The Crash of Hennington

by Patrick Ness

  —Think anyone noticed? Where’d Archie go?

  —Home, I guess.

  —And you let him go?

  —You can’t force an octogenarian to do anything. There was nothing for him to do here, so he left.

  —Without even saying goodbye? I wanted to talk to him about Luther.

  —I don’t think he was in a talking mood.

  —What do you suppose happened there?

  —Hard to say. From what I gather, Luther Pickett has always been something of a closed book.

  —But Archie thought he was the sun and moon, everything that Thomas never turned out to be.

  —Thomas is as astute a businessman as his father.

  —Except his father probably won’t end up in jail—

  —Good evening, Cora. Albert.

  —Oh, shit.

  —It’s Jon Noth, isn’t it? Well, I’ll be damned. Come to make a nuisance of himself in the flesh.

  —A gentleman as always, Albert. You’ve never been able to open your mouth without betraying how common you are.

  —'Common'? Does anyone even say ‘common’ anymore?

  Cora intervened.

  —You’re not welcome here, Jon. You shouldn’t have even been allowed in.

  —Fortunately, they must have been looking for some sort of lunatic to breach security, which of course allowed me to slip in quite unnoticed. You do me a discredit by barring access, Cora. I come as a friend and admirer.

  —If you don’t leave this instant, Jon, I will have you escorted out as roughly as is legal.

  —Are you sure Albert wouldn’t want to do the honors himself?

  —I’ve just had a manicure, little man, and wouldn’t want to scuff a nail flicking off a flea.

  —Time’s up, Jon. Security!

  —Stop it, Cora. I’ll leave peacefully, I just wanted to—

  —I don’t care what you wanted. I won’t listen to a single further word.

  —All I wanted to say was—

  —Yes, ma’am?

  —This man is here without an invitation. Please escort him from the premises.

  —Cora—

  —Get him out of here now.

  Albert raised his glass again.

  —Goodbye, Jon! Lovely seeing you again.

  —How can you … Ah!

  —I’m dreadfully sorry everyone. Someone had a little too much to drink it seems. Ha ha ha ha ha. You know how unfortunate and embarrassing a little misplaced rowdiness can be. Go back to your conversations. Enjoy your evening.

  She turned back to Albert.

  —We’re leaving here at the first polite opportunity.

  —Just what I was going to suggest.

  —What could he possibly have wanted to say?

  —Probably something we’re better off not hearing.

  48. Jarvis’ Sermon About the Brandon Beach Massacre.

  I was not yet born when Brandon Beach happened. Even our most senior churchmembers wouldn’t have been more than children, but we’ve all heard the story through our grandparents. We’ve read the books. We’ve had the school lessons. It’s a tragic moment in Hennington history that we all, by rightful necessity, have learned about so that we may be ever watchful not to repeat the ugliness of the past. Brandon Beach is especially painful for the many, many Rumour members of our church. It is, as we all know, a lesson about racism, about the lengths people will go to out of fear, about mob mentality. But the lesson I draw for you today about Brandon Beach, a lesson that has been on my mind for some weeks now, is one for us all, Rumour and non-Rumour alike. It is the lesson of the abuse of the Sacraments.

  You all know the story. The economy of the world, and of Hennington itself, had finally blossomed twenty years after Pistolet’s death, and the sun was beginning to shine again on all of our grandparents and great-grandparents as they went about reassembling the world. The tooth-and-nail fight for survival had finally seemed to ebb, and society had seemed to reform. But then a wheat famine struck the Rumour Land. Hennington tried to help as much as it could, but the times were merely good, not exceptional. Things took a dark turn. Good people who could still remember the brutal rationing of the post-Pistolet years began to hoard food in collectives. Whole neighborhoods and communities began to set up private commissaries. A black market reappeared, trafficking in basic staples and foodstuffs.

  We know now, of course, that this was an over-reaction, that food stores would turn out to be sufficient, but lest we feel too condescending to our forebears, understand that the world then was a shaky, unstable place. We have ninety years of history behind us. That’s not a lot. Remember, though, that they had merely twenty years and many of them had managed to survive in that impossible time before the start of the Recent Histories, under the thumb of Pistolet’s madness. We can and should forgive them if they acted too hastily in the face of what they thought was their world collapsing all over again.

