While Arwen slept in that morning I plugged the phone cord back into the wall—when had Arwen yanked it out and why?—and called my mom.
“Oh Lucien,” she said. “I was so worried about you.”
“I’m okay, Mom,” I assured her. “Better than okay.” I told her about Rose of Sharon and the new friends I had made at church, but there was so much I couldn’t say. I didn’t mention their apocalyptic beliefs, or Y2K, or the currents of white supremacy in their sermons, or the cabin barricaded against the end of the world, assault rifles leaning against a wall hammered in with sheet metal. I didn’t tell her about Arwen or the grave in the woods. I didn’t tell her about my devil dreams or the storms of ravens, harbingers of the apocalypse, or my uncertain hold on reality. I didn’t tell her I was risking my own life to find out what had happened to my lover, a married woman I’d been having an affair with.
“You sound better,” she said, and it was true. There were weeks after the accident when I had wanted to die. I had been wrecked both physically and spiritually, a drained monotone on the other end of the phone. I felt more alive than I had in a long time.
I heard a toilet flush down the hallway and then the sink running. Arwen didn’t intrude, but I sensed her, listening. I remembered my mother warning me as a teenager that every person you slept with, you would carry with you the rest of your life, even if it was just a passing encounter, and that these were sacred matters my hormones shouldn’t rush me into.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’ve been busy.”
My mom sighed. “I’m glad you met people, Lucien. When I think of you alone in that old house, it hurts my heart.”
Alone? That had been the winter I thought I wanted, but the world made other plans. “What about you? What are you doing on Turkey Day?”
“Oh, you’re not the only one who’s been going to church. There’s these ladies—they put on a supper for the homeless in the area. I’ll be helping this year.”
My heart gladdened hearing this. I didn’t want my mom to be alone on Thanksgiving either. I worried she would start drinking again, the holidays a hard time with both her parents dead, her brother working odd jobs up in Anchorage, and five hundred miles of icy highway driving between her and her only child. We chatted awhile longer and I thanked her for giving Noah the address. She asked me when I would be coming home again. I was coming home for Christmas, right?
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Just for a few days, Lucien. I’ve missed you so much. You can fly into O’Hare.” She paused, gathering in a breath, her voice straining for lightness. “I don’t want you to try the drive in that ridiculous gas-guzzling boat your father made you buy. I’ll pay your airfare. That old house and dog will be just fine. You can get Noah to care for them.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t put her off forever. If Y2K happened there would likely be no climbing into the stratosphere at six hundred miles per hour in a jumbo jetliner. Even our cars would die, all that horsepower fizzled by a lousy computer, along with billions of microprocessors. Were computers the rot at the center of all that was wrong with modern society? Despite my programming ambitions, a part of me wanted it to happen. Maybe it was time for humanity to start over. But if it did, it might be a long time before I saw my mother again, if ever. I didn’t want that. “Yeah, Noah might do that for me,” I said, though I knew I would just ask Arwen. Mentally, I tallied all the things I had to do before the world ended. If. “I still have things to take care of first.”
“Lucien,” she said in a shaky voice. She was doing her best.
“Okay, Mom. Let’s do Christmas. I’ll talk to Noah and then come out for a few days.”
“It’s going to be so nice. You just made your mother very happy.”
At the base of the driveway leading up to The Land, several Chevy trucks were parked just off the gravel road, half in the snow-laden ditch. I parked behind a rusted-out Pontiac Grand Am and hiked up the hill, walking where tire treads had compacted the snow, trying not to think about the man in the watchtower, likely glassing me through his scope. Back at the Kroll house, Arwen was making do with chicken nuggets and some canned yams scavenged from the pantry for her Thanksgiving.
The scene up top looked festive. They had stretched canvas sheets among the pines between the old log cabin and trailers squatting on log foundations. I felt like I was stepping into a scene from a previous century. Cook fires burned at the outer edges of the billowing canvas shelters, women in dresses and scarves bending to tend to Dutch oven pots tucked in the embers. Before a hollowed-out firepit one man turned a huge metal spit with two turkeys basting on it, juice dripping into the flames. Children chased mongrel dogs between the fires while a boy with a shaved skull perched up on one of the tables strumming his guitar, teenage girls below him locking heads as they whispered.
