The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Not that Haliburton ever resembled a vacation resort, but after John Ezra became its clergyman, the straight and narrow became nearly impassable. Yet the Puritan rigor he imposed had somehow put energy back into the villagers, as brute force sometimes will give degenerates a new lease on life. For the first time they could remember, they weren’t bored. The homemade beer and double-run whiskey of the Haliburton tavern, the Old Cheese, suddenly acquired the interest of all sinful things; the Cheese’s custom doubled. They were too well-occupied, too full of nervous vitality to be bored. Illumined by the lurid light of John Ezra’s guided tours of the Infernal Regions, flirtations, even the utilitarian rites of the marriage bed, took on black fascination and the romance of terror. Morbid, its madness ignited and burning like a small but hellishly hot fire, Haliburton in this phase of John Ezra’s vicarage became the fanatical anomaly it had been trying for some time to become.

  Attracted by the brimstone theatrics of those sermons, the neighboring Pentecostalists started coming to hear him preach. In the summer of 1860, the two meetings merged, and the men went logging and built a meeting house big enough to accommodate both congregations, now one. John Ezra was out with them every day, in spite of his advanced years, swinging an ax with the rest. When the new meeting house was complete, his grateful townspeople made him mayor as well as clergyman and gave him the keys to the jail—the Church making brutal, unconstitutional love to the State. The War Between the States didn’t touch Haliburton, which had no slaves, no tobacco, no cotton, and little interest in the whole matter—Haliburton had seceded in its own way years before. When a new state line shuttled it over into the West Virginia side at mid-war, Haliburton gave the matter little thought.

  John Ezra was happy. And when his wife gave him a son in late 1861, it seemed that he should be happier still.

  His wife’s sudden death, while Simion was still an infant in arms, however, had ripped down a barrier that had contained the worst in John Ezra. He had always liked his “drop,” but after his wife died, he began to find that drop necessary and worked up from a drop to a pint and a half a day. Not of genteel scuppernong wine, either, but of corn home brew strong enough to use as embalming fluid. (“Christ’s Liquor on Earth,” Simion would later call him, for John Ezra was the Pope of Haliburton and rather like a full whiskey glass slopping over.)

  “His mother, she was a lovely woman,” Vickers had said. “I don’t know how she came to marry that thing in there. She wasn’t pretty, but she was educated and…I don’t know…quiet…refined…a lady. While she was alive, you could have eaten off any floor in this house, and now…you see what kind of a sty it is, and that ain’t nothin’ to the usual. They cleaned it up for you. A sty—a goddamn pig hole. There weren’t any children the first ten years, then this one came along when she was forty-five, and it was dangerous for her. He wasn’t expected until Christmas, but he came in late October. I had to ride hard, and I just barely caught him. He was the pitifulest-looking thing you ever saw, like a rabbit just after it’s skinned, but he had spirit, and I couldn’t help but think he had what it took to live. Well, that lady took the best care of him that any woman ever took of a baby, and he did well. Wasn’t even sick for the first nine months of his life. And then she died. Wasn’t ailing, didn’t complain of anything, but died in the night when the baby was just nine months, and I swear John Ezra’s been crazy since that day. He ain’t the sort that goes crazy for love of a woman, it was as if she’d been holding his craziness back. Even at his best, John Ezra never was a one to get on with children, and specially not with this one. This one’s uncommon quick and bright—talks just like a parson sometimes—but I’ll be surprised if he lives long enough to make use of his brains.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him, is it? He hasn’t got consumption or anything like that yet, surely?”

  “Naw, ain’t nothing wrong with him except that he’s smart enough to do just about anything but keep his mouth shut, but he ain’t smart enough for that, and someday John Ezra’s going to break his head in. This ain’t the place for you, Mr. Lincoln, rely on it,” Vickers said. “It ain’t a healthy place, and it ain’t a perfectly safe one either, to tell the plain truth. If you like, I’ll drive you to Mint Springs. You can stay with me and the wife. The diligence to Charlottesville stops at our P.O. Thursday. You can catch it. I take it you’ve made your mind up by now?”

