The doorbell rang. And a moment later Mom yelped “Oh my goodness—John!” in such a way that Scott thought he ought to go to the front door after all.
They’d known for only two hours that his father would be coming for Thanksgiving dinner. He’d called from New York, apologized for the last minuteness of it, didn’t seem to even realize that it was an American holiday. The surprise had scarcely begun to fade when Scott joined his mother and discovered the man himself sleeping on their doorstep beside a jumble of stems and rose petals.
“Help me get him inside,” said Mom. Scott lifted his dad’s head while Mom dragged him by his expensive wing tips.
“What happened?” asked Polly when they joined her in the living room. “Is he drunk?”
“Your father doesn’t drink, sweetie.”
The three of them hoisted him to the lip of the sofa and rolled him onto his stomach. He gave a contented sigh.
“Tch,” said Mom, examining the back of his suit jacket. “I should have vacuumed.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know, baby. Give me a second.”
“He’s dressed like he’s at a funeral,” said Scott. “That’s flattering.”
“It’s just how he is—how he’s always been. Either he’s wearing pink with orange feathers onstage or he looks like he’s the CIA. He’s not good with gray areas.”
John smacked his lips and said, “Look who’s talking.” He opened his eyes cautiously and turned on his side. “What happened?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
The movement dislodged a folded sheet of paper from the inside of John’s jacket. It read FOR SCOTT ONLY in pencil. “Whoop,” John murmured. “Mail for you.”
Scott unfolded the riddle and read it.
“Was about to ring the doorbell,” said John. “Boy came an’ slapped my flowers and then I fell ’sleep.”
Mom glanced at the note. “Is this one of Erno’s family games?”
“I don’t know.”
Mom sighed. “Dinner’s in an hour. Scott, you want to take your dad upstairs and help him get cleaned up?”
Scott did not particularly want to do this, actually, but he recognized it as one of those rhetorical questions.
“This is where you all live?” asked John as they ascended the stairs. “It’s small.”
“This is just our Thanksgiving house,” Scott muttered. “We have a house for every day of the year.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
Scott sat on the toilet lid as his father checked himself over in the mirror.
“I didn’t mean anything … untoward,” said John. “I’m glad to be here. I’ve been wanting to visit, but … it never seemed like the right time.”
But then you punched the Queen of England, and your schedule cleared right up, thought Scott. He felt like he was always thinking mean thoughts like this. They scared him sometimes.
“Would you excuse me?”
Scott left the bathroom and turned into his own adjoining bedroom, and lightly closed the door behind him.
“That your da?” asked Mick. He was nestled in the bedclothes reading comic books.
“It’s him,” Scott whispered. “You’ll have to be even more careful until he leaves. Right? I mean, we already know my mom can’t see you, so I probably get it from Dad.”
“He’s not leavin’,” said Mick. He folded a page of the comic back to mark his place, and Scott winced. This was Abraham SuperLincoln #344, and the first appearance of Penny Arcadian, but he thought better than to try to explain its historical significance to an elf.
“What do you mean, ‘He’s not leaving’?”
“Your ma’s about to go off on her jaunt down south, isn’t she?”
“To Antarctica. Goodco’s sending her. But this woman from the Goodco day care will be looking after us. It’s all set up already.”
“Don’t think so,” said Mick, and he looked thoughtful. “Didn’t suppose I had any glamour left for a foretellin’. Maybe I don’t, an’ it’s just good ol’-fashioned wisdom. But I think your da will be stayin’ on for a while.”
Scott was shaking his head. “No. No, he wouldn’t want to. I… I don’t want him to,” he said. It came out sounding a little like a question.
Mick shrugged. “He punched the Crown o’ England—he can’t be all bad.”
Scott frowned and slipped back into the hall, where he almost knocked his father down.
“Is that Polly’s room?” asked John.
“No. It’s mine.”
“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”
“I was,” Scott said. “To my imaginary friend.” It was a comfortable deception, since he wasn’t entirely sure he was even lying.
“I had one of those when I was your age. Well, Polly’s age maybe. Maybe younger.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was this little gnome or something that I’d see now and again. I’d try to talk to him, but he’d always run away.”
“You had an imaginary friend who wouldn’t talk to you,” said Scott as they returned to the stairs. “Did you have low self-esteem or something?”
John snorted. Scott wondered, of course, if his dad’s childhood friend had been only as imaginary as the little man currently ruining his comic book collection. John had grown up in England, after all—he must have had at least as many opportunities to spot the Fay as Scott had here in New Jersey.
