The Holly King

by Chris Martin

We are in a car driving though foothills of pine heavy with snow. Music jangles quietly from the radio. Judging by the cracked beige interior and the dark smudges along the stitching of the seats, we’re in a Volvo stationwagon on its 250,000 mile.

  It looks cold outside, the gauzy silence of winter. We look straight down a two lane road glistening and black against the snow banks. You’re left to guess where we are: Vermont? Michigan? Maine? There are no houses around.

  Carson is driving. He drives like an old man, hands at 10 and 2. Sasha’s voice pipes up, singing a jingle. “We’re going to a party – “

  She’s behind the camera. Carson nods carefully. But she wants him to talk, to her and especially the camera. “Tell me about it?”

  Prudently checking his rear view mirror, he says, “Well, they hold these things ever year. It’s pagan. In tone.”

  “With bonfires.”

  Carson nods again.

  “What’s your sister like?” His hands grip the wheel, so he shrugs his elbows.

  “I haven’t seen her in years.” With intense concentration, he carefully releases the wheel with his right hand and calmly fishes in his jacket for something. Out comes a sleek red smartphone. He points it to us like a badge.

  You wonder if they had this planned, this little sequence, though it appears Carson’s wondering if it was ever a good idea. He obviously doesn’t like to drive, let alone shoot and drive. Still, we’re looking at Sasha with her camera in the passenger seat.

  Because Carson is focussed more on the road than his camera, his framing sloshes a bit. She has on a bright blue and white striped, hand-knit ski cap with Pippi Longstocking drawstrings dangling. They’re filming each other.

  “I hope I like her,” she says from behind the eyepiece “I don’t want to feel like I’m visiting the goddess Kali.”

  “She may want to bathe in your blood.” Carson fumbles and his camera slips to the floormat, but Sasha keeps on rolling.

  “I guess that’s ok. I’ve never spent a Christmas vacation in constant fear or awe. You dropped your camera.”

  We like Sasha. We hope she sticks around.

  The cars turns onto a cleared driveway. Sasha must have gotten out and to film their arrival: you can see her track marks in the snow. And then a quick wipe to a delighted sister, arms wide, walking out of the house. Two children peak out of the doorway. It’s sort of a single story lodge that looks hand-built, not prefab. A large stone disk, a sundial, stands nearby, shadow-less under the overcast sky.

  Shannon beams, all grown up and glad to see her younger brother on her doorstep. She glimpses first to Sasha and then moves toward Carson, just coming out of the car.

  “I think it’s been like seven years?” she asks. She has dark eyes and a model’s wide, charismatic smile.

  And Carson’s a little shy. “Something like that.”

  They hug while Shannon, looking behind Carson, says to Sasha, “And hi to the camera.”

  A smudgy winter sundown over a frozen lake. Three trees sprout crookedly on an island in the middle of the white frozen lake-disk. The camera turns around: there’s his sister’s home in the gloaming, lit inside like an ember.

  A quick collage of eating and talking and the crack clattering of silverware on ceramic. Little hands grappling with bread and butter and the complicated effort of a 5 year old eating for himself; a profile of Shannon leaning with her shoulders, making a flamboyant point, her hefty, wool-sweatered husband Ken guardedly raising his eyes from his plate; a shy glance from nervous Sasha; a toothy mashed food grin from the other boy directed at Uncle Carson and his camera.

  Then dinner plates clear, led by Ken. Children are sent away. The table reveals itself now as an enormous slice of clear varnished oak with a black burl the shape of a galaxy spinning just off center. Shannon stays put, still wearing an apron over her white turtleneck. She stakes her territory over much of her side of the table. Carson sits perpendicular to her, arms on the table, the eager interviewer.

  “So which is it? Shannon or Tillie?”

  A brief annoyed eyeroll gives way to charity in Shannon: “Doesn’t matter. I’ll answer to Hey you.”

  “Shannon,” adds Ken from the kitchen. The camera swings belatedly in his direction and rockily zooms in as he scrapes child-mashed potatoes and ketchup into a little bucket.