  “Oh, indeed I have, I’ve made it up,” said Lincoln. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  And, true to his word, Simeon Lincoln remained. He woke up in the late morning, completely dazed by nervous shock and blood loss, and experienced a moment’s disorientation as he peered around the alien room. He had a fierce settled ache at the juncture of his chest and his belly, and the bones of his face hurt, and a pulse in his head thudded sickeningly. He was sprawled in an armchair with a blanket over his knees. But everything came together when his eyes settled on Simion, who seemed still asleep, his arm fastened to his side like a broken wing. Lincoln got charily to his feet, peering across the hall, where there was an empty bedroom; his unopened luggage was there. He tiptoed two tentative steps toward it.

  “It’s all right,” said the child’s voice. “Whyn’t you take a look at him? If you see an empty jar, and he’s snoring, he’s asleep enough to be safe. A great deal asleep.” Which, Lincoln realized when he traced John Ezra’s snores to the next-door room and peered in to investigate, meant that he was pig-drunk and probably wouldn’t have heard a cannon fired under his bedroom window, much less the steps of a consumptive on his floor. He paused in John Ezra’s combination bedroom-study—four walls of books surrounding a library table piled with the crudely printed little tracts he’d heard about, a brimming pisspot, dishes stuck together with old food on the hearth, and at John Ezra’s elbow a smeared tumbler and an empty jar exuding the keen, sweet reek of moonshine whiskey. Above his mantel, a horrible picture of the villagers’ god, that violent Christ wreathed in flames and brambles, surveyed the whole. Lincoln examined one of the tracts, then put it down hastily and rubbed his hand on his pants.

  He went back to the room where Simion was now shakily sitting up. The boy was blue under the eyes, unsteady, trying to get himself vertical with his free arm. Lincoln steadied him—“Oh, do take care! Your shoulder—” and got a new shock. Last night this child had barely cried, but now these words of sympathy and Lincoln’s fingertip on his clavicle made him cry helplessly, sobbing like a grown person in the grip of an overwhelming grief. Lincoln draped him over his shoulder again and patted him, afraid of hurting him more, worried about touching him and communicating his disease.

  “I suppose you’ll be leaving,” sniffed Simion when he’d nearly cried himself out. “I mean, you’ve seen him and all. You’ve met him. People generally leave.”

  “I won’t leave,” Lincoln assured him.

  “You won’t?”

  “I have no intention of it,” said Lincoln. The two of them looked each other over, and the child managed a watery smile. “So, is school in session now?” Lincoln asked him. “Has your assistant schoolmaster been holding the fort?”

  “Oh, no. Without a headmaster he won’t do nothing. He’s gone to Smoke Hole to tend his still until you get things in order,” said Simion.

  “He won’t do anything. His still, eh?”

  “The thing he makes whiskey in,” Simion explained.

  “Well, then…I shouldn’t want to distract him from any such vital enterprise as that. Perhaps we two might go and start getting things ready at the school. If you feel up to it, that is.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea! That way, we’ll be out of the house when Father wakes up. He always wakes up ugly. I know where the keys are,” said the child. Lincoln set him gently on his feet, and Simion proceeded to tiptoe almost noiselessly into the study and take the key ring from the rack. Handing it to Lincoln, he remarked, “The good thing about Father is that in the morning he doesn’t hear anything. You can pour hot candle wax on him when
he’s this way, and he won’t turn a hair—I did once. I wish he’d drink a little more and just sleep all the time.”

  “Does he always drink in this manner?”

  “Every day but Sunday.”

  “Don’t people…well…catch on to him?”

  “No. I think a lot of them must do it themselves,” said Simion meditatively. “Do you want some coffee? Grown-ups always seem to want it when they get up.”

  “In fact, yes…would that dirty old harpy who served at table yesterday make us some breakfast if you ask?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Simion, with a tragic sigh.

  “Go downstairs and ask her for some coffee and hot milk and toast and a couple of boiled eggs. I’ll follow soon.”

