by A. R. Moxon
When he removes the paper, the world’s gone back the way it was before. Only the etching tells of the way it’s been: the forge, the fountain, the bird.
Appetite for a walk or a sketch utterly vanished, Landrude turns and walks back down the greenway toward home. Before long, the walk becomes a run, etching still clutched in one hand, pencil in the other, running from the greenway as if pursued by some numinous beast. He knows already he’ll never walk that way again.
There’s a flood of relief as the door closes behind. Hand trembling, he allows the paper with the rubbing to fall to the foyer floor and stumbles in, trying not to think of brain tumors or even worse fates—God damn, but what the hell was that, anyway? At least he has the rubbing as proof; it still shows forge fountain bird, proof that his experience was a real one—though whether that proof is a comfort or not, he can’t say.
Landrude makes for the kitchen to pour himself something to take the edge off—it’s only Tuesday, but after this, he decides it’s allowable. Returning with his drink in hand, he stops and stares.
The paper lying in the foyer has changed into something different.
Even from here he can see it’s his own work, but he has no memory of crafting it. Picking it up, he can see it’s finished work. Glossy, torn from a published book. A page, split into two vertical panels of equal width: On the left, a view of some boardwalk, some corny carnival, gift shops and the hillbilly revues. Rubes and slickers and tourists lined up, faces tacky with partially moistened cotton candy, lips salty with remnants of fried pork skin, holding their prematurely obese children roughly by the upper arm, all standing awaiting their turn in the latest thrill ride—can you even call it a “ride”? A harness affixed to taut rubber bands has sent the passenger screaming up up up into the night air; the panel is drawn from a low angle looking up so you can see him, just a speck of yellow and red way up there. Soon he’ll be careering, newly weightless, back down again.
Here, on the right panel, the view has reversed itself; now it looks down at the crowd from high in the air, where the passenger, just a boy in a mustard-and-ketch-up T-shirt, has—disgusting!—in his sudden gutless nausea spewed a parabola of yellow over the ground and crowd below, the vomit lit up ghastly and vivid in the flashing lights of the rides and of the midway and from the spotlight from the Big Red Comedy Barn, yellow ropes of disgusting half-digested candy and ice cream and hot dog, trapped on the page, stories above the earth, mere seconds before the elastic will catch it and him already crying from fear and relief and the shame and surprise of sickness. And, in the panel’s corner, a caption:
Remember this boy. Remember everything.
If you forget, did it ever happen?
Remember everything.
Too late, the thing that’s been bothering him resolves itself in his mind: the slightest lingering scent of cigarette smoke—But you live alone, and you don’t smoke cigarettes.
“So,” a voice says from behind him. “You’re the one.”
Landrude turns. There, in his study, beside a door that has never been there before, a man regards him with something like loathing. But not just any man, no. He’s wearing a suit, too. It’s gray, not powder blue, but in all other ways…
“You look just like me,” Landrude says, dumbly.
“Yes,” the man replies. “I warrant on the other side, you’ll look just like me.”
To this, Landrude can only blink.
“Better make yourself ready,” the man says, drawing briskly nearer.
“Wait,” Landrude says. He walks backward and the man follows, until they’re crowded up against his own front door. “Wait,” he says: “Wait.” But the man doesn’t wait.
“You haven’t given me your name,” Landrude says inanely, his head swimming.
“No, but you’ll give me yours,” the other says, and then he removes his hand from the inner coat pocket and plunges the needle of a syringe into Landrude’s neck.
FOUNTAIN
Father. Father Julius.
Father.
Good. I thought you’d drifted out there for a minute. Let’s key key keep you in the waking world, Father. I don’t want you to sink and not come back out. Stay with me, now. Eyes open? Good. I’ll tell you my story. You ought to know, especially now you’ve got Morris after you, too.
I was a historian once. Did I tell you that already? Specializing in the colonial and pre-colonial mid-South? I taught at Henvine College in Knoxville. Have you heard of it? Father?
