Below, Ollie stares at the spectacle and says to himself, “It’s really true.”
Jonathon looks up at the sky as another flash ignites the center of the thunderhead in a yellow-blue burst.
“Winter lightning,” he says. “Very rare.” No one hears him.
No one is listening.
As the thunderhead lights up again, Alice starts to stand. She is just saying, “I’m ready, dear Lord…” when a terrifying clap of thunder tears through the night, startling her. She starts to fall. Steps backward to catch herself. Skids on a patch of ice. Tumbles over the edge of the roof, arms outstretched, robes flying majestically, body suddenly crunching against the frozen ground, eyes still open, smiling.
Horrified, Ollie rushes to her. Scoops her into his arms. Sees the spattered blood and lifeless eyes. Knows she is gone.
With gasps and moans the others scurry back down the ladder. The reality of death has erased their thoughts of eternal life. The spectacular meteorological exhibition continues, but by the time Alice’s body is carried into the house the show is over.
Alice is the only one who is taken that evening, but not in the way they had thought. Everyone else is left behind, and the torment is as terrible as they had imagined.
Jesus did not come in the clouds.
At least not in Rochester, New York.
At the time of Alice Crenshaw’s fall from the roof, Siyyid Kazim lies on his sleeping mat surrounded by nine of his students. Perspiration drains from his fevered body, soaking his white garments. One of the students, Jahangir, reaches for Kazim’s hand and is startled by its heat.
“Your fever grows,” Jahangir says.
“Perhaps the fire within me,” Kazim replies hopefully, “is purging the last of my imperfections before I depart this world.”
“I have been praying that you will be healed!” Jahangir replies.
“You should be praying that you will accept God’s will.”
“It cannot be God’s will that you die before the Qa’im appears. That would be unfair. No one has worked harder to prepare us for His…”
Kazim angrily interrupts the young student. “And who are you to question God’s fairness?” He painfully raises himself up on one elbow to look into his student’s eyes. “Have you the foresight to see the end in the beginning? My death, which God told a shepherd would happen on the day of ‘Arafih, is the beginning of the end. And what day is this, Jahangir?”
“The day of ‘Arafih,” Jahangir sadly replies.
Kazim collapses onto his mat but continues to converse with the young student, though his words now come in short bursts between gasps for breath. “Of which offense do you accuse God, then? Of being in error when he revealed the time of my death, or of being unfair to take me before the Qa’im appears? Which is it?”
“God is Perfection,” Jahangir replies. He struggles to focus on the logic of this argument when his Master is dying. “He can be neither in error nor unfair.”
“In that case—” Kazim’s words grow more feeble—“do not pray for God to place himself in error by healing me, for the one thing that God cannot do is contradict his own perfection. And do not judge God’s fairness by the standard of your shortsightedness.”
Kazim smiles, takes a deep breath, and says, “God be with all of you in the times ahead.”
Tears fill Jahangir’s eyes and he wipes them away with a coarse sleeve. By the time that Jahangir looks again upon his master, Siyyid Kazim is dead, a teacher to his last breath.
Chapter 39
Like a hungry crow on a corpse, grief plucks out Oliver’s eyes, blinding him to the naïve hospitality of his family and friends. In the fog of the funeral and the cold days that follow, he staggers through the barest routine of survival.
The Reverend, himself a derelict of sorrow, prays insufferably that God will remove from him the burden of sin that surely had caused God to punish him in this unbearable way. Jonathon wonders at how a “man of God” can turn a daughter’s death into such a narcissistic rumination.
Through sheer will, Isaac and Phebe keep the family troupe going, as if the oldest and the youngest members of this glowering cast somehow had been exempted from mourning. They cook and serve meals to the distraught. They clean the houses, feed the animals, travel to Rochester for supplies, thank the well-wishers for their kind thoughts, even try to raise the spirits of the emotional invalids in their charge by singing cheerful duets after dinner (to no applause) and importing parlor games into the sitting room (Oliver and the Reverend decline to participate.)
