The Land Read online

  He was looking right at me as if I was the only one in the room and we were having a conversation. No, I thought. My aim was to go out with as much stink as possible. “No,” I said, in a raspy voice, and my face flushed with heat, for the question had been rhetorical.

  “No,” he repeated gently before lifting his voice again. “Jesus has so much more to offer. So much more. We were dead in our sin. Every one of us. Dead and cold in the grave. In the devil’s own grip. But there is not a thing we have said or done that Jesus doesn’t know. He knows everything. Our darkest sin. Our deepest shame. And still he comes to us. He comes and finds us in the grave we have dug for ourselves, and he says, ‘You are not dead, only sleeping.’” He turned, releasing me from the heat of his gaze, and strode back up to the front, pausing to touch some of the elderly members on the top of their heads or their shoulders as he moved among them. Like he could heal them, wake them with a touch. I couldn’t help noticing that for a white supremacist he seemed to have borrowed many of his speaking patterns from African-American preachers.

  He paused last at the front, laying hands on a dark-haired girl. The girl lifted her chin, her look adoring. A girl so small I could see her legs swinging under the chair. Sarah. Maura’s daughter. His daughter. I knew her immediately, even though the girl sat beside a blond woman who wore a bold, blood-colored shawl that made the rest of her pale features look bleached out. The woman had her left arm around the back of Sarah’s chair, and she tilted her chin up with the same look of adoration. Pastor Eli ignored the woman as he continued up to the front. I tried to figure out how Maura could abandon her daughter. I still couldn’t believe she would leave her behind.

  Where are you, Maura?

  “We have to die to this world, leave behind the stench of our sins. We are called out of the darkness of our own grave. And we wake and we rise and there is such a singing in heaven when we walk again.”

  I tugged at my collar, pinpricks of heat needling up my spine, like I had been touched by a fever. I wanted to mock him, but in truth I was moved by his words. Deep down, I was the very dead man he had just described. I should be dead. I hated myself for not dying. I vaguely remember rising once more to sing another hymn along with Roland and then the pastor was talking again, but I completely lost the thread of whatever he was saying. He kept calling the devil “The Enemy” and growling warnings about a force of evil besieging us all. It sounded like some scary stuff, but I couldn’t follow any of it. If you crack a front windshield with your forehead it does things to your concentration, even a month after the stitches have been removed and your hair has grown in over the scars. If I stood too suddenly the dizziness overcame me, a glittering wave of nausea that could knock me from my feet.

  I had not expected this. I had expected crazy talk about the “agents of ZOG” and how the UN was the “One World Government” trying to put the “Mark of the Beast” on our bodies. Blood moons and blood seas. I had plenty of time during my convalescence to read up on white supremacists and skinheads, though I had to read it in snatches because of concussion protocol. But except for Clint Eastwood here sitting next to me with his holstered Saturday night special, these people seemed kind of normal.

  On our last day working together Maura had been remote for most of her shift, maybe sick with some kind of premonition. Alone in the break room, when I tried asking her what was wrong, she shook her head. She hadn’t been eating or sleeping well, couldn’t keep her food down. She was so frightened her husband had figured it out. “It’s going to be okay,” I tried reassuring her.

  “No,” she said. “It won’t. It won’t ever again.” Her eyes, so round and shining most days, looked pink and bloodshot under the fluorescent lights, the skin pouched and bruised beneath the sockets. She looked lost, her face ashen. Later that night after closing the bank and locking the doors, she excused herself to the bathroom and when she came back out, she said, “You’re going to have to drive me to the hospital, Lucien,” her breathing shivery as she described fainting in the bathroom after a dizzy spell and hitting her head on the sink.

  Had I been driving so fast because I was angry with her? Dangerous driving like that in the rain. “Slow down,” she said, but I had acted as if I hadn’t heard. If the car hydroplaned, if I had to brake suddenly. No way to know what might loom out of the storm ahead of us. But nothing happened on the way to the hospital. I got her there safe. I just didn’t know I wouldn’t ever see her again when I dropped her off at the emergency room entrance. I just didn’t know there was five thousand dollars missing from the vault back at the bank.