Well, that’s where I taught. My name was Sterling Shirker. Professor Sterling Shirker, if you please. Chair of Appalachian Studies.
I took a sabbatical that year, to conduct research for a book on the settlement economies of the Great Smoky Mountains during the time of the Colonies. Digging through local archives in small towns founded centuries before, when Appalachia really was the fringe. Anything past that was the territory of wild men and French trappers and tribes. No regular roads, nothing cultivated, no access to the amenities, nothing out there but the big “who knows.” Imagine living in that, back then, Father. Imagine living with that gap in your knowledge of what truly exists, only hours away as the crow flies. Anything at all could be out there, waiting. Nowadays you could wake up in Richmond and find yourself by sundown in Arkansas, Louisiana, East Texas, but back then, you might not even have heard of the mountains, or you might have thought them a rumor. Who knows what’s out there? Or how far back it goes? Who knows what’s in it? Trees nestled so thick they block the sun, for hundreds of miles. Back then, it was still possible to believe in the world’s end, some boundary where it all finished, where you might jump and fall forever.
Think about that. Everything is known today. We’re jaded in our mobility, apathetic, starved of mystery. Nothing new beneath the sun and stars, that’s what I thought.
That’s what I thought.
See, my mistake was I considered history something separate from the present. I liked to turn rocks over and see what lay underneath. But I thought of history in terms of archeology, not biology. I never expected to find anything still crawling around underneath.
What I found was the most amazing—
Father.
Father, wake up. Come on now. I’m talking here.
Gordon came along with me. His mother, too. Didn’t she? Was she with us then? Sometimes, in my memory, she was there the whole time. But she wasn’t there when Morris caught us. They can’t both be right, and I can never decide which it is. It’s jumbled up. Some memories I’ve kept. Some, I was the only one who kept them. Others are gone. I’ve been trying to gather it all back to me, but I’ve law law lost my wife along the way, somewhere in there. The cheese has just melted into the into the into the bread. I can’t work out how to separate them out any more. It all changed, see…more than once, I think.
I’m not going to think about that, Father. I’m not.
I’d mapped out my summer research tour the spring before. Dozens of towns, mostly small, founded before 1810, with long-established libraries. The plan was to travel cheap, sneak my way into the archives, photocopy anything relevant, move down the highway.
Gordon I let wander—in Pigeon Forge, particularly. A boy in the eternal youth of summer vacation, set free in a spot more amusement park than town. Doubt I could’ve kept him from it if I tried—not that I tried. The times were different; things felt safer…and I was distracted by my work. This was back before all this stuff was available on computers you hold in your hand, before you could use the same device to magically photograph all this stuff. Research actually involved physical search. Stacks, archives, card files, microfiche. I had to copy everything out by hand, sometimes working with materials so delicate that you had to turn their pages with a pair of tweezers. Or I had to thumb through thousands of discs of microfiche just to cross-reference a line. Like panning for gold, which is in a way what it is. When yo
u’re an academic, the thing you want to do is find something big. Something novel. Something to launch you out of the fusty world of trade journals and out into the public consciousness. Produce a book that hits the zeitgeist just right, you can be a wunderkind on the intellectual talk show circuit. Then you’ve made it. So you see, ostensibly, I was researching a paper on economic trends in late 1700s Appalachia, but the reality was I was panning the dry riverbed of that topic for gold, searching for a magic conceptual trampoline that would bounce me right through fame’s third-story window into a rock-star lifestyle of the mind.
And Pigeon Forge was, as I say, a natural stop. I was interested in the mill, which boomed in the early days, late 1700s through the first half of the nineteenth century, then went quiet after the Civil War. I figured it might make a good section in my book, likely a chapter of its own, tracing the progression of boom and bust and boom. I wanted to at least get to the bottom of the mill’s sudden fade from the scene. But what I found in Pigeon Forge wasn’t a chapter. It was the golden trampoline.