Isaac is particularly troubled by his father. Ollie seems more than sad; he seems to be simmering with repressed rage. Isaac fears the day that this molten flow will erupt. But Ollie is not the first to blow.
At the end of the third week of “self-pity,” as Phebe calls the unrelieved bereavement, she snaps. It’s not that she minds helping out on the farm and taking care of her loved ones, but when Oliver sullenly eats her beef and potatoes, made with her own weary hands, and then swoons into an even deeper spell of foul temper, Phebe throws a cast-iron skillet across the room and screams. The piercing shriek startles them all, even Phebe; no one has ever heard Phebe as much as raise her voice. The sound is a fingernails-on-a-blackboard, child-yelling, coyotes-howling kind of screech that boils the blood and sends shivers down the spine. The cats disappear and the dogs cock their heads in dismay.
“Stop it stop it stop it!” Phebe yells. “I can’t take this any longer! What’s the matter with you? All of you?”
The force of Phebe’s voice rocks Oliver back in his kitchen chair.
“You can’t mourn forever!” Phebe says, breaking into a sob. “I lost two dear ones as well, you know. First my dear granddaughter, then my stepdaughter. You’re not the only one in pain around here.”
She marches over to Ollie. Fixes her gaze on him. Bends so her red face is close to his. “You might lift a finger to help around here. Seems to me that Isaac and myself are the only ones left alive in this family.” She straightens up; her back is hurting. “Maybe the Reverend was right, that Winnie’s dream about the man under the palm tree meant that the world would die on New Year’s Eve. My world died, and yours too, I expect, when Alice fell off the roof. But if the Reverend was correct, we would then be born again—and to my reckoning, that means we’d come back to life. Well, I’m still waiting for the two of you.” She shifts her gaze from Oliver to the Reverend.
“Woman, you’re speaking madness,” the Reverend interjects, “and very possibly blasphemy.”
“Oh, go to hell, Reverend!” Phebe says.
The Reverend gasps as Jonathon smiles to himself.
“Or maybe you’re already there,” Phebe continues. “You’re no better than this one”—she points to Ollie—“and maybe worse. Who do you think you are—Jesus Himself? Who made you so cockamamie important that only your sins could be responsible for Alice’s death. Maybe you should take on the sins of the world and have yourself crucified!”
The Reverend is speechless. He simply stares wide-eyed at his wife.
Phebe goes on: “And who’s to say that your daughter’s death was punishment for anything? People die every day. New babies are born. The sun rises every morning. And I’m so sorry that Jesus didn’t come on your schedule.”
With a thud, Phebe sits down. And as she does, Oliver rises ominously from his chair. None of this speechmaking has improved his mood. In fact, he appears ready to burst into flame.
“You speak of God as if he is just,” Ollie begins. “Well, where is God’s mercy in the death of my mother?” He turns with reddened eyes to Phebe and says, “Where is God’s love in the death of Mary Rogers?”
Then finally he turns to the Reverend and says, “Where in the name of heaven is God’s righteousness in the killing of our good and pure Alice Chadwick?”
The Reverend is bright red and twitching. He bursts from his chair with the words, “I, sir, will not tolerate your blasphemy! Come, Phebe—we�
��re leaving at once.”
The Reverend grabs Phebe’s hand, yanks her from a kitchen chair, and whisks her into the living room where they hurriedly pull on boots and coats before plunging through the front door into the cold night.
Isaac wants to abandon his father, run after the Reverend and Phebe and ask for safe harbor. He is frightened by the darkness that has overtaken his father. But in the end his loyalty is to the man who saved him from the harsh streets of New York City. In those days, Isaac remembers, he was a miserable and unlovable wretch—maybe more unlovable than Ollie is now. Yet Ollie stood by him, adopted him, cared for him. Now it seems time to reciprocate.
Ollie is standing by the kitchen window, staring into the night. Isaac walks up behind him. In Farsi the boy quietly says, “I love you, father.”
Olie turns and looks at his boy. He has grown so tall! The others may have abandoned Ollie—and why should they not have?—but his son has stayed. Ollie wraps his arms around Isaac and says, “I will always love you.”
