He turned in to the alley between the post office and the courthouse—he’d shoveled the brickway clear the day before—and crossed the courtyard to his door.
Gather’s apartment was on the ground floor of the carriage house, so he didn’t have to worry about navigating the treacherous wooden staircase tacked to the fieldstones of the exterior wall. The stairs were thick with ice and snow, because Miss Charlie, who lived upstairs, didn’t use them. Instead, she clambered up and down along the rope contrivances she engineered for bad batch men wealthy enough to afford her work. One was always hung through the trapdoor in the ceiling of Gather’s kitchen.
Before he opened his front door, Gather pulled a canvas tarp back from where it covered his rick. He took an armful of split yellow wood, well seasoned, for the kitchen stove. Yellow was native Virginia wood, not like the Pilgrim pines on the bank. Not good for making useful soil, but good enough for burning.
Inside, Gather found Miss Charlie working at his kitchen table. She was tipping the pepper seeds out of one of his twists and into a clay jar. Gather saw that she’d already emptied the other three—the dead papers were spread across the tabletop.
“You told me, Gather, I remember your very words, you said, ‘I don’t like those hot old things.’” Miss Charlie was suspended amongst pulleys and weights, testing a new configuration. She was wrapped up in one of the soft hides people made from deerskins sometimes. Getting them soft was hard—Gather’d had a job doing that for a while but he hadn’t been good enough at it.
“I can grow ’em in the house, though, Miss Charlie,” he said, then dumped the wood into the metal box beside the stove. “And if you share your dried apricots, I can make the spicy jelly the preachers like.”
“Strong thinking, Gather,” said Miss Charlie. “Stronger than you were doing this morning when you let that pack of children lead you off into trouble.” Gather started to say that they hadn’t gotten into trouble but he remembered a lesson: Not getting into trouble isn’t the same as not getting caught.
Miss Charlie untwisted the paper she held and smoothed it flat next to the others with her skinny, clever fingers. Miss Charlie was a scientist. Everything about her was skinny and clever.
She arranged the four papers into a pretty, even line. They were rectangular, but not the same rectangular as the oiled wood top of Gather’s kitchen table. The ratios of the different rectangles were plenty enough different, which was a good thing. If they’d been close-but-not-quite, it would have been upsetting.
Miss Charlie leaned over each of the papers in turn and examined them through her glass. Gather could see that there were letters on the papers.
“Is that writing the same as on the”—Gather thought of the word—“exempla you’ve got upstairs in your kitchen?” Gather glanced up at the open trapdoor. Miss Charlie looked up at him but forgot to take the glass away from her face, so her eyes were huge—one green, one brown.
“My laboratory,” she reminded him. “I’m a scientist, we don’t have kitchens. The ones I have upstairs have a little life in them. This writing here is stuck on dead paper.”
Gather was afraid that she might lecture him for a while then, which she sometimes did, but she was too distracted by her work. Her work, Gather remembered, was always the question at hand. The question at hand meant something Gather didn’t know about.
“And anyway,” said Miss Charlie, “I don’t think these letters written here are like the letters on my papers upstairs, or on coins. They’re more like the letters on the mayor’s stick, or in a bible. Not quite, but that’s closer.” Gather had seen the mayor’s stick before—he’d felt it before, the bad way, across his backside—but he’d never seen the inside of a bible, as only preachers were allowed to uncover their tops. Once one of his sisters had pointed out that if the preacher reading from it wore a glass, you could see the writing in the green glow reflecting off his face.
“The paper—the medium”—and she looked at him and raised her eyebrows the way she did when she used a word she wanted him to learn—“the paper is about the same as what I’ve seen before, though.”
Miss Charlie chewed on her thumbnail for a second, then said, “Let’s do an experiment.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”
“Hush,” said Miss Charlie. “It’ll be fine. I’ll go upstairs and get our aprons and goggles. You’d better go get a bucket of water.”
Miss Charlie swung up onto a rung threaded through the web of ropes hung from Gather’s ceiling, then hand-over-handed up to the laboratory above. Gather had never seen the laboratory except from this oblique angle. Oblique.
He felt a little bit concerned about what was likely to happen next, but Miss Charlie did outrank him, so he went back out into the courtyard to sweep snow into a saucepan, then popped it onto the stove for melting. Gather breathed the metal smell of the new water and hoped it wasn’t meant for an experiment that would leave him with less furniture, as so many of them had in the past.
The heavy leather aprons slapped onto the tile floor, then Miss Charlie dropped down onto the table, free of her harnesses and crouching on her skinny legs. Two pairs of leaded glass goggles hung from her cord belt.
“Suit up!” she said. “I’ll let them know at the hall that you worked for me today, get you some credit.”
Which was better than chopping holes in the river ice, so long as he finished the assignment intact.
Miss Charlie took four of Gather’s baking pans from the cupboard and laid them on the table. Gather liked to make cookies, when he could get eggs, and so had lots of pans. She laid each of the papers in its own tray and that made three different rectangles, three different ratios, with one table and four trays and four papers for the quantities. “Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”
Miss Charlie made comforting noises and slung the heavy apron over Gather’s head. “Put on your goggles, young man. How often do you get to play with fire?”
