by Daniel Mills
Rain outside. The windows run with it, blurring the horizons, eliminating distance and perspective. I build up the fire and light a candle to see the page before me.
The storm is breaking. Thunderheads rupture with the gusting wind and hail spits down the roof-slates. A shutter has come loose upstairs. It bangs wildly, rips free, lands in the puddle where the gable empties.
On a day like this my mother left me at the gate to the Village and the stone house for which I am named. I was an infant, too young to remember, but Jerusha was a girl of nine when it happened and told me, later, how it was.
“The trees were shaking,” she said. “The wind was in their leaves and shredding them. The noise was such I feared for the children’s garden. I ran outside.”
“But this was in October,” I said. “The season was nearly past.”
“So it was. But the squashes weren’t yet picked and that is where I hid them, the dolls I’d made from cornstalks. I’d hollowed out a pumpkin which served them for a house. A mother, a father, and me their daughter. I couldn’t leave them. I went outside, though the trees about were pitching and groaning. An oak came down and shattered like glass where it fell.”
“You didn’t run? Weren’t you frightened?”
“I wasn’t thinking of it. My thoughts were all of the family I’d fashioned and the hell that was coming for them. Rain slapped my cheeks and blurred my sight but I lowered my head and pelted cross the garden to the place where they were hidden. I opened the pumpkin and gathered them out. I hid the dolls under my skirts and was making to run for the house when I heard from the gate a sound like hollering.”
“Me,” I said.
“You,” she said. “But I saw the woman first. She was at the gate in a crimson dress like none I’d seen, the color of it. The fabric shone like sparks from a flint in that evening dark with lightning cutting the sky. Her hair she wore pinned beneath a wide hat with a lacy brim like sometimes I saw in town. She didn’t speak. She only beckoned. And I knew as I shouldn’t but I went. She had a scent about her like crushed herbs or roses pressed in paper but nearer her I caught the tang of spoiled milk, which I thought peculiar, as her clothes were so fine. She carried at her breast a bundle of rags brown with dried blood or worse and this she held out to me. Plainly she meant for me to take it, but as I said, she wouldn’t speak or even look at me but pulled down her hat so the brim hid all and I never saw it, her face. Only the hands which gave you up to me.”
The dreaming haunts me, the music. Her voice like soft bells striking.
I woke tonight with the singing. The stove was out, the house turned cold. I struck a drunkard’s match and lit a candle. The flame stood up quickly, leaping to light the staircase as I climbed to the upper floor where the song doubled back on itself, echoing, circling round the candle’s flame so the words could be made out.
In yonder valley there flows sweet union—
My breath was visible, forming vapors in the candlelight and veiling the flame as I walked down the corridor, passing rooms unused in the years of my exile.
Let us arise and drink our fill.
The high notes piercing: puncturing bone, ringing the brain like a bell, and all sound ceasing when I reached the door to the nursery. My candle, upraised, showed only an empty room, an empty crib, a child’s horse faintly rocking. Overhead the ceiling appeared as lines of twilight where the slates had fallen away and the window was sealed with ice and frost in overlapping plates. The floor gleamed with old snowfall like the remnants of winter and no one to hear me when I spoke.
“Please,” I said, only that, and went downstairs.
Past midnight, and the singing lingers. The song is done, but the house keeps the memory, held fast in its walls and windows. Judah is awake, restless, a lion roused. He paces the lower rooms with claws unsheathed and clattering. He pauses to scrabble at the wall or balance on the window-frame with his forepaws. He presses his muzzle to the glass, looks east toward the pine-grove. The window fogs with his breath and he resumes his pacing.
“Judah,” I say, but he pays me no mind and will not listen though I urge him to lie down, to sleep. I have become as sounding brass: my voice jangles, fades, and is gone. The candle-flame flickers and dims, the dawn nearing, and I am alone in this house and only my own soul to haunt me. See its outline on the wall. See the thorns it wears.
