Father. Father Julius.
Father.
Good. I thought you’d drifted out there for a minute. Let’s key key keep you in the waking world, Father. I don’t want you to sink and not come back out. Stay with me, now. Eyes open? Good. I’ll tell you my story. You ought to know, especially now you’ve got Morris after you, too.
I was a historian once. Did I tell you that already? Specializing in the colonial and pre-colonial mid-South? I taught at Henvine College in Knoxville. Have you heard of it? Father?
Well, that’s where I taught. My name was Sterling Shirker. Professor Sterling Shirker, if you please. Chair of Appalachian Studies.
I took a sabbatical that year, to conduct research for a book on the settlement economies of the Great Smoky Mountains during the time of the Colonies. Digging through local archives in small towns founded centuries before, when Appalachia really was the fringe. Anything past that was the territory of wild men and French trappers and tribes. No regular roads, nothing cultivated, no access to the amenities, nothing out there but the big “who knows.” Imagine living in that, back then, Father. Imagine living with that gap in your knowledge of what truly exists, only hours away as the crow flies. Anything at all could be out there, waiting. Nowadays you could wake up in Richmond and find yourself by sundown in Arkansas, Louisiana, East Texas, but back then, you might not even have heard of the mountains, or you might have thought them a rumor. Who knows what’s out there? Or how far back it goes? Who knows what’s in it? Trees nestled so thick they block the sun, for hundreds of miles. Back then, it was still possible to believe in the world’s end, some boundary where it all finished, where you might jump and fall forever.
Think about that. Everything is known today. We’re jaded in our mobility, apathetic, starved of mystery. Nothing new beneath the sun and stars, that’s what I thought.
That’s what I thought.
See, my mistake was I considered history something separate from the present. I liked to turn rocks over and see what lay underneath. But I thought of history in terms of archeology, not biology. I never expected to find anything still crawling around underneath.
What I found was the most amazing—
Father.
Father, wake up. Come on now. I’m talking here.
Gordon came along with me. His mother, too. Didn’t she? Was she with us then? Sometimes, in my memory, she was there the whole time. But she wasn’t there when Morris caught us. They can’t both be right, and I can never decide which it is. It’s jumbled up. Some memories I’ve kept. Some, I was the only one who kept them. Others are gone. I’ve been trying to gather it all back to me, but I’ve law law lost my wife along the way, somewhere in there. The cheese has just melted into the into the into the bread. I can’t work out how to separate them out any more. It all changed, see…more than once, I think.
I’m not going to think about that, Father. I’m not.
I’d mapped out my summer research tour the spring before. Dozens of towns, mostly small, founded before 1810, with long-established libraries. The plan was to travel cheap, sneak my way into the archives, photocopy anything relevant, move down the highway.
Gordon I let wander—in Pigeon Forge, particularly. A boy in the eternal youth of summer vacation, set free in a spot more amusement park than town. Doubt I could’ve kept him from it if I tried—not that I tried. The times were different; things felt safer…and I was distracted by my work. This was back before all this stuff was available on computers you hold in your hand, before you could use the same device to magically photograph all this stuff. Research actually involved physical search. Stacks, archives, card files, microfiche. I had to copy everything out by hand, sometimes working with materials so delicate that you had to turn their pages with a pair of tweezers. Or I had to thumb through thousands of discs of microfiche just to cross-reference a line. Like panning for gold, which is in a way what it is. When you’re an academic, the thing you want to do is find something big. Something novel. Something to launch you out of the fusty world of trade journals and out into the public consciousness. Produce a book that hits the zeitgeist just right, you can be a wunderkind on the intellectual talk show circuit. Then you’ve made it. So you see, ostensibly, I was researching a paper on economic trends in late 1700s Appalachia, but the reality was I was panning the dry riverbed of that topic for gold, searching for a magic conceptual trampoline that would bounce me right through fame’s third-story window into a rock-star lifestyle of the mind.
And Pigeon Forge was, as I say, a natural stop. I was interested in the mill, which boomed in the early days, late 1700s through the first half of the nineteenth century, then went quiet after the Civil War. I figured it might make a good section in my book, likely a chapter of its own, tracing the progression of boom and bust and boom. I wanted to at least get to the bottom of the mill’s sudden fade from the scene. But what I found in Pigeon Forge wasn’t a chapter. It was the golden trampoline.
