The food was cold by the time Sebas came back, tramping inside with his muddy boots. As soon as he sat down, Father said, ‘Now go out back to the garden, Jonas Sebastian, and cut yourself a switch. It’s best you take your whipping for being insolent before you eat. That way, you can say grace with a clean conscience.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
In 1914, a man named Arch-Duke Ferdinand was assassinated in a city in far-away Europe that no one in Incarnation had ever heard of or could pronounce, and the world descended into war.
Over the years since Grandpa Strömberg had refounded Incarnation, the railroad never reached town, but the telegraph did. The wires brought us news of the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia and that the great powers of Europe were aligning on one side or the other. The rape of Belgium, the Battle of the Somme, all of these events became common currency to us, even though they happened on the other side of the world.
Father saw in this the Supreme Struggle, a way to galvanise our community against the Evil of the outside world, and to complete the task of unification his father had commended to him. From the pulpit, Father preached of divine forces behind the British guns. He described with ecstasy how the Holy Ghost blew mustard gas into the German trenches. He traced the shadow of the Anti-Christ that the Bolsheviks cast and hinted at the possibility of the End of Days.
For a while, Father’s crusade brought our community closer together. The church was bursting with people, the collection plates were full. Our people worked harder, produced more, hoping to show from the sweat of their brows that good people still populated the earth and that God would have no reason to smite us like He’d done in the time of Noah.
But Father soon fell victim to the success of his own rhetoric.
The telegraph told us that in England a generation of men was being wiped out. Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders were taking up arms to defend their brothers on the other side of the Atlantic. Soon the men of Incarnation began to wonder; if this truly was the End of Days, shouldn’t we, too, take a stand against the Anti-Christ?
Then in 1915 the Germans sank the Lusitania, sending over a thousand men and women to their graves. In the face of this atrocity, we wondered, why weren’t the good people of Incarnation beating their ploughshares into swords?
Yet still they worked the fields. Still they brought in the crops.
When the U.S. finally declared war against Germany in April 1917, most of the able-bodied men of Incarnation packed their bags, said their goodbyes and made their way on foot to the recruiting station. Incarnation became a ghost town overnight.
When our volunteers left, the earth mourned them. Ploughs stood rusting in half-cut rows. Crops they’d planted before they shipped out to France withered like the shoots in the Parable of the Sower. A heresy of weeds sprang up and was burned by the sun.
Months went by, and the telegraph was busy again, this time transmitting the names of our dead. Fathers and sons were slaughtered together. Brothers, in groups of twos, threes and fours, were never coming back. As the war dragged on, Father forbade the church bell to be rung until it was over, saying it was out of respect for the dead. In reality, even if he rang the bell, hardly anyone would come. Despite the fact that there were so many young men’s souls to pray for—or perhaps because of that, the ranks of the faithful thinned.
The funny thing is that, for all Father’s rants and ravings against the danger of foreign influences, the Mexicans and Indians were the last to abandon the church. But even they slowly trickled out, as reading names of the dead replaced the singing of the hymns.
There was little reason to hope the war would ever end.
CHAPTER NINE
As the war dragged on in France, Father and Sebas began a battle of their own. In spite of the staggering losses, Father continued to praise the war. Under his breath, Sebas called it ‘collective suicide’. Father saw Beelzebub behind the Russian Revolution. Almost audibly now, Sebas praised the mutiny of the Potemkin. As Sebas slowly began to voice his thoughts, our dinner table became the scene of angry conflagrations. Neither side surrendered an inch. They lobbed words at each other like grenades. They set their bayonets and charged.
Soon, it wasn’t just the war that Father and Sebas were fighting about. Union organising and the role of Suffragettes widened the bitter feud between them. Father always succeeded by dismissing Sebas as a rabble-rouser and a fool, until Sebas used a weapon Father couldn’t ignore: Indian folklore.
Because Father had forbidden it, Sebas took every opportunity to learn about creation myths and especially stories of magical transformations into animals. With most of the men gone, Sebas did all sorts of odd jobs—scared crows, set fence posts, strung barbed wire—to buy forbidden books. Soon the secret space under the floorboards of his room was filled with texts on mythology, anthropology and mysticism.