  “I’ve only been Shannon with Ken,” and to the kitchen, “haven’t I?” Ken doesn’t answer.

  With help from inserts of photographs and clips, a scrapbook pulled out of a drawer, newspaper headlines and ambiguous reactions from Ken, Carson leads Shannon through a brief summation of her life so far. I’ll summarize, too.

  Leaving home for a small rural college, she renames herself Tillie Harm, a slammed together marriage between an ostentatious affinity for indie queen Jennifer Tilly, and a punk age warning to the quiet preciousness of a liberal arts campus. It doesn’t take long for her to realize she was wasting her time petulantly yelling in the woods of academia. She quits school and with her newfound identity firmly intact she heads to Boston where she becomes the front woman of The Meesels [there’s a clip of her striding across a stage a little ungainly in black high heel boots, black leotard and frilly pink bustier; the band: a derivative mashup of Hole, Bikini Kill, Veruca Salt]. The Meesels meet anyone’s requirements of a successful indie band: local celebrity, tours, videos, two albums and disintegration after three years. “We all hated each other,” Shannon explains. “It was a race to be the one who left first.”

  There’s her first husband, Travis Rex, guitarist of Killholler, kissing her in a handheld wedding video. She leers drunkenly for the camera. They’re on an ocean beach somewhere far from family. Images and references to Travis disappear soon after. “He was boring and a jerk and the band sucked. I almost want those years back.”

  Modeling, artistic and otherwise, turns from a lark into a career. We see books by photographers like Harris Gorden and his aesthetic of Vegas motel glamor; and Willa Schoendorf with her women as plastic architecture series. But mostly there is Danton Khoudry who in retrospect seems to have invented the sooty dawn-of-industry look absurdly popular back then with the sawdust pallor of his exposures, models with red eyes, spindles and needles in the mouth, ears and eyebrows, sweaty flat hair and torn cotton or canvas apparel. Tillie was the muse.

  In fact, Shannon clarifies, she was the one fascinated with spindles, pinions and needles and what she calls “the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire” look, with burn marks in billowy sleeves, grubby fingers and tears running down black powder. “It meant to be political but wound up depressingly hot and sexy. Tragically,” she says. “Really, our ability to sexualize anything is what separates us from other animals.”

  Any way, after the success of their book Mill/child Danton Khoudry takes over not so much as husband but as sunglassed game warden. They become fixtures in the rarified, cross pollinating worlds of the European art scene, international conceptual fashion, and the rise of pornography-gangsterism in Eastern Europe, circa 1996.

  An image of Tillie straddling, barelegged, the smooth pate of a blank eyed runway model, her feet on the model’s upper arms like a living Versailles bird’s nest hat. Kissing Croatian president and demagogue Franjo Tudjman on the mouth for Rolling Stone. Lying seductive as a ripe-hipped Venus on a spring-punctured mattress tossed among Balkan rubble just as the plume of an explosion thrusts up in the background. Partying and shopping with Dita Von Teese. Partying with Brazilian soccer star Lucien. Red carpets. Lounging in the white shambles of a loft in perestroika-ed St. Petersburg where the only movement is the pluming smoke of her cigarette: the muse-star, pale enigma at rest.

  If you look on-line, you’ll know there was more to come. Cameos in risky independent movies, music videos, British lad and tattoo magazine covers, more modeling, appearances at awards shows on the arms of actors and musicians looking for an edgy bump to their image. Ken arrives right around this time, in a smeary chronology possibly overlap
ping her relationship with Danton Khoudry and possibly, platonically, not. At one point during the scrapbook review, Sasha innocently asks big sister/little brother when they came back together again. They’re stopped in their tracks, looking to each other to provide the answer, suggesting it maybe hasn’t quite happened yet, entirely.

  After dinner, in the 40 watt, nighttime glow of their guest room, Carson sits on the edge of the bed with a white granny quilt and lace fringe pillows, idly holding a stuffed goose with a bonnet. You can see Sasha holding the camera in a mirror above the headboard. It’s like we’re coming in on the middle of a conversation.

