Bullet One

As the Credence family began their new life in South Dakota, the boy tried hard to believe everything his family told him.  He believed Lucy’s flashing answers.  He believed mother’s somber mutterings.

He believed father when he told the boy that they had been in South Dakota for two months and he had not sold one hat.

Of all the things he heard and believed, he liked Lucy’s words the best.  The answers to his questions were always less bright and less hopeful coming from father or mother than from Lucy.

            It was mid-December now, and the boy began to notice that the fires mother built to keep the house warm were becoming smaller and more infrequent.  She would stoke the coals more often and try to keep them burning longer.  There weren’t many trees around the ranch house, and they had to buy most of their firewood in town, which was not cheap.

            Each day father would go out to his shop in Shadow and put more hats in the window, rotating styles and sizes often.  But no one came.  So he put more and more items in the window, along with the hats: gloves, scarves, time-pieces, anything he could think of to order from back east to sell in South Dakota.  The shop and the window became fuller with more and more things that father put out to try and catch the eye of South Dakota.  The shop grew fuller with products to sell, and the ranch house grew emptier of things on which to live.

            The boy was forced to find a job in town to help with the money.  In Shadow he acquired a position known as a “telegraph” because it was the only job he could manage to find.  He couldn’t work at father’s shop because he simply wasn’t any good at selling, and father did not want him around, anyway.  This did not bother the boy.  He tried working at father’s shop once in Richmond, but after that, father never ask him to work at the shop again, and the boy never offered.  It was understood that he would have no part in the business.

            So, at his mother and father’s behest, he decided to look for some work.  He wandered into Shadow and walked around to a few places of business.  The proprietors just looked at him and shook their heads.  They saw what he looked like:  poor, with an honest face.  This was a good face to have for most any kind of job, and they knew this.  But they had no jobs to offer him.  Shadow wasn’t a poor town, and it was not particularly depressed, but it was hard for a young new face to find a job.  The boy did not understand why because the reason was hard to see, and mostly came out at night, or in was disguise.

The reason:  An organization known as Dakota Inc.

The shop owners in town were forbidden from doing anything that they did not first discuss with Dakota Inc., and most of the time it just wasn’t worth the trouble.  For the trouble was always huge and expensive, and occasionally, life threatening.

            The boy met another boy in town named Timothy, who was a year or two his younger. He had wild red hair and the smile of a mad man, which was the kind of smile that never went away, no matter what.

            Timothy told Jason to go see Van Carlo.  He said to find the small casino, the only casino in town, and look near the corner in the dark room.  The gambler, Van Carlo, would be the one sitting closest to the curtains.  He explained that Van Carlo needed a new telegraph, and the boy did not know what this meant, but he thanked Timothy anyway and went to find the gambler.  Work was work, he decided.  He’d figure out the vocabulary later.

When Van Carlo first saw him, he liked the boy instantly and hired him on the spot.

            “Telegraph” was a name that gamblers in Shadow gave to the boys who ran errands for them, and did chores so the gamblers could play cards uninterrupted. The gamblers in the casino were known as the “tappers”, and Van Carlo was the most successful of all of them. He gambled continuously, all day and all night.

            The casino was a dim place, with heavy, velvet red curtains which smelled of tobacco and whiskey and completely covered the windows.  Also inside were dark, thick cherry wood chairs and tables.  Van Carlo had many telegraphs working for him, but after a few weeks decided that the boy from Richmond was his favorite.  The boy worked hard and stayed late; all night, sometimes.  And he could always be counted on to fill in for the other telegraphs if necessary.  Van Carlo grew to trust the boy so much that he even allowed him to go and stand in for him as a proxy during some of his most important personal meetings and appointments.

            The telegraphs made their wages by skimming from the money their tappers gave them for shopping and other errands, or by skimming a portion of the commodities they bought for the tappers. Skimming was well known to the tappers who employed telegraphs, and was an accepted practice, almost like tipping, except it was the sole way the telegraphs were paid.  The trick was for the telegraph to know just how much he was allowed by his tapper to skim.  Each tapper was different, and each had a limit to what he allowed his telegraphs to take.  And sometimes certain telegraphs employed by a tapper were allowed by that same tapper to take more than another telegraph who worked for him.  But if a telegraph was wrong and took too much, he could be fired, or worse. Some had been brutally beaten.  More than one had even disappeared completely.  But Jason Credence, the boy from Richmond, was not greedy at all, and Van Carlo never had any trouble with him taking too much.

When the boy first took the job as a telegraph at the casino, he worked for several gamblers, not only Van Carlo.  But this soon changed when Van Carlo made it known that the boy was his favorite.  The other gamblers fired him, and he went to work for Van Carlo exclusively.  There was something about him that Van Carlo liked very much.  The old gambler could tell that the boy was a fool and a dullard, but this didn’t annoy him nearly as much as it did with the other fools he had met in his day.  Van Carlo wasn’t sure why.  Perhaps it was because, though the boy was a fool, he was a quiet fool.  He never talked much, and Van Carlo felt that though the boy was a fool, his ability to keep silent at all the right times seemed to show that he was at least not a complete fool.

Van Carlo noticed that the boy’s face was very smooth, like the plains of South Dakota, and the outlines of his eyes and mouth were very fine.  In the dim of the casino when the boy sometimes put his lips together and close his eyes, his face would almost blend perfectly into the background.  This made the boy pleasantly unobtrusive, and Van Carlo allowed him to stand right behind him, near the curtains by the table, when he wasn’t having the boy run errands.