As soon as we got situated in our small rental, I went back to the library and started tossing the joint, as methodically and quietly as possible. I was a little over a week at it, and nowhere near about to give up, when I found a prize hidden behind the other books on the shelf. A heavy black tome, leather-bound, self-published: A Familial History of the Love Family, Volume 1, written by a recent scion of Pigeon Forge’s first family. Secreted between the pages I discovered loose papers, each sheet carefully preserved in a sleeve of plastic. These were handwritten by Margaret Rambo, another of Pigeon Forge’s earliest settlers. And her story…Oh mama. Paydirt. Hyper-intellectual talk circuit, here I come. I started to think about radio interviews, NPR, write-ups in TIME, Newsweek. It’s not pretty to admit this, but some mornings I even spent a bit of mirror-time rehearsing the things I would say at awards ceremonies.
But that was before those pages changed on me, and everything else along with.
I brought my research goodies to the Smoky Mountains Historical Institute to search for corroborating sources. Befriended the lonesome docent, and received access to a backroom with a desk I could use as my base of operations. I had Margaret Rambo’s ancient pages—my treasures. And, I had the book within which they’d been hidden; the local history, self-published sometime in the seventies, a particular history of a town founded on a smithy and forge, then later a sawmill and water wheel, a town whose fortunes grew and stabilized and ebbed and rose and fell in familiar ways, until the late sixties, when enterprising out-of-towners zoned an entire main drag for tourism and entertainment, and it became what it now is. How did a colonial settlement that formed around a smithy and a mill eventually become that? With the Rambo letters, I had an answer I couldn’t wait to share. After the change, that answer got even stranger.
Father, listen to me about the change.
I’d come from the records room, where I’d been picking my way through the stacks, searching for more treasures. Bringing some promising documents back to my desk, I re-read the Rambo pages, when all of a sudden, I had the oddest sensation. How to say it? Like suddenly I was seeing things three different ways at once. Like I was a sardine suddenly aware of swimming around a huge oddly shaped aquarium rather than the ocean. Like I was a pig being pushed through an extruder into a trail of sausages.
I’m not making sense. Maybe this will make sense, or at least be comprehensible:
After that sensation came over me, my sources were different.
Very different.
The Love family history wasn’t just self-published anymore; it was handwritten. It had a different author, too. Meanwhile, Margaret’s pages were totally gone. I’d been reading them during the change—where were they? I frantically cased the room, but no joy; I’ve never seen them again. In their place lay a different, smaller book with an unadorned cover of bright red. It was one of those deals you get at the checkout line in bookstores, with the blank pages you can fill, but which you never do fill. Someone had sure filled these, though.
I turned to the handwritten history, and immediately forgot the loss of the Rambo pages. A very different history, an even more interesting one. The new book—the red one—had a title in precise calligraphy on the inside cover: Love’s Fountain, by Jane Sim—near as I could figure, it was a novelization of what was set down in the history.
Other things had changed, too, but I couldn’t bother with that.
I was already reading.
