“When did she leave?”
“Funny you should ask.” She laughed bitterly. “She left exactly two years ago today. August twenty-seventh, a Tuesday morning, the day after her fiftieth birthday.”
“You know what you ought to do, Callie?”
“What?”
“Get rid of that car.” Grampa wondered if he might be overstepping, but Esme pointed to a flicker in Callie’s eye and gave him assurance. “Sell it to some enthusiast for scads of money and buy your own car.”
“Friend Ted, you may be right. In fact, if you’ll join me in a glass of water, I’ll drink to that.”
He laughed and said he would and they both drank to that. And they commiserated, one with the other, for the next hour or so, confessing their sins and granting each other absolution and forgiveness over water and an apple and a box of stone-ground wheat crackers. Grampa did not hold back about the angels, and his new friend appeared to take them in stride, though it was impossible to tell what credence, if any, she gave them. Nor did it matter, since all her kind caring was focused—as his, obversely—on how he had been affected by what he described.
When at last he rose to trek back home, Callie would have none of it, but insisted on driving him. She knew a back road, made long ago by God-knows-whom and forgotten, which took them jouncing and buffeting over slow twists of packed earth, so narrow in spots that both windows of the pickup brushed past a carwash of evergreens and it seemed as if they might be trapped in foliage. But for the most part it was clear and plenty wide enough, and Grampa had the odd sensation, peering out the passenger window at the woods to his right, that he was watching his dreamscape of the night before lit from a different angle. Exactly so, Ted, Esme commented where she floated by the front fender, and not long after, she pointed up into an oddly familiar stretch of trees indeed. “Here,” he said. “You’re sure,” she said. And they parted with an embrace and an exchange of phone numbers, the throb tearing at his legs as he made for the rise and Esme confirmed the edge of terra cognita they’d both been sure of already, home not twenty minutes distant along well-trodden paths, and Callie not driving off until she was certain, or as certain as she could be, that he knew where he was going.
11. Auroville Fallen
Reverend Fleischer had prayed much of the night. Or rather he had lain awake in the ruins of his life, asking the Lord’s guidance as his wife snored in oblivion beside him. Thank God he had not said anything to her about Ken Jefferson and the proclivities that had troubled him since Wednesday but troubled him no more. But he had attended the debauched festivities in the town square, had allowed the tall devil veiled in angelskin into his heart, and he had aided and abetted the demonic possession of his wife and daughter. Moreover—and how this could have come to pass he had no idea—he had taken in stride his daughter’s parading her nakedness in public, had even gone boasting from blanket to blanket, shamelessly proud of her body’s svelte beauty, reciting whole verses of the Song of Songs. And he had shouldered his way to the front ranks of those who watched and reveled in the mayor’s public fornication, his vision so mired in wickedness that even now, awakened once more to God’s clear light, his memory glowed with the gloss of spiritual beauty the vile act had taken on. He, his congregation’s beacon of righteousness, had misguided them, had let them and God down, had been seen to condone and applaud the work of Satan.
Kathleen Grayson, the bubbly older woman who managed the office, had been at the square. He worried about her soul, and about how she would judge him. But when he saw her car in the parking lot, reliably there, and her drawn face looking up at him like a misbehaved child waiting for punishment, he knew she’d watched the TV reports and been awakened—and, more important, that she was concerned far more with the state of her own soul than with his, which was only as it should be. They prayed together, just the two of them in the emptiness of the sanctuary, and he gave her the forgiveness she begged; and she, after a bout of fluster that he should even ask it, forgave him as well. And then, not two minutes after they stepped back into the office, the phone call had come. A lone reporter, a soft-spoken man, requested most respectfully an interview, not a major moment, just a sit-down in the office, to get his views on what was happening in Auroville; and he’d agreed. And the reporter, when he appeared with his cameraman, had smiled and said the office wasn’t bright enough, would the Reverend Fleischer mind if they did the interview in front of his lovely church in the fresh morning air?