Always in its shadow.
With these words the Elder Job had sought to comfort me when I was twelve and could not sleep for the longing which racked me. For days I had lain awake, terrified, heart’s blood beating down the dark. I hungered after the Gift, but the Gift eluded me, and I feared I might never feel the hand of God upon me or hear the angels singing. Their song: I craved the taste of it in my mouth as a man in the desert lusts after water. I would be purified, I thought. Cleansed of all that was rotten inside me. But the room was cold and silent and the blankets stank of my sin.
I sneaked downstairs to the library and lit a candle and applied myself to the study of the Word. Elder Job found me. Plainly, I was troubled, and the elder always was kind to me. He entered the room without admonishment and came to sit beside me. He did not speak but merely watched as I read, following my finger as it swept the shadowed page.
Behold the man, Christ said, and I closed the book.
The candle-flame wavered, went out. Job waited until I told him of what troubled me. When I was finished, he clasped my hand between his own and held it fiercely.
“You have come within the shadow,” he said. “It is well, David. It means the cross is near. The tree on which the living God was hung and where He died. It is behind you now as it is behind all men who must live always in its shadow. I say to you again: it is well. You must first pass through the dark of the cross that you might learn to take it up and follow.”
His voice was soft but urgent, pleading.
With the night between us, he told me, briefly, of his younger days. He was given to drink, he said, and gambling. A slave to the flesh and its impulses. He despised himself but was helpless to abstain from vice though it killed the living soul inside him.
“My life was all one shadow,” he said. “As yours is now, I know. You long to be made one with God, to sing in tongues of angels. But first you must cast off the flesh as Mother did before us. Do you understand? The cross is here. It is behind you. Have you eyes to see?”
Frost in the night but the day is warm. The mountains shrug off their burdens of snow. The pass to the south is open, though it comes nearly too late. The cornmeal is gone, the oats and tubers too, and only fish to see us through the coming days. The river teems with them but Judah will not go near the river and will not stray from the slate steps to join me at the hunt. He is frightened. Of the woods, perhaps, or of me. He broods, pacing, and will not be comforted.
Birds. This morning I heard them in the apple trees, singing to wake the earth to itself. Buds open with the sun’s rising, shedding the night’s chill and puncturing the prevailing gray. The soil is wet with snowmelt, good ground for tracking, and there were prints in the orchard this morning, moose-tracks, where the beast had paused to browse amongst the budding trees.
I followed them northward. The tracks continued into an old ravine, formerly a stream which fed the river. The channel is dry in summer but yesterday’s meltwater flooded the gully, flowing down swiftly from ridges above. The trail reached the water’s edge then vanished and did not reappear upon the opposite side of the gully where the streambed widened, draining to mud and shallow water. I listened for movement in the underbrush, steps in the dead leaves, but heard only birds, squirrels, the river plunging to the pass and the town six miles to the southeast.
I reached the river, wider here to the north of the pine grove, where the beavers had been at work. They had diverted a portion of the flow into a long, low shimmer fringed with reeds and tall grass and spruce trees forming rows beyond. Their lodge they built upon an island near the pond’s center with the door facing o
utward, a black circle.
I had given up the moose. I thought I might collect a beaver pelt instead and so concealed myself amidst the tall grass with the rifle to my shoulder when the moose stepped from the trees, floating into view with a soundless grace. The beaver pond was still, as were the woods all around, despite the warmth of spring, and the moose inclined his head to nibble at the buds of a stippled sapling.
I sighted down the barrel, drew back the hammer. The moose startled at the scrape of metal and turned its head toward me, antlers wide as my own arms spread, and I fired. The rifle discharged, catching the moose through the broad of its chest. He turned and galloped into the spruce trees, snapping branches as he ran down the last of his strength.