* * *
—
May the Good LORD be praised, it seems our smithy’s madness has passed. For the present our estimable Col S. Wear holds him in our stockade, but he has made a full confession of his plot, and, as you shall hear, a truly wicked and vile one it was. Our poor young friend F. Jay lies yet in the infirmary, caught ‘tween life and death due to Love’s Devilish ministrations, though our Doctor is skilled in emetic and has given us hope for his good recovery. I embrace this opportunity to convey to you, Sister, the device by which this troubled man, this smithy with a mind of an Empedocles, this Isaac Love, had thought to capture the loyalties of our colony, and, thereby, compel us to install him as King. As I have written previously, Mr. Love has proved a man of considerable and multifarious talents, though as with many such men, his estimation of his own knowledge extends beyond native capacity, and thus, possessed also by the sin of overweening ambition, they do themselves provide the engine of their own thwarting, which engine I now name PRIDE. Mr. Love believed himself possessed of enough skill as an Apothecary to extract from local root and berry an unholy concoction, which, if quaffed, would infuse all other bodily humors and dispense with all sense of one’s Self, and make the Drinker naught but a slave. This villain made bold enuff to provide this potion at our picnic following the flying of the spring pigeons, and made as if to administer it by force if blandishment proved ineffective. ’Twas only by GOD’s mercy that among us only our poor Mr. Jay proved pliable enough to obey Love’s directives and quaff his poison—though I must confess, were it not for my betrothed, others might even now be languishing in the same deathly manner as Mr. Jay—for it was my own brave Mr. Runyan who stood ’gainst Mr. Love, and shouted full in his face, then contended with him over the ladle he held and, in this struggle, the two fell athwart the hogshead, and thus the hogshead was spilled onto the ground, and all the grass thereunder did wither and die. Then was our coterie freed from indecision, and others sprang to my beloved’s rescue, and raised the alarum, and held him fast until Col. Wear, who serves also as constable, arrived with manacle and chain. But now Mr. Love appears once more to speak in his old decorous manner, and pleads his innocence, saying his acts were not his own, but rather of a fever that unfurnished him of reason, brought on from those same berries, which he discovered as he foraged, and consumed as he walked, and in such manner was driven into the strange madness now passed. Col. Wear will hear him more at trial, but it seems meet, so long as Mr. Jay lives, Mr. Love will be forgiven this trespass, for to lose our smithy so far out in the wild would be a loss most sore and grievous indeed
The fountain predated the town. It lay in wait before anything had been built. Everyone knows this. It would be foolish to believe otherwise; one had merely to look at it—nobody ever did—to know this fountain was one of the first things, older than any ruin on Grecian hills, older than Jonah’s fish, older than the ark, older even than the mountain upon which that lucky reeking ship finally foundered. When Isaac Love first arrived in this place, along with his small coterie of travelers, it was there already, awaiting him.
The Love Party came west in 1787, to make their fortune in the new-formed Northwest Territory. The “Love Party,” so named after Isaac Love. A bachelor smith and former corporal in the Colonial army, he quickly proved the most capable among them, and a natural leader besides. The group, setting out from Raleigh, targeting Cincinnati, was made up of a loose and unaffiliated kit of families a
nd fortune hunters, without head or government, but when the guide they hired took ill early in their trip, they found themselves in early danger of failure. The sickly guide was a sometime mountain man by the name of Isaac Runyan, though “Barefoot” was the appellation bestowed upon him in the Appalachians. He tucked himself away in one of their low cow-wagons, groaning and drinking and clutching his gut, and soon it was Love who moved wagon to wagon, assigning tasks, tending to livestock, serving as arbiter in disagreements. By the time Runyan pulled himself, heaving and pale, from the wagon, he was guide only; Love had easily assumed unassailable leadership. A short, broad man who kept clean-shaven, he wore clean white shirts and high chambray overalls and a brown hat with a wide brim to shade his eyes. His chest and shoulders were thick and powerful, his forearms burly. He held his posture erect, spine straight as a plumb-line in defiance of years stooped over the forge with hammer and tongs. Love proved capable of great feats of strength and possessed a native mechanical understanding; using only a length of chain fixed to a pulley block, he had extracted a wagon, oxen and all, mired foot-deep in muck. He looked you in the eye longer than you’d find comfortable, and then a little longer still—hypnotizing, almost. Men found themselves taking up his positions while in his presence, even if they disagreed, and then, to avoid the appearance they had been cowed, argued as his proxy with skeptical wives, defending convictions they themselves did not hold. Women avoided his company, and in this at least he ceded ground to the man he had replaced. Barefoot Runyan was taller than he, and comelier; his gaze, less fanatic, did not unnerve. He was jolly and easy around a campfire, and apt with a fiddle. So, while the trust and the dependence of the people went to Love and his manifold capabilities, their affection remained with the feckless Runyan, and while Love’s gaze went with increasing frequency to the young and fetching Margaret Rambo, hers went to their guide.