Continuum 1, page 16
part #1 of Continuum Series
All but me. I’m ignorant. Supreme means infinite? Sure.
Jesus Christ was the son of God? Ayah, don’t the Book say so?
God is infinite? Well, sure.
Therefore Christ was the son of Infinity? Ayah.
How does Infinity beget a son? It’s got balls? You trying to make a man look stupid?
(Hearing it reach this point, old Mr. Goudy chuckles, scratches his desiccated crotch, and spits a bollop over the porch rail. Fifty-five, oldest man in town; has a patch of Connecticut tobacco and does some business in the fall blending marijuana with the chaws, packing the mixture on his back through the neighbouring towns. Malachi often addressed him as Messenger of Light, which caused Mr. Goudy to cackle like one of Jud Hobart’s guinea hens; Jesse Lodson wasn’t quite old enough to figure that one out.)
I’m just trying to find out the sex of Infinity. Man your age could get his mind off sex, seems like.
Why?…
Melton Village was typical of those shrunken communities on the northeastern coast of what people were beginning to call the Hudson Sea. The villages maintained a tenuous, suspicious communication with each other along the mountain trails and the disintegrating grandeur of Old-Time roads. The people did cherish a faith in a few things, but not in the dollar anymore, with no central government to create one, and not in the ancient air-castle fantasy of squeezing an income out of the goddamn summer people. Weren’t any.
At fifty Malachi Peters was typical of himself. So increasingly, was his friend Jesse Lodson at fourteen, who had the run of Malachi’s library and who loved him.
* * *
Melton Village sprawls in the foothills of a green range looking down, yes, on the Hudson Sea, that long arm of ocean extending now from the Lorenta Sea all the long way to a confused tangle of islets and inlets several hundred miles south, where the Black Rocks mark the site of New York City. That tragic place was stricken by the peripheral blast of a fusion toy that annihilated the western end of Long Island, including Brooklyn and a tree that is said to have grown there. Then New York’s ruins were engulfed in the rising waters, the noisy history done. West of Melton Village, the opposite shore is occasionally visible on those days of clear atmosphere that seem to be coming more frequently. Out there under windy water and skittish tides lies the bed of what was Lake Champlain. The lake was beautiful, history says, until the Age of Progress shat in it and made it, like so many others, a desolation and a stink. The waters climbed; years of earthquake, cloudburst, landslide crumbled the narrow watersheds. The ocean, itself a universe in torment, perhaps renews itself in long labor, healing the worst afflictions of the human visitation.
Malachi Peters was in the habit of sprawling on his own elderly front porch, when he wasn’t tending his garden and chickens or doing his fastidious bachelor housekeeping, or mending a kite for the kids, or describing the universe to Jesse who had (Malachi thought) a rather too dewy-eyed view of it even for fourteen. Or arguing, of course, down at the venerable shanty that retained the name of The Store.
Trading was negligible: all the nearby communities were in the same fix as Melton Village. There was in theory a sort of state government still at Montpelier but you never heard from it — sometimes an excellent thing in governments. The overland trails into Massachusetts or New Hampshire got more snarled up each year as the rise in mean temperature transformed temperate zone forest into subtropical — a few degrees are enough. A visit to New York meant a sea voyage through tough waters by a people who had scant taste for recovering the art of sailing ships. Bud Maxon maintained The Store as a public service; he couldn’t support himself and his family with it, but managed like everyone else with a knee-scrabble garden, chickens and goats and pigs, and hunting. He owned the town bull; his brother ran a bit of a dairy. Bud learned archery, but kept his old rifle oiled just as if he thought there’d be cartridges for it again some day. The Store’s front steps and porch in summer, its stove in the softening winters, drew the lonely in their hunger for talk, that limping substitute for love.
Malachi could also watch the sea from his own front porch. To older generations of his family Lake Champlain had gleamed more distantly, where the Lamoille River ran into it. In that time a group of islands stood out there. Mr. Goudy remembered hunting and camping on Grand Isle when he was a boy. Watching the ocean, Malachi could let his thoughts ride free, as he might have if a world had not ended.
