“Clearly,” she concluded, “the Bible reserves the term ‘lord’ for God and does not condone its use for earthly men.” She closed her Book, sat down, and balanced it on her blue-jeans-clad knees. She took pains to stifle any urge toward Pride.
All attention turned to Poppy, who had listened calmly throughout Ginger’s argument.
“There’s a reason why children in his house do not read the Word without guidance, my newest daughter, and you just reminded us of why. I, myself, never bothered to count how many times the Holy Spirit uses ‘lord’ in His book, but clearly — as you say — clearly you have built your foundation on sand. It would take only one exception to undermine your whole argument. And here is that exception.”
Poppy turned the pages of his Bible but stopped and closed it. “I have a better idea. Since you brought up the subject of Bible translations, I will show you the proof using your own false Bible.” He returned his own Bible to its holster on his belt and snapped it shut. He extended his hand and said, “If you don’t mind.”
Ginger, looking less certain than a moment before, went forward to hand him her Bible.
He took it and said, “Stay here so you can see with your own eyes and be instructed.”
Poppy weighed the book in his hand, thumbed through its pages, sniffed it, then turned to a chapter in the Book of Genesis and read:
Now Rachel had taken the household idols and put them in the camel’s saddle, and she sat on them. And Laban felt through all the tent but did not find them.
She said to her father, ‘Let not my lord be angry that I cannot rise before you, for the manner of women is upon me.’ So he searched but did not find the household idols.” (Gen 31:34, 35)
Poppy leaned toward her, pointing at the word in question with his stubby index finger. Ginger stared in disbelief, as though he had just conjured up the impossible. She went to her chair, but returned for her Bible.
“You’ll get it back,” Poppy said, tucking the book under his arm, “along with your phone when you leave.” He glanced at her legs and added, “And your manly clothes. My daughters will loan you womanly clothes to wear while you are here.”
Ginger still had some fight left in her. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the Bible. It’s mine, and I want it back.”
“Return to your seat and shut your mouth,” Poppy said, paraphrasing Paul’s message to the women of Corinth.
Ginger was stunned. She didn’t know what to do. And while she was still off balance, Poppy concluded Worship Time with a final thought.
“Therefore, our Lord Father God tells us in Obadiah, fourth verse, not to put our own selves up on a pedestal, or He’ll be obliged to knock us down. Let us give thanks, amen.”
“Amen!” echoed the household. The little ones stampeded to the tables and tucked in their napkins.
Poppy did not stay for dinner but told Deut to make him a tray and to bring it to the prayer cabin. He had a long evening’s worth of study ahead of him.
He left the house marveling at the cleverness of the Holy Spirit. Obadiah’s text had not only served to knock him off his own high horse in regards to blowing the angel’s trumpet, but it knocked that uppity girl down a few pegs as well. Only time would tell if she learned her lesson.
VW10 1.0
IN THE MORNING, Poppy returned to the machine room with an LED lantern, their most powerful flashlight, and a broom from the kitchen. First he examined the rock floor where the trumpet had disintegrated, but it was impossible to distinguish heavenly dust from decades worth of rock dust. So he swept it all up and deposited it in an empty cardboard carton to be stored securely. Some of the dust sparkled as it floated in the air.
Then he proceeded to the vast graveyard of obsolete machinery in the chamber and began searching for the golden marble. He got down on his ancient knees to check under the rusting hulks. He searched the entire chamber but couldn’t find it. He grew so weary of bending down and standing up that he had to take rest breaks. His lantern and flashlight, bright when he had started, were gradually losing their charge. They needed fresh batteries, and, frankly, so did he. Give me strength, Lord, to see things through to the end.
Poppy left the keep, and as he was climbing down the tailings slide, Adam arrived at the bottom on a sno-go pulling a freight sled. The weather had warmed overnight into the twenties below (–29 C) and their temperamental Skandic was running again. So, while Proverbs was assembling their new Arctic Cat sno-go on the parking lot, Adam, Hosea, and Corny resumed transferring supplies from the rental truck.
