the voice, and again at the man. Mica-gray eyes, he had, and a long shock of wild, greasy gray hair of the kind that the imagination’s eye gave to Old Testament prophets. He was only slightly taller than most men but seemed built to last forever; even his skull was broad and gave the impression that its bone was twice as thick and hard as one’s own. He made Lincoln feel practically bodiless; Lincoln wondered where on earth he’d gotten that featherweight child. The old man came and offered Lincoln his big, hard hand, which Lincoln sprang up to shake. He was startled at the hand, too: At odds with the clerical black coat and white collar, it was as horny as any dockworker’s, and the nails were rimmed with thick black.
“I am the Reverend John Ezra Satterwhite, and that, I fear, is my son. Mr. Simeon Lincoln, is it?”
“A pleasure to meet you at last, sir,” said Lincoln. “He has been entertaining me,” he said, indicating the tiny fellow. “He…he’s remarkable.”
“Very quick but very conceited, alas. One of the painful duties of the position you have arrived to fill will be taking over Simion’s education and keeping him from mischief. His mother is no longer with us, and I can’t pay a woman just to look after a child. Since our schoolmaster left, he’s been around the house all day looking for devilment to do. He’s in my way, which is bad—and idle, which is worse.”
“Why, I am not either idle,” protested Simion mildly. “I helped you clean the house. It was filthy, you said so yourself.”
John Ezra glowered down at him and said, “I said nothing to indicate that I wanted your contributions to this discussion. What I believe you do not want is to suffer the penalty for interrupting and mouthiness, especially in front of your new teacher. You don’t want that, now, do you?”
Abashedly, Simion replied, “No, sir.”
“Then remember your manners, and get me my tea. Lively,” said the cleric. The child did as he was told, and this time Lincoln heard the cup and saucer rattle faintly in his daunted hand. Then he served himself and took refuge in one of the big armchairs, scuttling back into it and folding himself small. Interestingly, the fierce father did not reprove him for putting his feet on the furniture—nor, for that matter, for making himself a cup of tea that was mostly cream and sugar and consuming it as if it were soup, with a spoon.
After the tea had been consumed, John Ezra turned to his son and said, “Show Mr. Lincoln his room,” and Simion did so. When they finally converged in the dining room, the Reverend produced a Bible, opened it before Simion, and pointed out what he wanted read. John Ezra indulged himself in a small sarcasm: “In the vernacular, please.” When Simion had finished the passage and closed the book, John Ezra scooped him up, put the Bible on the child’s chair, and deposited him summarily upon it. “For what we are about to receive, thank God,” said John Ezra, followed by Simion’s unenthusiastic “Amen.”
Revelation and blessing were closely followed by turtle soup.
“Turtle soup out of season,” noted Lincoln. “It was good of you to go to such trouble.”
“I caught them,” said Simion, and Lincoln took a minute to realize that he meant the turtles. “I know where they sleep in winter. I went and dug them up. I didn’t like to, but Father made me.”
“Caught them, did you?” asked Lincoln humoringly. “I shouldn’t think you had to run very fast to catch them.”
“It’s more a matter of knowing where they bury in for the winter and ambushing them,” said the mite. “They’re hibernating, you know. All I had to do was to dig them up and put them in a pail. It really wasn’t fair, because when they’re hibernating they’re not really in their right minds and don’t know what they’re in for. I’d rather have kept them as pets. They make nice pets but awful old soup.”
“You could keep one as a pet,” said Lincoln. “I had one when I was a child.”
“If I kept one in the house, that awful old Jewel who cooks for us would cook it someday.”
“This man cannot want to hear all your opinions about turtles,” said John Ezra. “Eat your soup.”
“Well, it’s hard—I helped murder them,” Simion remonstrated mildly. He picked up a toast crust and nibbled it.
Unlike as they were in looks, the father and son shared a lack of elementary social polish that became even more shiningly evident as the meal progressed. It was more apparent with John Ezra because he ate more. As if he’d never heard of doing otherwise, he thrust his smeared knife into the butter, tilted sugar straight from the bowl into his coffee, and stirred it with the spoon he’d used to eat the vile turnips they’d had. He swabbed the juices from his plate with bread. Still, Simion was not much better; he ate his chicken by picking up the leg with his hands like a little primitive and doing his best to gnaw the bone bare. Then he cut up the rest of his food into tinier and tinier bits and began mashing the bits until John Ezra caught up with him: “Eat that up. And finish that soup.”
