Under-Heaven

by Tim Greaton

  “How’d you meet Aunt Alice?” I asked, truly curious about what had attracted him to her.

  He smiled.

  “It’s not what you think, Nate. I was married to your Aunt Bertrice not Aunt Alice. Bertrice and I were married for forty-seven years. Nice years, too.”

  Well, that explained why Aunt Alice’s outfit seemed more old-fashioned to me than his did. But where was Aunt Bertrice? I almost asked the unheard of but kept myself from voicing the question.

  He must have guessed what I was thinking because he said, “She’s in purgatory, Nate. Your Aunt Bertrice was always frightened of Mr. Edison and his crazy experiments. For a time there, I think she actually convinced herself he was a demon.”

  I couldn’t make the connection in his logic but continued to listen.

  “That crazy old genius actually burned his entire laboratory to the ground one time.” Uncle Albert chuckled at the memory. “Yep, he had flames reaching two and three hundred feet in the air. The smoke was so thick it coated the insides of houses blocks away. Rest assured your Aunt Bertrice wasn’t too happy about cleaning up after that.”

  I struggled to understand what any of this had to do with my less-than-nice Aunt Alice.

  “She’s still there,” Uncle Albert said. “Your Aunt Bertrice is still reliving those years in West Orange, still trying to find her way through all the angry words and negative judgments she made about Mr. Edison. Don’t you see?”

  I shook my head. I had no clue what he was talking about.

  “Your Aunt Alice is trying to make you understand that it’s important to decide. It’s not enough just to be here in Under-Heaven. And it’s not enough to just learn the lessons that your grandmother presents to you each day. At some point, you’re going to have to find a purpose to it all, Nate. At some point, you’ll have to decide.”

  “Decide what, Uncle Albert? I already know I don’t want a demon to drag me off to Hell.” I remembered the misshapen creature that had nearly captured Ricky that day. “I never want that to happen!”

  “That’s the problem, Nate. Knowing what you don’t want is only half the equation. At some point you have to decide what you do want. I know your Aunt Bertrice doesn’t want to go to Hell, but I also know she doesn’t want to forgive herself for all the things she said and did in regards to Mr. Edison. The problem is that she hasn’t decided the most important thing: whether she wants to be in Heaven. I’m convinced that when she makes that decision, God will judge her to be a wonderful woman who deserves to be at his table.”

  “So, I need to decide if I want to go to Heaven?”

  “Or not,” Aunt Alice interjected. At some point during our discussion, she had come back into the room. “I figured this old fool might need a bit of help before he got too worried about hiding those black sneakers of yours.”

  If a boy could have blushed in Under-Heaven, I’m sure I would have. It was a small mercy that complexions remain neutral there. My brief expression of horror at being caught, however, must have given me away because, for the first time since I had met her, my Aunt Alice laughed.

  I had to admit she had a pretty laugh.

  14

  Earth, Present and Past

  Ricky had become much more serious since the demon incident. In all, the archangel had stood sentry on his roof for three days. During that time my friend had remained inside his house. Twice I had seen his uncle arrive to visit, but both times Nathaniel—I had been thrilled to find the archangel and I shared the same name—had not allowed him inside. On the third day, I saw Ricky out on his porch talking with the archangel for a long time. As I watched from the fountain that day, I remembered envying him a little—enough so that my Grandma Clara had to pull me back across the cobblestone road and into my house. “Before you’re the next soul that needs saving,” she had said. Of course, my sneakers and the cuffs of my pant legs had already turned color.

  Now, almost three months since the archangel had left, my friend tended to play a lot less than he used to. But whatever had transpired between him and Nathanial had apparently helped because his color seldom went any further up than his knees. I raced to his house on one of my days off, hoping he might be in the mood to do something. I knew that wasn’t going to happen as soon as I saw the worried expression on his face.

  “I want to tell you something, Nate,” he said, “but I’m afraid it might be bad for you.”

  “You can tell me anything. We’re friends.”

  “I’m worried that if I tell you….” His eyes dropped and his left cheek twitched like it sometimes did when he was down. He didn’t have to complete the thought. I knew he would never have knowingly put me in danger of meeting a demon, especially one intended for me.

  “You think just telling me could make my colors change?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “Should we ask one of the angels?” I wondered aloud.

  He perked up a little. “Maybe.”

  The truth is he had me curious. I was almost as anxious to learn his mystery as I was to help.

  “What should we do then?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet,” he told me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We sat in the grass for the rest of the day and picked the petals off from hundreds of flowers, but they of course regrew as fast as we could pick them. We made small colorful hills and castles with them. While we played, we whispered about dogs, and frogs and even my pesky little sister. We laughed a lot, and Ricky didn’t seem quite so serious when we parted late that afternoon.

  Mentioning Vicky made me yearn to see her, so rather than going straight home I settled at the edge of the pool and focused my thoughts on her. I moved quickly through the white background and flickering lights until I could see a full view of her walking beside my aunt. My aunt and uncle used to visit our house several times a year, and I remembered the way Aunt Donna used to spend more time playing with Vicky and me than she did talking with my mother. I had always liked her and was thankful she and my uncle had accepted Vicky into their home.