The boy’s face blended into the background so well that it was very hard to read, which meant that Van Carlo never had to worry about him giving anything away by any kind of facial expression, or any kind of look or flash of the eyes.  This wasn’t true for all the telegraphs.  Most of the time the gamblers had their telegraphs wait outside, even during the extreme frigid cold of winter, out of the fear that their faces would give something away. Van Carlo sent his other boys outside, but Jason he kept behind him near the curtains.

Van Carlo enjoyed having a telegraph that could keep him company.  The poker table was usually a very lonely place, and Van Carlo found the boy’s presence soothing.  He enjoyed the gentle sound of the small movements the boy would occasionally make with his hands and arms, and his soft, clear breathing.  It was a welcome change from the raspy breathing of the other gamblers, and the ghostly, howling South Dakota wind outside.

Van Carlo also liked that the boy wasn’t from South Dakota.  He had such a refreshingly different aura.  Many of the other boys were nice enough, but they were from South Dakota.  They always had something of the cold and wild about them, even when they were just standing around.  There was always something mercilessly expectant about them; something noisy and intrusive about their simply waiting around.  It was not this way with the new boy from Richmond.

***

One of the first things the boy noticed about Van Carlo was that there was no emotion in the gambler’s face; only a few deep lines and creases that didn’t spell out much of anything in particular.  But the boy sensed that the gambler liked him because he nodded at him a few times when he first explained the job to him, and used his name a lot.

Van Carlo asked the boy if Timothy sent him.  The boy said he did.  Van Carlo then explained that Timothy did not smile all the time; Timothy was just born with upturned lips and very amber eyes that reflected a lot of light.  Timothy was a happy, pleasant boy, but Van Carlo warned the boy not to assume that Timothy was happy all the time just because his lips were upturned.  Timothy was from South Dakota.  Faces meant nothing in this place, Van Carlo said.

“Was your mother or your father ever a gambler?” Van Carlo asked.

The boy said no, he did not think so.  Then Van Carlo shook his head and told the boy that it was a shame that he didn’t even understand his own family.  Then he told him to stand behind him and to watch the table.  He told the boy to look at the cards.  Not at him, and not at the other men.

***

One evening the boy was walking into town to the casino. He was thankful the wind wasn’t blowing too hard.  On many days, it swept down from the mountains in a rush, but today it was in no hurry. Still, it was cold outside, and the air smelled like frozen metal.  It was painful on the boy’s naked hands, and it reminded him of the snapping fish with the dead eyes he used to pull out of the ponds outside of Richmond in the winter.

The boy had been working for the old gambler for several weeks now. He was very thankful for the job, and thankful to have learned so much from watching the poker tables.  He told himself that if the work ran out, he could always gamble.  He hoped it did not come to that, of course.  He hoped he never had to gamble for a living.  He liked Van Carlo, but he did not envy him.  The boy vowed to always find work before he’d gamble.

Surely there would always be something.  He thought about the boys back in Richmond, who made money on the streets of the city by giving directions to the wandering blue soldiers.  Some considered these boys traitors, but they were just trying to avoid having to live outside on the same streets where they worked.  The boy would do that, he told himself.  He had no love for the blue soldiers, of course, but once they were there they were there, and he didn’t see the sense in harboring any bitterness over it.   He’d rather work than gamble, and if that meant working with the blue soldiers, then that’s what it meant.

As the boy turned onto the street where the casino was located, he saw the brilliance of the dusky sky.  There were flat clouds over Shadow that ended towards the West in a very straight line on the horizon.  The edge of the clouds was lit up in yellow and in pink by the sun, and the scene reminded him of a sheet of paper that was burning at one end.  The boy hoped the sun would eventually burn the clouds up all the way so that Shadow could see the sky again.  It had been a long time, and a long winter, with a lot more winter to go.  But the sky in the distance was beautiful to the boy, very beautiful.  And though he may not have understood fancy, like he did not understand his father’s fancy hats, he understood beauty.

Van Carlo was sitting at the table in his usual spot.  He did not look at the boy as he approached.  He did not look up from the cards, but the boy knew that he never did this; he never looked up.  He never was distracted from the game. He could not afford to.  He could not afford to change his face for even a moment.  He would tell the boy that when the face changed, that’s when the money went.  So the gambler’s face was still and somber.  It might as well have been made of wood.  His body might as well have been a tree.  Swing from it, or fall out of it, or be hung from a noose on it.  Van Carlo would not have noticed.

The boy took his place behind Van Carlo near the heavy velvet curtain over the amber window.  The curtain was pulled slightly open.  The boy was a dark silhouette against the rectangle of gray light that tumbled into the casino.  It made the boy impossible to see; just a black outline against the window.

The game was soon over, and the other men went to find their telegraphs or to relieve themselves, or to smoke or drink.  Van Carlo stayed at the table, which was his custom.  He rarely left the table.  That was why he hired a telegraph, he said.  So he didn’t have to move.  No, he’d say with a little smile, he was glued in place.  Best to stay put, otherwise he might drag the whole casino around South Dakota with him, wherever he went.

The boy noticed that for a man who stayed in one place all the time, Van Carlo knew a lot of things, especially about South Dakota. Van Carlo did not mind discussing the things he knew with the boy.  He liked that the boy was not anxious to run off and do this or that when he was not needed.  Though, the gambler did admit to himself that there were times when he felt the boy needed to get out more.   He would sometimes make up an errand just to get the boy to go out.