As soon as we got situated in our small rental, I went back to the library and started tossing the joint, as methodically and quietly as possible. I was a little over a week at it, and nowhere near about to give up, when I found a prize hidden behind the other books on the shelf. A heavy black tome, leather-bound, self-published: A Familial History of the Love Family, Volume 1, written by a recent scion of Pigeon Forge’s first family. Secreted between the pages I discovered loose papers, each sheet carefully preserved in a sleeve of plastic. These were handwritten by Margaret Rambo, another of Pigeon Forge’s earliest settlers. And her story…Oh mama. Paydirt. Hyper-intellectual talk circuit, here I come. I started to think about radio interviews, NPR, write-ups in TIME, Newsweek. It’s not pretty to admit this, but some mornings I even spent a bit of mirror-time rehearsing the things I would say at awards ceremonies.
But that was before those pages changed on me, and everything else along with.
I brought my research goodies to the Smoky Mountains Historical Institute to search for corroborating sources. Befriended the lonesome docent, and received access to a backroom with a desk I could use as my base of operations. I had Margaret Rambo’s ancient pages—my treasures. And, I had the book within which they’d been hidden; the local history, self-published sometime in the seventies, a particular history of a town founded on a smithy and forge, then later a sawmill and water wheel, a town whose fortunes grew and stabilized and ebbed and rose and fell in familiar ways, until the late sixties, when enterprising out-of-towners zoned an entire main drag for tourism and entertainment, and it became what it now is. How did a colonial settlement that formed around a smithy and a mill eventually become that? With the Rambo letters, I had an answer I couldn’t wait to share. After the change, that answer got even stranger.
Father, listen to me about the change.
I’d come from the records room, where I’d been picking my way through the stacks, searching for more treasures. Bringing some promising documents back to my desk, I re-read the Rambo pages, when all of a sudden, I had the oddest sensation. How to say it? Like suddenly I was seeing things three different ways at once. Like I was a sardine suddenly aware of swimming around a huge oddly shaped aquarium rather than the ocean. Like I was a pig being pushed through an extruder into a trail of sausages.
I’m not making sense. Maybe this will make sense, or at least be comprehensible:
After that sensation came over me, my sources were different.
Very different.
The Love family history wasn’t just self-published anymore; it was handwritten. It had a different author, too. Meanwhile, Margaret’s pages were totally gone. I’d been reading them during the change—where were they? I frantically cased the room, but no joy; I’ve never seen them again. In their place lay a different, smaller book with an unadorned cover of bright red. It was one of those deals you get at the checkout line in bookstores, with the blank pages you can fill, but which you never do fill. Someone had sure filled these, though.
I turned to the handwritten history, and immediately forgot the loss of the Rambo pages. A very different history, an even more interesting one. The new book—the red one—had a title in precise calligraphy on the inside cover: Love’s Fountain, by Jane Sim—near as I could figure, it was a novelization of what was set down in the history.
Other things had changed, too, but I couldn’t bother with that.
I was already reading.
May the Good LORD be praised, it seems our smithy’s madness has passed. For the present our estimable Col S. Wear holds him in our stockade, but he has made a full confession of his plot, and, as you shall hear, a truly wicked and vile one it was. Our poor young friend F. Jay lies yet in the infirmary, caught ‘tween life and death due to Love’s Devilish ministrations, though our Doctor is skilled in emetic and has given us hope for his good recovery. I embrace this opportunity to convey to you, Sister, the device by which this troubled man, this smithy with a mind of an Empedocles, this Isaac Love, had thought to capture the loyalties of our colony, and, thereby, compel us to install him as King. As I have written previously, Mr. Love has proved a man of considerable and multifarious talents, though as with many such men, his estimation of his own knowledge extends beyond native capacity, and thus, possessed also by the sin of overweening ambition, they do themselves provide the engine of their own thwarting, which engine I now name PRIDE. Mr. Love believed himself possessed of enough skill as an Apothecary to extract from local root and berry an unholy concoction, which, if quaffed, would infuse all other bodily humors and dispense with all sense of one’s Self, and make the Drinker naught but a slave. This villain made bold enuff to provide this potion at our picnic following the flying of the spring pigeons, and made as if to administer it by force if blandishment proved ineffective. ’Twas only by GOD’s mercy that among us only our poor Mr. Jay proved pliable enough to obey Love’s directives and quaff his poison—though I must confess, were it not for my betrothed, others might even now be