It is the only love that remains in him.
Chapter 40
The Rochester winter of 1844 is colder than most, as if nature itself were mourning Alice’s death. For weeks, Ollie has not spoken to Reverend Crenshaw and Phebe; if possible, he has grown still more bitter and rancorous.
Forbidden to visit his “grandparents,” Isaac has continually disobeyed his father. The Reverend and Phebe had always treated him like their own flesh and blood, and he misses the fresh pies and hot meals, so he secretly visits them after school. On this chilly February night, as he lies awake in bed, Isaac tells himself it is foolish to feel like the longsuffering product of a broken home when this family, after all, is nothing but an artifice created by chance circumstances and New York adoption law. But in the end he always decides that the truth of the matter comes from the heart, and he knows that in their hearts all of these people—Ollie, the Reverend, Phebe, and yes even Jonathon—truly love him.
Ollie has walled himself in—or out, as the case may be. He has left the religious community of Rochester behind and begun a campaign of “cleansing,” as he calls it, to rid the town of charlatanism, hypocrisy, and superstition. His chief targets are the clergy and the overtly pious. Three weeks previously, in a manic outburst, Ollie had stomped into St. Martin’s Catholic Church during mass and before a filled sanctuary had publicly washed his soiled hands and face in a basin of Holy Water while muttering that the only articles of faith worth honoring were the articles he would soon be publishing in the newspaper. True to his word, less than a week later he published charges of corruption of minors against Father Flaherty; claimed that witnesses had seen Rev. Jacobs, the Temperance leader who preached at Union Methodist Church, imbibing spirits in the parsonage; called out Deacon Smythe of Colony Baptist Church for using profanity when issuing orders to his colored mill workers; accused Rev. Longley of the First Congregational Church of an adulterous relationship with a blonde congregant “who is fond of wearing scarves about the neck and little else when in the solitary pastoral care of the Reverend.”
No one knew how Ollie had persuaded the editor of the Rochester Chronicle to publish such clearly slanderous charges. Some suggested bribery, but most citizens and many churchgoers privately speculated that Ollie certainly must have gathered some evidence on which to base his allegations. (No one suspected that Ollie had bought the failing newspaper and retained its editor for a handsome salary.) This unspoken conclusion was given additional weight when, despite fierce denials, none of the accused chose to sue the slanderer in open court. One of them, in fact—the much-loved Rev. Longley, who apparently was more loved than anyone thought—suddenly left his church after fifteen years of ministry “to attend to a grievously sick relative in Boston.” The others, including the uncharged clergy of twenty or so other churches, seemed more intent on scanning the faces of their congregations for traitors or, worse yet, the countenance of Oliver Chadwick, who just last Sunday rose from his seat in the third to last pew of Trinity Lutheran Church and asked Pastor Yngqvist if he would be using this week’s offering to cover his personal gambling debts. (Pastor Yngqvist had angrily and unwisely answered no, which many took to mean that he had always covered his gambling debts from his personal income. The irony of the Pastor’s defense was not lost on the congregation, which had endured an hour-long diatribe on the wickedness of gambling the previous week.)
In a scathing series of three articles, Oliver had dubbed William Miller—the father of the Adventist movement—“a new edition of Mormonism.” He wrote that Miller and Joseph Smith were “two kings speaking lies at the same table.”
In just over a month, Oliver had become feared by the religious mainstream and cheered by the rest. No one knew where or by what means Ollie gained his information, and this caused a great wave of paranoia to set in among the Men of God. They grew suspicious of everyone they knew, but at the same time their overall behavior (some believed) grew more Christian and their vices fewer.
Jonathon had abandoned the farm for New York City, disgusted by Ollie’s malicious behavior. And as Reverend Crenshaw also began to fear Ollie, the old man seemed to cast a suspicious eye on young Isaac as well. “I’m not a spy for my father,” Isaac would often plead, and the Reverend would usually nod politely as if to agree, yet the Reverend was now often absent when Isaac came to call, and when the Reverend was present he was often mute, or nearly so.