  Sasha says eventually, “Not everyone has a famous sister.”

  “It’s not like she’s really, as in for real, really famous,” he answers.

  “Well, maybe you just don’t see it. I think she’s cool.”

  He weighs his thoughts, doesn’t answer. Just tosses the goose a bit. “If famous means being ripe for a cable show, a Where Are They Now? thing, then maybe you’re right. I just – we don’t really get along as good as my brother and I do. That’s no one’s fault. It’s family.”

  “I think it’s maybe a wee bit easy to intimidated by someone like her. But that doesn’t mean you should be critical of her. She does her own thing.”

  This suddenly seems like a thorny issue, not just between sister and brother, but girlfriend and boyfriend. Carson raises his eyebrows, wobbles his head, spins the goose on his hand. He offers a concession: “I like the cheese.”

  Outside, the delicate seeping light of predawn. Shannon, in wool and wellies, makes her way around mud puddles into a small barn. An acre or two away we see Ken in a backhoe. We can barely make out the engine working, but a small work lamp bouncing on top of his rollcage breaks the dark with a wobbling yellow glow. A busy place so early in the morn.

  Shannon is inside the barn, milking a goat with a trans-species murmur. Carson narrates: “It’s a small farm my sister and Ken have – if that’s what you want to call it. It’s more like they maintain a small engine of sustenance. The grass feeds the goats and sheep, and the milk my sister draws from them either goes into the bowls of granola she makes for her kids or over the hill to a couple who make cheese out of it.”

  Row upon shadowy-shelved row of little tuffets of cheese. “It’s some of the best cheese I’ve ever had. Actually, it’s the only great cheese I’ve ever had. Shannon is not one to be outdone, though, and is trying her hand at making her own cheese. She welcomes the arrival of mold with motherly joy.

  “That’s why I ask my sister if she’s becoming a survivalist.”

  Inside the root cellar with the green and white patties of cheese in the background, Shannon pauses, cut short by Carson’s question. Not that she’s angry. Just considering it for the first time. You’ll notice how all along she scrutinizes her words before speaking them, a sober, irony-shy habit you might see in people uncomfortable with words or have had years of careful-what-you’re-about- to-admit therapy. Or those just a little uncertain about the comedic motives of their kid brother and who want to maintain the surface respects of their relationship.

  So she answers it at face value, a practiced interview subject. “That sounds different than what I’m doing here,” she says. “What we’re doing. I don’t think of us as desperate, backs against the wall. I think it’s more working inside life, keeping it going. There are definitely people around here, people we do business with, who are, you know, hunkered down inside four windowless walls. Mr. and Mrs. Ted Kaczynski types. I think Ken and I are definitely more in the ‘isn’t nature wonderful?’ camp.” Anything else? No?

  A hand pulls open the heavy wooden door of a stone house. Black and ruddy clubs of meat dangle from rafters. “As if to demonstrate, we visit another building, Ken’s smokehouse. This is the turbine of the family engine, capable of bringing in a steady source of income. Their mutual legend has this smokehouse being the reason my sister fell in love with Ken.”

  Outside, as a tweaky bluejay lands on the pointed roof of the smokehouse, Shannon, sitting on the flat wheel of a tree stump, picking at a stray wool pile on her sleeve, begins formally: “We met when I was in this very expensive, very trendy, very organic restaurant way after lunch, when the staff was between shifts, cleaning, getting ready for dinner. Clearly in the way, clearly being the guests who take advantage of being famous or rich. Or both. Famous-rich.

  “Me and four other people I didn’t really like, but I’d spent all night with them in this huge ... well I didn’t know why I was with them. But any way, there I was still, feeling, empty, sad, withered. Down to the wick. And just to get away from them and their eighth espresso I totter into the kitchen in my crazy heels and tell the chef who I am. I don’t really think he knows me, and doesn’t really care because he’s a working guy, but either he smells money or fame or it’s his nature as a chef to be accommodating to crazy people, he starts to show me around the kitchen when this delivery comes in. And it’s Ken. Bringing prosciutto. Swinging it over his shoulder like he just hunted it, bagged it, brought it home. And I thought, I want a home. I want someone like him to come home to me, with some kind of provision.”