“So … how long are you staying?”
They descended the stairs before John answered. “Actually, your mother and I want to talk to you kids about that.”
At dinner Mom asked Scott to say grace, which was ridiculous. They never said grace, except maybe when Grandma Adams visited. To be specific, Mom asked Scott to “say a few words,” so Scott found himself saying more than a few words about the Pilgrims, and how they had to flee from England, and how awful England was back then because there wasn’t any freedom and you couldn’t just punch the queen whenever you felt like it; and now Scott could feel his face get hot and his mouth dry, so when his mom cleared her throat in kind of a serious way he said “Amen” midsentence and started dishing out mashed potatoes.
The turkey was dry, flavorless. Difficult to finish. And a halfway-decent metaphor for the dinner itself. Scott wouldn’t have minded hearing Polly prattle on as she usually did on every conceivable subject, but she was apparently having one of her well-earned quiet moods. She always had one hand or the other hidden, and Scott knew she’d be clutching her little prince figurine like a rabbit’s foot under the table.
After dinner Mom had the idea that the four of them should take a walk around the neighborhood and maybe drop in on the Utzes.
“We can wish them a happy Thanksgiving,” she said, and didn’t say anything about asking them to explain what exactly had happened earlier on the porch. Scott supposed the subject would just come up naturally. And during their walk his parents explained that they’d been talking and that John would be staying with them while Mom was doing research in Antarctica. This had the effect of thawing the last of Polly’s shyness, and she began firing off comments and questions like she was making up for lost time.
The Utz house was dark and shuttered. Mom and John and Polly waited on the sidewalk as Scott rang the bell and peeked through the gaps at the edges of the windows.
“Maybe they left for the weekend,” called Mom, and maybe they had—but when? There were two newspapers and an unclaimed package on the porch. Scott thought of the episode with John this morning, and of the riddle in his pocket.
Something was wrong.
THE GOOD AND HARMLESS FREEMEN OF AMERICA, or Freemen for short, share a history that is shrouded in mystery and contradiction. If you ask the Freemen themselves, they will tell you that the organization is a direct continuation of the Round Table of King Arthur. Since there is historical confusion regarding whether King Arthur or any of his knights were real persons or simply the stuff of legend, this claim is difficult to verify.
The Freemen certainly don’t suggest any connection to Camelot through their iconography, which is mostly concerned with vague mysticism and breakfast cereal. Their most visible symbol, the Sickle and Spoon, symbolizes the harvesting of cereal and its consumption.1 Freemen consider the night sky to be the Inverted Bowl of Heaven, which is filled with the cereal of the gods (stars) and of course the Milky Way. The Grand Hall of any well-established Freemen lodge will have a domed ceiling painted to resemble the cosmos. The floor will be decorated with any manner of icons and symbols.2 From floor to ceiling will stretch two freestanding columns fashioned to resemble bundles of tall wheat and topped with capitals like ornate bowls. These represent the finished and unfinished cereal, which is also symbolic of each member’s journey from an unfinished Initiate to a fully realized (and therefore fully free) Freeman. In some lodges each column will also be crowned by a globe: one painted to represent the Earth, the other utterly black. The meaning behind these globes is one of the Freemen’s most closely guarded secrets, and made known only to those who reach the highest level of membership.
The Freemen have 987 levels of membership, the first three of which are achieved merely by filling out an application. The 8th level is granted upon full acceptance into the local lodge, the 13th following Initiation, the 21st at the end of the Initiate’s second week, and the 89th the first time he brings snacks.3
At the 89th level the Initiate will become a First Squire. At the 144th level he makes Second Squire, and at the 233rd he attains the rank of Knight Errant. At 377 he is a Knight of the Round, at 610 a Launcelot, and at 987 a Knight of the Siege Perilous. When a member crosses each of these important milestones, he is celebrated with a pageant and mystery play. Each play is intended to reveal some new secret of existence that has heretofore been hidden and to explain some fresh facet of the Freemen’s ultimate purpose.
The Freemen believe that something has been lost. The Freemen believe that man is no longer whole. They hold that humanity’s connection to the supernatural has been severed and that we can no longer feel the rough hands of our Creator: a Great Cultivator who has raised us, reaped us, and now wants us all to Awake to a New Morning in the Inverted Bowl of Heaven, once again reunited with the marshmallow magic of the universe.