Not often. It was true that Gather did not often get to play with fire. But this wasn’t comforting.
The first part of the experiment was designed to determine if the paper could burn. Gather had never seen paper that would burn, but Miss Charlie claimed to have heard of it, to have heard of paper that would immolate. So Gather tonged a coal out of the stove and placed it squarely on each of the papers, one by one. That was called the scientific method.
None of the papers even curled up brown like burning things do when they start to burn, so Miss Charlie had Gather fetch down a rag from the cupboard while she pulled a tiny clay bottle from a pouch at her belt. She poured a scant two or three drops from the bottle into the water from Gather’s saucepan, then took the rag from Gather and swabbed it around and around. The water went from smelling of metal to smelling of lemons. Miss Charlie then squeezed the rag over the papers. Each of them flickered on and off once, then shriveled up, twisting back almost to how they’d looked when they still held pepper seeds.
“That’s a datum!” said Miss Charlie.
Which was very exciting, but it was well into the afternoon by then, and the children had coaxed Gather onto the river without his breakfast. Between those labors and now all this science, he was very nearly starved.
Since the pans were laid out, and since he had plenty of sugar and even a few eggs, the thing to do seemed to be to bake cookies. Miss Charlie, long resident above Gather’s kitchen, knew his baking and was very excited by this plan.
“I’ll do more on this tomorrow,” she said, and swept the papers together onto a single pan. While she cast around looking for a receptacle she might deem appropriate to carry the papers upstairs, Gather pulled a mixing bowl out from beneath the dry sink.
He went to set it on the table and saw the soaked, twisted papers gathered all together. He raised his hands above his shoulders and keened. He began to breathe in and out and in and out fast.
Miss Charlie took his hands and hummed. She breathed slower, slower, slower, slower�
��slow.
Then she saw the papers, too. She saw how’d they flickered back on and smoothly scuttled together into a new, single sheet. She saw that the words had crawled to the edges and she saw the finely detailed, heretic drawing that took up the center of the page.
“Why—” Miss Charlie was not a churchgoer, but she saw it. “Why, it’s God.”
How Miss Charlie convinced Gather not to go to the mayor or to the preachers with news of the picture was to: sing to him for one hour; tell him the names of all of his sisters that she’d ever known; give him the dried apricots she had tucked away in a burlap bag beneath the eaves in her apartment; promise him that the two of them knew as much about what God needed as anybody on the side of the river where people lived.
The whole time she was singing and listing and fetching and talking, Gather kept watching the paper on the table. It kept being God. God with people.
There was God, all of God, not just a little bit like on a coin, not just told about like in a sermon. All of God was on the papers on Gather’s table, and more. Because, unheard of! Untellable! There was a man with his hand on God’s flank and a woman kneeling next to God’s ferocious mouth. God, with people.
People lived on this side of the river. God lived on the other. Even should God want to cross, the river was too swift in the summer. The ice would not bear God’s weight in the winter.
It was impossible to know what to do, so Gather decided to let Miss Charlie decide. He was frightened, too frightened even to bake the cookies.
“I think there are three things we can do,” said Miss Charlie. “We have to choose one of these three things.” Miss Charlie held up three of her fingers and waved them around in a scientific way. Gather didn’t like threes. They made people mad. They were odd.
“Take it to a preacher,” she said, “but we’ve struck that already.” Gather saw then that she’d only started with three so that she could get to two right away, which was easier and soothing.
“We can hide it and never speak of it.” Miss Charlie looked at Gather very carefully when she offered that up. “Gather, could you do that? Could you never speak of it?”
Gather scrunched up his face and thought. “I think I would do a pretty good job for a pretty long time, Miss Charlie,” he said. “But I think that then I’d forget and tell.”
“That’s what I think would happen, too,” Miss Charlie said. “And I think you are very wise to be able to predict things like that. Don’t tell me you can’t be a scientist!”
“But what is number two?” Gather asked. He remembered that there were really only two.
“God…” Miss Charlie was thinking very hard. “God must be lost. God must need to get back across the river.”
Gather attended every Sunday service. Most times, it was the same preacher—the little green-eyed girl’s father—up there. Sometimes, though, if that preacher was away, then it was the mayor up there because he was the lay leader. There were even times when it was a different preacher altogether. And all of them did different homilies—a little bit different, anyway—and all of them always led three songs, an odd number of songs. But the thing that was always the same, no matter who was up there, was the way it ended, when they would say, “This is my God, and this is his body, and this is his blood.” And then everybody would eat the bread.
“Does God need to go across…” Gather paused. “Does God need to go back across, because otherwise, everybody will eat God all up?”
Miss Charlie could pitch her eyebrows up as steep as rooftops. “Yes, Gather,” she said. “Yes, I think that’s it exactly.”
Miss Charlie said that Gather should stop taking the work assignments he was given at the hall every morning. “You can work for me full-time,” she said. She tucked her bottom lip under her teeth, which meant she was performing a sum. “I have enough points for that to work for a time. For as long as we’ll need anyway.”