  She hasn’t really looked at the camera, pensively avoiding contact, until she arrives at that last line, delivered as if finding it within hand’s reach in the dark. The memory gives her a crooked, silly smile. “I forgot the chef, forgot my friends and followed him out to his truck and sort of made him take me with him.”

  After a moment Carson tells her, “I never dreamed my sister would marry a farmer.”

  “Nothing’s impossible. What about your mother as a born again? Or your brother as, whatever it is he’s doing? Compared to them, marrying a farmer is pretty sedate.”

  And then she shifts position on the stump, sitting up girlishly. “Besides, I don’t think Ken’d know the difference between a seed and a pod. You can’t really call him a farmer.”

  “He was up on a tractor this morning.”

  A smile of warning from Shannon. “That man’s up to other things.”

  Architectural drawings are spread across a wooden table under a beam of afterhours tungsten. “You’re staying for the party, right?” Carson and Sasha are asked. Ken is big, with tiny green eyes and a well-kept red beard. He has a deceptively aquiline nose. Under all that, he’s handsome. When Carson responds yes, Ken continues his tour.

  The drawing is, maybe, for something key shaped. There are hundreds of surveyor’s symbols, cross-sectional grade illustrations and other unreadable engineering subtleties along the key that perplex the design. It could be a spaceship. Ken knows it by heart.

  “These woods here, I cut through a year ago. The cutting runs from here to here. Which is how I found the 3.3° grade from this area here all the way down there.” His thick finger points to one end of the key to the far end. “It diverges maybe .2 -.3° the whole time. You’d never notice it. Unless you had the largest carpenter’s leveler in the world.” His mustache parts with a tiny grin. Ken’s dry humor. “To the eye, it looks flat. To water, a straight smooth decline.”

  To illustrate: a series of images including a steady focal rack, helped by a remarkably stable long lens of this long cut line through the trees. It’s a corridor of white snow through tall pine, but the treeline is not cut parallel; it’s gradually V-shaped, with a thin black line running up the middle. Your eye, guided by the white of snow, the black line, and the forest boundary, enjoys a walled convergence at an ankh-shaped stanchion sticking out of the ground at the far end. This is the pole we saw earlier, planted on that little island with the three trees. It looks maybe half a mile away. Behind the island is an empty field tilted down to the island. It’s a humpbacked rolling hill and beyond that, the gray ceiling of winter.

  “Ken’s project, I realized, is a kind of North American Stonehenge. He calls it a ‘Solstice Alidade.’ “

  Back to the pine corridor. Little loafs of sandstone line its edges. But down the middl
e, more sandstone bricks create an un-swerving, heterologous sluice in the ground, three inches wide: the meltwater inside makes the black line. It is unnervingly straight, regardless of earth’s bumps and twists. The sluice runs down Ken’s invisible grade and then, coming closer, divides into two streams sending the water to encircle a densely covered bower supported by large stone slabs. A little tornado of smoke twists upwards from it.

  After a few seconds, the precise placement of the two largest slabs, front and rear, suddenly reveals itself. They’re like sentinels.

  Inside the bower, also made of stone and entwining ivy, oak beams cross the top with a gnarly overgrowth of grape vines. A shallow but very wide iron bowl hangs from the center beam. The smoke has been rising from a tidy, vigilant fire inside. Hanging from the bowl like an ancient Japanese bell is an iron cylinder.

  Beneath the cylinder and firebowl there’s a labyrinth formed by little pebbles on the floor. Ken walks the tightening circle of the labyrinth until he can reach up and place two logs into the bowl, feeding the fire. He obediently follows the labyrinth out.

  In the rear, cut into the stone is a perfectly smoothed hole. The camera, sensing a companion iris, peeks through.