Of the family that Isaac had held so dearly, by springtime he remains in contact with only two. Phebe and he continue to find ways to communicate and sometimes meet; these are glorious moments filled with love and tenderness. Ollie, on the other hand, has adopted severe authoritarian measures in his attempt to impose discipline on his disobedient son. He now drops Isaac off at school in the morning and picks him up after school, ensuring that the boy has no clandestine contact with the Crenshaws. A harsh regimen of chores keeps Isaac occupied at all other times.
There are still moments, however, when Ollie and Isaac share the kind of intimacy they enjoyed before Alice died. These times occur primarily at night when the two of them speak only Farsi to each other. At such times Isaac often asks about Ollie’s early life, and Ollie tells stories about his beautiful mother. With each telling, Ollie’s memory of Anisa, of Anne Chadwick, glows a little brighter and the bitterness that he had felt toward her diminishes ever so slightly. He wants to keep the memory of her alive, as he does the memory of Mary Rogers and Alice Crenshaw Chadwick. His remembrance of them, and their love, and their senseless deaths, is the fuel that sustains his vendetta against a Power that he surely cannot beat, but which he can fight.
And fight he will.
In early May, Oliver receives a surprising letter from Jonathon Fury.
My heart has been cold since returning to New York and I realize now that I had too easily given up the friendships I enjoyed in Rochester. While I cannot in good conscience approve of your behavior at all times, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I am not responsible for your actions, but only for my faithfulness to a friend, a virtue which I have sorely lacked and failed to demonstrate. I write now for two reasons: to ask your forgiveness; and to invite you to a most special occasion, one which I believe you will thoroughly enjoy.
On May 22, Professor Morse, whom you may recall introduced me to the mysteries of the daguerreotype, is unveiling a new invention which he promises will revolutionize the world. I will be making a picture of this historic occasion, and I believe that you might be interested in attending for the purpose of announcing this grand event through the newspapers. If you choose to attend, I trust you will see fit to bring Isaac, as I miss him terribly and would greatly appreciate seeing him again.
Your friend, Jonathon.
Oliver sets the letter aside, tries for a moment to dismiss it from his mind, then picks it up and reads it again. Until now he had not recognized how lonely the farm house had become with Jonathon gone.
Chapter 41
On May 1
8, the God-fearing citizens of Rochester are happy to see Oliver leave their city. Jesus may not have returned yet, but the departure of the “antichrist” (as some churches have nominated Oliver) is seen by many Christians as the next best thing. According to Pastor Yngqvist of St. Luke’s Lutheran, watching Oliver board the train sends him into “a Rapture of a different sort.” Perhaps with this pot-stirrer stirring the bigger pot of New York City, Jesus will consider coming to Rochester.
In the few days before his departure, Oliver had sold the Rochester Chronicle to his loyal editor for a pittance and a promise to continue printing Oliver’s articles. He had also put the farm up for sale. It was clear to Isaac that he and his father would not be returning. The “militant religious reformer” had set his sights on a bigger battlefield.
It is late afternoon when Oliver and Isaac exit the train in New York and catch a carriage to the Regis Hotel. On the way, the carriage passes the old boarding house on Nassau Street. Isaac cranes his neck to see his old home, a place of great happiness that he will never forget, but Ollie does not seem to notice.
At the hotel they are greeted by Jonathon Fury, who bursts into a sunny grin when he sees Isaac. “My goodness, old man,” Jonathon says to Isaac, “you’ve grown inches in the few weeks since I left.”
The two embrace emotionally.
Oliver feels a twinge of guilt; he can’t remember the last time he had hugged his son.
“It’s good to see you, Jonathon,” Oliver says. His manner is reserved—not aloof, but cool.
“Likewise.”
“I trust the City has been generous to you.”
“It has.”
An awkward pause threatens to linger too long, so Isaac interrupts. “Father says that you have a friend with a new invention.” The remark is directed at Jonathon. “He says that your friend will be announcing it shortly, and you’ll be the official doc… docu…”
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