A New Eden

by Quent Cordair

  He was even more gaunt and pale than she remembered, a length of raw lumber long left outdoors, smoothed and blanched by the elements. Taking a step inside, he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

  “How are you, Simon?” she asked. “You must be studying a lot.”

  “I don’t know if you heard, but I tested out of my classes at the end of last semester, after you left. I’m working towards the doctoral ministry program now. They say I could be finished in three years. Brother Lundquist himself has approved my course work going forward. He’s had me helping with the research for his new book and with his sermons.”

  “That’s so impressive, Simon. You’ve always been so dedicated.”

  “I’ll be doing my first missionary tour this summer. I’ll be away for three months. . . .”

  “You must be looking forward to that.”

  He glanced out the window. “I look forward to serving God with all my heart, body and soul, in whatever capacity He sees fit, bathem.”

  “Do you know where you’re going yet?”

  “We don’t usually get a choice, you know, but because of my grades, they say I can choose between Brazil, Malaysia or Nicaragua – ”

  “Oh, I think Brazil would be exciting. But I’ll bet you choose Nicaragua – your Spanish is quite good.”

  “I reminded the selection committee of my Spanish, but I’ll go wherever I’m most needed, of course.”

  “Of course. You must be excited to be seeing some of the world, getting out of the valley finally, at least for a while.”

  His eyes flashed questioningly. “If it weren’t for the need to spread the Prophet’s Message and God’s Word to the world, bathem, I would never leave. Not as long as . . .” He glanced at her, then away. “I suppose you won’t be sent out to a mission. You’re far too valuable here.”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “He would never send you. I’m still surprised he let you go to Los Angeles for as long as he did. How was it?”

  “It was great, actually. I think you would have enjoyed the filmmaking process, as much as you love drama.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing more than what I said. In your Youth Service sermons, you’re so very good at storytelling, at drawing the listener in with vivid details and making it all seem so real, and filmmaking is just professional storytelling, you know. I think it’s a wondrous, powerful medium.”

  “If you say so. I’m glad you’re back – I’m delivering my first pre-sermon in the main service tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s great, Simon! Brother Lundquist has always had such high hopes and expectations for you. I’ve always thought that he thinks of you almost as a son.”

  “We’re all God’s children – family – brothers and sisters in the Flock.”

  “Well, I’ve always thought of you as a brother.”

  He winced and stopped breathing momentarily.

  “I’m sorry, Simon, it was meant to be a compliment.”

  “Of course. No, I was just . . . I’m sorry. Anyway, it seemed you were gone longer than a few months. So, you were saying you liked Los Angeles?”

  “It was a whirlwind. It’s just a completely different world out there than what I had thought, so much busier and faster and – energetic.”

  “And you liked that? The movie-making went okay?”

  “It was fascinating, exciting. I’m intrigued by the whole process. I think my acting was adequate, though I’m always needing and trying to get better, of course, and there’s so much to learn. You should have heard the director. He was so funny. He’s German and has a thick accent, and sometimes when I would finish a scene, he would declare, ‘Mein Gott, Fräulein Skye, the whole vorlt vill fall in love vit you.’ He was always making me laugh.”

  “He is – older, I assume.”

  “Not so old. A quite handsome man, actually.”

  “He didn’t – touch you or anything, did he?”

  “Touch me? Oh, all the time. He had his hands all over me – shifting my position relative to the camera and to the other actors, making sure that I had my head tilted and turned just so, that my outfit was adjusted right. One time he used me as an example of good posture for the other actors, putting his hand on the small of my back and the other on my chest – ” She demonstrated.

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “Brother Simon! Obadites don’t gamble. We can’t bet.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  She smiled at him teasingly, then goofily until he had no choice but to smile back. “I’ve missed you, Simon.”

  “Have you?”

  “Of course I have.”

  He looked away to the window and swallowed.

  “So,” she said, extra brightly, “tell me how things are going with Passion. What part are you playing this year?”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about. Actually, that’s all I came to talk to you about. I got the part of John this year, finally. At least I have a few speaking lines now.”

  “Oh? Congratulations!”

  “And you’re Mary again, of course.”

  “Yes, again.”

  “Well, I was hoping that maybe we could rehearse our lines and blocking. Sister Tina has been standing in for you at rehearsals, and she’s just dreadful.”

  “Surely she’s not that bad.”

  “Compared to you, Skye, she’s that bad. But who wouldn’t be?”

  “I would love to rehearse with you, Simon, but I haven’t unpacked yet and I have so much to do before Early Worship. I have to go see Brother Lundquist, then after Worship there’s dinner, choir practice, then Passion rehearsal – maybe we can find a few minutes before rehearsal tonight? I re-read the script on the plane, and not much has changed from last year. We’ll be fine. And John only has a couple of lines – ” She regretted it the moment she said it, but it was true.

  “You’re always so busy, Skye. . . .”

  “I know. I’m so sorry, Simon. We’re both busy. I’ll try to arrive early for rehearsal tonight.”

  “I know you will. Thanks. Okay. Well, I should go, then.”