And he agreed (against his better judgment, but then he’d stopped listening to that) and on the steps, they had barely begun when new vans drove up like ants to honey and instead of one mike, which was bad enough, a black-spoked fan of them were pointing into his face. Their questions threw him at first, they came so fast and impolite, but he soon felt their rhythm like the rain of God; they pattered against him and shaped the truth and washed it out of him, no quarter with sin, no holding back. Yes, he had been on the town square twice, God help him; and yes, the Devil in pleasing shapes had mocked him and his family.
“Is it true, sir, that your daughter stripped herself naked and walked about and you did nothing to stop her?”
“How dare you ask such a thing?” He flushed and his grip on the Bible tightened. The questioner had the lean look of a hungry wolf, that self-serving, atheistic sheen of indifference to the suffering of others he’d seen on so many newscasters’ faces.
“Wouldn’t you agree that it suggests how profound the mass deception went, that a Methodist minister would allow his flesh and blood to—?”
“My family is off limits. Next question.”
Another face, a woman: “Reverend Fleischer, from all indications Mayor Cosgrove has long been respected in this city for her political acumen, her love of community, and her quiet dignity. How do you explain the mayor’s bizarre behavior yesterday in the town square?”
“You’d have to ask the mayor that, as I have no doubt you will. I have known Thea Cosgrove and her husband for years, and you will not find more upstanding citizens than they. I am filled with shame and compassion for them—and for all the good people of Auroville unwittingly caught up in the Devil’s mischief. And I am filled to the brim with heavenly wrath toward those few who have perpetrated this outrage.”
“And that would be—?”
“I will not name names. You already know the names.” The fury boiled in him, righteous fury against those whom Satan had chosen as his instruments. He wished it weren’t so: Hate the sin and forgive the sinner. But there was a time for forgiveness and a time for condemnation. “If you will indulge me, this is what God has to say about sorcery of the sort we have suffered under.” He’d found the verse the night before, pondered and prayed over it. He turned now to the red ribbon which marked it. “‘But there was a certain man,’ Acts 8, verses 9 to 11, ‘a certain man called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries.’” He repeated the last phrase slowly and deliberately, leaning into the black bristle of mikes.
“Are you accusing T. E. Jameson of witchcraft?” The questioner mocked with incredulity.
“The passage speaks for itself.”
“But, sir, this is the twentieth century!”
Another voice: “Are you suggesting Mister Jameson’s fiction has primed this community, and perhaps the nation as a whole, for shared lapses into delusion?”
Yet another: “What about the children?”
“Yes,” the mocker again, “what about Ward Keeshan and June Lockridge? Are they witches too? People are saying the children have played a far greater role than Jameson in this affair.”
He was momentarily at a loss. Though he’d heard that Ted Jameson had been downtown several times this week, the writer hadn’t come at all
yesterday nor had he been in the town square Wednesday at the moment Bill Fleischer’s gaunt fiend had billowed out, the mayor’s words crisp, clipped, and bright in the air. Ward and June had been sitting on the stage, but that day he had not heard them say a thing. “I . . . I don’t know the mechanism, but I sorely suspect he has corrupted these children in some way, bending them to his will.”
“Sir, do you have any idea how ridiculous the city of Auroville appears to the rest of the world?”
“All I can say in response to that is, thank God the insanity has stopped here. Spread the word, good people, spread light and truth. Inoculate the world against the wiles of the Devil, because if it can happen in a decent God-fearing town like Auroville, it can happen anywhere.”
*****
Ward felt boxed in. He had all the clubhouse windows open, the door too, but still he felt confined, penned up against the coming slaughter.
June had been snatched from him, her father glaring at his house—unable to see Ward behind the drawn curtain but surely sensing him—as he yanked June into the Camaro and sped away. Grampa had not yet returned from his walk in the woods. And poor Joydrop, burdened with the death of Gramma and the disappearance of Grampa, as well as her enforced separation from Luke Petrakis, had been awakened at six by the first rude reporters phoning and was in the house now, two hours later, patiently repeating to every caller, at phone or door, that neither T. E. Jameson nor his grandson was available for questions. He really felt for her, though he wished she’d rip the phone cord out of the wall like they did in movies. The jangle, incessant and distant from here, like tiers of phones ringing under a PBS pledge drive, had to be driving Joydrop nuts.