“Van Carlo,” the boy said.

“What?”

“I was thinking about war.”

“Of course you were,” Van Carlo said, nodding and looking down at his chips and sorting them.  “You are from Richmond.”

“And what about South Dakota?” the boy asked.

“What about it?  We are the West.”

“Have you ever seen a war?”

“Jason,” Van Carlo said.  “The West is a war itself.  It must be. It’s where the present crashes upon the past like waves on rocks.  It cannot be any other way on the frontier.  It is not like your war back in Richmond, though.”

“What’s it like, then?”

“Well, it’s not like your war, that’s for sure.  The roofs aren’t torn off houses and the walls aren’t smashed through or anything.”

The boy looked confused.

“It’s just different,” Van Carlo said.  “I guess I would say that we are men at war trying to pretend that we are not.  Hoping we are not, but knowing we are.”

The boy nodded.  “Yes, I can see that you all carry guns here.  Even you, Van Carlo, at the table, but you never really move.  All you do is play cards, and yet there it is, your gun clearly showing in your holster.”

“So what is strange about that, besides all of it?” Van Carlo said with a little grin.

“I guess that the men look so peaceful, all of them with their guns.  There were a lot of guns in Richmond, but that city was shaking with soldiers and horses.  Here, you’re just playing cards. And even Timothy carries a gun, and he’s simply running out to get powders and candy for Mr. Fields.”

“That’s just how it is here, Jason,” Van Carlo said.  “It’s a war, all of it.  Guns are just part of the outfit.  Just like a cufflink, or one of those hats your father sells.”

The boy nodded and then looked thoughtful for a moment.

“But as far as playing cards goes,” Van Carlo said. “Having a gun on your side makes it harder to read your face, if you can believe that.”

The boy shrugged. “I guess I can.”

“You can?”

The boy shrugged.

Van Carlo shook his head.  “The gun,” he said, “belies a man’s true intent.”  He tapped the butt of the gun in his holster. “What’s it there for?” He tapped his forehead. “What’s he thinking?  Why does a man who is selling me groceries carry a gun?  What’s a man haying my field got a pistol for?”

“So it’s a way to hide yourself?”

Van Carlo nodded.  “Best mask ever invented; great for a gambler. I’ll never take my gun off.  Never.  It’s more useful to me here at this table then it ever would be fighting your blue soldiers.”  He snorted.  “Or your gray ones, or the Indians, or the Mexicans for that matter.”

“The women don’t wear guns,” the boy said.  “At least none that I can see; and I’m glad.  I don’t want a gun to hide their faces.  I like their faces.  Pretty.” He smiled at Van Carlo and blushed. “Prettier than ours, that’s for sure.”

Van Carlo scoffed. “They don’t need guns to hide their faces.  They’re women.  We can’t read them.  And you, you’re just eighteen.  For you to describe the face of a woman is like describing a dark cabin from a hundred yards away in the middle of the night.  You couldn’t read the face of your own mother. I’m starting to think you’ve never truly seen a woman’s face.  If you had, you’d realize what a fool you sound like.”

Van Carlo then suddenly laughed and smacked the table with the palm of his hand, scattering his chips.  “Boy, I think you must have stayed too long at the breast!” he howled.

“Van Carlo,” the boy said when the gambler was finished laughing.  “Do you suppose the women don’t carry guns because they have their men with them most of the time.”

“What, you mean like for protection?  You mean they don’t need their own guns because they have men to protect them?”

“Yes…maybe,” the boy said.

“No,” Van Carlo said shaking his head. “That’s not the reason.  South Dakota has enough trouble.  That’s the reason.  And like I said their faces are hard enough to read without guns, anyway.”

The boy waited for a minute and thought about this.

“So, would you play poker with a woman?” the boy asked.

Van Carlo turned in his chair and leaned in towards the boy.

“I have a lot of respect for women,” he said.  “And don’t ever say that I don’t, because I do.  But I wouldn’t gamble with a woman in South Dakota even if my choices were that or settle with the house for two pennies on my eyelids and a box to lie down in.”

The boy smiled for a moment.  Then his smile faded and he looked down at his hands.

“Van Carlo?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know anything about fancy hats?”

Van Carlo’s face became serious.

“Do you test me, boy?” he said.

The boy said, “No, Van Carlo, of course not.  I mean only to ask because I don’t know myself.”

“Then let me ask you first,” Van Carlo said.  “Can you read my face?”

“No, Van Carlo.”

“No, you can’t.  You can’t understand much of anything around here.  Not the women, not the guns, not the hats your father sells, not a fancy hat or any other hat.  That’s just the way it is in South Dakota. But that’s no excuse for not skimming the proper amount from the money I give you, like the other telegraphs do, and like you should.”

Van Carlo shook his head and turned back to the table and started stacking his chips and shuffling his cards. “Don’t ever ask me to pass judgment on your father or his business again,” he said.

“Yes, Van Carlo.”

“Maybe someday someone will tell you about those fancy hats.  You think we don’t understand hats like that in South Dakota?  We understand.”

“Yes, Van Carlo.”

“And those hats don’t match these guns, and that’s the problem.”

“Yes, Van Carlo.”

“And they didn’t match all those guns in Richmond, either.  And that was the problem there, too, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Van Carlo.”