Mother Sophie must have known I was coming because she stood at the edge nearest the driveway. “Welcome, Meshach,” she said as her misty eyes found mine. And even though my body ached from the long climb, lungs pushing up against ribs still on the mend, I felt welcome.
“How’d you know it was me?” Had her hearing sharpened to make up for her loss of eyesight, so that she could detect who was coming by the mere sound of footsteps in snow?
From one pocket in her dress, Mother Sophie pulled out a walkie-talkie. It squawked in her hands. “He’s here,” she said into it, smiling in my direction. “Over and out.”
From out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Roland’s sister, Caroline, dragging a little girl behind her. The girl’s blond hair looped in pigtails, her small body stuffed in a pink puffy snowsuit too large for her. Tears slipped down her cheeks, her huge hazel eyes brimming. I recognized Maura’s changeable eyes, flickering green in bright light or dark as the clouds overhead. Here was Sarah, Maura’s daughter, who I’d been longing to see. I felt a catch in my throat, remembering the girl’s mother, Maura, who I’d come here for.
Caroline’s bony chin jutted out as she let go of Sarah’s hand and gave her a tiny shove in Mother Sophie’s direction. Caroline didn’t even look my way. She brushed a loose strand of straw-colored hair from her eyes, tucking it back into her scarf and puffed. “Will you take her, Mother? She doesn’t want to play with the others. She won’t listen.”
“You’re not my mom,” Sarah wailed as she ducked behind Mother Sophie’s voluminous skirts.
Mother Sophie thanked Caroline and sent her away. She rested a hand on the top of Sarah’s head. “This is Sarah,” she told me. “She lives with us now.”
I glanced toward Caroline stomping off to rejoin a circle of men under the canopy and tried to sound nonchalant as I asked, “Her mom’s not around?”
Ducking behind Mother Sophie, Sarah gave another muffled cry.
“Her mother’s not in the picture,” she said. Her eyes fixed on some point beyond me, her mouth crimping.
I decided to press matters, not knowing when I might get another chance. “What happened to her?”
Mother Sophie’s frown deepened. She turned away from me and knelt so she was close to eye level with Sarah. “Can you do something for me, sweetie? Fetch Jack and the other boys and tell them it’s almost time to eat.”
“I don’t wanna . . .” Sarah started, but Mother Sophie shushed her and brushed away the tears that had continued to spill from her liquid eyes.
“You remember what we talked about? I need you to be my eyes in this world. You fetch those boys and then you can sit with me at the meal. How’s that sound?”
Sarah gave a grunting assent and skipped off, pigtails bouncing.
When she was out of earshot, Mother Sophie turned back to me. “What happened to her mother is a sad story. Stole money and run off. And I will tell you this honestly, Meshach. I’m glad she’s gone. That one was trouble. Too much of the world inside her. She caused Elijah so much pain. Wherever she went, she isn’t coming back.” Mother Sophie’s eyes narrowed above the hooked beak of her nose. It was clear she had not liked Maura, not one bit. Her malice surprised me. “Why do you ask?” she said, cocking her head. Her suspicion didn’t feel natural to me.
Why did I keep coming here at a risk to my health? There are some things you don’t want answers for, things you aren’t meant to know. I didn’t know, but this felt like where I needed to be. I breathed in the sweet smell of wood smoke and basting turkey. “I just don’t understand why anyone would leave such a place,” I said. I searched for the right words. “A safe place.” The phrase rang false in my mind—this place felt like anything but safe, and I supposed it hadn’t been for Maura—but I hoped I sounded sincere.
“A safe place?” Mother Sophie repeated my words. “You know The Land is our Place of Safety. That term comes from our faith tradition. It’s what we’ve been building to escape the coming Tribulation.” Her brief smile let me know I had been restored to her good graces. “Come along, now. I suppose you’ll want to see what the men are up to.”
She led me into the encampment, where eight picnic tables occupied even lines under the billowing canvas, kerosene lanterns swaying from ropes strung above. The swinging light and wind-whipped canvas gave me a sense of being on board a pirate ship heading into uncharted waters. Mother Sophie threaded her way between the tables until she came to one where a group of men huddled around something. Roland spotted us coming and flicked away his cigarette, smoke streaming from his nostrils as he tapped Elijah’s shoulder. Elijah pushed away from the picnic table and came over to greet me like an old friend. I tried not to wince when he clapped my shoulder. Her delivery completed, Mother Sophie turned away, the walkie-talkie squawking once more in her dress pocket as she ambled away to give orders elsewhere.