They had to leave the supplies at the foot of the slide, however, because the switchback turns were too sharp for sno-gos to negotiate. The final lift would have to be done by hand with toboggans.
At the bottom, Poppy watched his son unload the sled. Adam grew nervous and said, “Is the trumpet okay, lord? Proverbs claims that . . .”
Poppy waited to hear what Proverbs was claiming. He hadn’t instructed Proverbs to keep the matter secret; and he was curious. But Adam changed the subject, telling him how positive Sue’s first impressions were of their household.
“I only wish you didn’t call her my betrothed, you know, before I got a chance to pop the question myself. It made things . . . awkward, lord.”
“Listen,” Poppy said, cutting him off. “I want you to head out to where we chiseled the trumpet out of the ice. Collect the ice chips in a plastic bag and bring them to me.”
“Yes, lord. I’ll do that this afternoon.”
“No, do it now.”
“Yes, lord, except if I wait till Proverbs gets the new sno-go up and running, we can keep three sleds on the trail and —”
“Now. I said now.”
VW11 1.0
POPPY WAS STUDYING in the prayer cabin when Adam returned with the bag of ice chips. Poppy poured them into a coffee mug and set the mug next to the wood stove. He figured that some of the chips must have been in direct contact with the golden marble.
An hour later, he sniffed the meltwater. There was no odor, and the liquid was colorless and clear, like ordinary water. So he wetted a finger and tasted it. It tasted like meltwater with no hint or trace of wormwood. Praise Father God.
Still, the test results wouldn’t be final till he repeated it with the actual fallen star. Which continued to elude him in the machine room.
VW12 1.0
AFTER A MEAL and a nap, Poppy returned to the slide. Although he was still strong, he was old, and he loathed having to climb to the keep more than once a day. Plus, the fatigue he had experienced earlier in the day hadn’t lifted completely, despite the meal and nap.
The middle boys were already hauling supplies up the slide on their remaining plastic toboggans. Even burdened with heavy loads, they passed Poppy twice by the time he reached the top.
At the gate, he collared two of them, Ithy and Uzzie, and told them to follow him. They all donned hardhats and hiked the tunnel to the machine room.
An hour later, Uzzie found the golden marble. Being the smaller of the two boys, he had crawled under the wreck of the carriage of a steam-powered drill. The drill sprawled in pieces against the south wall of the chamber, directly below a large ventilation shaft.
“I still can’t reach it,” he yelled.
“Go fetch your brother the broom,” Poppy told Ithy.
The ventilation shafts handled the air exchange for the entire first level when the gate was shut. The system relied on natural convection to move the air up the twenty-foot (6 m) shaft. Poppy zipped his coat against the draft and yelled into the chamber behind him, “What’s taking you so long?”
Ithy returned with the broom and passed it to his brother under the machine.
“Got it!” Uzzie said, and a wobbly golden marble rolled into the open. Ithy gaped at it.
“Are you stupid?” Poppy asked him. “Bring it here.”
Ithy grunted as he picked up the marble. “It’s heavy,” he said, “and look — it’s got ears.”
&nbs
p; Poppy took the marble and was surprised that his boy was right; the marble was heavy, two or three times heavier than an equal amount of lead. He had’t noticed its weight while it was still attached to the trumpet. And it did have ear-like flaps, soft and pliable. Like they might have been their own marbles once upon a time but had lost their innards. They must have been hidden inside the trumpet mouthpiece.
“Will it explode?” Uzzie said, crawling out from under the machine and dusting himself off.
Poppy was about to criticize the whole notion of an explosion but checked himself. For all he knew, the marble might explode at that. He smiled at the boy, the smartest brat in the brood. With his innocent question, he had hinted where his father could keep such a valuable and mysterious bauble — in the powder room.
Poppy dismissed the boys. “Now git, the both of you, back to your chores.” But as they fled the machine room, he called Uzzie back. “Before you go, fetch me some water from the cistern.” He took a glass jar from a shelf and tipped its collection of metal washers into another jar of bolts. “Here, use this. Rinse it out good first.”
