Excerpt: Chapter 1
Readers: My latest book is due out from TouchPoint Press in September. It’s a small press based in (I think) Arkansas, and publication on schedule is never a sure thing, nor these days can any sort of fanfare (aka muscular marketing) be counted on. I’m not J.K. Rowling. Authors are expected to toot their own horns, something at which I have no native skill. MINISTRY is the most ambitious piece of fiction I’ve so far attempted. I have no idea what people will call it. Speculative fantasy? Post-Apocalyptic saga? Spiritual adventure? Hell, I don’t know. I think of it as a romance with a capital ‘R.’ It’s written in a female voice — Isobel begins as a precocious child of 13 and grows to be a magnificent young woman and the spiritual leader of a bootstrap rebellion against the tyranny of a self-declared A.I. demigod. (I hope they don’t bust me for gender appropriation — I have two daughters and I ‘borrowed’ their voices as well as that of my own interior feminine to create my Isobel) Anyhow, I’ve decided to do a partial serialization here on Medium. Here’s Chapter One.
PART ONE
THE KNOWLEDGE
1
When I found Daddy, his face was blue as the alley snow piled around him. His eyes were frozen puddles with the color gone under the ice. He was a building nobody lives in, with windows nobody looks out of. That was what struck me most: the nobody-ness and nowhere-ness of him. Dead people, I saw, have no name or address in the world.
I stayed with him for a long time, kneeling in the snowbank where he’d fallen at the mouth of the alley, thinking that, if I warmed him, he might come back into his body. I covered his legs and chest with snow because he’d taught me it’s the wind that kills and that, if I ever got caught in a blizzard, I should burrow in like animals do. His nose stuck out like some great beak. I’d forgotten how big it was. You get used to faces, and only when they’re dead do you see how much like drawings they are.
Daddy had always told me not to cry for him when he died, that he’d be the one to cry for me since I’d have to keep living in what he called the Valley of the Shadow and he’d be on the green hillside looking down at me. And so I didn’t. Not a single tear. Not until later. I asked him once why people bothered living if dying was the way out of the shadow valley, and he told me it was for one reason only: to make a heart strong enough to carry you up that hill and still have something left over as an offering.
Why didn’t I go for help? First of all, there was nobody out, it being the coldest night of the year. Second, we lived in what Daddy called the ass-end of the city, in a room that used to be the shipping office of an old factory. It still smelled ofthe grease and metal shavings from the machine parts they’d once made there, but nobody built machines anymore, and Daddy said it had closed long before I was born. I don’t know how we’d come to be there, just that it was the only place I’d ever known.
The third reason, which is important, is that I had never asked anyone for help — or really ever talked to anybody but Daddy except to nod or wave. It was later I discovered that the way we spoke to each other wasn’t even recognized in the city, at least not anywhere outside of the ass-end. And I had never been outside of that part as far as I remembered.
There was a rundown gas station about a fifteen-minute walk from the factory, near the entrance to the old highway, the rare place still open. They didn’t sell gas anymore, just old rations and bartered goods, but they sold these packaged sticky buns that I loved, even though Daddy said they were probably older than me. Sometimes for a treat he’d walk over and get me one. Why he’d decided to do this on the coldest night of the year, when he was feeling sick, I’ll never know. Maybe he was just building up that last bit of heart he’d need to get up the hill.
I went looking for him when the dawn was just beginning to purple the sky beyond the smokestacks. He’d never been gone that long before. I wasn’t supposed to wander into the valley by myself, but we had looked after each other all my life, and I wasn’t about to stop now.
My name is Isobel Christmas Lemont, but Daddy never called me anything but Christmas. He said it was because it was the last good thing most people could remember. I was newly thirteen when I lost him. I’m old enough now to tell about what came after. I’m still not sure if everything that’s happened to me is real, because Daddy always said that life in the valley was a kind of dream-story: you should take lessons from it like any story but not let it become too real to you or touch you in your secret locket, where the love you stored up in life was kept. He said that people in the valley do a damned good job of pretending but that he suspected most of them knew the truth.