Fifty now, he had been twenty, with two years experience of Harvard, when civilization encountered the Bang, and presently the red plague that made the 14th Century Black Death look like a cold in the head. Destroying civilization, always a task for fools, was relatively easy with the tools constructed for the purpose in the 20th Century. To recreate one you need something stronger than divine guidance.
In the Year 30 the residents of Melton Village numbered about a hundred adults (the red plague having wiped out the old as you wipe chalk squiggles off a slate) and eighteen teenagers and children. The population before the war and the plague had been three thousand.
Malachi Peters numbered precisely one. Six-feet-two, weighed 160 pounds. Standing erect he resembled a weedy figure One, with wind-wavering hair already ice-white.
Of the children, thirteen were physically normal except perhaps in their genes. The village had no statistical information on the incidence of radiation-induced birth deformities, fetal deaths, and stillbirths. Many good souls were inclined to blame the trouble on the infinite wisdom of God (after all, it’s been blamed for everything else ever since we invented it). The village did try to cherish the children. Some of the mues, as they began to be called about that time, were hard to cherish, especially the brain-mues who could only sit where they were put, smile and drool when they were fed, cry when they were cleaned. Others, like Jesse who had no physical oddity except his six-toed feet, were not yet regarded with superstitious terror. As for Jesse’s peculiarity, as Malachi told him more than once, such things weren’t too uncommon long before technology started monkeying with the sunfire — except that his extra toes were functional. They gave a special buoyancy to his walking and running. Jesse was slim like a marsh reed, dark-haired and faun-eyed. At fourteen he could outrun anyone in the village and not even be winded.
Most of the adults could read, but books were few — some volumes that had been in the tiny public library in the Year Zero, as many more privately owned in houses that survived flood, fire, night-raiders, and abandonment in the worst of the bad years, and Malachi’s library of maybe three thousand at the Old Peters Place where he had lived most of his years alone since the crash. Except for Malachi’s lot, a high proportion of the surviving books were less than useful to a society that might have liked to recreate civilization, or anyhow Vermont, if it had known how. But to understand that one shall see no more new books, ever, is a horror even to some of the illiterate, like smashing blind into a stone wall.
A little school limped along under good Miss Seton, whose resources were near to nothing. The greatest difference the old lady noted after the death of American culture was that in the new age she was treated with some respect even by the children. Especially by the children.
Malachi knew (but seldom said to his neighbors except for Tad Doremus the blacksmith) that the rise of waters was engulfing the dry land because of the determined blundering of expert technological man in the recent past. What else but man-made fumes, particularly those of humanity’s dearest buzz-toy, had heated the atmospheric greenhouse the critical few degrees that hastened the melting of polar ice? And choking on atmospheric garbage meant Progress: so choke. All toward what conclusion — who tried to know? Not the engineers — it wasn’t their job. They were earnest and righteous about that: it was never their job to forsee anything beyond the immediate achievement and immediate profit. They could only build and grow — one says that of cancer. “We climbed Mount Everest because it was there!” — that was the Golden Cliché of the 20th Century, mock-modest bombast quite as banal and unthinking as any 19th Century godsaking, and like most popular swashbuckling it went unchallenged.
It was an exhausted world — beaten, raped, robbed, mutilated by industrial greed and political stupidity, and left for dead. Malachi himself knew exhaustion, hours when his head could hold little except despair at human folly. He looked then on Jesse, the boy’s uncalculating goodness, simplicity, power to love and to wonder, and could only think: This is the world they left you. The rain itself as it falls on your head is poisoned. Sometimes instead of they he said we; but Malachi was not given to wallowing in unearned guilt. A yeasty college student at the age of twenty, there wasn’t much he could have done to prevent the idiot from pushing the button. If burning himself with gasoline in front of the White House would have had that effect, he was the sort of ardent youth who might have done it; plain reason told him it wouldn’t: the Juggernaut is mindless. The danger would remain simply because those in power had not the intelligence nor the good will to remove it, and what had been representative government had given way to the corporate state. To say these things in the 20th Century usually seemed like hooting down a rain-barrel. In the pig-scramble to be good consumers for the blessed state, honor and virtue and reason could not be heard; it was natural to assume that they had died.