  I brushed my hand over the water again to smooth a larger area. The scene expanded. Tall buildings rose beyond my view to either side, and there were dozens of cars moving past in both directions. My sister and aunt stopped in front of a store. I could see my aunt saying something but for me there was only the loud rush of the fountain streams striking the pool. My Grandma Clara had explained that to hear back on Earth I would have to settle into the scene rather than just watch. From her description, I got the impression it would be like sitting inside someone’s head, and I didn’t think I was ready for that.

  I watched my sister for quite a while as she and Aunt Donna went in and out of various clothing stores. From the look of things, Vicky was getting a fancy new outfit. I imagined there might be a wedding or a big party coming up. My little sister sure looked happy about it, or at least about shopping for the occasion. I spun the scene around until I could see her from the front. She was garbed in a light polka-dotted yellow dress that, like most of her clothes, had laced fringes. Two red bows held her hair neatly in ponytails that bobbed in rhythm with her energetic walk. I zoomed in until her cheerful face filled my pool window. I absorbed her image into my mind. It became a nightly habit that would stay with me for as long as I remained in Under-Heaven.

  Finally, I reached down and touched her perfect face.

  “I love you,” I said as the ripples washed her likeness away.

  Time seemed to speed along faster and faster as my days in Under-Heaven continued. My Grandma Clara said it had to do with the maturing of my soul. Our daily lessons now included more detailed histories of various cultures and their theologies, most of which turned out to have similar basic beliefs. It seemed especially odd that religions which had such a difficult time coexisting back on Earth integrated seamlessly in Heaven. Each Under-Heaven was tailored to the beliefs of the new souls that inhabited it, and as the souls moved on, the perfection of Heaven made conflicts o
f belief trivial and moot. Of course, those souls who had no tolerance for other people or beliefs were ultimately condemned to an afterlife more suited to their dispositions. Overall, a simple but effective system.

  I also began to receive regular visits from other relatives in my Under-Heaven. They arrived sometimes two or three a day but usually didn’t stay long. I was thankful that Uncle Albert had assumed the duties of guide and escort to all of my visitors, because, though most of my relatives were genial, some tended to be less friendly. No matter what the difficulties, however, my uncle always navigated them nicely.

  Aunt Alice had also become a regular guest, usually visiting two or three times a week. I came to realize that she was as cool in her affections as Grandma Clara was warm. Even though Aunt Alice wasn’t the type to say she loved you often, she did have a way of making you feel important, even if only important enough to be worth correcting you about this or that. The truth is, in spite of her uppity manner, I had grown quite fond of her. And I think she had garnered a certain fondness for me—though it wasn’t quite so obvious on the days when I tried to hide my color-ridden sneakers. One time, I had even wrapped them in pillowcases before she arrived. I should have known the cases would turn the same dark shade as my sneakers. Though only for a moment, Aunt Alice had smiled about that.

  One out of every three or four visits, my Aunt Alice would declare a “discussion day,” which was time after lessons for just talking. Of course, this meant I had to forego some playtime with Ricky, so at first I found those days bothersome, but more and more I looked forward to them. Often, Aunt Alice would tell me about her fascinating life back on Earth.

  She had been born to a minor nobleman southern Russia in 1793. Her mother died during her birth. The owner of about two thousand acres along the Volga River, her father lorded over nearly five hundred serfs by the time he arranged to marry his twelve-year-old daughter Alice to the adjoining landowner, a widowed nobleman. It was an especially difficult time in Russian history. The people were largely either serfs, sworn to work for lords who provided them with the most meager of food and housing, or they were peasants, free to roam within certain townships, though often so poor they were actually worse off than the serfs. My Aunt Alice’s father and her new husband believed that by combining the strength of their estates, they would be better able to weather the economic storms that regularly swept up and down the country.

  In this, they turned out to be correct.

  Though she didn’t at first, Aunt Alice grew to love the husband fate and her father had forced upon her. She also came to care deeply about the serfs who worked the land for both estates. She loved those workers much the way a mother would love her children, and as early as her thirteenth birthday she would walk among them, offering support and wishing them well in their daily toils. On her fifteenth birthday, my Aunt Alice convinced her husband to set aside three large rooms on the ground level of their large estate home to serve as a hospital and a welfare area. There she made sure well-trained servants were always available with adequate supplies of food, water and medicine.

  In time, word spread of her serfs’ superior living conditions, which put pressure on other landowners to begin offering better if not equal conditions. Soon, the region became known for its humane and even caring treatment of most residents, a situation that was noted and definitely not appreciated in higher societal circles.

  By the age of seventeen, my Aunt Alice had become the natural mother of two, and had begun to personally attend every serf birth within the two estates. Over the course of time, she grew to know most of her serfs by name, and was greeted throughout the estates with smiles and waves. These were her people. She loved them and was beloved by them.