Since all this happened, I’ve learned what is expected of people in such situations as I found myself that night. I’ve learned that you don’t leave your father’s dead body in a snowbank, even on the ass-end of town, because even a dead body has pretend value. But I knew nothing about pretending when I was thirteen. I saw that he was all emptied out, and what was left was a kind of puppet with half-open purple lips and frozen eyes looking up at that hillside.
It never occurred to me to go back to the factory because Daddy had told me that, if he died, I should move on forthwith until I found a place I could call my sanctuary, the way the factory room had been for the two of us ever since the crack opened in the world. Anyway, he said, they were going to “roll up” the ass-end soon, so our tenancy was limited. He also said that his death would be a sign that it was time to begin my ministry. I kissed his purple lips, covered his face with snow, took from his fingers the sticky bun he’d bought me at the gas station, and started walking. I had walked all the way to full morning before I found a place that seemed a suitable sanctuary. It was a long, low building made of concrete blocks, ugly as everything else in the ass-end. A big sign out front said DISCOUNT TIRE CENTER in letters made of glass tubes, only the O had been broken off so that it read DISC UNT and the sign was dangling from its post by nothing more than a fat cord. I knew from a memory that letters like these had once lit up, but there hadn’t been electricity on the ass-end for a long time, other than what could be pirated from the city when conditions were right.
There were tires stacked high all around like donuts, tires that no one here had any use for and that I guessed weren’t worth stealing, and in the big, empty parking lot, someone had made a design out of them. From close to the ground where I was, it reminded me a little of pictures I’d seen in the Big Book of the Milky Way galaxy seen from the edge-on. It called to me, so I walked over and began jumping from tire to tire. That took me deeper into the circle until finally I realized that it must be a kind of spiral but with breaks and dead ends that caused me to make switchbacks like Theseus in the Greek story Daddy had read me. After maybe ten minutes, I made it to the center, and it was nice because for those ten minutes I didn’t think about my dad or how I wouldn’t ever see the color in his eyes again.
From the center, I looked over what might be my sanctuary.
The building had four giant doors, two of them open with abandoned cars still up on the lifts with their tires off. On the corner nearest me was a small office with a counter and some chairs for people to wait while they got their tires on, I suppose. It was like a smaller version of our room at the factory, and that was what made me think it was suitable. Or maybe it was just that it looked to be safe from the killing wind, and I was cold. I don’t get cold easily. Daddy always told me I had a kind of second skin. Not fat, because nobody on the ass-end is fat and I’m skinnier than most, but more like a sock stretched over me from head to toe. Daddy said it was my northern constitution, because my mother had been Estonian. I’ve never been to Estonia and only know where it is from the Big Book, but I knew that many people there were blond like me and that my mother had been too. But even my second skin and northern constitution — along with two of my dad’s t-shirts, his Scottish wool sweater, and the lined red raincoat he’d foraged up for me when I got too big for my kid’s parka — could not keep the wind from sawing through. Daddy had always said that dressing in layers could save you, but on a day like this, all the layers in the world could not have kept the cold out.
The oddest thought went through my head: I ought to have taken his coat or his sweater before I covered him up. That is, it seems odd to me now that I’m older, but as I say, I knew nothing about respect for the dead then. I knew only that he had no use for them anymore and would have taken them off himself if he could have. The reason I hadn’t taken them was that I hadn’t been able, at that second, to imagine the future.
The door of the Discount Tire Center office and waiting room was locked, but I did not give this a thought. I reached into the big pocket of my raincoat, where I kept a dozen useful things, and fished out the little tool that Daddy had called Saint Anthony’s Key after the patron saint of lost things and travelers. He’d said that technically it was called a caliper, because the two tiny prongs — no bigger than the tips of a bobby pin — opened and closed when a wheel was turned, allowing almost any common lock to be not so much picked as popped.
