Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

I had to walk Kaiser before joining Arwen in the den. After a week here I no longer bothered with snowshoes since we’d tamped down a navigable path through the pines on our rambles. A flurry of snow spin-drifted through the bare birches. We went as far as our aching bodies would allow us, pausing to pay homage to the koi goldfish, entombed in their icy pond. The big grandfather pines shrugged off sleeves of snow as we walked under the burdened boughs, but otherwise the woods were hushed and whispery. The quiet made me nervous. A shadow waited out here in the trees, beyond the furthest edge of my vision. I sensed it, a residue lingering from the carnage of the ravens. These had become the woods of a Hawthorne story, I thought, where a wanderer might encounter the devil out seeking new converts.

One night at the bank I remember asking Maura why she thought the original settlers had named so many places in the wilderness after the devil. The Devil’s Spine. The Devil’s Backbone. Even our own Wind River flowed out of a gorge called the Devil’s Maw. “Some of the most beautiful places in the country. Why pin a name for evil on them?”

“Lucifer was the most beautiful of the angels,” Maura had said, musing as she brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. “Those places are breathtaking . . . but they might also kill you.” In the deepening cold, I remembered how beautiful Maura had been to me and thought about the Rose of Sharon and Pastor Elijah. My unfinished business. I didn’t feel nervous or afraid about confronting her husband, only a sense of urgency. Sunday couldn’t come soon enough.

These long walks hurt, but I needed the exercise. I had to rebuild the muscle in my legs and hips, especially since I’d been skipping my physical therapy sessions. I was done with doctors and traction machines. I wanted to keep going, but Kaiser’s breathing had grown ragged. Fearing the dog’s great heart would burst in his chest, I led him back home. By the time we reached the grove, I smelled wood smoke. The Gingerbread House loomed over the birches, a fairy-tale vision, smoke spiraling from the chimney. Arwen must have kindled a fire in the big stone fireplace. In just a couple of days, she had made herself at home, the banished princess restored to her realm.

In the mudroom, I stamped my boots and Kaiser shook snow from his fur. We ambled into the den with its high, arched ceilings and bay windows, enjoying the heat of the stone hearth. She’d brightened the place already. I didn’t see her right away, not until I looked in the bunker room that adjoined the den. Along with his massive movie collection, old man Kroll kept many of his books there, locked away behind glassed-in lawyer bookcases. These, too, were “off-limits” he had explained, though it seemed strange to me, to give a person keys to your gun cabinet but lock away the books. Arwen sat legs-crossed on the wood floor, coffee-table-sized tomes spread around her. She didn’t even look up, not until I knelt beside her and picked up one of the books she had taken from the shelf. The leather cover read Gemäldegalerie Linz, and the pages inside, yellow and filmed by age, featured large sepia photos of artwork.

“Do you know what it is?” she said, setting aside her own book.

The leather cover was soft and green-skinned. The book felt eerie and alive in my hands. I shook my head.

Arwen scooted closer and took it gingerly from me. “This is his favorite,” she said. The high gloss of the photo in its casing showed a Renaissance scene, gaily dressed couples preparing for some feast or dance, the hounds a blur of movement at the edge.

“Looks kind of ominous,” I said.

“No kidding,” she said. “It’s about death. Well, sex and death. But that’s what all art is about.”

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t like these kinds of pronouncements. Everything seemed to be about death these days, even my anatomy class. Even what little I’d learned about sex turned out to be about death. I was ready for a change of subject.

“There’s a movie about it, too. Albert owns one of the last eight-millimeters. Maybe the last.” She put her finger on the page. “This one’s a silent film. It’s about this evil, witch-like woman who seduces a father and son. The son kills his own father and then turns all the churches in town into whorehouses and places of devil worship. Then, death himself . . .”

“To think I had him pegged for a rom-com sort of guy.”

“Funny,” she said, without smiling. “So, death—”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re not one of those people who talks during movies? Who gives away the ending?”