She gave up her belief in Nemo.
“Nemo, Nemo, Nemo. When are you going to stop?”
I’m in mourning.
“Tell me about it.” Ward was fed up with Timothy’s paste-white face and his slick black hair and the variants on gloom in his outfits. Not to mention his stasis in the air: no swirls, no sweeps, and as morbidly affixed to one spot as the jangle of phone noise from the house; it felt as if he were in danger of wearing that patch of air out.
I need to husband my strength. This is a far more serious situation, Ward, than I think you’ve been willing to admit.
“Surely,” Ward replied, “common sense is bound to win out. It’s a minor setback. Listen, Timothy, I still have you; June still has Jeannie. Didn’t Mister Gregerson call last night to assure us that his angel was still around?”
The man protesteth too much.
“You think his faith was crumbling?”
Likely. I’d bet today’s batch of ice cream will have more than its share of bittersweet chocolate shavings.
“No way is TV going to rob people of their senses.”
Already has.
“A temporary thing. We have no idea how widespread. And even if a vast majority lose touch with their angels, they’re bound, once the smoke clears, to poke their heads out of their shells again.” An image of glistening snail horns extending from stretched slime-gray heads, blindly waving as they suctioned forward, came to him. “They’ll see their guardians again. And they’ll come out and tell the world.”
Not so easy, once consciously denied.
Ward, finding no answer, fell silent. He was afraid it was true. In the so-called natural course of events, the world weaned kids unthinkingly away from belief. It was such a deep-seated process, in fact, and occurred so early in a child’s development, that invisible companions were considered a rarity and not the universal phenomenon Grampa had suggested over dinner a few days before.
More phone janglings and the sound of a truck coming up the road. Ward missed his grampa. And he missed Esme towering joyously beside him. Mostly he bought into Joy’s notion that Grampa had found some friend to stay overnight with, that he was “a grown man” who could see to his needs and who, in his distraction, had simply forgotten to call. But part of him was genuinely worried. Part of him wanted to venture off into the woods right now, Timothy sleuthing alongside him, not waiting to launch a rescue effort until Joydrop felt it was time to call the sheriff.
Restless Ward. His tones were funereal.
“You bet.” The clubhouse was a matchbox, a child’s room, yes a place of refuge but also a place he’d outgrown in the past week. He’d had validation of his weirdness on a grand scale, public exaltation; and he’d become intimate with June, the precious love of his life. Now these were in serious jeopardy and all he could think to do was ride the situation out, hoping that when the smoke cleared the world would right itself again.
Call June.
“I can’t. Her parents.”
Worst they could do is hang up.
“What if there’s a reporter in the house and he makes me answer questions, kinda backs me into a corner?”
Wimpola! Timothy drew a face of exasperation. Use Grampa’s phone.
“I could, couldn’t I?” But then he’d have to get up off this bed, actually move. The air seemed so heavy, his limbs so listless, the torpor bone-deep.
And you wonder why I’m decked out in black!
“Oh, all right.” He groaned audibly as he shifted up off his elbows and came to a sitting position, pointlettes of pinging light dancing before his eyes. First tiny step in a hundred steps.
My, my, the centipede counts its legs!
“I’ll get there, don’t rush me!” And eventually Ward reached the door and then the rope ladder and his grampa’s never-locked treehouse. But what lethargy dragged at him as he went and with what trepidation he finally lifted the phone to his ear and dialed.
*****
June was devastated. She had always delighted in her father’s antic side, the elaborate soliloquies he’d launch into at the dinner table. Wednesday evening, with Ward in the empty chair near the window, he’d outdone himself over pork chops, his pastel companion playing straight-man in an extended bit about how dearly he loved his family, heights of exaggeration both overbroad and absolutely heartfelt, a staggering testament to her father’s burgeoning joy. But now, sitting with her parents in the deathwatch stillness of the living room, it felt as if her dad’s angel, having fled too quickly and too close, had sheared away his antic facade and exposed a cold hard layer of sheetrock she had never known before.