  My adrenaline up, aching with feelings I couldn’t yet name, I still had my foot pressed firmly to the accelerator on the way home after dropping her off, and I ended up skidding right through a stop sign and into a speeding pickup that made mincemeat of my Civic. The guy in the pickup was hurtled through his windshield and across the road, his body blazing a thirty-foot meteor-like channel through somebody’s front lawn. This turned out to be a good thing because after smashing into my Civic, the fuel line in his pickup caught fire. I woke to heat, gasoline burning in my nostrils, the frantic screel of metal-on-metal as paramedics tried to cut me from the pinned wreckage with the Jaws of Life before I passed out again. My own foretaste of hell. I know some of this because the pickup driver later came to visit me in the hospital, a lanky kid wearing a Twins baseball cap, his arm in a cast since they’d had to replace lost skin there with skin from the back of his legs. He was otherwise miraculously unhurt. “You got a raw deal here, dude,” he’d said. “This is why I don’t wear a seatbelt.”

  The cops searched my crushed car for the money and didn’t find it. Harry Larkin cleared me of suspicion; the burden falling on Maura, who disappeared that night. She never checked into the hospital where I would spend the next ten days.

  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. If Maura had stolen the money, she could have lied about other things.

  Where did you go, Maura, and why? Were you really pregnant and unsure about the father and what to do next? Did you really miscarry? Did you feel even a shadow of what I felt for you?

  “Do you want to be saved?” the Reverend Elijah was asking from the front. “Is there anyone here who wants to get up and leave behind the darkness of the grave and walk into the light?”

  Every head bowed while mine was still lifted. My throat parched and dry. Right there in the church I smelled burning gasoline. Reverend Elijah watched me. Even Roland had raised his head. I stood and stumbled, pushing past Roland into the center aisle.

  “Come, young man,” the preacher said, his eyes on me and his voice soft and beckoning, the people with the bowed heads swaying and murmuring. They knew someone was approaching the altar. And I don’t know how to explain it, but there was an energy in the room. I felt it, like light at the base of my spine, urging me toward the altar. Years later, I’ve wondered over it, because in that moment, I heard the pain in the preacher’s voice. He was hurting, too. He needed me as much as I needed him. As light calls to dark. Or dark unto dark.

  I took one step toward him, my head down. My vision had gone blurry. I was terrified that one of the migraines I had begun suffering since the accident was coming on, but in that moment I wanted him to lay hands on me. I wanted to believe. I wanted him to lay hands on me and say, He is not dead, only sleeping.

  Instead, I turned on my heels and lurched toward the front door. He didn’t call out after me, instead addressing the congregation, moving on with his prayer.

  Outside, a snarling wind bit into me. I felt the tears on my face freezing. A cold that torched my lungs. I kept on stumbling across the parking lot like some wounded animal until I made it to my car. Trembling, wrung out, I climbed into the Continental. I didn’t deserve any forgiveness. I had failed to save a good person, helped steal a wife from a husband, a mother from her daughter. I had been an accessory to a crime that I didn’t even know wa
s being committed. Her husband had named my condition correctly. I was dead in my sin.

  I didn’t start the car up right away, but sat shivering in the front seat trying to steady myself by gripping the wheel. When I glanced back at the church I could see Roland standing sentinel by the front door, watching me curiously. After another coughing fit, the engine turned over. When it sparked and rumbled to life, I peeled away.

  Maura, did you tell me the truth about your husband? His violence? Were you really afraid of him? That man, back there?

  I never saw any bruises, but I believed I had touched her wounds just the same. After she disappeared, I called the local police to tell them what I knew, to accuse Elijah Winters, but I had no idea if they followed through with any kind of investigation. I had believed Maura when she had no one else to turn to. No one in the world but me. She wouldn’t go to a shelter. There was no place safe from him, she’d said. Not for her, or her daughter. I had to come back, had to let him know who I was, but I didn’t know how I’d find the courage.

  I had to see him again, but I no longer knew if I was the light or the shadow in this story.