languishing in the same deathly manner as Mr. Jay—for it was my own brave Mr. Runyan who stood ’gainst Mr. Love, and shouted full in his face, then contended with him over the ladle he held and, in this struggle, the two fell athwart the hogshead, and thus the hogshead was spilled onto the ground, and all the grass thereunder did wither and die. Then was our coterie freed from indecision, and others sprang to my beloved’s rescue, and raised the alarum, and held him fast until Col. Wear, who serves also as constable, arrived with manacle and chain. But now Mr. Love appears once more to speak in his old decorous manner, and pleads his innocence, saying his acts were not his own, but rather of a fever that unfurnished him of reason, brought on from those same berries, which he discovered as he foraged, and consumed as he walked, and in such manner was driven into the strange madness now passed. Col. Wear will hear him more at trial, but it seems meet, so long as Mr. Jay lives, Mr. Love will be forgiven this trespass, for to lose our smithy so far out in the wild would be a loss most sore and grievous indeed
The fountain predated the town. It lay in wait before anything had been built. Everyone knows this. It would be foolish to believe otherwise; one had merely to look at it—nobody ever did—to know this fountain was one of the first things, older than any ruin on Grecian hills, older than Jonah’s fish, older than the ark, older even than the mountain upon which that lucky reeking ship finally foundered. When Isaac Love first arrived in this place, along with his small coterie of travelers, it was there already, awaiting him.
The Love Party came west in 1787, to make their fortune in the new-formed Northwest Territory. The “Love Party,” so named after Isaac Love. A bachelor smith and former corporal in the Colonial army, he quickly proved the most capable among them, and a natural leader besides. The group, setting out from Raleigh, targeting Cincinnati, was made up of a loose and unaffiliated kit of families and fortune hunters, without head or government, but when the guide they hired took ill early in their trip, they found themselves in early danger of failure. The sickly guide was a sometime mountain man by the name of Isaac Runyan, though “Barefoot” was the appellation bestowed upon him in the Appalachians. He tucked himself away in one of their low cow-wagons, groaning and drinking and clutching his gut, and soon it was Love who moved wagon to wagon, assigning tasks, tending to livestock, serving as arbiter in disagreements. By the time Runyan pulled himself, heaving and pale, from the wagon, he was guide only; Love had easily assumed unassailable leadership. A short, broad man who kept clean-shaven, he wore clean white shirts and high chambray overalls and a brown hat with a wide brim to shade his eyes. His chest and shoulders were thick and powerful, his forearms burly. He held his posture erect, spine straight as a plumb-line in defiance of years stooped over the forge with hammer and tongs. Love proved capable of great feats of strength and possessed a native mechanical understanding; using only a length of chain fixed to a pulley block, he had extracted a wagon, oxen and all, mired foot-deep in muck. He looked you in the eye longer than you’d find comfortable, and then a little longer still—hypnotizing, almost. Men found themselves taking up his positions while in his presence, even if they disagreed, and then, to avoid the appearance they had been cowed, argued as his proxy with skeptical wives, defending convictions they themselves did not hold. Women avoided his company, and in this at least he ceded ground to the man he had replaced. Barefoot Runyan was taller than he, and comelier; his gaze, less fanatic, did not unnerve. He was jolly and easy around a campfire, and apt with a fiddle. So, while the trust and the dependence of the people went to Love and his manifold capabilities, their affection remained with the feckless Runyan, and while Love’s gaze went with increasing frequency to the young and fetching Margaret Rambo, hers went to their guide.
Without Love they would have foundered and failed. The families were mainly of farmer stock, and used to rough living; however, the trail offered new hardships: of tedium, of deadfalls, blockages, detours, of rivers with no easy ford, of blinding rain churning up paste-thick mud, of insects beyond count, and of disease, which incapacitated the strong and dispatched the weak. Pushed from behind by a relentless Love, they soon wearied of the hard trail, which left them dirty and tired and every day fearing attack from savages, and so, when they broke through into a clearing beside which a happy river chuckled, they rested the night, and when, following a strange disappearance, Love returned to announce it was not the Ohio territory in which they would plant themselves, but rather here in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, no dissenting voice sounded. A cask of cider was relieved of its bung, and the travelers themselves were relieved of their travels, for it was relief indeed to have come to a perch—any perch. They became talkative and gay, incurious about their leader’s sudden, uncharacteristic deviation from their objective, glad for cessation of discomfort.