Late at night Sebas would whisper to me some of the wonderful things that were bubbling up in his head. Once he said to me, ‘You know when you’re scared, and you wrap yourself up in your sheets?’
I nodded my head, afraid he was making fun of me.
‘Well, I read there’s this theory that we inherited the practice from the Anasazi people. And they probably got it from the Ancient Egyptians: when we wrap ourselves up, we play the part of Pharaoh being mummified. It’s a practice infused with powerful strong magic, for the king’s journey to the afterlife. You could say it’s a sort of etiquette that even the most impure souls must abide by.’
‘Etiquette for the dead?’ I asked. ‘Are you funnin’ me?’
‘No, no, I swear it’s true. There’s a spiritual order to this world that all creatures must abide by, alive or dead. The Indians know that, and that’s what makes them wiser than us all.’
Sebas felt fortified by our late-night conversations, so, one evening, at the dinner table, he asked, ‘Father, how can the Bible hold the whole Truth, if all ancient cultures speak of a great flood? Take the Ojibwe people, for example. . . .’
What followed was the whipping of his life. Father actually broke a thick birch branch on Sebas’ backside, but my brother didn’t care. Sebas didn’t cry out, he didn’t shed a tear. It was the first time I saw the glimmer of defeat in Father’s eyes.
I think Sebas’ research on mythology started as a way to rankle Father. But as he learned about the Indians’ stories, he became interested in their causes, too. With a tremor in his voice, Sebas would tell me about the Indians’ lack of access to schools and hospitals and clean water. Once he even wrote a letter to the State Legislature in Austin to protest the Dawes Act that had stolen Indian lands; he had Lupita smuggle it out, so Father wouldn’t know.
Then, early one morning before the end of 1917, Sebas came into my room and gently shook me awake. Shining the flickering light of a kerosene lamp on my face, he said, ‘I’ve come to say goodbye, Verge.’
‘Huh? What?’ I yawned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I’m leavin’. I’m hitchin’ a ride on a delivery truck out of town . . . right now.’
A chill ran down my spine. I was suddenly awake. I bleated out, ‘You’re not going to enlist, are you?’
‘Naw,’ he replied. ‘I’m no sucker. The war’s a smokescreen for what’s really goin’ on. It’s just fat bankers and oil barons on either side of the Atlantic dukein’ it out. That’s no fight for me.’
‘Then what are you going to do, Sebas?’
‘This,’ he said, thrusting a crumpled newspaper article at me. With blurry eyes, I scanned the paper, picking up random words: ‘Volunteers needed . . . ethnological survey . . . Bureau of Indian Affairs. . . .’
Barely registering what I was reading, I protested, ‘But Sebas, what’s Father going to say?’
‘To hell with him. I’m almost eighteen now. He can’t tell me what to do. Anyway . . . he couldn’t care less if I took this job or went to the trenches in France. Either way, I’m dead to him.’
‘But what’s it all about?�
��
Sebas’ eyes suddenly lit up. He said, ‘I’m goin’ with a great bunch of guys my age. We’re goin’ to travel from reservation to reservation, ’cross the whole state of Texas. They got these new-fangled gramophones, so we can record the stories of the elders before they disappear. They pay us next to nothin’, but it’s a Government job, so we’re exempt from the draft. Maybe I can even get a job with a university afterwards. Who knows?’
‘But how will you live?’
‘I’ll live with the Indians. Eat what they eat, sleep where they sleep. We’re just goin’ with a sleepin’ bag and a duffle bag. Look, Verge, it’s the adventure we always dreamed of.’
‘I . . . but I . . .’ I started to protest, but then shut my mouth. ‘I’m glad one of us can leave. But . . . I’m going to miss you.’
There was a long silence between us. Then Sebas reached over and ruffled my hair. ‘I’m going to write you . . . a lot,’ he said. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I whispered back.
