Among the Lilies

by Daniel Mills

  We did not sleep. The dawn came and we walked out together. None were there to bid us farewell. Man and woman, the believers carried on with their work, tending to the animals or building up fires in the kitchen. The Eldress Rose watched us go, if only to make sure of our leaving, but turning back toward the house, I glimpsed a face at the library window.

  Job. His drowned features, black stones of his eyes.

  The cattle-track struck north toward the woods and ridges beyond, and Jerusha and I walked hand in hand along it, skirting wood-lots and rubble-walls, the fields by which we lay together in the cradle of our summer. All was transformed in the wake of autumn’s passing, the corn reduced to rows of stubble and a fine rain falling as we passed beyond the outermost wall and the Village disappeared, lost to sight behind the veils of blowing mist.

  Forest-sounds enfolded us: music of drifting leaves, dripping boughs. The songbirds were gone, though crows remained, and ravens. They called to one another as we climbed for the whole of that first day, the track rising sharply beneath us to meet that distant rim of hills, white with frost like winter’s breath upon us. We were not afraid. In our exile we were even then in Eden, knowing nothing of this valley or the pine grove. That low hill with its three pines like crosses at Golgotha where Adam’s skull was buried and the living God succumbed.

  Abba abba lema sabachthani? Saying this the breath passed from Him and so too the soul we shared like the flesh of our flesh, dead in the womb with the cord wrapped round.

  Daybreak. Judah’s cries cut deeper and I must go.

  It is done. I brought matches with me and rags, a length of cord which I looped into a coil and tucked into a pocket of Fitch’s haversack. The haversack I slung from one shoulder where a wood-axe also rested, the blade newly sharpened. At my side I carried a small ironbound cask, which fit snugly in the crook of my arm but was heavy, and it pained me to carry it. I resorted to use of a strap. This I cinched round the body of the cask and secured it to the cord that I might drag it behind me as I walked.

  Progress was slow, tending to east while the sun swung round behind me to shine out of the south. The day was warm and fragrant. Leaves twitched with birds in their singing while the undergrowth rustled, red squirrels surfacing, darting out of sight.

  The pines appeared, adrift like ghosts in the crush of greenery. I was close. I reached the edge of the dying wood and turned again toward the river, striking north to the bend where I had found Judah, two years ago, writhing in the grave his master dug.

  Fitch. He was a beast of a man, well-suited to war and arms, his sergeant’s stripes. His family deserted him so the house was empty on his return and he had no one, no companion but the dog who feared his master too much to flee from him as did his family.

  He raged. He tore the pages from this journal and drank down the bottles of scotch which I had found years later then left the house without his gun, his coat. He followed the river to the east past the beaver pond, his dog beside him. They came to the bend, where the river turns to south and narrows, running downhill.

  He meant to leave the valley. Perhaps he intended to ford the river and Judah defied him: I do not know. But in his frenzy he savaged the dog with his boots then buried the beast in a shallow grave before splashing into the water, drunk and half-mad. He lost his footing and was swept downriver. He drowned, hooked like a fish in a forked willow-branch, and there he lay for years while the pines grew taller, deeper, and the roots crept farther afield for purchase as their crowns unfolded and spread.

  In time the roots reached the hole wherein he had buried the dog. They breached the earthen walls. They shattered the bones and compassed the skull within their grasp, puncturing the spine first then the brain til from the broken flesh there rose the resurrected body.

  Judah. He was not of the flesh but of the spirit and could not die so long as the tree held his bones within its grasp. I was blind. I had mistaken spirit for the flesh and lived with his ghost for years while the tree’s roots churned and collapsed the bank and his grave was all a snarl, filled with roots as pale and tough as horn. For this reason I had brought the wood-axe. The first blow shuddered off the bark as did the second and third til I repositioned myself and stood with both feet braced to bring the axe down over my head.