Now Arwen laughed. “Sorry. I get carried away when it comes to old movies. But no talking is a good rule.”

“And that old projector. It really works?” The old man had forbidden it.

She folded the book closed and smiled. “You’re not too busy with your studies?”

I shook my head. “What’s the title on the album mean?”

Arwen turned away and caged the book back on its shelf, locking it away behind glass. “These photos were intended for an art museum. It was to be built in Linz, Austria.”

Linz? I searched my mind for the significance of the place. “Was to be built?”

She looked at me over her shoulder, quirking one eyebrow. “If I said any more that would be giving away the ending. I’ll get that projector going.”

Late afternoon into evening we watched movies, me dozing in and out in the La-Z-Boy beside her. I admit to sleeping through much of Die Pest in Florenz, but Arwen didn’t seem to mind. We took a short break for summer sausage sandwiches with German mustard and to make popcorn and then settled in for The Seventh Seal. A double matinee with gothic movies featuring scenes of Armageddon. It was a way to pass the time.

While the projector rolled, I snuck peeks at Arwen. I liked her silhouette in the flickering light of the eight-millimeter, the spectral shine of her sharp profile, the intense way she loved these movies. Her face lit up by the screen, her hair pulled back, she looked like a dark version of Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby. The second movie, The Seventh Seal, fascinated me: Max von Sydow’s chess game with Death in order to forestall his own demise, his longing to accomplish one meaningful thing before his time was up, the plague and the mad witch burning at the stake, the picnic that is the closest vision to any kind of heaven, one found on earth and not in the hereafter, and the final danse macabre as Death sweeps him up. I loved it, though I knew it would follow me into my dreams. The fool in the game I was designing would have a face now: Max von Sydow’s.

I ducked out with a quick good night when the credits rolled and got ready for bed, knocking back a Percocet along with my migraine med and anti-depressant, so I could float off to sleep in a warm, narcotic haze. “Maura, where are you?” I said softly after turning off my lamp. I climbed under the covers and squeezed into my pillow, trying to conjure her face as I had earlier in the snow. More than anything, I wanted to dream of her again that night. Such longing only carried me into nightmare.

When I slept there was a woman screaming in my dream. At least I thought I was dreaming at first, because it felt like I was inside one of those movies we had just watched. Her strangled cries shocked me awake. Maura? Was it her? How did she get here? I remember wandering down the hall. Awake or asleep? All these years later, I’m not sure. The fabric of my reality, between narcotic dream and cloudy waking, felt tissue-thin.

I stumbled down the hall, following the calls, not knowing what was happening. The voice led me to the garage door. I remember the cold seeping under the door, how I paused to wonder if I should be feeling such physical sensations in my sleep. I didn’t want to open the door. I knew I didn’t want to see whatever waited for me on the other side, but I didn’t have any choice. The doorknob like a hunk of ice in my palm, I twisted it open.

Arwen, clad in a long black dress, sat on the concrete steps. She held the raven in her lap, wrapped in a bloody towel. How had she coaxed it from its hiding place? Her other hand, red with blood, clutched a hooked knife dulled by rust.

“What’re you doing?” My voice sounded tinny and faraway, echoing as if from speakers.

She turned to look at me with her dark, almond-shaped eyes. “I split the tongue,” she said. “So it can tell us the message it has brought.”

The swaddled raven gasped for breath in her grip. The pink tongue that flicked out from the glossy beak was cruelly forked, a devil’s tongue. And when it cried out, it spoke in Maura’s frightened voice, “Help me. Lucien, please. You have to help me.”

I woke in the clean wash of sunlight, my heart pulsing in my throat. I knew the folklore about splitting a raven’s tongue so it could talk. I felt sure that the shadow that had fallen over me after the ravens killed each other had followed me from the woods. I worried that it lived inside me now and would the rest of my life.

Sunday morning, I arrived at Rose of Sharon early. Deacon Roland shook my hand and greeted me by name. He ushered me inside and introduced me to an elderly white-haired woman. Mother Sophie, the fabled woman from Maura’s stories. I hadn’t seen her at the previous service.