  He lingered. She went to him, stood toe to toe with him and, looking up into his eyes, projected all of the joy and happiness from her soul into his, until his eyes started to well. She embraced him with all of the affection and compassion she could muster, in spite of her fatigue. He responded stiffly, not knowing what to do with his hands. She stepped back, taking his hands in hers.

  “It’s good to see you again, Simon. Congratulations on being on the ministry track. You’ll be a great minister, no matter where you go.”

  “Thank you . . .” He managed a shallow smile as he turned to go.

  * * *

  She had started ironing a fresh blouse while still unpacking her suitcase when one of the second-year girls came through the door in a breathless rush, thrusting a sealed note ahead of her. On the front of the envelope “Skye Emberly” was written in neat cursive. Skye turned it over in her hands, examining it.

  “Who is this from, Katie?” Had the note been from anyone in the Flock, it more likely would have included the Flock’s standard “Sister” or “Sis.” in front of her name.

  “I don’t know, Sister Skye. It was on the front desk when I started my shift a few minutes ago.”

  “Thank you, Katie.”

  “You’re welcome, Sister Skye.”

  The girl took a step to leave but paused nervously.

  “Yes, Katie?”

  “I’m sorry, Sister Skye, but I just wanted to say how good it is to have you home again.”

  “Thank you, Katie. It’s good to be back, and it’s good to see you again. How’s your dog?”

  “You remembered! Pogo had to have surgery, but my folks say he’s much better now. I really miss him. . . .” She dabbed at her eyes but held the tears in bravely. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Sister Skye? May I finish ironing your blouse, or . . . ?”


  “No, but thank you, Katie. That’s very sweet of you to offer, but I think you’re supposed to be at the front desk, aren’t you?”

  The girl nodded, smiled shyly, and hurried off.

  Skye opened the envelope. The note was from Ian Argent. As she read it, her face paled.

  She hurriedly changed into the half-ironed blouse, grabbed her purse and headed out the door. She dashed back in, unplugged the iron, and hurried out again.

  * * *

  Jonathon was driving the van. From the age of six, Skye had been required to have a chaperone accompany her whenever she left the church campus. To her knowledge, she was the only member in the entire Flock who had ever been required to do so. When she asked Brother Lundquist about it, he only replied that God had special plans for her and that it was God’s will that she receive special protection. While all the other Flock children had only to worry about meeting curfews and being to classes and services on time, her own time and activities off campus were limited to what her chaperone would accommodate and allow. For nine long years, that chaperone had been Sister Flack – grumpy, stern-as-a-stump Sister Flack. When Sister Flack unexpectedly died in her sleep one night, Skye felt as if a ball and chain had been cut from her ankle, as if she had suddenly grown wings. Within hours of Sister Flack’s passing, Brother Lundquist had assigned her someone new.

  Jonathon Beam, only a year older than Skye, was an enormous improvement. Jonathon was enormous, period. Standing six-foot-seven, with shoulders as broad as an armoire, he had won the state heavyweight-wrestling championship for the Flock’s high school. Academics were a challenge for him – Skye, of her own accord, had taken to tutoring him on subjects he had difficulty with, which were most of them. Academic challenges aside, he was as gentle and sensitive as he was fearless and large. When Brother Lundquist preached about Christ’s suffering and death for the sins of all, making it so personal that no one in the auditorium could escape their own feeling of guilt, Jonathon would be among the first to have tears streaming down his face. When she wasn’t in the choir, Skye would sit next to him in services, reaching out to take his hand, comforting him when needed. Over the years, when he missed his family, as on the day he heard his grandmother had died, she would draw his big, curly-haired head down to her chest and rock him until he felt better. When she sang in the choir, especially when she soloed, she would make a point of finding him in the audience and singing some of the words just for him. Skye adored Jonathon. Jonathon worshiped Skye. As chaperone, he accompanied her wherever she wished to go and stayed for as long as she wished to stay.

  When he pulled the van up to Eileen Vasari’s, Skye was out of the vehicle almost before it had come to a stop. The dogs were ecstatic to see her and demanded her attention, but today she had to keep moving, petting them without slowing, promising more later. Max met her at the barn door and took her in his arms. It was Skye who spoke first.

  “Oh, Max. I only just heard. How is she?”

  “She’s fine, she’s fine – at least according to her. She checked herself out of the hospital this morning, and she’s back at work again now as though nothing happened. She doesn’t want to talk about it, you know, but maybe you’ll have better luck with that than me.”

  “Ian says she fainted during dinner. Did she fall? Was she hurt?”

  “She started listing in the middle of a sentence, and before I could get to her, she’d fallen right off her chair, onto the floor. She has a good bruise and bump on her forehead, which she thinks she’s hiding with makeup, but you’ll see it.”

  “Did they find out anything at the hospital? What was the diagnosis?”

  “I don’t know. She says it’s nothing. If you can pry anything out of her, please let me know, will you? She drove off on an ‘errand’ after we got back from the hospital and wouldn’t say where she was going. What if it happens again while she’s driving? What does she think she’s doing? She’s making it damned hard for me to concentrate on getting any work done around here, that’s what she’s doing.”

  Skye hugged him again. “I’ll see what I can find out, Max. But it’s so good to see you, regardless.”