“I’m eating.”
“You are not, sir.” (Actually calling a child “sir” like the beadle in Oliver Twist, Lincoln noted.)
“I have a headache from all those bad stories last night.”
“What bad stories?” asked John Ezra, not hostilely but as if he honestly couldn’t remember.
“About all those people who got holes shot in their heads in the Civil War because they kept slaves and had parties. You told me those stories while I plucked the chicken, don’t you remember? Then you made me look at the chicken guts. It gave me a headache, and if I have to eat soup with cooked turtles in it, I might throw up.”
This had the sound of a familiar and by no means idle threat, one which needed no such powerful impetus as cooked turtles to activate it. The two of them exchanged significant looks and seemed to come to a draw. John Ezra just said, “My son has been a poor feeder from the first day of his life. Ever since he could talk, he’s known how to whine about stomachaches and other reasons to waste good food. It is a tiresome tendency. One among many, I might add.”
“I myself was that kind of fragile, cerebral little child who’s always being told to eat,” said Lincoln, who had swallowed this well-meant swill only because he was famished. The dishes did not go together particularly well: the gamy turtle soup, those turnips, baked apples with no walnuts and insufficient sugar, and a skinny chicken with a grim cornmeal stuffing. “I never had even the beginnings of an appetite until I reached my teens,” he said.
“And now…your professor who recommended you said…”
“Consumption. I’m threatened with consumption. The medical men said that a few years in the mountains might reverse it,” said Lincoln, who hated to talk about this and never did without an internal moan of rage. In truth, he was more than threatened; he had just turned twenty-four and had been told that this was his last chance for the vitality of his first youth to throw out the plague. He had spent most of his modest inheritance on cures that had not cured him; sometimes he thought every available medical indignity had been perpetrated upon his body, which did not heal but merely kept going, maintaining its scrawny strength from some flame of will that had nothing to do with physical vitality.
The child’s big eyes seemed to get bigger, and he swallowed hard. Then he said, “The air up here’s supposed to cure consumption. It’s very clean. And I can run your errands for you, and copy out your letters so you don’t get tired.”
Normally Lincoln loathed sympathy and kindness that came his way because of his ailment, but not this time. “I’m sure you’ll be very helpful to me, and it will be no mean pleasure for me to teach such a bright student,” he said. He tried to put aside for future consideration the clamor of complicated emotions besetting him—encha
ntment, and the recognition of a creature at once kindred to himself and exotic as a hummingbird. He would have been the first to confess that he didn’t like ordinary children, that he found them repellent in their hardness of heart and anarchic simplicity—but this was the child for him. At the same time, he sensed from John Ezra a regard for this rare creature that was beyond severity and possibly beyond dislike. While waiting for the dessert to be brought in, he tried to turn the conversation in some direction well away from the little boy.
“So, where did you matriculate, Reverend Satterwhite?”
“Where did I do what, Mr. Lincoln?”
“College. Where did you take your undergraduate degree, sir?”
“I did not, Mr. Lincoln. I attended to my own education.”
“That’s remarkable—I didn’t know that a person could be ordained without a divinity degree,” said Simeon Lincoln weakly, aware that this seemingly innocuous avenue had been all wrong.
“I was ordained by Him On High,” said John Ezra forbiddingly. Lincoln nodded; you could hardly argue with that. He could imagine this creature as a hulking youth, perhaps getting bitten by a rattler in the bush and staggering home in a delirium from which he remembered oracular clouds of fire, trees that spoke in human voices. Up here he’d have had no one but a handful of inbred and illiterate townspeople to contradict him, and Lincoln bet they hadn’t. Thus he began making his own private surmises as to how John Ezra had attained his position as vicar and mayor here.
John Ezra himself was not having a good evening, for outsiders in general tended to assail his amour propre and make him feel inauthentic. He was already questioning the wisdom of getting this young man with the city clothes and fancy education up here to spread a pernicious spirit of skepticism—which he could see in Lincoln’s haggard eyes despite his evident nervousness—and spoil and flatter this brat of his. John Ezra loathed Simion with a passion as fierce and abiding as love and wished he had an excuse to pick his son up and shake him; he also wished he had a drink. Both or either. He’d had a discreet tumblerful of Smoke Hole Hollow hooch, the neighboring county’s finest, before coming down to greet his guest. However, even white lightning could not fully medicate him against this stranger’s polite horror and the itching sore of his own loathing for his child. They’d be in league against him, he could see it now.