by Adam McOmber
Bill mulled this over, wondering if his purpose might possibly be to remain in physical proximity to Cal for the rest of his life.
“Spiritual improvement,” Cal continued, closing his eyes. “That’s what the Reverend Fellhorne says. Every man must build a temple.”
“A barn isn’t good enough?” Bill asked.
Cal laughed. “No, Bill. A barn is not.”
At the age of sixteen, without good warning, Cal began his studies to become a minister, working privately at the church with Revered Fellhorne, a red-faced prophet of damnation, and to Bill’s dismay, the ministry seemed to cool his friend, moving Cal toward some absolute zero in which no motion or life was possible. Cal stopped working at his family farm and then stopped coming to Bill’s for games. His skin took on a glassy sheen, as if transmogrified, becoming a delicate ornament that an old woman might be proud to sit on her shelf. He no longer drank root beer nor went swimming at Brook’s Pond. His white-blond hair turned into a field of icy thistles, and even his liquid eyes went hard.
On the day Cal announced his intention to follow the ministerial path, they were sitting on a bale of straw near the lowing cows, and Bill was kicking his boot against Cal’s, trying to knock the other boy’s foot into the air. Both had grown accustomed to these sorts of physical intrusions and though they usually ended in wrestling, neither seemed to mind. Cal was carrying the family Bible, a worn object with a soft hide cover, embossed with a faded Methodist cross. Already, he had begun to wear white clothes that matched his fine skin—a living snowstorm of shirt, suspenders and trousers, even going as far as buttoning a starched collar at his neck. “Bill, have you considered why the Bible has only two testaments?” Cal asked, hefting the book. “There’s the Old and the New—the book of the Father and book of the Son. But there are three members to the Trinity, isn’t that right?”
Bill shrugged, not accustomed to his friend playing at rhetoric. He wanted to rest his forehead against Cal’s neck which was still plain and strong because he’d only recently given up farm work, though this was an act he’d never dare attempt. “Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” Cal continued. “It’s the sort of question Reverend Fellhorne doesn’t much appreciate. He says that Abraham didn’t question God nor did Moses. But I think it’s important to work things out before you go preaching to other people, don’t you?” Cal let the Bible fall open between them. “How many pages do you see here?”
Looking down at the book, Bill was glad he was being asked to count instead of read. He had trouble with the ornamentation of King James and didn’t want to embarrass himself. Reading Jules Verne was easier, not to mention more interesting. “Two pages,” he answered. “Left and right, facing.”
“That’s how many I used to see too,” Cal said. “Only recently, while listening to a sermon from the reverend about the Holy Ghost did I begin to perceive the third page.” Cal touched the air between the two open Bible pages, pinching his fingers together as if holding something thin and vertical. “You have to learn to read the Testament of the Ghost,” he went on. “It’s not immediately visible, but once you gain the ability, you realize it’s the most important part of the book.”
Bill leaned forward, squinting. He wondered if Cal was making a metaphor or if he actually saw something there. “So what does the invisible page say?” Bill asked.
Cal grinned, the same saw-toothed expression he wore when Bill asked him to look through their tin can periscope and describe the gardens of the moon. “The Testament of the Holy Ghost doesn’t say words. It’s not that simple. It makes a noise like music.” Then he sang a few discordant notes, loud enough to make the swallows take wing.
“All right, all right. I heard enough of that,” Bill said, wincing.
“You know what the song means?” Cal asked.
Bill shook his head.
“It means I’m gonna be an important man,” Cal replied. “It means I have something to say.”
Without thinking, Bill grabbed the boy’s pale hand, brought it to his mouth and quickly kissed it. Cal recoiled as if burned. “What was that?”
“I’ve heard it’s what you do to important men,” Bill said.
Cal did not speak again. He lay in the straw studying the back of his hand as if Bill’s lips might have left a mark.
