"I guess things have changed pretty much since you moved away, huh. Great Mam?" I asked.
She said, "I've never been here before."
Mother made bologna sandwiches and we ate lunch in a place called Cherokee Park. It was a shaded spot along the river, where the dry banks were worn bald of their grass. Sycamore trees grew at the water's edge, with colorful, waterlogged trash floating in circles in the eddies around their roots. The park's principal attraction was an old buffalo in a pen, identified by a sign as the Last Remaining Buffalo East of the Mississippi. I pitied the beast, thinking it must be lonely without a buffalo wife or buffalo husband, whichever it needed. One of its eyes was put out.
I tried to feed it some dead grass through the cage, while Nathan pelted it with gravel. He said he wanted to see it get mad and charge the fence down, but naturally it did not do that. It simply stood and stared and blinked with its one good eye, and flicked its tail. There were flies all over it, and shiny bald patches on its back, which Papa said were caused by the mange. Mother said we'd better get away from it or we would have the mange too. Great Mam sat at the picnic table with her shoes together, and looked at her sandwich.
We had to go back that same night. It seemed an impossible thing, to come such a distance only to turn right around, but Mother reminded us all that Papa had laid off from work without pay. Where money was concerned we did not argue. The trip home was quiet except for Nathan, who pretended at great length to scalp me with his toma-hawk, until the rubber head came loose from its painted stick and fell with a clunk.
Before there was a world, there was only the sea, and the high, bright sky arched above it like an overturned bowl.
For as many years as anyone can imagine, the people in the stars looked down at the ocean's glittering face without giving a thought to what it was, or what might lie beneath it. They had their own concerns. But as more time passed, as is natural, they began to grow curious. Eventually it was the waterbug who volunteered to go exploring. She flew down and landed on top of the water, which was beautiful, but not firm as it had appeared. She skated in every direction but could not find a place to stop and rest, so she dived underneath.
She was gone for days and the star people thought she must have drowned, but she hadn't. When she joyfully broke the surface again she had the answer: on the bottom of the sea, there was mud. She had brought a piece of it back with her, and she held up her sodden bit of proof to the bright light.
There, before the crowd of skeptical star eyes, the ball of mud began to grow, and dry up, and grow some more, and out of it came all the voices and life that now dwell on this island that is the earth. The star people fastened it to the sky with four long grape vines so it wouldn't be lost again.
"In school," I told Great Mam, "they said the world's round."
"I didn't say it wasn't round." she said. "It's whatever shape they say it is. But that's how it started. Remember that."
These last words terrified me, always, with their impossible weight. I have had dreams of trying to hold a mountain of water in my arms. "What if I forget?" I asked.
"We already talked about that. I told you how to remember."
"Well, all right," I said. "But if that's how the world started, then what about Adam and Eve?"
She thought about that. "They were the waterbug's children," she said. "Adam and Eve, and the others."
"But they started all the trouble," I pointed out." Adam and Eve started sin."
"Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heart-ache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them," she said. "It works out."
Morning Glory looked no different after we had seen the world and returned to it. Summer settled in, with heat in the air and coal dust thick on the vines. Nearly every night I slipped out and sat with Great Mam where there was the tangible hope of a cool breeze. I felt pleased to be up while my brothers breathed and tossed without consciousness on the hot mattress. During those secret hours, Great Mam and I lived in our own place, a world apart from the arguments and the tired, yellowish light bulbs burning away inside, seeping faintly out the windows, getting used up. Mother's voice in the kitchen was as distant as heat lightning, and as unthreatening. But we could make out words, and I realized once, with a shock, that they were discussing Great Mam's burial.
"Well, it surely can't do her any harm once she's dead and gone, John, for heaven's sakes," Mother said.
Papa spoke more softly and we could never make out his answer.
Great Mam seemed untroubled. "In the old days," she said, "whoever spoke the quietest would win the argument."
She died in October, the Harvest Month. It was my mother who organized the burial and the Bible verses and had her say even about the name that went on the gravestone, but Great Mam secretly prevailed in the question of flowers. Very few would ever have their beauty wasted upon her grave. Only one time for the burial service, and never again after that, did Mother trouble herself to bring up flowers. It was half a dozen white gladioli cut hastily from her garden with a bread knife, and she carried them from home in a jar of water, attempting to trick them into believing they were still alive.
My father's shoes were restless in the grass and hickory saplings at the edge of the cemetery. Mother knelt down in her navy dress and nylon stockings and with her white-gloved hands thumped the flower stems impatiently against the jar bottom to get them to stand up straight. Already the petals were shriveling from thirst.
As soon as we turned our backs, the small people would come dancing and pick up the flowers. They would kick over the jar and run through the forest, swinging the hollow stems above their heads, scattering them like bones.
STEALING GOD
by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
Chosen by Katherine Kurtz
A great many readers of science fiction and fantasy are also fans of thrillers, mystery novels, and conspiracy theories. "Stealing God" combines some of the best elements of all these genres and then gives them its own unique twist, the while keeping tongue very firmly in cheek. (Imagine, if you will, Illuminatus meets Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in an idiom reminiscent of Raymond Chandler or one of the other classic detective writers.) It all begins with the theft of the Holy Grail. (Bet you didn't know that the Grail currently lives in New York, did you?)
The characters and premise are so much fun that I urged Doyle and Macdonald to expand the concept and consider doing a full novel (or two, or three!) about modern-day Templar operative Peter Crossman and his spunky sidekick, Sister Mary Magdalene of the Special Action Executive of the Poor Clares. The first book, they tell me, is already in the works.
In the meantime, however, "Stealing God" will have to serve as a tasty introduction to a most adroit partnership, whether it's Crossman and the delectable Sister MM or Doyle and Macdonald themselves. I, for one, can hardly wait for the next installment, whatever form it may take!
Katherine Kurtz
I was working the security leak at Rennes-le-Château when the word came down. The Rennes flub was over a hundred years old, but the situation needed constant tending to keep people off the scent. That's the thing about botches. They never go away.
Now I had new orders. Drop whatever I was doing and get my young ass over to New York mosh-gosh. Roger that, color me gone. I was on the Concorde out of Paris before the hole in the air finished closing behind me in Languedoc.