In the Year 30 it seemed to Malachi that not enough survivors existed to renew the species. Within a generation or two there would be a lights-out, somewhere a last man perishing. Hadn’t a critical moment arrived when the dinosaurs became dry bones without issue? He could see his contemporaries as like insects crowded to the high end of a piece of driftwood and going out on the flood. He would have been happy, if only for Jesse, to invent God and a heaven, but he couldn’t do it. For a mind once honestly wedded to reason there is no divorce.
And yet, mercilessly comparing grown-ups, the children said of Malachi: “Tshee, he never acts bored!”
Jesse’s father had been a veterinary who somehow retained the conscience of a specialized profession through years when the complex drugs, antiseptics, antibiotics, all that, were no longer obtainable. No immunology, no anesthetics, nothing that depended on the vanished 20th Century laboratories and the huge complex of supporting industries. Lost or broken instruments could not be replaced. No more scientific journals — no more science. For the blunder, the incomparable brass-bound goof, is one thing that homo quasi-sapiens can carry off magnificently: out goes the baby with the bath-water, and what’s left (if anything is left) is an astonished and very naked primate.
Dr. Lodson did what he could, with herbs, observation, common sense, memory, and that mixture of hunch and sympathy which is justly called “a feeling for animals,” through years when probably no one understood his difficulties except Dr. Stern, who was in the same fix with his human patients, and Malachi Peters who liked to play chess with Dr. Lodson and who was inclined to take all Melton Village troubles as his own — for no good reason except that this was Malachi’s way. It was not meddlesome, nor particularly aristocratic, this concern of Malachi’s for his own people. The village had an exasperated, partly loving name for it. They called it Malachi’s Thing.
In the Year 24, when his son Jesse was eight years old (this was the same year Dr. Stern died of intestinal cancer with none to succeed him), Dr. Lodson got momentarily careless while treating Bud Maxon’s priceless Jersey bull for a leg ulcer. With the lightning-flash of an act of God, the brute wheeled and gored him to death.
In that year Jesse began to see that love and mercy, like hate, are man-made. He had adored his cheerful, unexacting father. He was there when it happened, though Bud got him out quickly. The death was a hurricane smashing a door inward — maybe the house can’t take it. He learned later that the world is also beautiful — “sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,” as two-faced Caliban murmured to him in the peace of Malachi’s library — but on your life, expect no conscious mercy except from merciful people! The bull can turn.
God’s will, said Jesse’s meek mother. Jesse wished at eight — and at nine, and ten — that he could discover what she meant. Couldn’t God have stopped the bull? At eight he was only beginning to learn he could ask questions of Malachi, and this one was too difficult. By the time he was ten Jesse had acquired a stepfather, and Malachi’s library was not only a haven but a necessity.
The stepfather, a hardworking religious man who took over Dr. Lodson’s haphazard little farm and improved it, didn’t like to have Jesse go barefoot. Knowing a little about leather-work, he cobbled a pair of shoes that fitted Jesse’s broad feet, more or less. He said it looked tacky for the boy to go barefoot, as if his family was no better than the heathen mountain folk. Even Jesse’s mother could hardly look at his feet without her eyes brimming. Jesse wore the painful shoes except when he visited the Old Peters Place. There he slipped them off at the door, and walked with his friend.
His earliest memory of Malachi dated back to a time when he had been small enough for Malachi to take him up in his lap. He remember a long hand curving over his bare feet, and some remark — he did not retain the words — that made it seem a potent distinction to possess twelve working toes.
Love is a wordless thing in childhood and maybe ought to be. Grown-ups forget this at their peril.
Mr. Goudy brought the first word of Preacher Abraham to Melton Village, a casual profane mention of one more end-of-the-world preacher spouting hellfire and resurrection — only this guy, he said, is appealing to the kids for God’s sake. Stuff about a pilgrimage to found the New Jerusalem. Them golden streets, said Mr. Goudy, spitting over the rail. All our troubles over, or some shit like that.