  What is harder to understand, yet still perhaps no less important to forgive, is the breakdown in the relations between Rumour and non-Rumour. What had for two decades been a full-fledged partnership to put life back in order, disintegrated virtually overnight because of the wheat famine. When starving Rumours moved north in large numbers to join families already settled in Hennington, resentments, as they have a way of doing, began to form.

  Fanning those resentments was, of all people, a Bondulay minister, a Rumour. Merrill Eycham.

  Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, Merrill Eycham railed against the influx of people from the Rumour Land. Moreover, there are tapes existent of his appearances on public service television shows, complaining about the drain on present-day resources, selling the idea that the immigrants would forever damage the fragile growth that Hennington had managed to achieve. His message was typical demagoguery, a man seeking to cement his own power across the backs of others, in this specific instance conjuring up the supposed ‘difference’ of the Rumours who were immigrating, making veiled references to skin color and so on. The only surprise here is that the people of the day allowed such a man power in the media. You would have thought the fear of a new Pistolet would have caused the people of Hennington to turn a deaf ear towards him. But again, I remind you that these were fragile times that seemed to be taking a turn for the worse, and in difficult hours finding someone to blame can be a dark comfort.

  There is of course the matter of Eycham being Rumour himself. History has often wondered why he quote-unquote ‘turned against his own people', especially by making the matter one of race against race. I do not know the answer to this. Perhaps he considered himself different from the immigrating Rumours because he had been born in Hennington, perhaps it was a cynical and shrewd use of his own race to stoke the fires of racism. If a Rumour is saying awful things about other Rumours, then like-minded non-Rumours could feel okay about agreeing without having to run counter to the unpleasantness they felt towards overt racism.

  I do not know Eycham’s justification, but I do know his motivation. I’ve read his sermons.

  And in a time of sunlight, a dark wind will encroach, obscuring the truth,

  And in the time of dark wind, a light wind will encroach, revealing the truth.

  The Book of Ultimates, Chapter 19, Verses 43 and 44. The last words in our Sacraments. We’ve all heard these words before. We as a church have always touched lightly on the Book of Ultimates, primarily because it is so open to interpretation. We do this to avoid division and schism among our own congregations. In this, we have been successful. I know personally this is the first sermon that I have preached since seminary that has focused on the Ultimates, a span of over twenty-five years. You all know this. It is accepted Bondulay doctrine.

  But I put it to you today, my beloved brothers and sisters, that perhaps we have been mistaken in skimming over the Ultimates. Not for the reasons you might think, not to look for prophecy, but to learn the lesson of misunderstood prophecy. I put it to you that Merrill Eycham started his crusade not just
because he was power-hungry, not just because he coveted the spotlight, but also because he interpreted these verses in such a way that inflamed the fears of an already worried community, that tragically led to violence and to the one hundred and seventy-nine deaths at Brandon Beach.

  Picture it if you can. The Dulcinea, a fishing boat, one of those big ones, four or five stories tall, more than two hundred meters from stem to stern. They had been at sea for more than four months, pulling in the huge summer catch, storing it in the refrigerated decks below, a catch that normally would have been exported but which was intended that year to help alleviate the famine in the Rumour Land. See in your mind’s eye an enormous ship, packed to the rafters with food intended to help the hungry and filled with fishermen who hadn’t set foot on land for four full months. Now picture if you can their despair when one of the ship’s engines fails and the ship has to limp into Hennington Harbor for repairs so it can make the now-relatively-short ocean journey southward to where hungry families await. Now imagine how that desperation multiplies when the other engine fails under the strain and they realize that the Dulcinea won’t even make it to the port inside the harbor and instead strands itself irrevocably on Brandon Beach where, in one of history’s horrible coincidences, the Reverend Merrill Eycham just happens to be holding a tent revival on a sweltering summer’s day.