  “With Druidic precision," Carson explains, "the circular opening on top of the pole on the island lines up exactly with the circumference of the firebowl cylinder and this hole at the rear of his bower.” The camera turns to a black-limbed, leafless apple tree behind the bower, waiting for spring.

  Back in the bower, and excited himself, Carson describes what happens next. “The earliest sunbeam on the morning of the solstice will rise right over there, poking through the ankh, through this bower, through that hole and onto the apple tree. Ken says it should be ready by tomorrow, just in time for the sun’s rebound, and the party.” He then moves closer to the camera, confidentially. "Unfortunately the forecast doesn't look too good."

  Another image of Ken dragging several logs by tractor. He hoists and leans them into a triangular pile. It looks like the preparation for a bonfire.

  “This is amazing,” Sasha says.

  Over images of burly, Granger-coveralled Ken striding across his winter acreage, tinkering, riding his tractor, Carson says, “She’s right. We’re both awed by Ken’s project, regardless of the weather. And so is my sister who, I realize, has fallen in love with someone who can match her grandiosity, but is patient enough to direct it into the world around him.

  “His life before Shannon was doing odd jobs, drinking, hunting, fighting, fixing cars. Making prosciutto was a lark. The movements of the stars literally went over his head, indifferently.

  "Somehow, just by having someone like Shannon in his life, Ken is now a post-medieval enviro-cosmic landscape sculptor.”

  We cut to a computer screen of Ken’s website, BlackCauldron.com. “That’s how his agent describes him in the artist profile on his website and artist catalog. He’s already moving onto another Neo-Iron Age project. Its working title is ‘Ecclesiastic Orrery.’ It’s not far from the Alidade.”

  In a nearby clearing, we see an enormous structure of several orbital iron cages mounted on rusting staffs. Large wicker wheels bound by leather straps lie on a sandstone mater etched exquisitely with the hours and degrees of position, dug snugly into the ground. In the center of the mater is a tall octagonal obelisk with what looks like a solar panel on top. A sundial garden, of various sizes, shapes and registers, rise from the snow like miscellaneous tombstones.

  “The sundials will be added later. But idea is that the sun, hitting the panel, will drive the wheels and provide the motion not only of these planets [the iron cages] but also little comets and meteors in a way even Ken admits he hasn’t figured out.”

  There are ground level shots of the now towering sundials, as well as discoveries of rods and the Cadillac fin-looking comets. Tilting up from a copper disk blooming with oxidation, we see Sasha in the sundial garden, posing with arms outstretched, an upward glance at the pallid winter sky.

  Later, more hushed confidentiality in their bedroom at night. Carson speaks for both of them while Sasha pets a large heavily crashed Newfoundland in the middle of the bed.

  “Having seen what we saw today, the proto-medieval cosmic sculptures, and the sundials everywhere, Sasha and I are wondering if the solstice party will even be a party. We’re kind of thinking it will be .... "

  He turns to Sasha. “How did you put it?"

  She keeps her attention on the dog. “Sort of like a reverential observance. Something holy. In the holiday/holy day sort of way." Then lands a big playful whoompf on the dog. “Which could totally be cool."

  Carson nods, kind of. Not too sure. “Yeah ... or totally pretentious."

  Fade to black.

  “Then the beer truck pulls up.”

  Out in the driveway, another hairy delivery man, this time in white coveralls and rainbow knit cap pulls a keg from his truck and stages it among eight or nine others as Ken hoists one onto his shoulders.

  Shannon and Ken, with experienced help from their kids, prepare for the party: moving tables, signing for slabs of meat, chipping ice into buckets, placing candles just so, cooking sugar to pour into the candy cane molds, then trimming trees outside with popcorn, cranberries and the homemade canes. They roll logs into theatrical seating arrangement near the bower and dispense luminarias every three feet creating a path to the log seating.

  Shannon answers a question from Carson: “We began having solstice parties like right away, maybe that first Christmas I moved in. And that was only because I wanted to have a big bad ass Christmas party in the country, make a lot of noise and ruckus. But no one up here really wants anything to do with something as bourgie or mainstream as Christmas, so we threw a solstice party. For whatever reason, people really liked it, really preferred the idea of a solstice party. So, ever since.”