Abraham was a great tall man with flame-colored hair and a voice of thunder, said a traveling tinker who hadn’t seen him — heard about him, though, from an old woman at Pittsfield Ruins who told fortunes. Abraham was come, she says, to prophesy the Messiah just like John the Baptist. The tinker himself didn’t buy it, much.
Later came another man through Melton Village, a burly gentleman leading a caravan — three wagons which once had been half-ton pickups and pulled easy on the rims if you knew how to get the work out of the mules. This gentleman, Homer Hobson, and his henchmen were heading for the open country north of the St. Lawrence — might start a colony, he thought. They were foreigners from the south — New Haven. That’s in Connecticut. There he had seen Preacher Abraham, talked to him and shaken him by the hand.
No, he said, the fella wasn’t nine feet tall, just average or a mite under. Big voice though, that part was true, and you could say his beard was reddish like. No Goddamn hippie, talked like a gentleman. Peaceful-looking, said Hobson, thinking back over it — peaceful till you stared him straight in the eye, and then you felt maybe a wildness. Blue eyes, and Hobson admitted he generally couldn’t remember the color of a person’s eyes. Bright blue — stuck in his mind, sort of.
“What does he say, about the New Jerusalem?”
That was Jesse Lodson, talking out of turn and annoying his stepfather, but Hobson gazed down on him without reproach, knitting his brows and trying to remember. “Well, boy, he says the New Jerusalem will be — be a place where the earth is so cherished that God will return and live among men.” Then Hobson seemed surprised, and added: “Why — don’t sound so bad, you say it right out like that.”
At the time Hobson saw Abraham the Crusade must have been barely started. Hobson saw no large crowd with him, only a couple of dozen children between ten and fifteen — yes, quite a few mues among them — who might have merely gathered there in the New Haven street out of curiosity to hear the red-bearded man talk.
Time passed, and word came that Preacher Abraham was healing the sick with prayer and laying on of hands. Word came that in New Providence he raised from the dead a poor man who had perished of smallpox and lain two days without life. Elsewhere the Preacher blessed a woman afflicted by an evil spirit, and the devil passed out of her.
Word came that a thousand children followed Preacher Abraham, foraging, taking care of their prophet with certain miracles.
These tales lit fires. Until even Jesse Lodson, fourteen and never foolish, began to wonder: Can God after all exist? Mother believes in him. Not all-benevolent, or the bull — but Mother says we aren’t wise enough to understand… Should I place so much faith in my own power of reason? Can there be miracles? Then what becomes of the natural order? A New Jerusalem, “where the earth is so cherished” — but the books, the books! Or have I (and Malachi) been mistaken all this time? I pray, and it’s all silence.
He hungered to believe in the marvelous. (Who doesn’t?) For most of existence in Melton Village had a flatness, a sourness partly generated by adult despair, and he was lonely in spite of Malachi. The other children had little to do with him, put off by the strangeness of an original mind that is not willing to hide itself or has not learned how. He was aching and changing with the needs of puberty. There was a coolness in Malachi, a steadiness that Jesse Lodson sometimes felt as a chill because he could not yet share it.
His mother and stepfather of course distrusted the love of an old man. Still, they did not forbid him those many hours with Malachi. Miss Seton herself said there was nothing more she was capable of teaching him, and Malachi was, in a way, important to Melton Village, like a monument or a natural force.
On his side, perhaps Malachi expected too much. He needed the freshness of youth with the companionship of maturity.
And word came that when Preacher Abraham entered a village and preached and asked who would help him found the New Jerusalem, the mue-children were first to forget their afflictions and follow him.
He was coming from the north. People talked now not only of Preacher Abraham but of “Abraham’s Army.” Or “the Crusaders.”
They had gone north, rumor said, through the Maine and New Hampshire wilderness. Most of this had already returned to the rude health of nature, but it was still possible to follow the roads of the old industrial culture, the skeletal remains that demonstrate the articulation of the original monster, and its indifference to the welfare and beauty of the planet that endured it for so long a century. The Crusaders had taken one of the highways into Canada, and soon headed south again, but instead of coming by the Connecticut River they marched north of Lake Memphremagog to the Hudson Sea. They were at Richford. They were at St. Albans.