  Concerning the Unkindness of Ravens

  In one of the religion classes I attended, the prof talked about primitive tribes who believe that the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby’s skull, is a doorway for spirits. Through membrane where the brain pulses underneath, stretching and flexing like spongy muscle, spirits trickle in. This makes babies both holy and wholly vulnerable, attended by seraphim and spectra, until the bony plates grow over that fleshy place, hardening, and a world of possibility shrinks to the mundane every child must muddle through to reach a humdrum adulthood, where no spirits ever visit.

  My car accident split me open body and mind. I’d broken three ribs in my left side, had four silicone screws stitching together a busted collarbone, and my left hip had been fractured. At the hospital, the attending surgeon told me he had expected to put me into a medically induced coma so he could drill into my skull to release the pressure, but my brain hadn’t swollen. I was lucky, he said, to emerge from the wreckage without any lasting damage to my spinal cord and neck. After I recovered from the concussion, troubling migraines lingered, so I left the hospital with a serious arsenal of medication: Percocet for pain, sumatriptan for the migraines, Effexor after they diagnosed me with what they called “situational depression.” While I didn’t drink, partaking of this cocktail of pharmaceuticals played with my perception of reality. I hurt all the time and couldn’t imagine a life beyond the hurt. My survival didn’t feel like luck, but there is this: when my skull cracked like a clay jar, I didn’t just become ultrasensitive to light and sound. I saw things I had never seen before and have not seen since. My damaged skull throbbed like a fontanelle opening unto a spirit world where most mortals cannot tread.

  All these years later, even if this second sight has dimmed, the cracked places healing over, I can’t forget what I saw. The Apostle speaks of powers and principalities at work in this world that are invisible to the human eye, a struggle beyond flesh and blood, a spiritual evil that lies upon the earth. I am not certain about any of what happened next—some of it feels so impossible—but I know this much. That winter of 1999, just before the turn of the millennium, I walked with angels and demons.

  Following my visit to Rose of Sharon, the demons came for me first.

  Ravens arrived the next morning, blown south from Canada as if by fallout. Big black birds with glossy wings and devil eyes. When I took Kaiser on his morning walk, I marveled at the storm of birds up in the barren grove, all bristly like wind in leaves. A hundred and then a hundred more, filling up the pines on the ridge. I heard anger in their croaky choir. So many, it was as if a seam had unzipped in the gray sky and out poured these birds, bickering in the branches like they had taken a wrong turn somewhere and couldn’t agree on which way to go next. Kaiser made a whimpering sound, like he could sense something wrong in the ravens, both of us stunned by the confabulation of their caw, caw, cawing. I had never seen such a wonder, both beautiful and terrible.

  Branches creaked and cracked under the weight of so many birds, ravens on every bending bough, painting the pines inky-black. A shiver scratched at the base of my spine. When the migraines came on it felt like an electric storm, fast-moving flashes of light and dark gathering at the corners of my eyes, my world shrinking to a trembling tunnel. If I collapsed in such a place, I was sure these birds would drink my eyes from the sockets.

  “Don’t be scared,” I told Kaiser, my voice a little loud to be heard over the ravens. “They call it a ‘murder’ when so many flocks gather. No, that’s not right. A murder is for crows. Flocks of ravens are called an unkindness. An ‘unkindness of ravens’ is the right term.” I coughed into my gloves, because naming them correctly had not taken away any of their dark magic. “I know, I know. Ornithologists are major fans of understatement where ravens are concerned.”

  His hackles up, Kaiser turned back toward the house.

  “Not yet,” I called after him. The old dog had shat himself the day before, right at the door to the backyard, and I didn’t want any more messes. It was only seven in the morning and I had meant to walk the dog and then get back inside and start working on my programming for The Land. The first week of my convalescence had passed and I had little to show for it. I knew if I had any chance of getting this project done, I had to establish a regular schedule: creativity only came if you made time for it. Let Kaiser finish his morning business and then we could take shelter. But the dog wasn’t cooperating, spooked by the ravens.