  Max could only smile wanly. He didn’t try to reply – a man had to maintain his composure. He watched her walk past the tractor and back to the studio before he went out to Jonathon, who was occupied with the dogs. There was a pile of railroad ties behind the chicken coop that needed moving out to where he’d been building Eileen a new planter-box for her tomatoes. It was entirely possible that he had once had Jonathon move the same ties from the garden to the chicken coop, a couple of years ago – he couldn’t quite recall – but the young man was always more than happy to help, and Max wasn’t above inventing a task requiring great strength for the sheer pleasure of watching Jonathon accomplish it, considering it fair recompense for that summer day when Jonathon was ten or so. . . .

  Max had been splitting wood one morning when he turned to see young Jonathon sitting on a knee-high boulder nearby, watching him quietly – which was all well and good until, midway through splitting the next log, Max realized the boulder hadn’t been there previously. Before going in to lunch, he asked the boy to put the makeshift seat back where he found it. Jonathon picked up the boulder as if it were no heavier than an inflatable gym ball, put it on his shoulder, walked it over and set it back in its original place by the gate of the horse corral, some fifty feet away, without seeming to think he’d done anything extraordinary.

  On another occasion, the next summer, Jonathon had gone over the pasture fence to retrieve a baseball the children were playing with. Max had watched it all from the barn. At the time, there had been a half-grown young bull named Cyrus in the pasture, and Cyrus, unsurprisingly, took exception to Jonathon’s presence on his side of the fence. Before anyone could raise an alarm or react, the bull charged. At the sound of the hooves, Jonathon turned and calmly watched the beast’s approach. At the moment it expected to make contact, the bull found that the boy had slipped to the side. To Max, the cuff to the animal’s temple didn’t look like a particularly hard blow, but the bull went sideways and folded to the ground as if it had been shot. It lay there unmoving as Jonathon proceeded to retrieve the ball. On his way back to the fence, he stopped and knelt to check the bull’s condition, gently smacking its nose until it roused and struggled to rise. Jonathon helped it to its feet, lugging it up by its horns, patting it on its rump to send it tottering unsteadily away. From that day forward, whenever Jonathon would come over, he’d have a few marshmallows in his pocket, and Cyrus would meet him at the fence, letting Jonathon scratch him on the muzzle in return for a treat. Sometimes the boy would climb over the fence and grab Cyrus by the horns, and they would tussle and wrestle until panting and fatigued. It was a good match, those two, and it continued to be so as they both grew to full size and strength. Jonathon cried the day he learned that Cyrus had been sold.

  Max didn’t know why Jonathon had been assigned as Skye’s chaperone, though the young man was surely an improvement over the curdled Sister Flack. When Max asked Jonathon about it one day, Jonathon only knew that he took instructions directly from Brother Lundquist and only Brother Lundquist, that he was to make sure nothing ever happened to Skye, that he was to beware of strangers particularly.

  There was little the pastor had ever done or could do that Max might approve of, but Max couldn’t fault Lundquist for having someone keep an eye on Skye. A bodyguard the size of Jonathon seemed overdone, but the reality was that the girl seemed to cause a magnetic field of attraction anywhere she went. Jonathon had even been sent along on the trip to Los Angeles, but if there was anywhere a young lady as angelic as Skye might need a bodyguard, Max thought, it would be in the City of Angels. He didn’t know of any specific threat locally that Lundquist could be concerned about, but he was sure of one thing: with Jonathon at Skye’s side, God help anyone who attempted to harm the girl. A coroner might need dental records to help identify the offender’s body – assuming enough of th
e teeth could be found.

  * * *

  Eileen Vasari was at her modeling table, the light from the skylight above illuminating her work. Her back was no longer as straight as it had been. The joints of her fingers had grown knobby and stiff, but her hands still moved over the clay with a graceful flow, gently pushing, pulling, shaping, leading the clay to where her mind’s eye saw it should be. When she reached for a tool on the tray, there was no need to look – each instrument came from its place, each returned to its place, as each had done thousands of times before.

  Skye made only just enough noise to be heard as she entered and closed the door behind her. She approached quietly and stood closely, reverently.

  On the table, the figure of a woman was emerging from the clay – rough still, but coming into being. She was seated on the ground or floor, her legs half-bent beneath her and to the side, her weight resting on one hand, the arm extended. If her head were lowered, it might be a pose of despair or forlornness, but her head was raised and her other arm and hand were partially extended, reaching towards some unseen entity, as if in supplication or invitation. Which it would be would depend on the gesture of the hand and the expression in the face, both yet to be formed. But the emotion was already there, in the body – a stressed arch in the torso, a yearning.

  Skye laid her hands lightly on Eileen’s shoulders. “Oh, Amuma, she’ll be so beautiful. . . .”

  Eileen reached back and took Skye’s hands, leaning into the girl’s embrace. Amuma, one of the Basque words for grandmother, was the name Skye and her friends had always called her, a fragment of the ancient language that lingered in corners of the valley, the Old World tongue still spoken by the older generation, among the retired shepherds on the plaza’s park benches, between the weathered berets around the card table in the Elbow Room. Eileen had always responded in kind –