  I swung. This time the blade bit, cutting a narrow channel the width of a fingernail’s mark. The cut burbled and overflowed to spill out crimson sap the color of new blood. The liquid trickled from the wound then flew in droplets from the axe-blade as I struck home again and again. The root shattered. Warm sap gushed out of the wound, pouring down over my feet to fill my boots, and the air itself was greasy, reeking of offal.

  The flow slowed and ceased. Morning passed to a heat like summer. I removed my shirt and mopped the sweat out of my hair then hacked at the cut to widen it. The axe breached a second layer of root-matter and again the red water spurted out, wetting my pants and soaking them through so I appeared as though I had crossed an abattoir on hands-and-knees, blood pooled shin-deep on the killing floor.

  I dulled the axe. I sharpened it then dulled it again while sunlight licked cross my back like a fire’s twitching tongue. My vision blurred. My hands went numb for the twist of the ash within them and I clambered down the bank to the water to wash my hands and face and drink down the sweat I had lost with the sunlight still on me, blinding, beating down.

  I returned to the task of destruction. With the axe in both hands I broke through the masses of braided root til the muscles failed me at last and I could scarcely heft the axe though my strength it must suffice for the final task before me.

  The sap drained out of the cut. With my shirt I blotted the edges of the wound to dry them then knotted the rags and cord together to feed the length of it into the hole. The tail-end protruded, trailing a distance of five yards over the piled-up roots toward the river.

  I opened the cask and held it fast with both hands to upend its contents into the cut. The black grains of gunpowder rolled out to fill the axe-wound and trap the rags into place that they might serve for a fuse. The cask empty, I retreated down the bank.

  My hands trembled. The first three matches went out in my hands. Then the flame took, and I ignited the fuse. The cord burned slow, spitting, but the fire quickened upon reaching the knotted rags and I scurried away down the bank. I submerged myself in the freezing water and grasped at the trailing weeds, anchoring myself in place below the level of the explosion which I knew must come—and did—and shook the planet on its axis, stealing the sound out of my ears so all creation was made to ring: a death knell.

  But I was not dead. I recovered my wits and scrambled up the bank. The roots were gone. The great mass of them had burst out of the ground like a wine-cork, leaving the soil stained and sodden and stinking of sulfur, shattered bodies, exposed innards. The stench of Jerusha’s body where she lay on her back with legs spread and face upturned to the pine boughs overhead. The dead thing which dropped out of her.

  Bones. White shards of them everywhere, scattered like eggshell among the broken roots and jutting from crimson puddles. The day dwindled in the stench of hellfire. I searched amidst the bones with dusk thickening on the air and the clangor of bells in my head, though the woods were quiet, all birds and animals fled.

  The skull I found some distance from the hole. I knew it by its elongated snout, the yellowed teeth fixed in the top of the jaw and the red root-matter clinging. I carried it down the bank with both hands and lifting it over my head I cast it into the river.

  The splash came. The waters closed and were still. All was silence, full on night, and I waited for moonrise that I might see my way back.

  An hour passed on the river-bank with the falling dark and the trees in leaf around me, hiding me from view. The waters rippled, the wind from the south and building. Thorn-bushes swayed down the curve of the opposite shore with the void of the night-forest beyond, a space permitting of no observer, no human eye.

  Wolves appeared o
n the opposite bank. They emerged from the wood as from a thick fog and paused upon the waters’ edge, the wind in their fur. Clouds were moving, quickly now to catch the moon and shred across it so a light flashed through like storming. It stole into the eyes of the assembled pack, set them glowing.

  They stood flank to flank watching me, a hundred paces away and still their shadows covered me. The great pines sighed with the wind in their branches, heavy crowns dragging. His lowered head hanging with the wreath of thorns upon it.

  Into your hands I commend my spirit.

  These same words I spoke two years ago when the hole was dug and the stillborn body placed within. I sealed the grave with earth. I spoke these words and the very soul went out of me—and of Jerusha too—exiling us to the world of flesh, hell of bone and sinew.