Love shared none of this felicity. He had been captured already.
On the first morning, as had become his custom, he had gone foraging alone. The river crafted an abeyance through the thickness of the forest, a bank of packed loam and gravel along which Love walked at ease. Presently, however, he spied a curiosity: a pathway, cut into a spinney growing up between old growth of evergreen and so attenuated by neglect, it seemed more tunnel than path. Curious, Love followed it into the thickness, and soon found himself within a tunnel indeed. The spinney surrounding him was composed of bushes, from whose darkwood branches wicked thorns projected and crimson berries hung. The thicket to each side was impenetrable, concentrated, and between the rare gaps in its profusion could be glimpsed hazardous rotten deadfalls.
Love pressed on. The wood encroached wetly around, putting him in mind of constrictive snakes. The farther inward the path led, the narrower it grew, the tangling above descending until Love found himself obliged to walk stooped, marveling at the forester who had set himself the task of fashioning a path here—the will, the strength, the madness vested in any man who would dream of such an undertaking. Yet here it stood, even now it had lasted against a wood so consuming, so impenetrable, so dark and malevolent. What end had fueled such obsession? Love’s curiosity contended against a growing sense of entombment. The wood, though silent, was too close, too alive, too quiescent; it was a watchful thing, and not only watchful, for the thicket’s thorns now bit his shoulder, and though reminding himself he was no timid man, still he resolved to continue along this course for another minute only, and no more.
By the time he broke into the clearing, the path had narrowed to such a degree that he walked bent with head nearly level to his waist, arms shielding his face, hands cut and bleeding; his shirt, once clean, now spotted red. He came to the opening, little more now than a rabbit hole, and, heedless with an excitement he could not name, pushed through into brightness. He stood, shielding his face from the sunshine, in a place most unnatural. Love was no superstitious man, but now he remembered tales of fairies, of bogies, of druids, of hob and sprite, sylph and imp. This lacuna in the forest’s heart was circular. No, that was too imprecise a formulation: not circular; it was a circle. As if some titan had crafted it in the earth by means of a vast compass. The debouchment in the greenery birthing him into this grassy ring was the only rip visible in the fabric of the surrounding wood. Inside, the ground lay draped with a bright green turf as soft and as level, in surface and coloration, as any fitted carpet in any gentleman’s sitting room. It was hot there, and very still; he could hear no hop of hare, no twirrup of bird, no chatter of squirrel.
At the hub of this wheel, in the very center, a fountain pointed its white finger to the sky.
Love circled the fringe, never taking his eyes from the alabaster formation, his back always to the forest. Though it was a thing inanimate, he did not deign to approach, for there could be no natural account for it—not for its existence, nor for the precision of the demarcation between lawn and wilderness—none, save witchcraft. But Isaac Love was—he reminded himself—a rational man. Still, to pause seemed wise; in any case, it might be an ambush. He made one full revolution around the circle, convincing himself he was alone, yet still he waited, his back to a tree, pondering. Prudence suggested caution; but curiosity insisted upon action. He felt within himself a growing ire for his unseemly quailing. It was stifling hot within the circle. Slowly, he approached the basin. Upon closer inspection, the fountain proved white as whalebone, without spot, without blemish, but now he espied on the basin, filigreed in delicate calligraphy, some unrecognized cuneiform, cut with a skilled hand, flanked with tracery of vine and leaf wrought by the same ingenious chisel. The basin was as round as the ring of forest encompassing it, its circumferential area broad enough that, were it drained, a brace of yoked oxen could pull a wagon in a circle within the basin as easily as a pair of children might garnish a maypole.
Love reached the basin’s edge. The ground about was ringed with three concentric bands of stone paving: The outer was of gray slate; the middle, wider than the other two, of a glistening stone black as coal; the inner was a terrazzo tile of deep red hue. Before drinking, Love paused to study the tower. At the base, a massive stone terrapin lay flat upon a rock rising only an inch above the water; facing Love, it regarded him with old and sunken eyes. Water fell from its mouth into the pool. From its back the tower rose, three-tiered. Around the base of each tier stood cherubic statues—figures of such intricacy, so natural in their poses, that an observer might be forgiven for being taken in momentarily by the counterfeit. From the center of each of these laughing figures, water tumbled forth in high arcs. Love frowned at the perversity. These angels…were they pissing forth the water? Could a craftsman of such skill stoop to base vulgarity?