“What do you think of our setup?” Elijah wanted to know right off.
Mud and slush clumped my boots and soaked into the hem of my jeans, and my clothing already reeked of a smoky, campfire smell. I liked it. A lot. “This is great.”
Elijah nodded toward Roland. “He’s the genius who came up with it.”
Roland’s brief grin revealed long incisors. Wolf teeth. “If this is the last Thanksgiving of the old millennium, we might as well go out in style,” he drawled in his gruff voice.
“And it’s the only way we could fit so many people from the church together in one place,” Elijah said. “With more of us coming home to The Land, people from all over.” He pushed his way into the circle of men and introduced me around. Brian, with his stringy blond beard and close-set eyes, was there, along with a gaunt dude with a skeletal face named Bjorn. I’d never met him before, but I felt an immediate visceral reaction, a cold ball of dislike in my gut. Bjorn didn’t look like a member of the church, his head shaved down to stubble, a crooked nose broken in several places. A tattoo of a black iron cross crawled up out of his collar and spread like a stain on his neck. Why did I dislike him right off, aside from his appearance and unfriendliness? I knew why: because he was exactly the kind of neo-Nazi I’d been expecting when I first started visiting these people. “This must be the Birdman,” Bjorn said. His eyes were cold and empty, and he didn’t offer to shake my hand.
I turned away from him without acknowledging the nickname. Birdman? I wondered how the story of the ravens changed as it was passed around.
As I came closer, I saw that the men were gathered around a chessboard of all things. Elijah gestured at the board. “You play?” Even in a Carhartt jacket and orange hunter’s cap, he still reminded me more of a college professor than an ex-con, his face clean-shaven, his eyes bright with intelligence. I couldn’t figure him yet.
“A little,” I said, with an uncertain shrug. In high school I had been second board on the team. Our chess coach, the computer science teacher who inspired me to learn programming, had been heartbroken when I quit my sophomore year. At the time I didn’t have the courage to tell him I feared that if I stayed on the team I would end up going through high school never having been on a date, chess nerdery a surefire path to extended virginity.
“You heard of Bobby Fischer?” Bjorn asked. He drizzled tobacco juice into an empty Budweiser can in front of him. He played chess, too?
“I read some of his articles. From his column in Boy’s Life.” My coach had dutifully photocopied the articles on an old mimeograph machine so that when you read them ink came off on your hands, a blueberry stain that didn’t wash off right away. I read so many I dreamed in blue, my mind puzzling over problems when I lay in bed at night. I had been so lonely then. Seeing this board now I realized how much I’d missed the game.
“His books got me through prison,” Elijah said. “For a high school dropout to rise in the ranks the way Fischer did. That flash of brilliance. I wanted to understand it. I read his books and studied his blitzkrieg style. I wanted to take what he did in the chess world and apply it in real life. To business or leadership.”
Brian wandered off, apparently uninterested in the game of kings. Bjorn leaned forward, speaking out of the side of his mouth as he drizzled more spit into the can. “He was one of us, you know. Belonged to the Christian Identity church before Jewish cockroaches drove him into hiding.” He glared my way as he said this, as if he thought I was one of those Jews. Bjorn had the look of someone who wasn’t happy unless he was torturing small, innocent creatures: puppies, hamsters, confused undergraduates who had wandered into a place where they didn’t belong. Did you know this part about Bobby Fischer, Coach? This legend you taught us to idolize, the man who put chess on the map in America?
“The board here shows his third match with Boris Spassky in 1972,” Elijah said, ignoring Bjorn’s ugly comment. “From the World Championship in Reykjavík. Fischer went into it already down 2–0. It’s the moment when everything changed in the chess world.”
“He opened with Benoni,” I said. I remembered this from one of the articles. “It cast everything into uncertainty. Spassky thought he was winning.”
“Huh,” Elijah said, sitting beside Bjorn at the picnic table. “Benoni means ‘Son of Sorrow’ in Hebrew. You know that too?”
“You think I’m a Jew or something?”