TWO YEARS MORE AND BILL HAD MARRIED Minarette Anderson who attested to not believing in any sort of god, a refreshing notion in farm country where everyone seemed to wear a wooden cross. It was generally agreed that Minarette’s atheism was part and parcel of her city ways and therefore mysteriously accepted by most. Minarette confided to Bill that Calvin Hascomb’s additions to Reverend Fellhorne’s sermons gave her a bad case of the chills. “He looks like a crazy person in all those white clothes,” she said one day when she and Bill were at a church picnic, watching Cal from some distance. “And when he talks about the Holy Ghost, I can’t help but picture some loosejawed ghoul hovering behind him, waiting to do his bidding. Who’s ever heard of an invisible testament that sings? He’d be laughed off the pulpit in Chicago.”
“It’s not like that, Min,” Bill said. “He’s not trying to harm anyone. He’s trying to nourish them.”
“Imagination can work both ways, Bill. Nourishment or disease, and your friend is a blight, clearly indicated by those clothes. My father has a similar sickness. He transforms it not into sermons for the pulpit but hollow dialogue for the stage.”
“Tell me more about those plays, why don’t you,” Bill said, wanting to change the subject and having heard little about Minarette’s family. Only her sister and cousin had attended the wedding.
“There’s very little to say,” she replied. “He is as cruel to his characters as he is to me.”
“What sort of cruelty?”
“A subtle kind,” she said, looking toward the lake.
“Is that why you never ask to go back to the city?”
“Partly,” she said. “For all its buildings, Chicago can be an empty place.”
He attempted to touch her hand on the gingham blanket, but she pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She attempted a smile. “Don’t be. I’m just feeling cold.”
Most of the time, Bill was fine with his wife’s temperature. In bed, she folded her hands over her stomach and lay staring up at the ceiling like a woman in a casket. Once he’d had gotten up the courage in the dark of their bedroom to ask why she’d married him—she so clearly did not think of him as a wife thought of a husband. Minarette took her time in answering this question. In a measured voice, she said, “I married you for the same reason you married me. Because I understand that much of life is theater.”
He waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t, he said, “How do you mean?”
Her small chest rose and fell beneath the neatly tied bow on her nightdress. “We all choose a stage,” she said. “If we choose poorly, no one comes to the show or worse yet, they bring rotten produce. People can be cruel if they do not appreciate your character, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Seems hard to believe a woman like you would come all the way out here and choose a farm as her stage.”
Even in the darkness he could see her discomfort, lips parted over teeth. “I didn’t choose a farm, Bill,” she said. “I chose a high and distant plain. I can be a woman of finery here because people are still foolish or kind enough to believe in such things.”
He shifted his weight in the bed, unsure of her meaning, then thinking about how the cook at Gardener’s Kitchen served Minarette a special plate, extra nice with all the trimmings, to make her feel at home. They held bolts of fabric for her at the general store, believing it was of a quality she might have encountered in the city. Mrs. Emmet at the post walked into the street to meet them and personally deliver Minarette’s exotic mail. He’d never considered that Chicago might not be the place they’d all imagined.
When he fell asleep that night, Bill found himself wandering through a city that leak
ed pistons and gears from its shadows. He called the names of everyone he knew until his throat went dry and his voice would no longer make a sound. Finally he leaned against a wall, exhausted and hardly believing that after all those years of yearning to leave the farm, he’d come to understand that there was nowhere else to go.
THE WAGON WAS HALF FULL of wheat and a great hill of chaff had accumulated behind the McCormick. Bill adjusted the throttle, listening closely to the engine for distress. He watched the road, hopeful still for Cal’s wagon. He’d sent a letter into town with another farmer days ago and wrote only that he wanted to talk before Cal’s leaving. He hadn’t seen his friend for months except at church where the barely recognizable figure in white sat at the right hand of Reverend Fellhorne, sometimes standing to preach near the end of the service, but then disappearing behind a polished oak door before Bill could detain him. Cal no longer seemed to walk on the ground as other people did but rather floated through an invisible ether, perhaps supported by the hand of the Holy Ghost itself. Bill worried that Cal might come permanently unteathered from this town and this cluster of insignificant farms. He’d slip off into the stratosphere, as Minarette must have done when she left Chicago. But he would not let Cal go off to Toledo like that. He would have his say.