Love, thirsty, stooped and cupped some of the water into his hands, yet he did not drink. It occurred to him the water of such a fountain might bear some adverse quality. In any regard, this water—he now looked from his hands to the basin—was it…black? Indeed, the pool in the basin seemed dark, suggesting either some taint or a greater depth to be sounded than a fountain’s basin should possess. Or was it merely cloudy? He could see his fingers through the water he held, but the volume was too meager to divine its true properties. He sniffed it. It smelled like nothing.
Fear gripped him then without reason. Hastily, he let his fingers open, spilling the liquid onto the stone, the spatter disquietingly loud in the silence. He could hear in his ears the thrubbing rhythm of his own heart. The turtle seemed to him a living thing even in its stillness, its eyes auguring portents evil and ancient. The cherubs now appeared minatory, their childish smiles transmuted to warning grimaces, their stone eyes desperate and trapped. He backed away, calling himself a dastard even as he did. Again, he circumambulated, forest to his back, like a duelist facing a fellow master, and, nearer now, he discovered something new.
Stairs were cut into the black middle ring of flagstones. A rondure of granite steps, the contour of which approximated the curve of the ring, leading beneath the fountain. Love heard himself breathing, thirst forgotten. Somehow he had come to the brink of the steps, toes hanging over the topmost, hesitating, vacillating between trepidation and wonder, fearing what lay at the bottom, scorning to leave the mystery unexplored. There was something there, he knew, some secret grand and terrible. It was unthinkable to climb downward, but impossible to resist the pull of what lay beneath. Finally, he descended.
He emerged at last in late afternoon parched beyond even a soldier’s reckoning of thirst, thirsty down to his lungs. He walked directly to the hole in the forest and pushed through, incautious of thorns, making his way quickly through the tunnel to the banks of the river, and upon gaining it he walked directly into it until the water reached his mouth and he drank himself full. Returning to camp, Love announced, before even taking food, that they would not only camp by the banks of this river, but here they would settle, and there was such mantic fire in his visage, such vitality in his countenance, and such a paucity of it in their hearts, no objection was raised to this abrupt and capricious change, and none dared inquire as to his recent whereabouts. They eyed the blood dried to his shirt where the thorns had marked him, but they did not gape long, and they held their tongues. Then Love chewed on what they set before him, and when it was swallowed he fell off the log upon which he sat, sunk already into a deep sleep, and if he had dreams he did not remember them. As he slept, his people shook off their confusion, unbunged the cask of cider, and set upon the meticulous task of convincing themselves Love’s command had been their heart’s hope all along.
When Love woke, he changed his clothing and ate a quick but hearty breakfast, then went out again, taking with him a full flask of water, a leather poke filled with dried fruits and jerky, an axe, a sharp hatchet, and a boy of their party named Frankton Jay. No man asked him his business as he went, and none followed but Frankie—a big boy, not bright but hardworking, open-faced, and well liked. He chattered easily as they walked along the bank, as unperturbed by Love’s lack of reply as he was unconcerned about the details of their task. His arms swung loose-jointed with each step, and from one hand dangled the axe.
When they came to the pathway, Love pointed and uttered one word: Cut. And so Frankie cut, plowing through the tangle with the joy of one who has found the task for which he was originally conceived, never questioning the end of the path upon which Love had bent him, content to merely hack, and to clear, and to widen, chattering empty and well-meaning observation as he did so. Sure is warm today. But not as warm as yesterday. You reckon tomorrow it will be warmer still? That’s what I reckon.
Behind him, Love added finishing touches with the hatchet, giving no reply, and in time Frankton’s prattle ceased and they worked without speech, delving into the quiet part of the wood, where the only sounds were their grunts and the methodical toc toc toc of blade on wood. They rested briefly to eat, then fell to once more, this time with the smaller man taking the lead in the tight places. They returned to camp exhausted and dirty to find the obedient men already at work, industriously surveying parcels to clear-cut for their homes. After a hasty meal, Frankie collapsed into slumber on the ground like a beast, and Love followed him, once he had spent an hour at the grinding wheel returning the edge to the blades. Frankie slept like one dead, but when Love nudged him with a boot-toe an hour before dawn, the lad leapt up, eager as any hound, and followed. The inventory of their kit kept unchanged from the day previous, save that on this outing, Love carried three makeshift torches, fashioned from spokes pried from a broken wagon wheel, and topped with brown turbans of rags soaked in pork fat and creosote.