Elijah laughed, but Bjorn only stared. “No,” Elijah said. “You wouldn’t be here if I did. But it does strike me that you know more about this game than you let on.”
I sat on the opposite side of the table. “You want to play it out with me?” Both comments were spontaneous, the words leaving my mouth before I thought about it.
Elijah set his elbows on the table, his hands under his chin, his pebbly eyes shining. He revolved the board around, careful not to disrupt the pieces, so his black pieces would face my white. “I get to be Bobby Fischer,” he said. “You’re Spassky.”
Fischer had played black in game three. I studied the board and tried to ignore Bjorn as he went on a tangent about blacks having all the advantages in life as well as in this game, an entire welfare support system bought and paid for by taxes on whites. Elijah chewed on his lower lip, and I wondered if Bjorn made him nervous as well.
My pieces on the board occupied an impossible position. Elijah’s black pieces were fighting for control of the light squares, a battle he was winning because of the advanced positions of his two pawns. He was the shadow, marching forward as Fischer had in Reykjavík. Spassky had lost the game long before this. I took off my gloves to maneuver my pieces. “We had a hard time with our chess club in prison,” Elijah told me. Bjorn nodded along as Elijah moved his King to H7, exactly duplicating what Fischer had done in the real game. My death would come about by slow dismembering of my defenses. “People would burn the black pieces to use for inking tattoos.”
“Dice and shit were banned,” Bjorn added. “Can’t have niggers gambling. No games on which someone can make a bet.” His lips twisted. “You’re fucked, by the way.”
I kept my eyes on the board, hoping to see Elijah make a mistake. The cold nipped at my fingers. This was the first time I’d heard Elijah talk about prison, where I gathered he’d met Bjorn. “How’d you play then?” I asked.
“I made my pieces from origami,” Elijah said. “I had a lot of time on my hands back then.”
We’d reached the part of the game where Fischer offered up his queen. She floated out there in the open, vulnerable and exposed. The pieces were carved from soapstone, the queen elegant in her black gown. A lady of the evening, an invitation. I blew on my fingers to warm them. I knew the move for what it was: a trap. I took her all the same. I took her as Spassky had taken her. I took her because I had no choice.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Elijah said, studying my face. “How chess demands sacrifice. You can’t win unless you’re willing to sacrifice everything. Even your queen.” I met his gaze evenly, searching his eyes for any kind of remorse. I felt a fresh ache in the scar tissue along my collarbone as I thought of Maura and wondered if he considered her such a sacrifice, and then his bishop swept in like a righteous figure of judgment to remove my queen from the board. “Fischer understood that.”
I wouldn’t last much longer. The book here had already been written. Elijah continued his relentless march, sacrificing a pawn so his bishop could roam free and harass my king from hiding. We were two moves away from checkmate when behind us, Mother Sophie rang the dinner bell, the sound summoning children from the snowy woods, the bedlam of their cries putting an end to any chance for us to finish. “You lucked out,” I told Elijah. “I was just preparing my surprise comeback.”
He didn’t laugh. All the men had turned to Mother Sophie who stood in the center of the dwelling now, her voice raised to be heard above the children. She rang the bell again for quiet. “This bounty,” she began, “must remind us of the One who provides. Every delicious morsel of this feast has been cooked by the old ways. Roasted over open flames or cooked in embers. Cooked the old ways because what was once old will be new at the turn of the year. We know what’s coming, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. God’s judgment.”
Someone shouted an amen. Freshly spared my doom in chess, I didn’t imagine judgment as something to look forward to.
Mother Sophie’s prayer went on: “‘When I snuff you out,’ he writes in Ezekiel, ‘I will cover the heavens and darken the stars.’ So it shall be for the great cities of the earth. All the world going dark. Absolute night. And where will we be when this happens? Here on The Land. Here in our Place of Safety. Here, where we will keep the light of our faith burning by the old ways. By the Refiner’s Fire. For it is written in the Book of Revelation that salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just.”