Wearing a long dress of yellowing ivory, the old woman held out both arms in greeting, pressing her large, soft hands over my own. My palms were sweating, even though I’d just come from the frigid outdoors. She seemed to take notice of how this place made me nervous, squeezing my hands briefly before releasing me. “Meshach,” she said when she heard my name. “You have a lot to live up to with a name like that.”

“My parents got used to disappointment early on.”

She frowned. “You are a child of God. Don’t shrink to fit yourself to the world.”

I didn’t say anything, afraid of further betraying myself. There was something both magisterial and elephantine about her, a giantess with sharp blue eyes and a sonorous voice. I wouldn’t have even known that she was blind if Maura hadn’t told me. The usual Lucien might have said something mocking in response to her, but the words wouldn’t come. Here I was Meshach. Here the words froze in my mouth because sometimes Maura said similar things, her hands at the nape of my neck, touching the curls above my collar. You are going to do great things, Lucien. One day you’re going to make someone very happy.

“Where’s the preacher?” I said when I found my tongue, because I hadn’t spotted Maura’s husband yet or her daughter.

“Mother Sophie is the preacher,” Roland said, stepping in. “She’s the senior pastor and Pastor Elijah is her associate. He has some private matters to attend to and will be gone the next couple of weeks.”

“Private matters?” Mother Sophie said. “There’s no reason to be elliptical, Deacon. Eli is getting The Land ready.”

“Oh,” I said, because that also sounded fairly elliptical. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I had no idea yet where The Land was. I needed to find my way into their inner circle if I was to ever discover any ideas about where Maura had gone and what had happened to her. This would be harder to do without her husband around. I already felt a little foolish for forgetting that Mother Sophie was the senior pastor, an odd arrangement for a right-wing church.

“You will stay for coffee, Meshach,” the old woman said. Her voice was pleasant, but it was not a question. “I would like to talk further with you.” She turned and walked away, her long dress sweeping the shag carpet.

This time I sat far away from Roland and his Saturday night special. People filed in and filled the rows, though none sat right by me. I saw a few families, the children squeezed in between the adults. Some of the men wore blazers like Roland, though they often had sweatshirts on underneath, big belt buckles and blue jeans. The women, who were mostly white, all wore dresses, but a few had raven hair they wore so long it hung to their hips. These women had the high cheekbones and darker skin of Ojibwe from a nearby reservation. This also took me by surprise. I had not thought Indians would be welcomed in a white supremacist church, but then again, Rose of Sharon didn’t advertise itself as such. No more than thirty strong, they were a younger congregation than I expected, and not skinhead punks in black shirts and jeans or bearded Unabomber loners like I had first pictured.

I picked up fragments of their conversation, mostly ordinary things about the weather, the coming snow. They stole glances in my direction but didn’t engage me directly. So far as I could see there were no clocks in this room, but they were ready when Mother Sophie raised her arms and called them to worship with the hymn “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.”

“For the world is overcome,” goes one line in the hymn. Someone forgot to tell the world, I remember thinking. After the opening hymn, Mother Sophie led us in a short prayer before starting into her sermon. If I had been disappointed by the ordinariness of my first visit here, she more than made up for it.

Gray wattles swung from her neck and arms as she gestured and called for us to take up our Bibles and turn to the Book of Revelation. I didn’t know my Bible well, those few years of Sunday school mostly focusing on kid-friendly stories, Jonah getting swallowed by the whale, Noah’s Ark, Moses parting the Red Sea. That kind of thing. So I had little idea what I was in store for. She started by talking about current events and described the turmoil in the Middle East (when is there not turmoil there?), saying this was but one sign fulfilling the prophecies. She spoke of a star named Wormwood that was going to fall from the sky and contaminate the waters of the earth. Then she began to read from the chapter, speaking of dragons with horned heads rising up from the sea. Strange chimera, half-leopard and half-lion, scarred by past wounds. How the people bowed in wonder before the beast.