Frankie, keen to return to chopping, took the fore. Love, working drag, widened Jay’s rough-cut path with short, precise strokes. They arrived at the narrowest place by midday, the thatch above a solid verdant ceiling sparing their backs the wrath of the noon sun. They stopped before the final push for repast, and Love drank deep from the flask, which was filled with cool river water. When it came his turn, Frankie drained the flask dry, his thirst unquenched—naught had been left him but a swallow.
When at last they broke through into the clearing, Frankton Jay bullied into the circle, a smile cresting his broad simple face, but then he saw the thing and wailed and turned to run. Blind with dread, he stammered and stumbled back into the hole they had carved, caught his foot on a root and landed heavily on the earth.
What is that, Mr. Love? Oh my Lord. What is it?
Come boy, don’t crawfish on me now. We have work yet to do.
After many blandishments, Love was able to lead the boy back to the clearing, where Frankie sat on the grass, near enough to the opening to feel safe of escape, and looked at the thing with fear and awe, still close to panic. Love had some skill in soothing a calving heifer, which tactics he now employed: murmuring, cooing, distracting the body with soft pinches and punches, and the mind with empty words and simple questions.
Frankie’s words came slow and stubborn, but from them Love came to understand the boy supposed he, Love, had himself crafted the fountain during his long absence two days previous—a foolish notion which surprised the blacksmith, though he made no attempt to unfurnish the boy of it. Love walked up to the thing to prove it safe, to show it would not crush him for his temerity, as the lad was convinced it would do. He walked slowly around it, laughing, calling to Frankie in a loud cheerful voice, and when the tower blocked them from sight of each other, he dipped the empty flask into the dark water. The boy would not budge, so Love returned to him. They sat on the grass. Love spoke without pause, frequently reassuring the boy they would soon depart.
We can’t stay in this place. None of us. We can’t live here. Not next to…
Of course, boy. I see it now. Are you thirsty?
Thank you, Sir, I surely am.
Love stood, proffering the flask.
It’s empty, sir. I finished it.
I brought two. If you were thirsty, you should have asked me.
Greedily, Frankie took the flask. As he fumbled with the stopper, Love moved to the place where their tools lay. He held the axe close to the end of the handle and watched carefully to see the effect, if any, of the draught.
He regretted what needed to be done; Frankie was a fine boy. He would have made any smith an apt apprentice—but a sheep gone mad with fear can stampede the herd. The boy raised the flask to his lips and drank deeply. For long minutes he sat, still as a stump. Then he rose with unnerving suddenness, turning in blind circles, his eyes filled with confusion and fear, and what he said stayed Love’s axe.
Who am I? Who am I!?
He asked it again and again, in dumb frightened yelps, and with such guilelessness there could be no suspicion of deceit. Love cajoled and interviewed, for a second time in an afternoon whispered him back into his placid nature as if he were livestock taken fright.
Who are you, boy? You tell me.
I don’t know, sir. I don’t know.
Are you alone or with some group?
I wish’d I know’d sir. I wish’d I know’d.
Love carried on the interview until he was certain. The water of the fountain, or else something in it, had flooded into Frankton Jay and washed him away, flooded him right out of his own body: all seventeen of his years washed, dirtfoot Carolina childhood washed, the weeping mother and the drunken father he had left behind washed, the three younger brothers and four younger sisters also washed, loves and likes and hates and all of the longest-held grudges and the oldest friendships, all washed out; and Frankton Jay, too, had been washed away and out of his own comprehension, settling like silt into some faraway ocean’s basin. Now he bleated and kicked at the turf like a panicked calf newly born into a world of trouble. His eyes rolled, rootless as his mind, as he scrambled to gather any identity to himself.
Frankie finally passed into whimpering, then into sighing, then into deep snoring slumber. When Love was sure he was completely asleep, he took his torches and the axe and went down the stairs once more, which led him again to the short narrow passage carved into damp earth. A timid stripe of sunlight ventured halfway down the shallow incline of the stairway, allowing a notion, however slight, of what lay in the passage. The clay of the corridor was thick but malleable, and Love worked a wagon-spoke torch into it until it held there.