After a chorus of amens, we formed a line ringing the shelter, picking up plates and silverware at one table and making our way from fire to fire as the women served the children first, then the men, and then each other. There is something about eating outdoors in the cold that makes you crave the food even more. Whole potatoes wrapped in tinfoil opened up, blossoming with steam, the nuggets melting butter into greasy rivers on the plates. The stuffing puffed fragrant clouds of sage and herbs, the turkey, piping hot from the flames, dripped with grease, a feast worthy of a pirate king, especially if you ended up with one of the fat turkey legs like me. For a time the conversation ebbed away while we savored our meal in the frigid air, eating quickly before the cold could claim it, our faces close to the plate.
I sat near Elijah and Bjorn, the board pushed aside with the soapstone pieces tucked away in velvet bags, like precious treasure. Mother Sophie sat at a neighboring table, Roland hovering at her elbow and pointing out where her food was located by positions of the clock. Sarah sat beside her instead of her father, Roland’s sister Caroline on the other side. Caroline’s eyes bored into mine as though she were jealous of my spot. This was the fourth time I’d run into her and each time I had the distinct impression she didn’t like me. Caroline looked away from me, staring a long moment at Elijah, willing him to notice her. I wondered again what might be going on between them. He didn’t return her gaze.
Something about Mother Sophie’s prayer still bothered me. “So if Y2K happens,” I said, “what’s the next step?”
“You mean when,” Elijah corrected, impaling a prong of dark meat on his fork, “and we don’t really know.”
“What if nothing happens?”
Elijah sliced open a buttermilk biscuit, releasing moist steam. He gobbled it in two bites and chased it with a gulp of milk. “Then we go on as we have before,” he said, wiping his mouth on his Carhartt sleeve. “We trust in God’s plan. Maybe it won’t happen right at midnight. God has his own time.”
That sounded to me like a person hedging his bets. What did Elijah really think was going to happen? What about the dynamite Brian had mentioned? And why had Bjorn joined them? I decided to keep pressing: “What I mean is what if the computers go haywire and there are blackouts and all that bad stuff Mother Sophie talked about. The worst. The star of Wormwood poisoning the waters of the earth and so on. What if all that happens and instead of chaos, people help one another?” I was about to add a bit about neighbors helping neighbors, to call attention to this gathering here that had brought so many different people together, ex-convicts and pastors and children.
I didn’t get the chance because Bjorn barked with laughter. It was a shrill sound, half-hyena. He talked with his mouth open. Yellow biscuits crumbling between yellowing teeth. “He’s never seen niggers riot, has he? Burning their own hoods. Even dogs know better than to piss in their own water bowls.”
Elijah set his fork down and rested one hand on my shoulder. My bad shoulder again. I tried not to wince. “My God, do we have an actual optimist in our midst?” His voice was faintly derisive. “Meshach, I believe you have a misplaced faith in humanity.”
“He doesn’t know,” Bjorn said, shaking his head. “There’s a war coming. A war between the races. We’re getting ready for war here, boy.”
After that I stuck to my food, braving even Caroline’s green bean casserole, though the beans had gummed into a cold, gluey paste on my plate. I listened in from time to time, my attention wandering, and I learned that Bjorn had just been released from Stillwater, and that there were other “bruisers” who would be out before the turn of the year, men from “The Order” who would be good to have around when things turned ugly. Elijah got up and left the table and I trailed after, not sure who to latch onto, as he talked with a group of rough-looking skinheads who’d shown up late. I fetched some pecan pie and readied to leave. I wouldn’t find out any more today. Not with so many people around. After mixing with the skinheads, Elijah went over by Caroline where he must have told some joke that set her laughing, Caroline’s face aglow when he slipped his arm around her shoulder.
“I got something for you to do,” Roland said as he came up behind me, appearing out of nowhere. He hadn’t been talking to me much lately, and I had the feeling he suspected me for a liar. He leaned forward, his fists on the table. “You like coming here, right? You know by now this isn’t camp and we aren’t playing. Everyone here serves some purpose.”
I nodded, wondering what I was in for.
“So, I have some ideas about how to harness your particular skill set.” He didn’t say any more than that, watching my face for how I responded. “We need help getting the word out.”
Here, I had a chance to walk away. They didn’t know who I was yet or why I was here. I no longer had a death wish. I had my game at home. I had this strangely intimate relationship with Arwen that I didn’t understand. I had friends, a mother and father who loved me. Why chase after a woman who was gone or worse? Why, when the more I learned about these people, the more scared I should have become? “What do you need me to do?” I said.