Van Carlo turned to the boy again.  He looked up at him.  The sun had set, and he could see the boy’s smooth, sad face in the dim of the casino’s candlelight.

“It isn’t really that you don’t get those hats, is it?” Van Carlo said.

The boy stammered.

“It’s your father you don’t get.”

The boy looked at his hands again.  His face looked very uncomfortable.

Van Carlo sighed and turned back to the table. This boy was truly a dullard, and a fool, with an imagination like the underside of a boot.

“Go buy your father a gun,” he said.  “It’ll make more sense when he puts it on.”

“But you said that a gun…” he stopped.  He didn’t want to say anything else.  He felt like he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Your father’s a stranger, son, is what I’m saying,” Van Carlo said, shaking his head.  “He doesn’t get those hats any more than you do.”

There was an awkward silence between them.  The other gamblers started to shuffle back through the casino towards the table.  It was almost time to play again.

“Boy?” Van Carlo said.

“Yes?”

“Your father is on the hard floor, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” the boy replied.  “Hard.  And dirty, he says.”

Van Carlo nodded.  “He’s on the hard floor.  And he’s hoping to find a coin that he might have dropped.”

The boy looked out the window.  “Yes,” he said, after a moment.

Van Carlo nodded again.  “Look, I have to be honest.  I don’t think your father’s shop has a chance here.  He’ll need to find something different, like you did.”

The boy looked very sad.  “Yes, Van Carlo,” he said.

“And there’s something else you need to understand.  There are a lot of things down on that hard floor.  There’s no coin, but there are men in this town who will tell him that they can help him.  But you must tell him not to believe them.  You think I hide my face behind my gun?  These men have long since forgotten that there’s any difference.  You must tell your father to stay away from them.  And you must tell him that you did not hear this from me.”

“Yes, Van Carlo.  I believe you.  I think you must be very wise.  You’re the only one around here who tells me the way things really are.”

“No,” Van Carlo said.  “I am a fool.” He lowered his hat over his eyes and sunk down a little in his chair.  The other gamblers were sitting down at the table.

“I think my family is doomed,” the boy said quietly.  “My father will not like your idea of finding something else to do after all his trouble. He won’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Maybe,” Van Carlo said.

“What can my father do?” the boy asked.

Van Carlo shook his head.  “Your father is like a horse with no rider and no wagon, running in circles.  You’ve seen them sometimes, on the plains here in South Dakota.  Like them, it is only a matter of time before someone puts a saddle on his back.”

Van Carlo began to shuffle his cards.  “He needs to do something.  I don’t know.  Anything. Tell him to try harder to sell his hats.  Maybe that will work, but I doubt it.  Tell him to drink.  Even that would be better.  It may be too late to go back to Richmond, but if it isn’t, then go.”

The boy said, “What men will come to him, Van Carlo?”

“The men you first saw when your train pulled in.  You know who I mean.”

The boy nodded.  “Yes, they looked like trains, puffing on great cigars in their dark suits, and the women gliding behind them.”

“Yes.  Dakota Inc.  That’s who they are.  You saw them, but I promise you, they saw you first.”

The boy nodded.  He certainly remembered the men.  They looked strong and ambitious.  “I will tell father tonight.”

“Good. Now, I can’t say anything more about it.  Words are currency in South Dakota, and I need everything I’ve got right now.”

The boy nodded again.  After a moment, he looked out the window. “Look, Van Carlo.  The moon is out tonight.  All the clouds must be gone.”

“I hate the moon.  Close the curtains,” Van Carlo said.  Then his face turned to wood again and the game began.

         A few moments later mother came and stood next to the boy in the doorway of the room with the hole.  She pushed him back gently with her arm and told him that she wanted to close the door to the room.  She told him that since they didn’t have the money to fix the hole, closing the door to the room was the best they could do.  Soon, she said, father would sell enough hats that they could hire someone to repair the roof.  Maybe he’d even sell enough so that they could buy a new house.

            “Somewhere closer to town, perhaps,” she said.  “Away from the watching mountain.”  Mother sounded uncomfortably suspicious, and the boy didn’t understand.  The hundreds of marching and watching eyes in Richmond never seemed to bother her, when the lines of immaculate blue soldiers filed past their row house with their glistening, silver bayonets against their shoulders pointing threateningly towards the sky.  She would open the curtain in the bedroom and stare back at them until they rounded the corner.

The lines of soldiers were as big as any mountain, the boy thought, and yet mother would stare back at them with a calm, resigned look on her face.  But out by the ranch house in South Dakota there was nobody.  No hoards of blue soldiers marching past; just one lonely, cold mountain in the distance.  Yet she seemed troubled.

            “Can I have this room, mother,” the boy asked.  He remembered the moon in the window of his bedroom in Richmond, and didn’t mind being watched by the moon, or the mountain or the sky.  With the hole, he could stare back at the moon even longer at night than he used to.  And besides, didn’t Lucy tell him he should appreciate the thinness of the walls, and everything new in South Dakota?  He’d never had a room with a hole in the roof before.

            Lucy came up behind them as mother was closing the door, and before mother had a chance to answer the boy, Lucy spoke.  She was no longer crying.  Her eyes were not even red anymore.

            “Oh, what a marvelous idea, Jason!  It will be just like sleeping outside in our new place!  I think I must surely envy you a little bit.  How can you ever forget where you are when you wake up and see the sky of South Dakota above you?  I’m afraid I will wake up in the middle of the night and still think I’m in Richmond.  I wish I had chosen this room first, but I guess you’re the lucky one, Jason. You see?  Already your imagination is getting better!”