‘And when I get settled . . . wherever that is, I’m comin’ back for you. I promise. I’m always gonna take care of you.’
‘Constantinople?’ I asked, my eyes filling up with tears.
‘Yeah, Constantinople,’ he said. ‘Now, get back to bed. Father’ll be in a bad mood when he finds I’m gone. He’ll probably take it out on you. So, eat well. Keep warm. And don’t let him ever convince you that your books are stupid.’ Then he paused. ‘You’re all I have in this world, Verge.’
‘You, too,’ I said, trying to stifle a whimper.
Sebas pulled the bedcovers around me and tucked me in. Then he put the hood down on his lantern, and I lost his face in shadows. I heard him swinging his bag over his shoulder in the darkness. He shut the door quietly behind him.
It turned out Sebas was wrong. Father never showed he was angry about his leaving. In fact he never spoke his name again.
True to his word, Sebas wrote frequently. But Father ripped up most of the letters before they could get to me. Late at night, when he was asleep, I’d pick through the garbage to find fragments stained with egg yolk and coffee grounds. They had words that made my heart jump like ‘hail storm’ or ‘icy river crossing’.
Every now and then Lupita made it to the mailbox first. She’d hide the letters in the pockets of her apron and smuggle them to me. Locked in my room, I’d read and re-read the cramped words by candlelight.
For a while Sebas camped with a Navajo tribe. From there he wrote, ‘I’ve heard the most amazing story of the Kieje Hatal, or “night chant”. It tells how the Indians turn themselves into sheep and crows. I guess old Carlos isn’t alone in his beliefs of mysterious transformations. I gotta look into this. . . .’
In another letter Sebas wrote of how he and his group had become lost during a snowstorm while crossing the Barnwell Mountains. Sebas had fallen into a crevasse and broken his leg. He went snow blind and almost died of exposure. Luckily, a hunting party from the Kaddo people found and rescued them.
They led Sebas and his friends back to their village. While his leg mended, he decided to study the tribe’s stories in depth. The rest of his group moved down south. He wrote, ‘You’ll be surprised to hear that stories of the Muladona have reached even this remote village. There are lots of versions. Sometimes, the curse is the result of incest.’
The last letter I received from Sebas was in August 1918. It was dated months before, and read, ‘I’ve learned so much. But I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I think they’re holding back on me. The Chief has agreed to initiate me in the secrets of the tribe. But first I must pass a test of courage.’
CHAPTER TEN
At the start of October 1918, the Spanish Flu hit Incarnation. By November, over half of us were dead.
It started at the Henderssen farm just outside of town. I remember it clearly, because it was the first day of heavy rain that Fall. Doc Evans checked in on old man Henderssen, ’cause he’d been thrown from his horse the day before and twisted his ankle. Doc found the whole family sat down to breakfast. Mother, father, two little girls. Blood dripping from their noses and mouths. Eyes wide open and staring. The cornbread on the table was still warm.
Then it was the Tornqvists’ turn. Tornqvist senior pulled through after fighting the fever for three days. His son, Thorvald, a big, strapping boy—I once saw him bend a horseshoe with his bare hands—was gone in a matter of hours. Thorvald’s lungs filled with fluid and burst like a levy in a flood. Doc Evans called it a ‘cytokine storm’. Father called it a reckoning for our sins.
That’s when Sheriff Wilkinson closed the schoolhouse and quarantined the sick there. He also boarded up the church and outlawed public gatherings on pain of horsewhipping. From then on, everyone with a runny nose or a bead of perspiration on his forehead was suspect. People gathered what food they could and nailed themselves inside their farmhouses. They didn’t answer the door, even if their closest friends called for help; they kept a shotgun at hand in case they did.
With the closure of the church and the schoolhouse, the ancient row of houses along Main Street took on greater importance. They loomed like the jealous monoliths of a long-forgotten religion. We occupied the houses now less as masters and more as squatters, fighting a war of attrition against the inevitable decay. Above it all, rightful emperor of abandonment, loomed the tower of the long-dead gambling hall, left untouched from the old times. In its heyday, the tower’s light must have shone far out into the prairie. Now the tower was the black shell of a thing no one entered anymore.