  In 1812, my Aunt Alice turned nineteen years old. It was a year she remembered well because that was when the Russian economy was brutally shaken and nearly destroyed by the invasion of Napoleon’s troops. Though Czar Alexander ultimately chased the French warmonger and his army back to Paris, the victory came at a devastating price. Two hundred young, male serfs, nearly a fifth of the estates’ combined work force were sent away as foot soldiers in support of Alexander’s counter-war. Only two dozen were destined to return, and even then it would be two years before she saw them again. Lacking the strongest backs, maintaining both estates became a struggle. Even after her father’s death allowed the two estates to consolidate under a single, noble roof, conditions for her and her people continued to worsen.

  Alice’s husband, along with many nobles of the time, felt that only by radical change could the country recover. Many were in favor of overthrowing the Romanov Czars and letting the people rule themselves by way of a constitution. For years those sentiments brooded.

  Alice was thirty-three years old when Czar Alexander died. Her husband, an old man of sixty-two, joined a con­spiracy of three thousand other nobleman who attended the coronation of Alexander’s younger brother Nicholas in St. Petersburg. They intended to stop the proceedings and declare rule by the Romanov Czars to be over. Nicholas Romanov, however, retained enough military strength to crush them. It was December 14, 1825 when Alice’s husband was slaughtered along with most of the other conspirators. History labeled those men and their movement as “The Decemberists.”

  I had learned all of this over the course of my previous few weeks’ discussions with Aunt Alice. And I had begun to infer that somehow my aunt’s own demise had been tied to the same Decemberist movement. As I entered the kitchen with her one afternoon, I thought this might have been the day I would find out how she had died. But instead of beginning a new reminiscence, she said, “Today we dance!”

  “Dance,” I exclaimed. “Boys don’t dance!”

  “Up in Heaven they do,” Aunt Alice said.

  Reluctantly, I agreed to try, but not before I glanced out the front window to make sure Ricky wasn't watching. It wouldn’t do to have my friend see me dance. He was nowhere to be seen. Secure in my privacy, I returned to the center of the floor. Suddenly, soft music began to play.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “There are advantages to being an angel,” she said. “First, we’ll try a Russian Waltz.” She grabbed my hand. “Here, like this.”

  15

  Receding Footsteps

  Jesse surveyed his room and thought it would probably pass his mother’s scrutiny. He had hidden most of his dirty clothes under the bed and in his pillowcase. The dirty plate and glass he’d used that morning was pushed to the back of his underwear drawer. Yes, overall it was a pretty good job. At the last minute, he remembered the small hole he’d poked in the plaster wall above his bed with the tip of his Frodo Lord of the Rings action figure sword. For some reason the void looked so much bigger in the daylight. Hurriedly, he moved his tall green Teddy bear against the wall to cover the hole.

  Definitely better.

  It was Saturday morning, and his father was supposed to take care of him for a few hours while his mother worked the midday shift at the restaurant. Though his last couple of visits hadn’t gone so well, Jesse knew the ’speriment was still in process. He just wished his father could keep doing what he did that one time when he showed up really clean and in nice clothes. Unfortunately, the last two times Jesse and his mom had seen him, he’d been wearing soot-covered work clothes and his usual stained green jacket.

  “Are you ready, Jesse?” his mother called from somewhere in the living room or kitchen.

  Glancing one last time to be sure everything look good, Jesse nodded and opened his door.

  “Ready for my ‘spection, Mom.”

  She was wearing her white and pink waitress outfit when she came into the room. Jesse could tell how much she loved him, because even though she pretended to be stern for these weekly ‘spections, she always had a tiny smile at the corners of her lips. It was hard to fail when your mom was proud of you no matter how bad you did. Even so, Jesse wanted things to go smoothly so she would be in a good mood when his dad arrived.
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  “Um, Jess,” she said, her hands on her narrow hips, “I seem to remember someone having their toast and juice in here this morning.”

  Jesse opened held his breath.

  “Well?”

  “Maybe that was yesterday,” Jesse suggested, wishing he could spin excuses as fast as his friend Storm who had once told their teacher he only pushed Karen Cushman over because he had to go to the bathroom really bad and didn’t see her. Everyone in class, including Karen, knew it was because he had a crush on her. But the story worked and the teacher never told Storm’s father.

  “No, maybe it was this morning,” his mother said. “And I don’t remember you putting those dishes in the sink.” Her tiny smile had disappeared. “So where are they?”

  Jesse stared at the floor.

  “Come on, Jesse. I have to finish getting ready, and your father will be here any minute.”

  “Sometimes things fall off the bureau,” he muttered.

  “So they’re under the bureau?” she said, her voice stern. “I doubt a glass would fit under there.”

  “Maybe my drawer was open when—”

  “Jesse!” She pulled his top drawer open. “Do you want your clothes all full of bugs?”

  “I picked up my dirty socks,” he said, trying to change the subject. Of course, he didn’t add they were inside his pillowcase along with yesterday’s tee shirt.

  His mother pulled out both the plate and the cup and placed them on the bureau. Then she started pulling out socks and underwear to shake them out.

  “I’ll be the only mother in preschool that sends her kid to school with crumbs all over his clothes.”

  Jesse wanted to say that Taylor Spence had mustard stains all over his jacket and pants the day before, but the look on his mother’s face suggested the time for excuses had passed. He was still studying her frustrated expression when her eyes widened and she pulled his piggy bank out of the back corner of his drawer.