            “I think you will freeze, Jason,” mother said.  “And I think you’ll have to tread water when it rains.  And you will never get a break from South Dakota, not even in your bed at night.”

            “No, I like this room, mother.  I have many blankets, and I’ll move the bed to the side so that I’m not directly under the hole.  I like this room.  It gives me something to think about besides Richmond,” the boy said.

            “Rain from the ceiling!” Lucy said. “What a lovely thing! Waterfalls and stars!  Waterfalls and stars!  Why, it will be like you are part of the fields and hills and flowers of South Dakota!  And if it rains, you will wake up even taller than the night before!”

She giggled.

            Mother said, “But what about the candle you like to keep next to your bed?  I think you’ll have trouble keeping it burning in here.  This room seems dreadfully drafty.”

            “Well, the hole is a place for the moon, I suppose,” the boy said.  “There will be light.”

            Mother shrugged.

            “If you want to sleep in here then I have nothing against it,” she said.  “I don’t know what your father will think, but it’s best if we don’t bother him about this right now. When he settles in at the store and begins to sell enough to make him happy, then we can tell him.”

            “Of course, mother.”

            “You are seventeen and can do what you want.”

            “Yes, mother.”

            Mother sighed and pressed her hands against her pulled-back hair and smoothed it.  Then she straightened and smoothed her dress, and adjusted it slightly at the bust.

            Mother said, “Now I must go and help your father unpack.  He wants me to pick out the hats for the window of the new shop.  You two can come and help, or you can stay and unpack your own things; whatever you choose. Later you can bring in some wood, Jason, and we can light a fire in the fireplace.  Hole or no hole, this house seems very greedy for heat, even though it’s not yet the middle of October.”

***

            A few hours later the great trunks were unpacked and father had chosen the hats he wanted displayed in the shop window.  He was now in the kitchen having tea, and mother was putting the linens on the bed in the main bedroom.  Lucy and Jason were sitting in front of the fire place where a small flame shyly crackled.

            Jason asked his sister about father’s shop, and many other things, too.  He asked her if the moon was brighter in South Dakota than it was in Richmond, and how far away the mountain was and if it was further than it looked, and if it was dark and shadowy by nature or if the sky gave it that color and made it look that way.  He asked her what she thought of cows and horses, and where he should put his bed, and whether or not he did the right thing in picking the room with the hole.  He asked her if the war in Richmond was a good war or a bad one and if she thought it was right that Richmond fell the way it did.

            Then he sat back and listened to her answers, enjoying the warmth of the fire.  All of her answers were bright, coming at him more like flashes of light than like words.  Like the popping of muskets.

HINT:  The primary purpose of this novel is to highlight my philosophical belief that all reality and truth is fundamentally and singularly bound within the physical world.  That beyond the physical, the visceral, and the natural, all other “truth” is abstract, and thus, the driving force of all real morality, as well as our justification before God is our very created selves.  Furthermore, I believe the consciousness to be an inexorable part of the biological, though capable of putting one outside of their own physical existence theoretically, based on quantifiable observations.  Nevertheless, this unique ability of man’s consciousness does NOT change the reality that all that exists and is truth is actual, objective physical “things”, of which man is preeminent…and thus, the material universe IS the source of all spirits and souls.  And of course, as a Christian, I consider God to be the very definition of the perfect, visceral, utterly real IT, or, as He puts it better, I AM.  If He is not physically REAL, by very essence, then what is?  I am not suggesting that GOD is an abstraction, is what I mean to say.  If nothing else, the PERSON of Jesus Christ obviously proves that.  On the contrary, there can in fact be no abstract attribute ascribed to God within his own existential framework.  He is utterly ALL He is and all He thinks and all He does…all of that IS God.  And that is why God is One.

The secondary purpose of this novel is to show the destructive pitfalls which result from seeing reality through the lens of abstract constructs; that is, basing one’s assumption of “truth” (moral or otherwise) on a figment of man’s ability to think OUTSIDE his physical environment.  One one hand, we have the practical, uber here-and-now thinking “Jason”; on the other, his sister, Lucy.  The persistent dreamer, almost to the point of madness. And still to come, Leonard, the “faceless man”…the physical embodiment (as he seems to think) of the all powerful abstraction:  “god”…but not the true God.  No, “god”, but devoid of the boundaries of man’s existential–though certainly no less true–reality…that is, reason, logic, metaphysical and moral consistency.  He, that is Leonard, of course, could thus be consider the symbolism for mystic despotism, or, as John Immel puts is, spiritual tyranny.  And if you consider him thus, you will not be wrong.  That is part of it. 

Er…I also hope the novel is , you know, fun to read and a good story.

And now, on we go, with our heroes, long suffering Credence family:

On the platform were two men in wool pants and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up.  They were standing next to the Credence family’s great trunks discussing and something in loud voices, not paying much attention to anything but their own conversation. The boy sniffed the air and there was just a hint of coldness on it; just an aftertaste of a chill. It was getting on early autumn, and though it was still very warm in Richmond this time of year, it was much cooler in South Dakota.  Here the boy understood that the chill came early and stayed late, and already there was something cold under the surface of the season.

The boy looked at the men standing next to the great trunks and noticed that they were wearing hats.  They did not look like father’s hats, though, but more like the hats that the horse handlers wore back in Richmond.  The boy recognized something familiar in the uncaring, lazy way about these men.