Poppy set the heavy marble on a workbench and turned on a lantern to get a good look at it. He leaned over to sniff it. Was that a hint of brimstone he smelled? He went to a far shelf to retrieve a tray laden with old padlocks. There were dozens of them, and they came in all sizes. The newest were Master locks dating from the middle of the 20th century. The oldest were heavy, old brass antiques with skeleton keys. Paper tags told where in the mine each lock had been used, but the ink on the tags had faded away. Poppy selected a relatively modern, case-hardened Master lock and threaded its keys onto his already overburdened keyring. He wrapped the marble in a rag to make it easier to carry. Then he leaned over and picked up the carton of trumpet dust.
The powder room was located on the same level as the machine room but deeper inside the mountain. Poppy carried his burden only so far as the ramp intersection, where he waited for the boy. Soon Uzzie’s footsteps echoed in the darkness above, and a moment later his headlamp lit up the ramp.
“Here, lord,” he said, handing his father the jar of spring water.
“No, you carry it. And that box. Follow me.”
With the boy in tow, Poppy continued up the first-level tunnel. They passed the mess room, where miners had once taken their meal and breaks. Beyond it, the powder room marked the spot where the tunnel began to narrow. The initial copper vein had petered out there, and the miners had shifted their attention to the second level.
The powder room was a small space no larger than a walk-in closet, and it was fitted with an extra-stout timber door. A wooden crate that once held blasting caps sat on a shelf. Poppy put the carton of dust next to it. He set the Mason jar on its own shelf and dropped the golden marble into it. The marble looked enormous in the water.
“What is that thing, lord?” Uzzie said.
That was a good question, and Poppy was impressed that the boy should ask it. Pity that Poppy didn’t have an answer yet.
“It was what was plugging up the trumpet so we couldn’t blow it,” he said. “What do you think it is?”
“Is the trumpet destroyed? Did Proverbs break it?”
“Nobody broke it. It just went away.”
“Went away where?”
“Here.” Poppy tapped the carton with his finger. “What’s left of it.”
When they left, Poppy padlocked the door.
VW13 1.0
BACK IN THE machine room, a few particles of floating dust wafted up the ventilation shaft and were deposited in the snow alongside the metal grating on the mountainside.
The Winged Spy
WS1 1.0
THE RAVEN WAS a large, fit male, as big as a small dog and twice as clever. There was a routine to its days as it searched for food, and it knew every scrap heap for miles around. When not scavenging, it often sat on the top of spruce trees or utility poles and cawed or chortled at the passing scene below.
One day while making its rounds, the raven spied something shiny on the side of a mountain. It detoured to take a closer look. The thing glittered in the sunlight in a most appealing way. After watching it from a stone ledge for a while, the bird glided down and landed not far from it. It was a sparkly flower, and the raven hopped closer to examine it, first with one eye and then with the other. Finally, it hopped right up next to it and seized it in its pliers-like beak.
But its beak stuck to the thing and the raven couldn’t let go. The bird struggled to break free, but only for a short while, as warm, gentle oblivion bubbled through its frisky mind.
THE RAVEN WADDLED about drunkenly with outstretched wings. To the red fox, observing from a snowy lair, the bird was injured and easy prey. The fox stalked it and pounced upon it. It seized the bird by the neck and gave it a terrific shake. But instead of feathers and flesh, the fox got only a mouthful of smoke and ashes. It abruptly abandoned its kill and fled down the mountainside.
THE FIRST FEW times the raven attempted to fly, it pitched forward and plowed into the snow. But it didn’t give up, and with each attempt it gained better control over its many competing parts. When it did achieve flight, it didn’t remain airborne for long but crashed, sometimes spectacularly. After each catastrophe, the bird was obliged to remain still awhile as its parts coalesced.