I never asked why Daddy taught me about the saints. They were just a part of our lessons, along with reading, rhetoric, chemistry, drawing, and solfege. But it was a part that I looked forward to, because when Daddy talked about the saints, they came to visit. Saint Anthony, for example, always came as a sweet-faced young man, with a monk’s cap and fringy sort of hair, even though I learned that he had gotten old and wise living alone in the desert. Saint Agnes, my favorite, was a young girl with flowing hair and eyes looking up to a light in the sky. She was only a year older than I am now when she died. She was treated poorly for her beliefs, but they said that any man who messed with her went blind afterward. Saint Elmo, also known as Erasmus, wore a red hat and was the protector of sailors, in the days when there were sailors. I don’t think there are anymore. He could also protect you from lightning. Saint Theresa always came with a white dove over her shoulder and seemed kind but a little crazy.
One day, Daddy paused mid-lesson when he was telling me about Saint Francis and said, “You know, Christmas, you don’t have to believe that Saint Francis really talked to the birds and the forest creatures in their own language. What mattersis what it means that this is part of his story.”
“What does it mean?” I asked. I was eight years old.
“What do you think it means?” he said. He was always turning questions around like that, but the answer was always right there floating in front of his eyes. All I had to do was watch and it would come to me.
“That Saint Francis liked the creatures and they liked him.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And because nature speaks in what you might call God’s language. The church in Saint Francis’s day had gotten away from nature, and for Francis, that meant that it couldn’t hear God anymore.”
“Can you hear God’s language, Daddy?”
I remember his laugh rattling in his chest, where he always seemed to have a cold, and I remember how he smiled and touched my head.
“Not in this place,” he said. “Maybe some can. I was never very religious, so my ears may not be tuned properly. I teach you religion because, for long time, it was the only thing that made people believe there was reason to be good. When the Awakening came, all that ended.” He laughed then, but I don’t know why. “That wasn’t exactly what was advertised.”
“Did God go away from us when the Awakening came?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so. Not if God’s what I think it is. I think it was us who went away. People thought they knew better. The new prophets said leaving God behind would set us free to be more than human. They said the best of us had a natural instinct for redeeming ourselves.”
The door opened easily with Saint Anthony’s Key, and inside the Discount Tires office, the wind’s edge was gone. Other than that, it was an icebox. Gray and dirty white, with only a few rays of winter sun on the wall to give the place some kindness, and smelling of black rubber. It had windows on three sides, rattling in different pitches that weren’t pleasant like the ones I’d learned in solfege. Behind the counter were two three-legged stools. I climbed up on one of them and shivered when the windows rattled.
It was then that I became aware of everything gone and dead, everything I wouldn’t see again. The Big Book, for one. All my lessons began with Daddy opening the Big Book. That would set the subject of the lesson, and then he would go off riffing, as he called it, because he knew the subject well. He told me the Big Book was the last printed edition of the Random House Illustrated Encyclopedia — the last one before they stopped making books. He said that, although they couldn’t fit all knowledge into one book, the doors to that knowledge could all be found in this one.
God, he loved that book. It was old and smelly and wrinkled from the damp, and by the end it was falling apart, but I don’t think there was a night when I wouldn’t wake up and find him reading it by the light from the burner of an old propane stove that he’d scavenged when I was little and that we kept fueled from a big tank at the factory that never seemed to run out. Against the open lid of the stove he propped a small mirror we’d found once in a dumpster, and the mirror reflected the flame from the burner and made enough light to read by. I’d wake up for a few seconds — maybe because he coughed or the wind shook the factory windows — and when I saw him there with that golden light around his shaggy head, I’d fall right back to sleep.
My dad believed that knowledge had saved the world twice before and might have to save it again, if it wasn’t too late. The first time was when the Musselmans brought back Aristotle and Pythagoras. The second was three hundred years later in Ireland, when monks rescued the great books from the Vikings who wanted to burn them. Now, more than a thousand years after, the world needed saving again. We were like those monks, he told me by the light of his stove. In a generation, he said, all the knowledge of humans, ancients and moderns, would be burned up or stored in the great cities, where it could be kept from us. But not from all of us.
Sowing the knowledge was my ministry, only I hadn’t thought it would begin so soon.
Daddy must have memorized just about the whole encyclopedia, from the Periodic Table of Elements to the Genealogyof the Royal Families of England. It was his project. He said that if it hadn’t been for those Irish monks in the ninth century, sitting in cold, stony monasteries day after day copying out the Greek classics, we might never have known about Plato or Euripides, or understood music and science.