Be strong, June. Her angel made up the fourth, hovering above the carpet diagonally opposite June, who, carefully averting her eyes from Jeannie, felt penned now by her parents into the vertex of the L-shaped couch in the TV room. Her mother’s striated face hung in anguish over the clutch of her hands, off to June’s left. Her father, quietly haranguing her from the right, looked unnatural out of his suit and tie on a weekday.
“Listen, your mother and I apologize for shouting at you while that reporter was here,” he was saying. “But we were right to cut the interview short when it became clear you were still under Jameson’s spell and were about to dig yourself deeper.” She hadn’t liked the gum-chewing guppy-faced reporter, who smelled like piled grass clippings and whose lidded eyes concealed strangeness, but his questions had relieved for a while the twist of tension she had felt since being picked up at Ward’s, the dual parental stress wrenching at her gut. “I promise you we’re going to break that man, for all his ill-won fame and fortune. You don’t appreciate that now, I suppose. Possibly you think we’re being too harsh. But we’ve been where you are now; he got to all of us—the man’s an evil genius—but we pulled back in time. You’ve got to cultivate flexibility, resilience, a healthy skepticism. Your mother and I know how tempting it can be when you’re young to go for the easy fix, not to appreciate all the nuances, the hidden corners. Is any of this getting through?”
She saw the fear and anger in him, feeling it push at her face like a hot insistent hand. The phone rang.
We can get through this together. Her angel’s voice carried less assurance, faintly wavery like a radio signal threatening to break up.
“I . . . I don’t know
what to do,” June said.
“I’ll get it,” her mother said. She cut between June and Jeannie, knifing across the room’s surface tension and giving her daughter, whether intentionally or not, a space to gather breath. Her father shifted, easing off, but she knew it was nowhere near over; he planned to chisel at her faith, to wheedle and wheel like a squeamish kid trying to peel off a Band-Aid one micro-inch at a time.
They’ll give. Eventually they’ll lapse into sadness and look at one another and send you to your room.
More tomorrow, June thought.
Yes, more tomorrow; but you will have kept the center and that’s enough to win the war—maybe even enough to win back the seeds of your parent’s belief as well.
But her mother’s voice rose sharply from the kitchen. It seared across June’s ears. “No, you may not speak with June. Not now, not ever! How dare you call . . ? Now listen to me, little man: You don’t know what ‘sorry’ is; not yet you don’t, you and your grampa. But that’s about to change in a big way. We’re coming after you, all the decent people you turned into laughingstocks, and you’ll get a lesson in ‘sorry’ you’ll never forget.” The words jumbled out, more frantic and unhinged with every passing moment. Her father bounded up, crossing the room faster than June had ever seen him move and ripping the phone out of his wife’s hand, hugging her protectively to him as he bellowed into it. “YOU HEARD HER, YOU LITTLE SHIT! YOU COME NEAR JUNE AGAIN, YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT HER HARD, I’LL COME OVER THERE AND TEAR YOU APART!” He slammed down the phone.
Brace yourself.
June didn’t require any warning and she knew Jeannie understood that. It was more in the way of an uh-oh that builds swiftly inside as the tide too quickly turns. Her mother, all reserve gone, came stumbling across the room in a wounded-deer hobble. Her face streaming with tears yet hotly defiant like the face of a frustrated six-year-old fumbling over a puzzle beyond her capacity to solve, she collapsed against June on the couch, grabbing at her hand with a strength that frightened her and pressing it to her chest, pleading and simultaneously demanding that June come to her senses. Her father’s upset, surging in swiftly like a backup assault team, lent its cacophonous counterpoint, loud, red, angry, in-her-face so close she could smell his breath, how dare she upset her mother so, denying his own upset or compressing it to fuel the spew of invective he now blistered her ears with. It was too much. She had thought herself besieged before, but that, painful as it was, had been a casual grilling contrasted with the searing blowtorch blasts she now did her best to endure. She’d never seen them like this—people of quiet reserve turned inside out—yet they were her mom and dad, and the ties ran direct to the bone, numerous and strong and so tempting to yield to, patterns of thought she had unconsciously adopted growing up, these voices, the core beneath them hitherto glimpsed but now exposed in all its siren glory. It would be so easy to—
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 23