  We haunt ourselves. We are dead but unburied and with nothing left to us save the haunting. In the delirium of that summer we were as the first man and woman and joined our spirits together even as we twined our bodies to forge from ourselves an Eden which flourished and died and now lies buried in the ground.

  The moon emerged. The pack moved with one body, lifting their heads to loose a blast of sound like the angel’s trumpet, howling even as the trees howled, as all of the world screamed for the weight of the flesh upon it. The sound moved through me, vibrating my hair-ends, my fingertips. The river, frothing, cast up the moon from its depths to illumine the far-bank.

  And I saw her. A young girl, perhaps two years old. She crouched amidst the screeching pack on hands and knees and naked save for the long hair which covered her like a pelt. She did not look at the moon as did the others but at me and did not howl but sang, sweetly, in the language of the spirits all infants know.

  Vo o, vo nee

  o har ka e

  on a se

  The moon passed through a ribbon of cloud, climbing up the sky. The wolves turned and vanished, the girl following, and the trees fell silent as the wind withdrew into the south.

  I stumbled home. Moonlight shone in the tracks I made, silvering the orchard wherein I had placed Judah, his resurrected corpse. All about was quiet. My body twitched, a drawn string, but there came no sound of moaning and the grave stood black and empty. His suffering, then, is at an end even as I sense my own is just beginning, for such is the task before me.

  I am thinking again of Ahasuerus, who denied Christ a moment's rest and received in exchange the curse of eternal life. How well the old storytellers understood the truth of the scriptures. It is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, where living is a fire never quenched. Job born new out of the river but with the same hole inside him. Fitch in the teeth of his madness, rage undiminished in death. Judah blinded and broken, unable to sleep, panting after water he could not drink. A child with long hair, a girl: two years old, nearly three. She ran on all fours like an animal, the wolves pressed round.

  I climbed the slates to the house. I passed the broken door and fell upon the stores of food with a hunger like none I have before experienced. Rashers of bacon I ate raw, chewing fat to jelly in my gums and washing it down with frigid water hauled from the well and splashed over my hands and face. Then I sat down by the window to write this account.

  I am nearly finished. The world outside is a sea of fog and the bells in my ears are striking, calling me to work: the pines, the grave I dug and must unbury. The spade is blunted but will serve. Let me wait only til the morning, for the first hints of color in the orchard.

  [David Stonehouse’s narration ends here. The concluding passages are written in a different hand.—ed]

  PART FIVE

  This book was my mother’s before it was mine. She carried it with her always. When I was a girl, she taught me to read that I might know my father by the account it contains and later entrusted the journal to my keeping. But my father died with his story unfinished and so it is for me his daughter to provide it with an end, though for me, as for Mother, there are no endings.

  The last part of the story alone I remember and this is only pieces. The river’s chill, colder than the air. Sensation of fur between my fingers. Holding fast as we swam across, the others close. Smell of pine-sap, needles. A figure in the grove, thin and quaking. Crouched at the foot of the hole with its hands in the earth, busy about the work of burying.

  The rest I know because Mother has told me.

  Autumn days they wandered the wood without means of forage, their hunger after one another become craving after food of which there was not enough. My father’s faith waned. His fear grew like a shadow to cover all he saw so he would not touch her, my mother, though her labor came early and the awful pain was on her.

  She told me of this too. How she lay within the grove with needles for a bed and strained against the pressure in her gut, her chest. Her body closed in upon itself, crushing organs and babe alike til the slick pieces of it shot into my father’s waiting hands.

  Silence then, my father unspeaking.

  Is it a boy? she asked.

  A girl, he said, nothing else, and still there came no birthing cry.

  The after-birth slipped free. It splashed upon the ground. She smelled a scent like raw meat, new killing, and hot blood belched from the rip in her body.