  Now imagine yourself in that tent. Imagine sitting in a crowd of people overheated on both humidity and rhetoric. The Dulcinea beached itself at around three in the afternoon. The revival meeting had begun at seven that morning. Imagine having listened to Merrill Eycham rant about the prophecy of the dark wind for eight hours. Imagine hearing doom foretold with salvation only coming later from an unnamed ‘light wind'. Imagine the sweat making your church clothes stick to the sides of your body, even here on the seashore where the sea breezes seem to have died. Imagine turning your head at the great crashing sound of the Dulcinea hull plowing its way into the clay seabed, slamming great walls of mud out of the ground before coming to rest with a lurch up on dry sand itself. Now imagine seeing the dark tan skin of the Rumour fishermen scrambling around on deck, frantically trying to minimize the damage and do what they can to save the catch if at all possible. And now in this moment, you think to yourself, it’s the dark wind. And at the same time, your neighbor thinks it and his neighbor thinks it and his and his and so on and so on until it reaches the pulpit where Merrill Eycham stands and he says the words out loud: ‘It’s the dark wind'. And as if by silent command you stand. And you reach for something heavy to carry, your chair, a hymnal, even the Sacraments.

  There were one hundred and twenty-one fishermen on the Dulcinea. There were more than one thousand churchgoers in that oven of a revival tent. History reports to us that thirty-eight fishermen were bludgeoned to death right there on the beach, eleven were forcibly drowned, and the remaining seventy-two were burned alive when the wreck of the Dulcinea was set afire by the mob. Fifty-eight revivalists were also killed; at first it was thought by fishermen fighting back, but that seems to have happened in only eight or nine instances. The fishermen were overwhelmed so quickly that they barely had time to fight at all. No, the bulk of the revivalist deaths were caused by other revivalists, settling old scores perhaps, getting caught up in the heat of the moment. There are even reports of revivalists being killed when trying to shield some of the fishermen from attack. So there were brief flashes of humanity even amidst that crowd, but that humanity was rubbed out along with the fishermen.

  Blame the massacre on the economic climate of the day. Eycham’s light sentence afterwards would seem to be proof enough of that. Blame it on the shakiness of society itself at the time. Blame it on a generation not yet quite removed from the purges and violence of Pistolet’s reign. Blame it on simple fear that the life they had built was going to shimmer away. Blame it on a deep-seated, inflamed racism. Blame it on the heat of that sweltering afternoon.

  Perhaps it was all of these things. Certainly they each played a part. But the blame for those deaths, along with those of countless others who needlessly starved because the shipment never reached them, the real blame, I think can be rested squarely on the shoulders of Merrill Eycham who believed he was following the final words of the Sacraments, who built himself up to such a degree that he thought he was the vessel meant to fulfill a vague, obfuscatory prophecy, who ventured where he should not have and brought about the deaths of one hundred and seventy-nine people.

  I offer no further comment on this cautionary tale except the obvious. There are parts of the Sacraments that are vague, sometimes impenetrable, as here, but this was done, I believe, so that they could be all things to all people who seek Our Lord. Our Lord is a loving Lord who has given us the Sacraments as a way of finding Him, as a path to His never-ending love, but this is not a gift given without attendant responsibility. Any use of the Sacraments that does not further this purpose of bringing ourselves closer to Our Lord is an abuse of His Gift to us. We must be ever-watchful that we do not twist the Word of Our Lord into what it is not, into what we would rather hear, into anything that takes power away from the Sacraments and places it into the hands of a man. We have seen the potential for disaster. If we keep our eyes open, it is my hope that we will be able to keep it from ever happening again. This is my hope and my prayer.

  49. An Unexpected Intransigence.

  As difficult as it had been to have Archie tell him not to come back to his office, Luther had held out hope that their relationship was not completely severed, but as time passed, he kept not having the courage to visit, not having the strength to face Archie’s fury and hurt. Of course, the longer it took, the harder it got. Somehow, two weeks went by, then three, the days and nights piling weight onto his immobility. On an occasion or two, he had called Archie but had only gotten machines or Jules, who was surprisingly sympathetic but similarly unable to get Archie to the phone. Luther leapt every time his own rang, but it was only ever Peter.