  “What do you think about Christmas, generally?”

  “Generally?” Shannon dwells heavily on the question. “It’s – “ she looks for her kids, deciding on secrecy. “Well, the way it is out there ... in mainstream AmericaLand, my first reaction is: are you kidding? I mean, from out here, off the grid, it seems loud, crass, annoying, stressful. And too bright. It’s a mess, really. A complete mess. Something to be avoided at all costs. But my second reaction is, well, a lot kinder, especially now that I have kids of my own. Now I’d say it has its plusses and minuses.”

  Shannon continues while images of the solstice party crank up, first with people arriving, friends and neighbors hugging and laughing, potluck chefs unveiling dishes on the oak table, kids playing in the snow, Ken lighting the luminarias, kegs being tapped. Four or five people watch a huge pig, maybe it’s a boar, roast slowly over a fire outside. A guy other than Ken is in charge of the roast.

  “On the one hand,” Shannon says, “people do find a way to be charitable and use the I guess you’d call spirit of the season for some good. For some mystery-of-the-universe reason, this time of year really ignites humans. We’re engaged. With the world, the universe, each other. There really is such a thing as kindness. Or can be.

  “But on the other hand, most of what we call Christmas, really isn’t supportable. Not the money, not the insistence of gifts, gifts for gifts’ sake and then tossing those on the pile, on the landfill. And the wretched traveling. It’s all the capitalist mandate, on steroids.”

  The house quickly fills. Among the conventional minglers in puffy down quilted coats and wool caps with ear flaps, many are in costumes: 19th century Victorian carolers with bonnets and muttonchops; Renaissance Fair wenches and Henry VIIIs drinking from goblets; lots of Father Christmases; Wiccans in luxurious black velvet long coats with fox fur cuffs and collars with little wiccan tots dressed as ponies and wolves; a lordly but very anomalous Klingon male with his lion-maned Klingon female consort.

  “And the overriding social message that’s sent out,” Shannon continues, “is: this is expected of you now. To participate in Chri
stmas and contribute. Accept it or we die. The message is loud and clear and reiterated over and over: You should be out, spending money, buying, collecting, spending again. Because the kids, members of your family, friends, they will think better of you if you succeed at this. And on top of that, the economy needs you. People will loose everything in the spring if you don’t buy a lot during Christmas If the cash registers are singing and the waste is mounting, then all is well with the world.

  “That’s a crazy message. No wonder the fundamentalists go haywire over it.”

  “The ‘Where’s Jesus in it?’ crowd,” Carson suggests.

  She chortles. “Exactly. It’s sort of a joke: isn’t it funny how we’re all crazy doing this? Getting on line for the toy of the season in a blizzard, just for that one morning of pleasure for your kid, and victory for you. Society expects you to absolutely burst at the seams with consumption and to spread it around and not really have a great time doing it. I mean it’s like, Ha ha, it’s ok, it’s going to end soon. We know this time of year sucks. Just get through it. That’s the answer you get: It’ll all be over soon. Happy holidays!”

  “I can see why you want to avoid that.”

  “Right? I mean, neither one of us is a model parent. We just want our kids to grow up smart, strong and caring, engaged with nature and the universe and not cowed by the expectations of others or become the cogs of someone else’s wheel of greed and power. At least that’s what we tell each other, as Mom and Dad. Like anyone else, we make things up as we go along. Which includes having a party at a time of year when the urge is really strong to throw a big party. When it’s dark and cold out.

  “The solstice party, I hope, is a little antidote to all that. I actually like to think of it as a kind of karmic corrective. A little creative craziness in the distant forest.”

  Four women in white gowns embroidered with moons and stars, powdered faces and the same long blood-red hair, stride in mysterious, four cornered unison; lots of teenagers wearing wool caps with little ears on them, sometimes cat or fox or donkey; a tall and courtly Papageno and Papagena who fit bottles of local brew into their beaks; otherwise ordinary-dressed folks, with Ken, shooting rifles in the air out beyond the Alidade; a snowman playing a pan flute; a little girl serenely nibbling a cookie whose crumbs flake down onto her penguin costume.