“Who has seen the beast?” Her eyes gazed out over the congregation as if looking beyond into a world where such things roamed. My fingers itched as she spoke. I wanted to draw the bestiary of the chapter. I knew that I was going to add these creatures to the game I was designing. The evil king in my story would send four horsemen in pursuit of his queen. And she would be pregnant.

“The beast is here,” she said. “He is of our own making. He has risen from the seas inside us. Born of our sinful nature and wandering minds.” Mother Sophie began to describe the world as she saw it. Women dying of overdoses and leaving their children motherless. Gangs knifing and raping. The epidemic of suicide among the young. Aborted babies stuffed in garbage bags and dumped in fields. A tide of mud people at the border, bringing crime and disease. A church she called “the whore of Babylon.” A government run by Jews that conspires against its own people. “Even now they are watching,” she said. Her gaze glanced over me without landing, but I could feel eyes boring into the back of my head from the congregation behind me.

Maura, is this how you felt every Sunday? A great pretender? Did he hurt you because you didn’t share in his beliefs?

Mother Sophie held up her own swaying arms as she spoke of Y2K and the coming days. Nuclear meltdowns and jumbo jets falling from the atmosphere, the computers dead inside them. The four horsemen riding roughshod over the sodomite cities of this earth.

“Will you receive the Mark of the Beast the One World Government sets upon you?” By this point, the room vibrated with tension. Mother Sophie had led us to a terrible place. It seemed so fantastical, so impossible, but I had read articles in respected publications that posited how Y2K could happen. I had not thought much about it before now, but here in this room, she made it a tangible reality for her listeners. I wasn’t sure what to think.

Tears jeweled the corners of Mother Sophie’s eyes. In the years since, I have not thought of the Book of Revelation as a particularly hopeful chapter, but it became so now in her rough, homespun retelling. She recited to us this passage from chapter twenty-one: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, no crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And when she finished, such a note of pure longing in her voice, there were tears in my eyes as well. I was not the only one. Behind me, a man blew his nose. One woman wept openly.

I’m not sure how long Mother Sophie spoke, but my bony posterior ached on the metal chair, so I figure she’d been talking for an hour before she mentioned Pastor Elijah. “I know some of you have heard he had a breakdown. But the Lord has his finger on that one. All you need to know is that Pastor Eli has gone ahead of us to prepare the way.”

The congregants murmured in sympathy.

She called for us to bow our heads in prayer. I thought we’d come through the strangest part of it, but in the midst of one moment of silence, a woman at the back stood up and growled in a low, gravelly voice, a sound that didn’t seem to come from any human being. The words, both foreign and unknowable, raised the hairs on the nape of my neck. It was like a dead tongue come to life, the cry of some terrible angel. Her voice filled the room with a dire, ancient chant. It reminded me of the nightmare-sound of Arwen’s raven, calling out with its split tongue.

I turned around. One of the Ojibwe near the back stood swaying in her bright blue dress and patterned shawl. She wore a beaded necklace that clinked like finger-bones as she swayed. Her entire body quivered, shot through with invisible electricity. The moment did not feel fake or forced. I felt like I was in the presence of some Other greater than myself. There was no translation for the words that rolled from the woman’s slack jaw. Yet, I discerned a story there.

I shut my eyes and let her words wash over me. And when I did, ravens whirled out of the snow, screeching in their harsh tongue. They flew past me, their black wings whisking near my ear. There I was again, in the midst of the maelstrom. And the Enemy was there, too, whispering of anger and famine. A story of blood and starvation. His chanting strung them together, like chords of music from a hidden conductor. And the Enemy was trying to reach for me as well, reaching for my mind.

Then the woman at the back of the room gave a great sigh, collapsed into her metal chair, and slid to the floor where she lay trembling as if her body was being squeezed by a great hand. She was quickly surrounded by other women, fanning her with pages of a prayer booklet and speaking in rushed, excited voices. I also slumped in my seat, released from the vision. I had to swallow down my sick.