Gather had never had a permanent assignment. It was a comfortable distraction, even when Miss Charlie made him practice being quiet for the whole next morning before they went to arrange it with the mayor.
The mayor was outside the hall, watching preachers push wagons full of soil up the road to the chapterhouse. He spotted them as they approached and fled inside, but forgot to bar the door.
Miss Charlie marched straight past the glaring preachers and on through the door. Gather didn’t know whether his proscribed silence had started while they were still outside, but to be safe he didn’t answer their calls for him to lend his shoulder to their wagon wheel.
The big chimney in the hall had a poor draw, and the air was thick with smoke. The mayor had taken refuge behind his desk and was pushing beads back and forth on a calendar rod when Miss Charlie cornered him.
“Charlie,” said the mayor. “Charlie with the questions.”
“I want—” Miss Charlie began, but the mayor said, “No!”
He stood up suddenly and reached for his stick. Words ran around it in a loop, blinking on and off when he tamped it against the ground in time with his words to Miss Charlie.
“No, you cannot go to the chapterhouse. No, you cannot have an…exemplum of the soil before the preachers bless it. You cannot take a skiff south unless you pair with a bad batch man, and you will never have a bible!”
At that last, he struck the stone floor so hard that his stick made a buzzing noise and went dark. The three of them all stared at it together for a moment until it flashed back on.
“I want to hire Gather for the rest of the week,” said Miss Charlie.
Even in the dark, Gather was able to follow his sledge tracks from the PK morning back across the river. At first, Gather wanted to find a sledge and pull Miss Charlie on it, but she said that they were equal partners. She said that it was an equal endeavor.
At night, the fires in the watchtower seemed to burn as bright as a pinewood fire, but Gather knew they weren’t, not really. He had a job once hauling yellow logs out of the water and stacking them to dry by the watchtower fire, but only while the regular man was sick.
They were close enough to the fire for them to cast flickery shadows on the ice, but in the afternoon, Miss Charlie had gone to see the night watchman with some cookies she had made herself—unprecedented—and said that he would be sick tonight. He would not raise the hue and cry.
When they got to where the tracks ended, Gather said, “Shhhhh-choom,” as quietly as he could.
“Is that how God talks?” asked Miss Charlie, and Gather remembered that she could never have been so close to the other bank before.
“The only time I ever heard God was that morning, Miss Charlie,” said Gather. “And that is what God said.”
“Did you know that makes you a prophet, Gather? If you hear God, I mean?” she asked him.
“All those little girls heard it, too. Little prophets,” said Gather. “Little prophetesses.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she said. “Like on an initial hypothesis. Maybe you have to hear and listen both.”
Gather didn’t understand, but his feet were very cold from the nighttime ice. He shuffled the last few yards to the shoreline and noticed that he wasn’t afraid anymore. He reached his mittened hand up to a branch to steady himself, then gestured back to Miss Charlie. “Give me God,” he said. “I’ll put God up in this tree.”
Miss Charlie had wrapped God up in white clothes from the laboratory. Neutral. Sterile. She pulled the bundle out from the bottom of her leather pack. Mysteriously, she had filled the pack with food and blankets and tinder. She handed the bundle to Gather.
“When God is back on the bank, there, Gather, what about those people? What about the man and the woman with God?”
Gather lowered his hands to his sides. The bundle hung in the loose grip of his left mitten. He waited to see if Miss Charlie would keep talking, but she didn’t.
“Is this another experiment?” Gather asked her. He felt himself getting agitated and didn’t know whether to push i
t down.
“I don’t think so,” said Miss Charlie. “I think this is an exploration.”
That was another word to learn, so Gather said, “What does it mean?”
Miss Charlie put her mitten around the bundle and pressed it against Gather’s palm, so they were holding God there, holding God up and between them.
“I think it means we keep going,” she said.
Then there was no agitation in him, and no hesitation. Then there was some clarity in him. “I think so, too,” he said.
Sonny Liston Takes the Fall
Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrine Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer as well as the Locus Award, and she currently lives in southern New England, where she claims that she is engaged in murdering inoffensive potted plants and writing science fiction and fantasy.
Her most recent books are a science-fiction novel, Carnival, from Bantam Spectra; an urban fantasy, Whiskey and Water, forthcoming from Roc; and—with Sarah Monette—a Norse heroic fantasy called A Companion to Wolves, forthcoming from Tor.
I know that Bear is best known for her fantasy novels, and I’m familiar with her dark Lovecraftian stories because I’ve published some of them. But “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” is something very different from either.
1.
I gotta tell you, Jackie,” Sonny Liston said, “I lied to my wife about that. I gotta tell you, I took that fall.”
It was Christmas Eve, 1970, and Sonny Liston was about the farthest thing you could imagine from a handsome man. He had a furrowed brow and downcast hound-dog prisoner eyes that wouldn’t meet mine, and the matching furrows on either side of his broad, flat nose ran down to a broad, flat mouth under a pencil-thin mustache that was already out of fashion six years ago, when he was still King of the World.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 9