  Not one but five bonfires are lit and burn in a large pentagonal area which melts the snow, summons the mud and compels the biggest bellied men to take off their shirts in the toasty middle and wrestle. Elsewhere: a bareback equestrian barrel race and a kind of nomadic capture-the-flag on horseback starring a fluttering red banner with a skull (human? real?) on top; a stilt-walker performance with fire (juggling, eating); a well-attended children’s magic show; a huge snowball rolling race; and, somewhere in the distance, the ever-present drum circle.

  We see Ken conferring with Shannon and a few others, notably a nimble, elderly woman in a green and black robe with a tall white collar. The Celebrant. They’re looking at the sky, black with unseen, impenetrable cloud cover. Then at their watches.

  “Well, it’s almost ten thirty,” the Celebrant says.

  Ken inhales with a wet sniff. “We should just do this any way.”

  “The fireworks will help,” someone says.

  “The solstice will still happen,” Shannon adds. “Whether we see it or not.” The small group nods collaboratively.

  Carson: “Ken’s plan, from the very beginning was to start this year’s party at midnight and go until dawn, having pointed his sculpture at the exact latitude the first rays of the new, solstitial sun will appear. Which were then trained on hundreds of little crystals hanging from the apple tree. He gave up on that, Shannon told me, for practical reasons. Such as, no one would come that late. Plan B was using a laser borrowed from the nearby university for the same affect, which Shannon also scuttled. Plan C became the way to go: a huge mercury-vapor lamp borrowed from a local timber camp. But his contact for that never arrived. This council is the result.”

  “Ok, let’s go,” Ken says, then turns to the Celebrant. “When is it, again?”

  “Eleven thirty eight.”

  “Maybe I can aim some kind of beam ....”

  Ken tugs at his lip thoughtfully, turns and is gone, leaving the others to fend for themselves. He appears inspired. The council looks at each other, at disappearing Ken, and then at each other: what’s going on?

  “I guess I’ll get us started,” the Celebrant decides.

  “The ceremony they’ve planned,” Carson explains, “is a series of rituals taken from ancient lore, mostly northern European. According to the program, it begins when Beiwe arrives.”

  That would be the lady, in a long white leather and fur coat, with a little girl in white leather and fur at her side, who is led around the grounds of the farm in what appears at first to be a wicker sleigh, lit by swinging lanterns. Though it’s not wicker. The little girl tosses small evergreen tips behind them.

  “That’s Mary Anne Klieg, as Beiwe, and her daughter Dakota. They’re local. She teaches chemistry at the university. In the neolithic past, I’m told, Beiwe’s carriage was made out of reindeer bones. Her husband Bob is a hunter and he and their friends spent most of the year carefully building this out of deer and moose bones.

  “A bit about Beiwe: Professor Wolfram told me that to the early Iron Age tribes of Finland, the arrival of Beiwe, and her daughter Beiwe-Nieida, means a return of green grass for the reindeer to eat. Not only is she a fertility goddess, then, but she is also, given the long winter nights, the bringer of sanity. That’s her job, now and always: bringing sanity to the bleak mid-winter.

  “After Beiwe, there are other performances and rituals,” Carson says, over corresponding imagery. A Mayan fire dancing ritual. Shaker shape singing. And for reals now, the mock sword fight between the Oak King and the Holly King.

  By the light of bonfires, two large men, Druids, wield large swords against one another, with great heaving clouds of exhale and body heat.

  “The fight lasts until the Oak King, the bringer of the new year, light and red robins, vanquishes the Holly King, the lord of withdrawal, disintegration, repose, death. He will have his rematch in June. Rudy and Jake here own a bar nearby and hit the Renaissance fair circuit pretty hard each year.”