THE RAVEN FLEW far and wide. It circled the mostly vacant town and outlying camps and cabins. It loitered wherever it found living creatures to observe. It visited dump sites and fuel tanks. It spread its wings and climbed high into the sky to take in great swaths of countryside. It flew east as far as the Canadian border and Mt. Logan, south to the Bagley Ice Field, north to the Alcan Highway, and west to the Copper River and Glennallen. In all, it surveyed ten thousand square miles of territory (25,900 sq. km) that surrounded its point of origin.
UP AND DOWN, up and down, all the livelong day. The middle boys and their surviving plastic toboggans moved supplies, cordwood, and lumber up to the keep. Adam told the boys that they were at the age when hard work outdoors built solid muscles and deep lungs that would serve them for the rest of their lives. Proverbs told the boys that so much pulling would stretch their arms down to their knees and that they would become knuckle-draggers and unfit for human wives.
When Uzzie and Ithy were pulling their toboggans past the grove of trees at the base of the slide, Crissy Lou started barking at a raven perched atop a spruce tree.
“What’s her problem?” Ithy said.
“I don’t know,” Uzzie replied. He crouched and called the dog to him. She came, but she would not be soothed, and when the bird took flight, she tore herself from Uzzie’s grasp, berserk with rage.
Ithy said, “She don’t like that ol’ crow, it looks like.”
“She don’t,” Uzzie agreed.
COOKING; BAKING; DISHES; sweeping; mopping; dusting; childcare; homeschooling — though Ginger didn’t see much education going on — mending; doing everything for Mama P, including bathing, dressing, and feeding her; burning trash in an outdoor incinerator; making up beds; tending the rabbits and chickens. All this and so much more was considered girls’ work. Add the fact that there was no electricity or running water to simplify things, and bush living was nowhere near as romantic as Ginger had imagined.
And it wasn’t as if the boys’ work was any easier. Besides their relentless roles as family sherpas on the slide, the four middle boys (1 Corinthians, Solomon, Ithamar, and Uzziel) hauled water from the pump house to the kitchen. They kept the various wood bins full of firewood. They were in charge of emptying and cleaning all the honey buckets — a task that required constant reminding. Whenever a rabbit needed to be slaughtered, it was usually a boy who did the deed. In the spring, they and the elder boys tilled the garden, and they did most of the weeding and harvesting. They painted whatever needed to be painted, kept the footpaths clear of snow, and skinned the spruce poles needed for construction. Most of their chores took place outdoors, no matter the weather.
> By far, the most onerous of the girls’ chores, in Ginger’s opinion, was doing the laundry. The large family generated a mountain of it every day, and a daily load or two had to be done (except on the Lord’s Day) just to keep up.
Fortunately, the Prophecy family owned a washing machine — of sorts. It was a gasoline-powered Maytag model from the 1930s that Hosea had found rusting away in one of the sheds when the family first moved in. He replaced the engine with a new Kohler and added a hand crank to the rubber clothes wringer on top.
The bathhouse, not far from the big house, doubled as the family laundromat. Today the task fell to Deut and her shadow, Cora. Ginger helped out, carrying basket after basket of dirty laundry from the house. She helped lay the hose from the pump house and filled metal buckets on top of the barrel stove with water.
A big raven sat on the roof ridge of the toolshed watching them, and each time Ginger went by, she spoke to it. “I’ll bet you’re glad you don’t have to wear clothes, Mr. Raven.” The bird ruffled its shiny black feathers as if in sympathy. When Crissy Lou followed the boys home for lunch, she barked at the raven until it flew away.
The girls rolled the washing machine out to the little bathhouse porch and loaded it with steamy water and a load of laundry. Deut locked its casters and pull-started the engine. The old contraption, with belts and pulleys, chugged like a steam locomotive.
The girls retreated indoors to pull yesterday’s washing from a spiderweb of clotheslines to sort and fold, all the while supervising the little kids who were taking their baths.
After the washing machine had churned for ten minutes or so, Deut killed the engine and drained the tub right off the porch. The family’s laundry had already built up its own little glacier. They refilled the tub with cold water for a rinse cycle. Finally, after draining the rinse water, they wheeled the machine back indoors to crank the load, piece by piece, through the wringer and hang it up.
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