Father gestured toward the great trunks and told the men that he and the family were ready to go.  The men didn’t seem to pay any attention to father, but the boy knew that they must have heard him because they turned and, still talking to themselves, lifted the great trunks into the air and began to walk with them.

Lucy was still smiling as the men loaded the trunks onto the wagon, which was hitched to one white horse, with splashes of gray on its back and near its hooves.  The boy noticed that mother was smiling too, but he thought there was something different about the way she was smiling. There was something not real about mother’s smile.  It was like during the War when the boy would sometimes see certain gray soldiers back in Richmond salute their officers, but he could tell that there was no meaning behind it; or that the meaning had somehow changed.

“Jason, you must come now,” mother said.  “Get on the wagon and stop thinking so much.  Get out of your mind and see this new place around you.  You seem very slow today, and I feel like a cat tugging on a snagged string.”

The boy said, “And I am that string, caught in the splinter of a door.” He smiled.

“You are the string, Jason. Always dragged along this way or that way, by some whim or thought, or another,” mother said.

“And I am a fuse,” Lucy said with a giggle.  “We are both strings, Jason, just not the same kind.”

They all climbed into the wagon and were soon underway.

“Jason,” mother said as they bumped along the dirt road.  “What do you think of South Dakota?”

“Do you think they will like father’s hats?” the boy replied.

“I don’t know what they will think of them.  I don’t know enough about this place, same as you.  Same as Lucy, except she pretends she knows, which is fine because it’s the way she is and it suits her.  But I don’t know. I agree they do not have many hats here like the kind your father wants to sell.  But then, this could be a good thing.  Maybe something of the East out here in the West will suit them.”

“Mother, have you noticed the way their boots are so dirty?” the boy said.  “Where are the cobblestones?”

Mother shrugged.  “It’s just the streets here, Jason.”

“They are just dirt,” he said.

“Oh, you two,” Lucy said.  “I just don’t understand you.  You see only dirty boots and dead cows on tracks and dirty streets.  I saw your face, Jason, when the man was talking about the cows.  Father and I do not see it like this.  We see lovely people who need what we have brought here.  We see that it is bright in South Dakota—at least today it is bright.  And so why should we not think it will be bright every day?  And I know that you see it’s bright, too, Jason, but when you see the brightness all you can think about is the moon and your burning candle by your bed in Richmond.  You loved that burning candle.  Even when all of Richmond was burning down around you, you lit that silly candle, and so I think you are a very strange boy.  So what if they have dirt on their streets and on their boots?  Father has purchased a beautiful ranch house out on the edge of Shadow.  It will probably have dirty floors and a dirty chimney, but does all that dirt mean that it’s not beautiful?”

Mother said, “Lucy, you are my very sweet daughter.  I think it’s indeed bright in South Dakota, but I don’t think it was bright until the cheerful Lucy arrived here.”

The horse looked very uninterested as she pulled the wagon up the very long, very narrow dirt road to the ranch house on the outskirts of Shadow.  There were two men on the wagon sitting on the front bench with father.  Father seemed very impatient, even more impatient than the men, and he was snapping his fingers at his family, who were in the back of the wagon between the trunks.  Father was sitting on the bench, up at the front of the wagon, between the two men who had come along to drive the wagon and to help unload the trunks.

“When we arrive, you must hurry with the trunks, and help these men, and get them unloaded quickly,” Father said.  “You see that these are very busy men and they are in a hurry, so we must also be in a hurry.  This is what you do when you come to a new place.  If you do what you’ve always done, then you are very silly and you should never have bothered leaving the place you came from.”

“Father, if that’s true, then why do you intend to set up your shop here in South Dakota?  Isn’t that what we’ve always done?  The only difference is that we’ll do it here, now.  Something of the East here in the West, as mother said.  What’s wrong with that?” the boy said.

Father replied, “Lucy is right about the hats.  We’ll sell them, but we’ll just have to do it quickly, and catch the people as fast as they are moving.  Things move very quickly in South Dakota.”

Father turned away from the family and said something to the men driving the wagon, but the boy could not hear it.  Father was blinking quickly and his cheeks were twitching.  The horse, on the other hand, hardly ever blinked, and her tail swished lazily as she pulled the wagon with slow and deliberate clomps of her feet.

***

The ranch house was low and had a faded, gray-tan hue like the land around it, and was crooked and sagging at the ends.  The boards of the house bowed and curled as half-hearted and bent nails protruded from them.  The windows were closed securely and were colorless and bland and seemed to reflect nothing at all.  The curtains behind them were old and bunched and knotted.

The curtains and the tightly closed windows reminded the boy of an aunt he had back in Richmond who wore her hair in a motionless braid and pursed her wrinkled lips sharply and almost never blinked. As the boy stared at the old ranch house, he thought of this aunt and something that happened to him a long time ago:

When he was nine, the boy walked into a room in the family’s row house in Richmond to find that his aunt was dead.  She was sitting in a chair next to a window, where the afternoon sun fell upon her body, and he stood just a few feet behind her, a little off to the side.  A little while later the boy’s mother walked up behind him and asked him how long he’d been there. The boy couldn’t remember exactly, but it had been quite some time.  There was still sun upon the body of his dead aunt, but the sun was the golden color of a late afternoon at that point, not the bright sun of the morning it had been when he walked in.