That book, and all the things Daddy kept in his head, had been my education.
There were other books we loved almost as much. We began by reading them together, and when I got to an age of reason, I read them again myself. The stories in them had been more real to me than whatever passed for real in the shipping office of a shut-down machine parts factory on the ass-end of town. We had a book called The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I used to imagine myself as Mick Kelly, the girl in the story, sitting in the stairwell outside the village concert hall, listening to the orchestra rehearse and dreaming of playing the piano. Daddy even said that I reminded him of her, as I was blond and skinny and as much like a boy as a girl in lots of ways.
I loved music, too, though all I knew of it came from hearing Daddy sing and play on a beat-up old guitar with only three strings. He could sing all the parts from the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony one-by-one: the flutes and oboes, the French horns and trombones, the violins and cellos and basses. And as he sang them to me over and over, I put them together in my head, and after a while, I could hear the whole orchestra. Sometimes we did that for a whole evening, and I would sing back the parts until I knew them too.
I could still hear it, even in the office of the Discount Tire Center.
The cold and my empty stomach, which hadn’t had anything but a sticky bun in it since the last meal we’d made the day before, made me sleepy. From my place on the three-legged stool, I inspected the office and saw nothing that looked even close to comfortable. Back in the shipping office, my dad had made me what he called a berth by pulling the shelves out of a big cabinet and lining it with blankets we’d scrounged up. If I wanted, I could shut the sliding door and be alone with the perfect dark, in which I could imagine all of the things pictured in the Big Book and in his stories, from mountains covered in glittering snow to leopards and hummingbirds, and paintings so beautiful they made my heart ache.
I got off the stool and began to nose around. There was a door going from the office into the first tire-changing area,and I decided to see what was on the other side. On the right was another door with a sign that said CUSTOMERS ONLY, and inside were a toilet and a sink. Both were filthy, but I suddenly had to pee so bad I didn’t care. I hiked up my raincoat, dropped my baggies, and put my butt down on that cold, dirty seat. I got up as quick as I could, hoping that maybe the germs hadn’t had time to jump onto me. When I did that, I saw myself in the cracked mirror hanging over the washbasin. The crack went right down my face.
At first, maybe because of the crack, I couldn’t put the face in the mirror together with the girl in my skin. I knew we were the same person, but knowing and feeling are different things. My hair was long and knotted, and covered a lot of my face, but it was still, as Daddy had called it, yellow as the sun. When I combed it back with my hands, I could see that, since the last time I’d looked in a mirror, all the baby fat had melted right off my face. Where there’d once been pillowy cheeks, there were now soft hollows with a ridge of bone over each one. My mouth was fuller, and my eyes (hazel, according to Daddy) had heavy lids like a picture I’d once seen of Salome in the Big Book. Of all the strange occurrences that happened to me in those first days, the strangest was looking into that mirror as a little girl and seeing a woman-thing looking back at me.
In the tire-changing room, someone had laid tires edge-to-edge across the concrete floor to make a kind of mattress, covering them over with orange work blankets that were marked up with grease stains from being used in the workshop. But they looked good to me, and I thought to myself, Well, maybe this will be a suitable place after all. At least for a little while. I knew that soon I would have to go looking for food and water, but at this moment, I needed to burrow in.
As soon as I did, as soon as the motion stopped and it was only me and the off-key rattling of the windows, I finally cried hard. It wasn’t for me, and it wasn’t even for Daddy, alone in the blue snow. He’d told me that the ancient Celts had never buried their dead but left them to nature, saying that the worms would carry the bad part of them to the underworld and the birds would carry the good part to the sky. And the soul would either find a place on that green hill or come back into a new body to try again. No, what made me cry was us together, him combing knots out of my hair and singing the parts from the Sixth Symphony. My daddy wasn’t what you’d call a soft man — I never saw him cry — but he was all the goodness I knew.
He’d always told me to keep a safe place in my head, a place I could go even in the worst of circumstances. After I’d cried for a while, I found that place and fell asleep, waking only when I heard someone say, “Look what the hawk blew in.”