I shouldered the rifle by its strap then stood and skirted round the beaver-pond. I reached the striped maple with its buds eaten away, the bark peeled down its trunk. Moose tracks were visible in the mud, dark blood splashed in the grass and spattered up and down the maple’s length when he had wheeled then bolted away through the spruce trees, limbs all bent and broken to show where he had passed.
Into the spruces, their branches close. They whipped at my face and hands, abbreviating distance so I had no sight of the moose though the wound was surely mortal and his heart’s blood darkened the ground. A hundred paces more and the spruce-wood opened onto deciduous trees, leafless to give a view of the river, glinting through the crush of limbs.
The moose could not be seen, though the blood trail continued for longer than I thought possible. It led me to the riverbank, the waters foaming white beyond so I dared not attempt a crossing. The beast was surely weak, near dead, but somehow he had walked across and so the trail was lost. I turned back toward the beaver-pond, halting by the maple sapling at which the beast had fed. My fingernails settled into the grooves of the beast’s teeth, elongated half-moons where the inner wood showed palely.
I looked behind me to the ranks of spruce where a second tree was missing its bark. A sheet of it had cracked and dropped away, revealing a deep wound ringed in red where the heartwood had splintered. The bullet. With a knife I dug at the bark, widening the gouge in the wood til I could insert the blade’s tip and twist my wrist to wrench the bullet free. The bullet, flattened, rolled down the blade of my knife and landed on the ground.
I picked it up. The bullet was greased with red fluid, warm where it sat in the close of my palm. Strands of fibrous tissue were folded into the deformed metal, heart-muscle. My shot had passed through the moose’s chest, tearing it open in two places before lodging in the trunk of a spruce tree. Unthinkable the beast should have survived such a shot yet it had done so and there was nothing for it but to rinse the bullet in the pond and slip it back into the pocket of my coat.
The day passed.
I reloaded the rifle and waited out the light with no sign of beaver. I walked home at noon with the gun unfired, my belly empty, thinking of the moose I had seen and of the shot which struck it. His terror like mine in that instant when he felt the end at hand and sought for shelter, a place of hiding where he might die alone and unremembered.
The bullet is in my pocket. It is strangely heavy, of a weight to sink a drowning man. The corpse I buried. Or the Elder Job in his youth when he thought to end his life.
“I wanted only to hide myself,” he said. “The river was below me, flecked with light but with a blackness beneath. To vanish within it, I thought. I longed for it, to annihilate myself body and soul. I would drown and disappear and be like a child never born.”
We were in the workshop adjacent the stone house. Job labored over the forge while I worked the bellows which fired the blast. I was there to help him, to learn his trade, but mostly, we talked. At seventeen, the Gift had not yet come into me, though children half my age had received visions of heaven or heard the spirits singing. I doubted. I told the Elder of my despair and he showed to me his own.
The story he told happened when he was a young man of twenty-eight and accustomed to the living death which is the life of sin. He borrowed money he could not repay then took himself off to a riverboat where there was gambling and drink and in such quantity he soon lost everything, even his pocket-watch, and afterward, made for the upper deck to be sick.
His creditors were close-by. He spied them from the deck-railing: two men on the jetty with pipes in their mouths, thumbs hooked in their belt-loops. A third man climbed down to a skiff which would row him out to the riverboat. This man wore a green plaid suit and sat at ease in the boat with his walking-stick between his legs and hands folded over the curved top, sharpened steel like a butcher’s hook.
“He meant to rip me with it,” Job said. “To cut me like a common swine.”
The skiff drew near, cutting the water with each pull on the oars. The man in green looked up toward the boat and nodded to Job in recognition. He doffed his cap, half-smiling in the glow of the bobbing lanterns, and Job bolted to starboard, his head spinning.
The skiff drew up to port. He heard it: ropes thrown, caught, fastened. The waters roiled below him, the stars forming long shimmers between the waves. He larded his pockets with boat-hooks, one in each, then mounted the rail and stepped beyond.