When the boy walked into the room it had not taken long for him to discover that his aunt was dead.  But the strange thing was that this fact didn’t seem to have any practical effect on him.  It didn’t keep him from talking to her for a time, and moving the hair gently from her eyes, and placing her tea delicately on the window sill, and reading a little of her favorite book out loud to her, as was his daily custom when she came to stay with the family.  He didn’t do anything particularly different than he normally would have, except that when he was finished with his routine, he went back to standing behind her, a little off to the side.  Perhaps this strange behavior was due  to his youth.  Or perhaps it was that his aunt had always a certain look about her that was the same in death as it was in life.

When mother came in the room she looked at the dead aunt in a way that one would look at a dead bird in the yard.  She told the boy that it was just as well and then quickly made him promise to never tell anyone she said this.

Then she said something about how death has a way of bringing out the personality of someone like this aunt. Then she made the boy promise to never tell anyone she said this, either.

The boy asked mother what she meant by this, and she replied that she meant more than one thing.  She then told him that if he really wanted to understand he needed only to go to the funeral.  So the boy went to the funeral a few days later with the family, and he found out that mother was right.

The preacher gave a speech and said many nice things about this dead aunt, and the boy understood that the things he said just didn’t fit.  The coffin fit, that is to say it fit around her like it had been there all her life.  But the words of the preacher did not make sense to him.  And also his aunt’s eyes were closed and her lips were turned up into a peaceful smile, and this didn’t make sense to the boy either because he had never seen her smile before.

***

The back of the ranch house was set towards the snow covered mountain in the distance.  The snow looked like a noose around the neck of the mountain, and there was a dark, gray curtain of clouds above and behind it that reminded the boy of the hoods they put on men’s heads just before they dropped them through the gallows in Richmond during the War.  The boy shuddered at this thought and drove it from his mind.  He needed to be more like Lucy, he thought.  He’d probably sleep better at night if he were, especially in South Dakota.

The windows of the house reflected no sunlight, and the boy wondered if anything at all could give a reflection way out there by the ranch house.  Did rivers and lakes give off a reflection, or did they just look like big holes in the ground?  He didn’t know of any rivers or lakes nearby, but he supposed that there must be some.  The melting snow from the mountain had to go somewhere.  If it ever melted, that is.  It was much colder there than it was in Richmond this time of year, the boy thought.  Colder in South Dakota and even colder out there in the lonely plains where the ranch house stood.

The land was very flat and hard around the ranch house, for the most part.  At irregular intervals there were crops of brush and some holes in the ground made by some animal or other, and there were three or four trees standing huddled together several meters away that looked to the boy like they had wandered out too far and gotten lost.  There was also a deep well in the front yard that was dry and dusty-looking on the outside.  A bucket hung lifelessly askew from an old rope underneath the small roof of the well housing.

The boy went to the well and put his head down into it.  There was a very strong, unpleasant odor.  For a moment he was afraid that perhaps it was not a well, but a grave.  He jerked his head back in disgust and banged it on the bucket.  It hurt, but he was relieved because the bucket reminded him that, yes, it was a well, not a tomb.  But the smell was still not good, and the boy thought that if he ever fell down into that well he’d die from the smell before he hit the bottom.

Dead bones.  That’s what it smelled like to him.  Dead bones piled high in the blackness.  And he knew very well what that smelled like; he remembered from the war in Richmond.  The bones smelled and they were all the same; blue or gray or black or white, they all smelled the same.  All the skulls were the same skull, and all the legs were the same leg, there was no difference.

Mother said, “Jason, the trunks are unloaded off the wagon, no thanks to you.  Truly you’re a foolish boy, and a dullard, with an imagination as empty as that bucket that you just cracked your head on.  But I don’t blame you completely, for the men moved very fast, as they tend to do here in South Dakota.  I hope that things will not move too fast for us like that all the time, because then where will we be?”

“I’m not sure, mother,” the boy said.  “I suppose nowhere.”

Mother nodded, and looked up at the mountain in the distance.

“Anyway,” she said. “They have left us the wagon and the horse, which will be helpful.”

Father picked up one end of a trunk and began to drag it inside the ranch house

“We should get these inside and unpacked quickly,” he said. “Then we need to unload the hats and go to town and set up our new shop there.  If South Dakota moves quickly, then we better move quickly, as well.  I am much too old and too tired to go any further west, where the ocean is; which is the other place that some men from the East are going.  Anyway, we don’t have the money for that even if we wanted to.”

“The ocean is very far away,” the boy said.  “I don’t even think I could pretend to see the ocean from my bedroom window here, like I could in Richmond.”

Lucy said, “Jason, I fear for you because you’re so dull.  South Dakota is a full half way to the ocean.  It was my dream too, once, to see the ocean at both ends.  But at least I am halfway there.  And that’s how it goes with dreams sometimes.  You are lucky to get them at a half if you can.  You should understand this and not think so much about Richmond.”

Then Lucy turned to father. “Oh, father, it is so lovely here!  So bright and such land!  How I have dreamed of such land!  Land that is a great open and laughing mouth that breaths in and out and sends the cool wind over us to refresh us and not to hinder us. Such wonderful openness and no houses around for our own house to lean upon.  Not like in Richmond.  Can this be anything but freedom?”

Father grunted and jerked the trunk over a loose board near the door.

“Until the war,” he muttered.

“What did you say, Holland?” mother said.

“When the war came, there were no houses for ours to lean on,” father said. “I don’t see much difference here when it comes to that, Lucy.”