“Tell me, children, who here knows what she was saying?” There was a querulous, uncertain ring in Mother Sophie’s voice. Maura had also told me about this. Someone else from the congregation, guided by the Holy Spirit, had to translate what the person had been saying. Sometimes, there was no translation.

Did what I saw count? I felt a quickening under my skin, sweat trailing down my spine. No one answered Mother Sophie’s question. Except for the ring of women surrounding the one who’d collapsed, the others in scattered places glanced around the room nervously or studied their hands in their laps as if afraid of being singled out by the Spirit next.

“Surely someone here felt the tremor of the Holy Ghost.” Mother Sophie’s gaze passed over the top of our heads, her eyes filming over with a deep disappointment.

More silence. Someone carried a glass of water up from the basement to the woman at the back. There was a ringing in my ears, like an explosion had gone off inside me. My own voice sounded so far away, but I heard myself say something. A rough question before I coughed out this sentence. “They came in the storm,” I began, my voice quavery at first.

“Go on, Meshach,” Mother Sophie said, her eyes finding me. “Go on and tell us.”

I told of my vision and what I had seen that day, how it came back to me when the woman had been speaking. I stumbled a few times, but my voice picked up in strength as I spoke. A certainty that this was meant to happen. I had been chosen. At one point I even closed my eyes again so I could see it better. I swayed in my chair as the woman had swayed. “They were starving. They were scared. I could see a darkness swirling inside them. The one you call the Enemy.”

I paused and opened my eyes. Mother Sophie’s eyes were shut as if she were in a vision of her own. Everyone staring at me. I told them about the birds massacring one another and the wolves that came later to feed upon them and the snow that covered up the blood. How after a day it was as if it had never happened, but the woods still scared me, like the earth itself had been stained.

A long silence followed. Mother Sophie opened her eyes and drew in a deep breath. She thanked me and turned back to the congregation. “You are wondering what this means?” Her voice subdued, her hands folded in front of her. “What this young man saw has no ordinary explanation. Do you doubt that the world is broken? Do you doubt that it is a sinful place? The reckoning is coming. The carnage Meshach saw is but a physical manifestation of the trials in the world to come. A demon moved in those birds. Meshach here today bears witness. But evil is powerless against the name of God. I say again, only Jesus has the power to command the darkness. The only thing that redeems this fallen world is love. God’s love. The things of this earth are passing right before our eyes. This old earth is dying. The things of the earth are but a pale shadow of the Maker. A shadow cannot command another shadow, that is only for the Son of Man. Oh Lord, send us Your light so we know the way. Send Your Holy Spirit to lead us out of this valley of shadow.”

She continued like that a long time, half-prayer, half-incantation. I should have felt wrung out after seeing the vision, but strangely I felt elated, like sharing what I had seen had lifted a burden from my own spirit.

A few members of the congregation came up to talk to me after the service was done. I didn’t know what to make of any of this yet, except that it felt nice to be at the center of attention, even if it wasn’t deserved. Even if I was here under false pretenses. Down in the church basement, chewing on a crumbling old-fashioned doughnut and sipping black coffee in a Styrofoam cup, I tried to feel like I belonged.

Mother Sophie came up behind me where I was seated at the table. She leaned over me, her skin smelling faintly of talcum powder. “Can I pray over you?” she said.

She began to pray, placing her hands on my head. I don’t remember the words exactly, but the feeling has not left me all these years later. It felt like she held fire in her palms, a healing heat. She finished her prayer, leaned over, and kissed the top of my head. “You will do great things for God,” Mother Sophie said. “You will stand in the fire, Meshach.” She thanked me for my words and went off to talk to someone else. I hadn’t even had time to process the encounter before Roland stood beside me. He set his hand on my shoulder and said, “There’s a prayer meeting this coming Tuesday morning at ten. At a place we call The Land. Care to join us?”

Roland drew me a map on a napkin.