  David, she said, but he did not reply. She wanted to say more but couldn’t. Words she lost but music came to her, the notes of a song. They passed from her lips as she passed from consciousness and all around was darkness and cold and worse when she awoke.

  The child was gone, the after-birth too. My father had torn his clothes into strips and with these bandaged the wound between her legs and staunched the flow of life from it. Pine needles spread between her legs, webbed with blood and shreds of tissue.

  David was nearby. She heard him over the bank, his steps like hammered nails. They punched through her gut and thighs. She ached with it but was too weak to call to him, to ask after the child. Her voice escaped her, a moaning, and soon his steps approached. The eyes rolled in her skull. They would not fix on him as he crested the bank. His outlines shimmered, faintly, and his hands were clean. They gleamed like new snow, fields of it at dusk and every bit as empty.

  The child, she said.

  He shook his head, looked at his feet.

  She asked, Where have you taken her?

  Her neck, he said. She was caught up in the cord.

  Bring her to me. I am her mother.

  She wasn’t breathing—

  What have you done?

  What was necessary. Only that.

  He gave no other answer. He could not speak the words to tell what he had done but only nodded toward the pines and the needle-strewn earth about them, a black patch of soil which was newly disturbed and overtopped with a cross.

  Her horror in that moment, her rage—

  I was too weak, she told me, years later. I couldn’t move for the hands he held on me. He grasped me about the shoulders and forced me down to keep me still though I shouted and thrashed til the wounds reopened, spilling, and the rest of the day is lost.

  It was snowing when she awoke. The ground was white, the sky. The trees shed plumes of white dust which hung in the air and did not fall. Hours had passed or days. Her dressings had been changed, the filth wiped away, and a fire was burning before her, the blankets piled high. She was too ill to rise but rolled onto her side to face the cross my father had fashioned.

  The snow was piled on it, she said, and it gleamed with the ice which formed there. The light shone out of it, so bright I was blinded, just as Paul was. I couldn't see but there was wind in my hair like a baby’s breath and David was beside me, kneeling. He said he’d found a place for us, a house. He carried me on his back across miles of snow and wilderness then up the crooked stair to this nursery, the empty crib which waited for me.

  I am there now.

  Much of my childhood was spent in this room and I linger now to write these words while Mother busies about the lower rooms, making ready for our depart
ure. The crib is before me, empty again, its purpose served. My fingers find the cracks in the legs, just visible to show where Father dashed it upon the ground.

  Mother repaired the legs herself. She used wood-nails and plaster then painted over the joints to hide the staining. The work was done quickly and the paint flaked away in spirals, revealing patched cracks white with paste. I noticed them and asked my mother how it happened.

  I thought she had not heard me. She was so quiet. Finally she spoke.

  I have told you that faith is a gift of God. You were born with it, my darling, touched with grace as I was and as your father longed to be. He was a good man, a clever one, but for his cleverness he was blind and couldn’t see the Gift when it was offered him. All was made plain to him but he couldn’t understand it, and because he had no understanding he gave you up for lost and would've given you up forever.

  She continued, Do you remember the sower, how some seeds fall on good ground? Others fall among the weeds and are choked by them. Something of the kind happened to your father. He saw the crib and thought only of absence, of loss. But an empty cradle speaks of expectation as well as loss and I had carried in my womb the very seed of Eden.

  He knew this the same as I did. But he couldn’t believe it. He had no faith and faithless himself mistook mine for madness and all because I never doubted, never ceased to hope. Everything else followed from that. It’s why he broke the crib—and it is why I mended it.

  I have read my father’s account. He was a clever man, Mother said, but I think he trusted too much to cleverness. He sought understanding, always, but the eternal lay beyond his understanding and became for him a thing of the acutest terror. It resisted his attempts at reason, a puzzle without solution, so all Creation came to seem a madness, a place of exile. The world of the spirit surrounded him but he had not eyes to see. In his blindness he perceived only the flesh and shrank from my mother's belief to make of her a ghost while she was still alive.