  Pausing, Lincoln stood over John Ezra’s sprawled and snoring two-hundred-forty-pound bulk. As of that moment, Lincoln’s existence, hitherto focused on his own desperate case, centered upon John Ezra’s son. Lincoln himself was not going to get out of his plight alive, but he decided early on that Simion would. “I’ll oppose you,” he told John Ezra in the silence of his thoughts. “While I live, you won’t live to ruin him. I’ll be the saint of his escape. I’ll get him out of here.” As simply as that, Lincoln suddenly had someone upon whom to spend his love and someone else worthy of all the considerable loathing he could conjure; his life pulled tight like a drawn bow.

  Sometimes a person can remember the exact moment of his psychic birth. Simion had the privilege of remembering his. The morning after that débâcle at the supper table, he was leading Simeon Lincoln down the muddy main street of Haliburton, schoolward. Though yet light-headed with laudanum, he could feel the pain wake in his shoulder as the dose wore off. Still, he wanted to get the stranger well away from his father before John Ezra woke. As they walked together, Simion was suddenly struck with the sensation and the idea of his hand in Lincoln’s thin scholarly hand, of kindly and similar flesh. When he got tired, Lincoln crouched down and lifted him up with effortful gentleness, careful not to jolt his sprained shoulder. “You direct me,” he said.

  After a morning of prospecting in the big, open classroom of the stone school, taking inventory and making lists, Lincoln went to the tavern and got them soup and cheese sandwiches and cider for lunch. Simion, in too much pain and too excited from the morning’s gentle attention to eat, wouldn’t—and to his shock, Lincoln put his own meal aside and gravely fed him. Lincoln could be absolutely firm when he meant a thing. The concern Simion felt from Lincoln made him submissive, and he ate until Lincoln decided he’d had enough. Lincoln’s enough was a bearable one, though, as if he understood what it was like to live in Simion’s skin and have his terrible stomach.

  When Simion rethought that time in later days, it would seem full of light, full of sudden, happy discoveries; he felt known and claimed for the first time. The villagers had regarded him as a sort of local Lar, half oracle and half freak. John Ezra had twined his fantasies of demons and spooks around his child. Simeon Lincoln, on the other hand, knew him for the kind of human being he was. It was as if it meant something that they had the same name.

  Even at this very early phase, Lincoln took over much of Simion’s schooling himself, sending him into the schoolroom only to practice writing with the others on the slate board. Lincoln had a great deal of latitude to delegate the drudgery to the assistant schoolmaster, Davie Darnley—he of the still—and he did. Lincoln taught Latin and made a game attempt to start the bigger boys on Greek, which left him ample time for his protégé. He took the child to and from school on his horse and, on birthdays and holidays, brought Simion baskets of fruit and candy and presents laboriously tied up in print paper and ribbon. In his study, he apportioned a special shelf on which the child’s lexicons, pens, rulers, copybooks, soap for hand washing, dishes, and silverware would be kept all through his years in Haliburton, for he did not allow Simion to handle household objects that he himself touched. It was one of the frail protections he tried to extend the child against his own disease in this cruel joke of a situation, wherein the only person equipped to protect and teach the boy might also infect him with consumption!

  Lincoln worked ferociously against time. At first, he taught Simion arithmetic and Latin and started him on the rudiments of music and the pianoforte, which he learned to play with moderate facility. He also taught him English grammar and patiently drilled from his speech the drawl and twang and fractured grammar of the hillfolk—“I can’t have you going out into the world saying cain’t,” he said, at least two hundred times, before he heard it for the last time.