The waters swallowed him. The current dragged him into that place of darkness, black as the shadow in which he lived with Christ dead on his tree behind him with arms spread wide to eclipse the sun—and like Christ he did not struggle but sank like a man already dead or indeed like one who had never lived.
“Such was my shame,” he said. “If I had not lived, I could not have fallen, and if I had not fallen, Christ could not have died for me.”
Sinking, he opened his mouth. He filled his lungs with the cold and plunged toward the river-bed with arms upraised and hands open, holding nothing. His chest was heavy with water, the boat-hooks dragging til he felt her hands upon him.
“A woman’s hands,” he said. “Or an angel’s.”
Woman or spirit she caught him by the shoulders and pulled him from the water, and when they reached the wooded shore, she leant her body over his to kiss him on the forehead. He slept and woke with a memory of her words to him.
“The cross is yours,” she said, and so it was.
The end of the story I knew already. Job gave up drink and the pleasures of the flesh and took up the cross as he was bid. In time he learned to shoulder it with ease, with something like grace. He came to the Church of Christ and to the Village where other Gifts were given to him, and in abundance, for these were the days of Mother's Work when the visitations of the angels were a commonplace. Job joined the brethren in their worship and danced with the spirit inside him, the holy words upon his lips. On the Sabbath he donned spiritual garments and ate of spectral food and drink which sustained him for days as the angels came and went among them and only their songs to show they had been there.
These songs we sang years later when Mother's Work was behind us and there were many among the brethren like myself who possessed only longing, for whom the duty of the cross meant weakness and failure, submission unto lust. Job's strength never wavered. At meeting he led the brothers in their ecstasy, whirling with them to cross the room with hands all joined while the strains of Eldress Rose’s voice floated down from the rafters: it lit upon the dancing men who lifted their heads to catch the notes in falling. For hours it went on like this with the men dancing and then the women until all were exhausted and the Gift broke upon them while I watched, and ached, and prayed in words which went unanswered.
I was like Cain, my sacrifice found wanting. Though I walked with God like Adam, He was silent and would not speak to me as He did so many others. The cross was on my shoulders but the Gifts of the Spirit were denied me, just as the tree was denied to Adam, who likewise yearned after the thing forbidden, until in his yearning, he fell.
Job sensed this, pleaded with me to be patient. “You are young,” he said. “The Gift will come to you as it did to me. The cross is yours, the angel said. And yours, David. Even
now you sink beneath its weight, the waters rising all round you. But you mustn’t despair. God is good: you will not be permitted to drown.”
He advised patience. The Gift would come, he said, and so it did, when I was three-and-twenty. It was on Sabbath. I lingered at the edge of the gathered fold as the lamb does who fears the shepherd. Eldress Rose, eldest among the sisters, spoke of a Gift she had received in the Era of Manifestations when a spirit came into her and for hours spoke in words which none could understand for none among them had received the Gift of interpreting prophecy.
Afterward, when the Supper was taken, songs sung, I watched the thought of angels move through the assembled brethren, passed along hand to hand until it fixed itself upon a young boy of perhaps ten who let fall from his lips a stream of queer syllables. His voice wavered, a lilting music, but his words—if they were words—evaporated and would have gone unremembered save for the sleeplessness with which I was afflicted, later that night, which kept me awake despite my exhaustion and the snores of my bed-mate beside me.
The songs ran through my head, the same as they do now. The notes sounded clear as glass in my skull, forming themselves into melodies which circled round me, dragging me down toward sleep. In that place between waking and dream I found I could recall with exacting rigor the boy’s song in every note and syllable.
Ash lach in
bi mor na, o
da rim a, e
o
I leapt from the bed and I think must have shouted, for my bed-mate started up with something like alarm about his face and said nothing though I dressed in the dark and ran down the corridor bare-footed. I rapped upon the door to the Elder’s study, where he often slept. He opened the door to me. His hair was tangled, nightclothes damp with sweat as from a nightmare, and his eyes appeared black and sunken without the spectacles he was accustomed to wear.