The door was still there, crafted from unvarnished wood and ensconced in an unadorned wooden frame on the left-hand wall at the end of the passage. Locked, Love knew from yesterday’s labors. No force of limbs would cause it to yield in the slightest. Today, however, it would fall. He felt the weight of the axe.
He eyed the door as he would an adversary, the iron head of his weapon resting between his feet. Readying himself for the task, he pondered what to do about the lad above: Should he be allowed to live? What if he tells tales? Yet who would believe? And if any do believe, they can be easily managed. And, if they cannot be managed, they can be disposed of. These corridor walls might be dug out with ease, and are capable of holding more than torches.
Already he knew the deference his people offered up to him. This sad huddle of suffering lazars waved their collective fatigue like a white flag. Beaten, they looked to the strong to lead them. Look now: Had they not already obeyed his edict to abandon their goal of an Ohio settlement—nothing less than the prize that had urged them into this undertaking in the first place? And moreover, had they not celebrated their abandonment with drink? Stronger than their dull rage, more powerful than their weariness, was their unadorned obedience.
Love decided Frankie would live. He was among the strongest in the company. No disease had sapped him, nor fatigue. Had he not been so simple he might have emerged as a rival, but providentially Frankie had none but the most animal of appetites. Strength without will was the measure of Frankton Jay, and of the two qualities, will was most to be feared. Jay had complied with Love’s commands with incurious good cheer through all the most difficult tasks. Now the boy was wiped clean of even his modest thoughts, feelings, beliefs, scruples…yes, Frankie could well be useful. Yet even now time pressed. The boy might wake, and wander, cause nuisance. So: for the door.
Love raised the axe and struck it with all the strength he possessed. The force of the blow numbed his hands, but the axe-head caromed off the unmarked surface. He cried out, and struck again, and again, and again, assailed his adversary in precise rhythm, until at last the axe handle snapped a half-inch below the head and the iron flew flipping back over him, coming to rest at the far end of the corridor near the foot of the stairs. The door stood absolutely unmarked, without splinter or blemish, without the slightest mar as record of the assault. Love shrieked; the door was hexed. To be frustrated in his pursuit by nothing but thin planks of wood…Love cursed; in his rage he battered the clay floor with the useless stave, and then, with the abrupt and determined bearing that marked all his actions, he silenced himself and withdrew, pausing only to stoop and collect the axe head. Shoulder cannot buckle the hinges, nor iron splinter the wood? The shovel next. If one cannot go through, one must dig around.
He found Frankie curled into a ball and sucking on one big thumb. Love lifted the top half of the boy and dragged him into the woodland tunnel and waited for him to awaken. Finally, he commenced to nudging him in the ribs with his boot until he was roused. He was pleased to see the boy was not reduced to an infant. Frankie still knew how to stand, and to walk, and to speak. He knew what hunger was, and what it was to be frightened, but he remained void of thought or notion particular to himself. Love spoke to him in soothing tones, and produced some dried fruit from his poke. With these and other inveiglements, he calmed the boy, and taught him his Christian name back to him, and fabricated certain truths for him to gnaw on. Love—creating this boy back to himself as he would shape a tool at the forge, but by instinct alone, without the practice he had in the honing of iron, decided to keep him away from the others entirely. Your name is Frankie. Eighteen years old. You are a brave boy, and strong, and good. And your whole life, until this day, you have been deaf and dumb. Today there has been, it would seem, a miracle. Frankie, you have in some wise (how I do not know) purchased your tongue and your ears at the cost of your memory. All men have hated you and abused you in your infirmity, save for I, save for Isaac Love. The others beat you and mocked you, spit on you and robbed you of your portion of food at meals. Only I protected you from them. They are not to be trusted. But if you listen well to your one true friend, if we keep the miracle of your cure secret from them, together we may devise a way to exact some measure of revenge…
Love watched the boy take all this into himself; watched his eyes burn with hatred for wrongs not remembered but believed, slights and injustices occurring only in imagination, which had become to Frankton Jay incontrovertible fact—harm which demanded harm, injury which required redress. The elder man watched as the boy, melted down and poured molten into Love’s mold, hardened into a new shape.