As for when exactly he’d decided on what to say, he wasn’t sure, but knew it had occurred to him around the same time as Minarette’s speech about life being theater. Bill understood that one way to ensure a man did not continue to devote his life to the ministry was to draw back the curtain and show him that there was, in fact, no such thing as a God. Or even if there was, He was a small and distant body, and there were more fulfilling idols here on Earth. Bill had decided to play out a scene. He wanted to take Cal into the orchard and lift an apple from a branch. He imagined the sheep mingling around them, ringing their bells as Catholic altar boys did when a host was raised. Transubstantiation—Bill had learned the word from Minarette who’d been raised Catholic because her father appreciated the grandeur of High Mass. If bread could become a body, then the apple might become a whole world. He and Cal could play out a final story together—a new creation in which there was no Fall. Instead, they would be enfolded in the garden. They could remain there, isolated. If there was no city that offered true escape, then they would invent a place as they had when they were boys. Bill understood, of course, that they were no longer children and games of the imagination could only go so far, yet he thought such a diversion might be enough to catch Cal’s attention, to remind him what they had once been.
When working out exactly what to say, he’d even gone as far as asking Minarette for help, approaching her while she was busy with one of her cross-stitches which, unlike his mother’s country patterns, revealed the image of some ancient temple covered in statuary. “Min,” he said, dragging the tip of his boot along the seam of the floorboard, “if you were—well—if you were lacking in the adoration that you currently garner, how might you attempt to draw such attention?”
She glanced at him. “Are you trying to seduce the horses again, Bill, because that isn’t going to work.”
“I’m just interested. I mean, you seem to have some sort of power. Even those who are obstinate eventually fall into step.”
“I practice witchcraft,” she said, poking her needle through the fabric.
“Be serious, Min.”
She sighed, looking at him with dark eyes. “If you want someone to care for you, Bill, you must be straightforward. Simply tell that person what you require. Be bold to the point of belligerence. You’d be surprised what people are willing to give if you simply ask for it.”
“A straightforward dialogue,” he said, beginning to walk away. Minarette called him back, voice softer than usual. “The question is, whose affections do you want to acquire, Bill?” When he turned, he saw she’d put her cross-stitch aside, and he found he could not answer. “Not mine,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was barely audible even in the silent parlor.
“No need for apologies,” she replied. “We’re beyond that. But asking for affection can be dangerous business. One of my father’s early plays was called All the Birds of Africa. A mess of a drama, though it did have something to say. He didn’t know the first thing about the continent, of course, and made up most of the details, using poorly digested bits of anthropology. But the general plot concerned a group of missionaries making their way down the Congo, attempting conversions at every port. They told everyone they met that God was love and that He wanted nothing more than to receive their love in return. The missionaries traveled in a houseboat painted boldly with crosses, and they sang hymns to the crocodiles. Most of their failures at conversion were caused not by their own actions but by a series of absurd accidents and intrusions. My father contrived these events to make the missionaries look like fools because he enjoyed that sort of embarrassment. These men and women, who’d begun their adventure with pride in their hearts, fell deeper and deeper into the sort of despair and lust that my father often wrote about. In the end, the missionaries agreed to set fire to their boat and surrender themselves to the whims of the Congo, knowing they might die or be swept to a place where no one knew who they were. They decided to unmake themselves because life was not worth as much as they thought. More than that, they were not worth as much.”
“That’s a grim story,” Bill said. “I’d be surprised if anyone would want to see that.”
“People flocked to it,” Minarette replied. “They applauded loudly at the end when the actors took their bow in front of the ridiculous burning boat. There are people, Bill, who enjoy seeing things burn because that is the way they think the world should be.”
“I can’t say I understand that point of view.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you can’t.”