  Peter. Lovely, lovely Peter. It was just possible that Peter was the only reason he was still alive. Certainly, the physical contact they shared was enough, once in a while, to remind him that he wasn’t alone, and Peter fed him and clothed him like a convalescent child, which in a sense was exactly right. All of the burdens that were supposed to have been lifted by making this decision had instead gained in gravity. Luther was wrong, totally, utterly, completely, absolutely wrong to think that he had a right to do this to Archie, and the painfully obvious results bore this out. Instead of solving his problem and giving himself a life filled with options and possibilities, he had destroyed his past in one fell swoop and left himself unable to enjoy or even greet his future.

  Peter, naturally, disagreed.

  —This is only a challenge. That’s all, nothing more. A big challenge, yes, but I know you. You can face it.

  —You don’t know me, Peter.

  —I learn more about you every day.

  —I’ve ruined everything.

  —If everything was ruined, I wouldn’t be here. I love you.

  I know you don’t quite believe me, but if we ever had a chance, here it is.

  The thing was, despite wanting to do so quite badly, Luther couldn’t believe him. He loved Peter, it was true, there was a small part of him that rejoiced at Peter’s presence, but that too was sullied and blackened by his destruction of Archie. Even taking the smallest joy from Peter seemed almost obscenely selfish. They had sex, of course, but Luther could barely bring himself to come and was often impotent. Some nights, he would have Peter fuck him and not even get an erection, doing it more for the pain at the beginning than for any pleasure that might come later. Not surprisingly, Peter caught on, and now he just held Luther when he couldn’t sleep, which by now had become every night.

  Finally, late into one evening, Peter wore him down.

  —You can’t go on like this. Some change has to be made or you’ll die.

  —What if I want to die?

  —You can’t
talk like that either. This is just a period of time. It will pass, and you’ll feel better. But you have to do something about it.

  —I can’t face him now. It’s been too long.

  —That’s not a choice you can make. You have to see him. You can’t move on without a resolution one way or the other.

  —Maybe.

  Which all eventually led to here, now, a shaved and showered Luther standing like a penitent before Jules’ desk and sweating waterfalls into a clean shirt that Peter had pressed.

  —Land o’ Goshen, look who’s here.

  —I need to see Archie.

  —I think that’s a terrific idea, but I’m not sure he’ll agree.

  —Could you tell him I’m here, please?

  —Yes, and for all of our sakes, I hope it goes well.

  Jules rang Archie in his office. Thomas heard Archie’s voice crackle over the speaker.

  —Yes?

  —Mr Banyon?

  —What is it, Jules?

  —Um—

  —Spit it out, I haven’t got all day.

  —Luther’s here to see you.

  —Luther.

  —Yes, sir, shall I send him in?

  The weeks, for Archie, had been nearly as bad. He told the Board Luther had departed for ‘personal reasons’ and then steadfastly refused to elaborate. There was no worry, he told them, he would merely stay on as Chairman for a bit longer until he could find a suitable replacement. He knew this didn’t wash, the Board knew this didn’t wash, but they also had never seen Archie so forcibly cheerful before, so terrifyingly large, a remarkable achievement from a man who had made a career out of largeness. They let the matter rest and privately speculated that the two men had had a falling out, one that, given Archie’s hot temper and Luther’s cool demeanor, had probably been a long time in coming and would work itself out sooner or later. Until then, they were resigned to curious watchfulness.

  A work tempest then commenced wherein Archie demoted fourteen different people; researched, initiated, took over, dismantled and sold a small car dealership conglomerate at a 34 per cent profit; changed the investment strategy for Banyon Enterprises Pension Funds twice at a .015 per cent loss; switched the name of his line of salad dressings from Green Valley Gardens to The Delighted Palate, against the advice of his Marketing Department, all of whom he summarily fired; and started a foundation in memory of his mother to help provide sporting equipment to financially strapped local schools. He was in the office late every night and every day on weekends, avoiding a house that was suddenly oppressive. Sitting there on his own, he could do nothing but think about Luther, and he just wasn’t ready to have any of that. God only knew when, but not yet.