  I figured he needed some encouragement, so I unzipped my pants. The cold nipped at my nether regions, but I shut everything out, the ravens’ sonic disturbance, my failures so far to make progress on my program, the sorry work I had done as a self-appointed detective investigating the mystery of Maura, the weeks I’d spent with my privates hooked to a catheter. The golden arc I managed to carve into the snow felt triumphant, but Kaiser only sat on his haunches, unimpressed. I quickly zipped my pants.

  I shared the dog’s unease. It wasn’t just the sight of so many ravens massed together bothering me. I sensed something else stirring in those birds, a carrion cry up in their heads, a darkness that had harried them here. Inside my brain I picked up a vibration, a humming of fear and hunger ahead of the long winter night, joining with a sibling shadow inside them. These birds were only birds, I reminded myself, just animals, and so who knows why they do what they do, but I couldn’t shake a supernatural sense of foreboding. What had Pastor Elijah called the devil? The Enemy. He was here. I sensed Him. He had come with the birds. In the trees I heard the steady splat of their shit dropping from the branches as they emptied themselves. I put up the hood of my parka in case any winged overhead.

  Finally, Kaiser finished his business and the two of us were hurrying through the falling snow along a compacted path we had made between the back door and the grove. Flashes of color lit up the edges of my vision, dark approaching wings, the onset of another migraine. This one was going to be a doozy. I was jogging as quickly as my aching hip would allow when I slipped in the snow and went down hard, striking the back of my head. Before I could rise again, the migraine had me in its talons, pinching until it punctured through membrane. I cried out thinly, so intense was the agony, as I fell back in the snow. It was like the shadow I had sensed up in the birds’ heads had overtaken me, pecking and shredding light and sanity from my brain.

  I believe I went unconscious. When the pain finally released me, I believe I even dreamed, encased in the warmth of my parka. I saw Maura again, that first time at Bay City Mutual. I had known before I even met her that I would like her. Transferring from a branch in Duluth where I’d been living with a cousin and attending Lake Superior College part-time, to Aurora Bay where I was starting school at NMSU, I had read the list of names ahead of time and tried to imagine my new life there. Maura Cosette Winters stood o
ut among the list of tellers. I remember putting my finger on her name, whispering the pure musicality of it aloud, all iambic pentameter, the same cadence as a beating heart. Maura. I already knew before I even saw her that she would be beautiful.

  And Maura was. She had wild, gingery brown hair she tried taming in a bun, but wisps were forever escaping in a spill of curls down her neck or wavy strands she had to brush from her large, mercurial eyes. Her high cheekbones and olive skin made her look foreign among the pasty white northerners that inhabited Aurora Bay, like she stepped from the pages of a story Scheherazade told to save herself from the Sultan’s executioner. She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met before. Quiet and reserved at first, she shook my hand formally when we met, and something caught within me when I looked into her eyes. Her eyes shifted color in different lights, green one moment, then blue or brown. She slid her hand from my own and walked away. That day, she had hardly said two words to me.

  Our small bank branch kept longer hours and a smaller staff than main locations. A few nights later we closed together for the first time. Near the end of a long day, I got stuck dealing with a rich old crank who was shutting down his checking account, angry it didn’t pay him enough interest. I had tried getting him to keep the account open at least until he spoke to our investment specialist the next day, but he proved intractable. This would mean trouble for me in the morning when our manager came in. Harry Larkin hated losing accounts, especially premium, gold-star accounts. That this guy earned any interest at all on a checking account made it exceptional, but it wasn’t good enough.

  While I went through the procedures, the old man further treated me to a long harangue about how he shouldn’t have to pay taxes for education because he already put his own children through school. By the time I had his account closed, a cashier’s check for his substantial balance printed, I had heard an earful about the troubles with the world these days. I should have just let him walk away, but everything about this squat little man bothered me, even the clothes he wore: a turtleneck with high-water golf pants and Italian loafers with no socks on. He had the hairy feet of a hobbit. I handed him the check, and the words “Good luck on your quest” just slipped out because I doubted he would find a better deal at any other bank.