The boy looked around and he could not imagine the land laughing, like Lucy had said.  Like the ocean, it was too far for his imagination to reach.  But if it was an open mouth, he thought, it was not laughing.  It was snoring, or worse.  And the only freedom he felt was the kind of freedom one feels when he is lost in the desert.  But then, he was the dull boy, and Lucy was the one mother said was born with all the lightning and imagination.

Yes, he really needed to be more like Lucy, the boy thought.  Lucy saw much.  Much more than anyone else saw, and if this made her happy then he needed to be more like her.  He was so amazed that his sister had such a gift to see so many things, even things that were not even there. She saw laughing. He saw snoring, or worse. He was a dullard and she was lighting, so he decided that he would try to believe her and not listen to his own thoughts so much.

The boy also decided that he needed to be more like father.  He was a boy that thought too much, but father was a man who just did what needed to be done, like move his family from Richmond to South Dakota to sell hats, without thinking much about it.  There were so many people he needed to be like in his family he thought, and he began to wonder why he was even there.  But this was an unpleasant thought, like the noose of snow around the neck of the mountain, and he tried to put it out of his mind.

Mother said, “Children, obey your father and help him get those trunks inside.  Move quickly.  I feel a wind blowing, like a storm is coming.  If the trunks are stuck outside in the rain then they will be ruined, and if they are ruined then the only place we will have to put our things is this house, which I don’t believe is quite big enough.  And be especially careful of the latches and the hinges on the trunks because they are so delicate.”

Lucy skipped towards the front door of the ranch house, patting her brother playfully on the shoulder as she went by.

“Do what mother says, Jason, and help father bring in the trunks.  I am going to pick out my room,” she said, and disappeared inside the house with her braided hair bouncing behind her.

The boy picked up the other great trunk and dragged it towards the door and inside the house.

“Where should I put this trunk, mother?” he asked.

“Anywhere it will fit,” she said.

The boy stood in the doorway with one hand still holding one end of the great trunk and looked around.  It was dim and hard to see, but he could tell that the house was small.  He heard the latches on one of the trunks pop, and then he heard rummaging.  A moment later father began to light some candles and a lantern.

“Suppose it does not fit anywhere, mother,” the boy asked.

“Then force it,” mother said.

“But what about the delicate locks and hinges?”

“Who cares,” mother said. “Break them.  It’s selfish of me to wish them well.  I’m a good wife, Jason.  I have always thought it important to be a good wife ever since my mother taught me this.  I shouldn’t care about those trunks, and you and I should both stop thinking of Richmond.”

“Yes, mother,” the boy said, and went to find a place for the trunk.  He dropped it in the corner, then knelt down and popped the hinges.  He opened the trunk and began to unpack, but then he thought about what mother said, and about his decision to try to be more like Lucy, and he left the trunk and went to look around the house.

He came to a room toward the back of the house and noticed that there was a hole in the roof, large enough for a man to fit through.  It was a jagged hole, and it looked like it had been a weak spot in the wood, and that something heavy had been dropped through it.  It reminded him of the cannonball holes he’d seen in the homes in Richmond.  He looked at the hole curiously for a moment.

“Oh, my!  Jason!”  Lucy said, startling him as she appeared out of thin air behind him. “There is a hole in this roof!  And now I can see the beautiful day outside and the sun coming through.  Now I never even have to look out of the windows, which I have noticed are not so good for looking out of anyway.  What a wonderful place South Dakota is, to have such ways to see the brightness of the sky!”

The boy looked down and saw that there was an erratic stain from the water that had rained in through the hole in the roof and warped and discolored the wood of the floor.  Lucy looked at her brother, and saw that there was no expression on his face. He saw the hole and the stain, and there was nothing more in his face than that.  It was such a blank face, she thought, simply reflecting back what was right in front of him.  Or it was worse, she thought.  He was thinking about Richmond again.

Lucy said, “Oh, Jason.  I see that you’re a very silly boy, and a dullard, with an imagination like a dusty jar.  I don’t know why you are missing Richmond so. Why is it so hard for you to change?  Why can’t you appreciate the freedom we have here?  Are you so used to our row house, with its four walls and floors and roof, and people on all sides of us?  Why can’t you appreciate the freedom we have here in South Dakota, where the walls and roof are unattached, and the neighbors are few?  And what is so wrong with the wind and the rain coming in?”

Lucy began to cry.  Her lips trembled, and she wiped frantically at her eyes.

“I know you have bright memories of your burning candle by your bed, and of Richmond, and I have bright memories, too!” she said.  “But my brightest memory is when the general brought his blue fire to the city!  I was so afraid of the fire reaching our walls because the walls were so thick and tight and I knew that they would burn for a long, long time, and so we would also burn that way!  But I do not fear that here!  Here our walls are thin and the fire will burn them up quickly, if it comes, and so we won’t have to suffer long, not like in Richmond!  And perhaps we might even escape, and if we do there will be no throngs in the streets to block our way!  So don’t you see, Jason, you silly boy, that South Dakota is a good place where everything moves quickly, even the fire.  Now you must go and tell mother about this wonderful hole in your roof!  You will go and tell her of the brightness of the sky and the wind on your face, right in this room!  Go!  Go now!”

She screamed at the boy to leave, but instead of waiting for him to move, she turned and ran from him, sobbing heavily.

After a moment the boy turned and looked one more time at the hole in the roof.  He wondered how many of father’s fancy hats it would take to cover it up.