Death came in spite of all our precautions, and they couldn’t bury the corpses fast enough. But something much more terrible than the influenza epidemic came to Incarnation that Fall of 1918.
If you got through the first day of fever okay, then maybe you’d beat the flu. And, if it finally took you, well, then you’d tried your level best. As awful as it was, the Bible says there’ve always been plagues, so I guess that’s some consolation. But what remedy can you expect, when the Devil comes knocking at your bedroom door?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The morning of 25th October 1918, I lay awake in bed, staring out of my window at the rain as it made a pitter-patter sound on the abandoned garden. It was a week before my fourteenth birthday.
Even with a woollen blanket wrapped around my head and shoulders, my teeth chattered from the cold.
I heard something tumble to the floor in the hallway. Then there was a cry and a crash. I got up, and the wooden floor under my feet felt like the grey slate of a tomb.
I opened my bedroom door to find Lupita belly-up on the floor. She was rubbing her wrinkled forehead, surrounded by a mountain of luggage. As I helped her to her feet, she muttered, ‘El señor pastor’s goin’ on a trip. Of course, he wants his old suitcase from the very top of the closet. Diosito, me va a matar algún día de estos.’
‘Are you all right, Lupita?’ I asked, touching the welt on her forehead.
‘Calla, calla, m’ijo, don’t worry about me,’ she said, slapping my hands away. ‘Get back in bed.’
‘Father’s going on a trip?’ I asked. ‘He never goes anywhere.’
‘I don’t know. He tells me nothing. Now, ¡vaya a la cama! You’ll catch your death, with all this influenza about.’
Then she took off down the hall, lugging the suitcase behind her with those old, gnarled hands.
Poor old Lupita did all the work around the house. She scrubbed away the creeping mildew on the tile floors on her hands and knees. She fought against the cobwebs in the high corners of the rooms. She did all the chores with a grim determination that the house would be just as Mother had left it.
After a few minutes, Father came striding down the hallway towards me. He was buttoned up in my grandfather’s old grey overcoat, several sizes too big for him. A long muffler was wrapped around his throat. He cleared his throat and addressed me: ‘Vergil Erasmus, I am going out of town on a very long, important trip. I have just received a telegram
from Pastor Svenson back in Bosque County; he’s been taken ill with the flu. Unlike here,’ he sniffed, ‘the authorities have had the good sense not to close God’s house. His parish is lost without him. I shall be gone several days.’ He continued, ‘Behave for María Guadalupe and don’t give her any of your usual nonsense. Take your medicine, every day. I don’t want you getting the flu and being even more of a burden to her. And don’t forget to say your prayers at night . . . because the Lord is always watching you.’
My father reached out and adjusted the collar of my robe. I thought I caught a gleam in his eye that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I imagined he was glad to be off on this quest, to be needed again. Without another word he turned around and went back down the hallway. He carefully closed the heavy front door after him.
I skidded into the kitchen in my slippers and plunked myself down at the kitchen table. Lupita bustled about. She set the enormous copper kettle on the stove, heated the iron and starched Father’s shirts. I looked out the window at our garden, a blanket of grey drizzle. As innocently as I could I asked Lupita, ‘When the sun comes up, could I walk to the town square and back? I’ll only be gone for a few minutes.’
Lupita groaned, ‘¿Te has enloquecido? There’s influenza everywhere. Just yesterday, news came over the telegraph, they say this Texas Ranger, Ben Pennington, die of the flu. That was just a few days ago at Fort Bliss.’
She grabbed one of my thin arms and wiggled it. ‘Those rangers are as tough as nails. You’re a fly. Escúchame, this plague’s gonna be worse than the Great War. Mark my words. This is the beginnin’ of the apocalipsis.’
‘But I’m bored to death,’ I whined.
‘Well, bored to death is better than death, death. Take my poor sister, keepin’ to her cabin, since the Good Lord took her legs. And she don’t never complain. She prays. She knits. And she don’t even know how to read, God bless her.’
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