  A little older, Simion stayed after school until five, and Lincoln poured the calculus, the Psalms, ancient history, botany, and chemistry into his willing head. He taught him French and German so he could go out as a fully equipped citizen of the modern world. And, through many feverish nights, Lincoln plotted the means of getting him out of this town alive and kept his hopes up with news of the outer world. This too had its perils: It fostered a fresh and urgent discontent. This problem came to a head the autumn that Simion turned eight. Lincoln recognized the mood—the same kind of discontent that had beset him at seventeen, pent in a sanatorium waiting for his temperature to go down before his doctors would let him leave for college. He had been an onerous patient, rebellious, evil of tongue. Simion, with his new knowledge of life needling him like a splinter in his thumb, gave John Ezra an unsafe amount of grief. Among other offenses, he did the dangerous thing of telling his father that people didn’t live in this crazy way in other places—a deduction drawn from a trip with Lincoln to Charlottesville, where he got to eat ice cream in a sweet shop, spend an afternoon in a real bookstore, and hear a Beethoven sonata performed at a concert. For his declaration, he got his head rattled and a baby tooth or two knocked loose, but pain and retaliation did not seem to give him pause. Furthermore, he had drawn the beam of John Ezra’s suspicions painfully close to Lincoln.

  Ultimately, Lincoln dealt with his angry and hungry little pupil by giving him more to do. He fed him the sacred honey, Greek, laying the groundwork of a driving obsession whose forward force, he hoped, would see Simion out of Haliburton before he was a man.

  “I think that with your restlessness and naughtiness these days, you’re trying to tell me something,” Lincoln told him, holding out a tantalizing package. Simion opened it and uncovered a fascinating array of Greek picture-tiles. Lincoln watched unwilling fascination warm and light his sulky face.

  “I think you’re bored and that you’re a big enough boy to learn a more difficult language, one with a different alphabet. It’s about time you began Greek, I think.”

  “These people are beautiful,” said the child, fingering the tile reliefs. “Did you go there and see them? In Greece?”

  “A friend of mine did. And brought back these tiles from a Greek island called Niarchos.”

  “Niarchos,” repeated Simion, savoring the foreign word like a mouthful of honey. “Are the people there all black-haired and brown like this? With big muscles?”

  “I think most of them are dark now, but it’s from mixing with the Turks. In the olden days, thousands of years before Christ, they’d have been a blond race and looked more like you. The artisans don’t know that, though, so they make the people in their pictures look somewhat like themselves.”

  “I think they look fine. If I learn Greek, can I read all the stories about them?”

  “You can, and there are many, and they’re very good stories.”

  “Did they teach you all that at Yale?”

  “Well, some of it. I began early because I was a good student, as you are now,” said Lincoln. And he slipped another sweet bait onto the hook, offering Simion the 1859 Yale College catalogue that he had ordered long ago so that he could prepare for the entrance comp. “You see, they have all sorts of courses that you’ll be ready to take when you’re sixteen or so. That is, if you don’t tempt your father to knock your head off long before that.”

  “I want to
go to Yale. And to Greece. And learn Greek now,” decided Simion. “How long does it take? When can I go?”

  Lincoln looked him over and considered whether he was old enough to be entrusted with the kernel of his plot, and decided that he needed it for his hope, the hope that would help him sustain his caution. “Come,” he said. “Put the tiles aside for a moment and come for a walk with me. I have important things to tell you, things that you’ll like to know.”

  It was a fair and cold day of early winter, windless enough that Lincoln found the idea of a walk bearable. He and Simion made their way out of the village and up one of the gentler and more winding woods trails up the Knob. When he felt far enough from the town, he sat himself down on a rock outcropping in a bed of bleached ferns and motioned for Simion to do likewise. Simion had not pestered him for information on the way up, since he knew that Lincoln wanted to talk in a truly private place; Lincoln’s other serious talks had been conducted in similar isolated spots. Simion thought it was just Lincoln’s way, but it was psychology—Lincoln had found that he got better results if he brought up serious things with the boy well away from town. It was as if the village oppressed Simion so thoroughly and made him so mad that he couldn’t help but be contrary there. You had to appreciate his orneriness as an evidence of health, but it was good to get him away if you needed to make him see his best interests.

  “You know,” said Lincoln, “you’re a very singular sort of boy, a unique one even. I stayed here because I knew that almost immediately upon meeting you—I don’t like this place any better than you do. I stayed because even then I had an idea about your future.”