  Jake, the winning Oak King, then walks to a little boy in a red cape and gold crown and kneels offering his sword. The boy touches the Oak King’s head and walks to the Celebrant standing in Ken’s bower. He gives her an offering of little cakes. Pleased with himself, he runs over to his mother, Mrs. Papagena, who has taken off her bird head. Her son buries himself among her feathers.

  Though the celebrant starts speaking at this point, I heard something on the soundtrack and played it over and over. It’s hard to pick up the first time, but it’s there: a diesel engine revving up, getting warm, then rumbling closer.

  “All over the world,” the Celebrant says, “we wait eagerly for the arrival of the sun, the long sun, the sun that brings light, warmth and life. Birth, life, decay and death proceed just as the sun makes its way across the universe, bringing birth life decay and death with it. As it goes, we go. So let us give time to our thoughts of loved ones past.

  The party descends to a quiet reflection, though the sound of the tractor is unavoidable. Some in the crowd notice it. When Sasha’s camera swings to the Celebrant, you can tell the Celebrant hears it too. But she marches on.

  “The cycles of life are the only truth the universe provides. We find simplicity and truth in these cycles for they teach us love, compassion, courage. To honor the neverending circle and to welcome the return of the light, we light a candle –” as many in the audience do. The Celebrant dips her candle into the iron bowl in the center of the bower, and ignites the inside with a small exciting whoosh. “And we proclaim: Return sun! Welcome sun! Abide with us, sun!”

  That appears to be it, but the Celebrant looks in a direction as if ‘Abide with us�
�� was a cue to something. Sasha’s camera finds some commotion in the crowd. People stir, look behind them and with minor confusion and awkwardness, separate themselves down the middle of the audience. A few stranded stragglers leap across the empty middle that Shannon wants to maintain with a wave of her arms: one side or the other, please.

  The Celebrant appears to get what’s going on, so she says, loudly, over the approaching engine, “Ok – well, from the top! Again, we proclaim; Return sun, welcome sun, abide with us, sun!” Hundreds of heads, also sensing a cue, look to the side, up at the sky, all around. But nothing comes. A few get fidgety.

  The Celebrant cocks a May West hip. “Don’t you just hate when you ask for something ... ” she says, but then it comes. Somehow, from a Ken-rigged contrivance with tractor, work lights, and metal sheeting, a fierce light is cast through the bower and poof! The fey little apple tree is lit with a narrow beam of light. It’s actually pretty impressive. People hurrah and say “Welcome sun!”

  Then come the fireworks overhead, from who knows where.

  “The party lasted all night,” Carson says. “And it ranks as one of the coolest, most fun nights I’ve ever had. Despite the obvious let down at dawn when there was no sun, just a white disk glowing behind the gray cloud cover, and the technical glitches of manufactured light.”

  More scenes of partying, late into the night. Music. Passed out little kids in animal costumes sleeping over their parent’s shoulders. The roast pig is passed around, meat piled high on the platter. Lots of drinking.

  “But I can’t help feeling that their solstice party is not any closer to the primal truth of the holiday than my parents’ choir albums, cocktails and aluminum tree. Many of the ancient rituals around the winter solstice in fact involved carnal sacrifice. Beiwe, for instance, was celebrated by killing and skinning little white animals. Human sacrifice was not a rarity at this time either and considering the plight of humans plunged in darkness amid a little understood universe, ritual killing makes sense.

  You might be willing to appease anyone or anything, in every manner available just to bring the light, and warmth, and food, back. Compared to that, listening to “O Holy Night” in the warmth of your centrally heated home seems much better. And the pretend bloodsport of Beiwe, a little crazy and nostalgic.”

  Of course, Carson can say what he wants. It looks fun as hell. As the party winds down, people stagger home in the snow, arm in arm, carrying sleeping children, riding off in fishtailing snowmobiles. Come the morning, there are two holdouts, a bare chested guy and a girl wearing a pink hat with pointy cat ears trying to keep a smoldering bonfire going, one knee-snapped branch at a time.

  * * * * *

  Part Six

  In which Carson drives to the Mashipan monastery to visit and film his

  brother Humphrey, who used to live in self-imposed seediness