THE SUN HAD DIPPED toward the western field, and Bill paused for a moment at his work, allowing the McCormick to tear and cut the wheat already in its gut. He passed one hand across his brow and squinted at the road. Still there was no sign of Cal’s wagon, but the moon had risen, and it seemed for a moment to act as a kind of proxy, glowing and pale like his friend, suspended by some unseen force. He did not realize Minarette had come outside until she was standing directly in front of him, holding a tin cup of water. Bill took it from her and drank, and she spoke to him, but he could barely hear her words over the cacophony—something about dinner—his parents coming home—maybe something about how she was sorry how things had worked out. She touched his arm lightly then turned away before he could question her, ascending the porch steps with the hem of her dress gathered in one hand so it did not drag. When Bill turned back to the thresher, he saw the flywheel was turning more slowly than it should have been and the engine was whining, begging for its steam to be released. In a matter of moments, the boiler began to shake and hiss, and Bill knew he needed to adjust the throttle but found that he could barely move. His legs were heavy, as were his arms. The platform atop the engine seemed miles away.
The clatter and whine of the thresher and its engine were developing a kind of rhythm—a strange music. Bill thought of the invisible Book of the Holy Ghost, the way it sang a song that only Cal could hear, and he wondered if his old friend would be able to hear the thresher singing too. He realized that if he turned toward the road at that moment, he might be able to catch a glimpse of Cal himself standing there, arms crossed and grinning as if he were still a boy. Cal wasn’t coming from town. He’d been standing there all along, watching the work, watching Bill’s definite and continued existence. Cal knew that the right kind of music made the invisible become visible. And now that Bill was finally ready to see—it was too late. The thresher’s song was nearly through.
Of Wool
THE ATTIC SHUTTER cast a ribwork of sunlight across the surface of the rug, illuminating the figures. The longer Aubrey studied the humped and trudging things, the more he thought they might be an attempt to represent some prehistoric
ancestor of the modern pig, though the amateur work of the weaver made it difficult to tell. The animals were woolly-faced with no proper snout, and instead of hooves, they had what looked like singleknuckled fingers. Their eyes were milk-white and hard like the horny tusks that protruded from their jaws, and the rug maker had glued hair to the fraying wool of their underbellies—long, decadent strands of gray that seemed to drag along the ground as the pigs followed the corded road past cottages thatched with yellow wool. In the distance stood the ruin of a once fine farmhouse. Rot had effaced the second story, and only one of a broken gable remained. A shadow protruded from its window, likely the result of an awkward knot, though Aubrey thought it also looked as if someone beneath was pressing a finger to the wool.
The world in the rug was not meant to reflect Aubrey’s own. Being the grandson of Bird Heidler, he was accustomed to this sort of exclusion. “Sisal and wool, horsehair and dye,” Bird had once told a darkened auditorium of graduate students, “these substances are brought together by the woman’s hand to become the architecture of her invisible self. Like the spider, she is enlarged by her creation. She is rug and hearth, house and landscape.” On the large screen behind Bird, an image of one of her more famous endeavors appeared—the piece Aubrey thought of as “Rug with Womb.” Students shifted in their seats for a better view. The rug, woven from fisherman’s rope that Bird had unbraided by hand, didn’t rest on a flat plain. Instead, a shapeless cone rose from the weft, creating a sort of mouth. As a child, Aubrey thought of this rug as a place to hide, a comfortable enclosure for dreaming, but from an adult perspective, the piece seemed like maybe it wanted to be fed.
The rug Aubrey found in the attic was nothing like one of Bird’s abstractions. Less refined, less intellectual—it was a narrative rug, but what was the story? Prehistoric pigs lay siege on an old house? He knelt in the dust, wondering if this might be one of Bird’s early attempts. A failure stowed away? The whole thing stank of mordant: an acrid smelling fixative that Aubrey recognized from Bird’s studio. She’d told him once that mordant meant “to bite”—aptly named, she’d said, because of the way the chemical fastened to woolen fibers. She’d snapped her teeth at him in good humor. Aubrey had dislodged the rug from a pile of broken boxes filled with vintage issues of Life magazine, all from the fifties and sixties when Bird’s star was on the rise. The covers showed pastel images of the Kennedys and photographs of the unknown depths of outer space. Aubrey, in a T-shirt and jeans, had set out to make a catalogue of the attic’s artifacts that afternoon but never expected to discover something as important as a lost rug.