In late afternoon, Love and Frankie returned by the path they had created and began assisting the rest in the construction and founding of their settlement. Love worked with such vigor he astounded his fellows, acting within the group both as mind and conscience and thews, directing all in their individual tasks, and, as the weeks passed, their outpost quickly climbed up from the banks. Love kept Frankie aside from the rest, setting him to work not with the carpenters raising shelters for man and horse, nor with the parties hunting opossum and fox and deer and the occasional small bear, nor with the tailors crafting skins into garments—for winter was nigh—nor did he set him to the unforgiving drudgery of fashioning lye into soap, nor the churning of butter, nor any other communal work. Frankie he set to labor in the forbidden area downstream, clearing the thicket leading to the fountain, and once it lay cleared back to the deadfalls Love judged it to be passable enough for his purposes, and set the lad to the task of building a smithy and forge along the river within the fresh-cut cove. The boy cast wary glances at the rest of the party and spoke to no man but Love, and then only when he was certain they were alone. The rest of the company, mystified by the change that had come over their affable lout, wondered what secret wrong he suspected of them. But, though they were perplexed, by this and by Love’s embargo against the far bank, their awe of their leader kept their misgivings hidden behind the walls of their cabins. The whispers of husbands and wives under thick blankets (for it was now growing cold indeed) never reached daylight.
Love was pleased as weeks melted to months. His settlement lay bulwarked against the coming mountain winter. All shelters were built simply but solidly enough, the chinks between the boards well occluded with rags and pitch, each abode the precise replica of its neighbor to either side—for Love had learned from his years in muster that repetition of process brings both speed and accuracy, and, if all shared in the building of each home, and no home was the better of another, then envy would not sow discord among them. For the sake of morale, even he for now took one of these shacks—the general’s trick of accepting a private’s quarters. The larders swelled with butter, with game birds, with gourds and sour wild apples and meat from the kill stretched, dried and salted; the cupboards brimmed with warm clothing, wraps, muffs, and boots in each abode at the ready; firewood filled the ruck split and stacked enough for three winters; the livestock lowed, warm and safe, in new stables. Their main risk would be enemy attack; the ground would soon be too hard to break, and a fort-wall would have to wait on spring’s thaw.
He had taken these rough tools he’d been given, these Carolina sod-busters, and built up something to last a mountain winter—still, Love’s dissatisfaction ate at him like a canker. There were exceptions still to his order. Yes, even still, even now, even after he made this place as much his own as if he had been the Creator himself who spake “let there be” and then watched the results of his divine fiat, even after saving these recalcitrant sheep from starvation and icy death, even still, there was resistance. It was all in the minutiae, yes, it was unmistakably small, but still…they were defying him behind these walls he had built. Whispering. Scheming. Mistakes were made, every day. Little things, yes. Small things. A wrong tool selected for the task, or a horse chosen from the remuda when another more rested beast might have better served the purpose. Infractions nonetheless, insults to his order. Each of these a flouting of his will. All of them, asserting their imperfections, impressing themselves as beings apart from him in silent defiance of him. It pointed toward chaos, division, fragmentation of purpose, danger.
And then there was the woman. Margaret, she was called, but “Jezebel” hit nearer the mark. Beautiful as the dawn, and yet she had taken up with Runyan. They were courting now, the two of them. There could be little doubt they would soon be married. Moreover, she regarded Love in a direct, appraising way he specifically disliked—there was effrontery in it.
And the cursed door.
From August until November, he had kept away, but as the months passed, the door called to Love, despite his forswearing it until he had proven himself perfect through the perfection of his followers. That impenetrable door. A guardian of such relentless strength must perforce guard something worthy of that strength. It taunted him, pulled him, coaxed, cajoled, with its promises of a greater power, which should by rights belong to no other but him, which had waited long years for him, for him alone, to awaken. This door was the guardian thwarting his birthright, his rightful destiny. He knew it threatened his sanity. That he had not yet mastered it was his failure, and failure within himself he found unbearable. No matter the risk, he would have it. But, in the meantime…there were small things still outstanding, flaws in the process, whispers behind doors. His people had not yet fully taken on his aspect. Love had taken these crooked tools and built a settlement, built it well enough they would last the winter, but then would come a remaking. His tools were not yet perfected, but he had a forge.
—Jane Sim, Love’s Fountain