There was a small town, a little dot of habitation in an endless sea of green wheat fields. It wasn’t much, just two dusty streets crossing at right angles that went by the somewhat ostentatious name of Bethlehem. The road that ran east-west contained all of the services the town offered: a bank, a handful of churches, a general store, post, city hall and a pair of saloons, though the owner at the more expensive of the two called his a tavern. On the perpendicular road were the homes of the town's elite. Big houses with wraparound porches. Into the largest of the houses, a young woman carefully stepped, carrying a baby.
It was not her house, She and her infant son were there for the ritual, a bit of domestic divination that was also a social event. The Church of the Cross, the Mithrians, the Reformed Hall, they all denounced the ritual. To them it was a superstition, a remnant of old folkways. But still no socially conscious woman of means could forgo a chance to know her son’s future vocation. And the baby’s mother, being the younger second wife of a man of esteem, was more socially conscious than most.
All the furniture of the house’s front room was moved aside except for a circle of chairs all facing inward. Around the room, talking, standing, laughing, whispering, were all of the prominent ladies of the town. In the warmth of late spring the heavy corsets and petticoats meant all the ladies were sipping tea covered in a thin sheen of sweat, but they were all too proper to show any signs of discomfort beyond the dainty flapping of a handheld fan.
After an acceptable period devoted to gossip and speculation, the women took their seats and the crone was led in. That was not a pejorative word, crone, the old woman called herself that. The witch-woman was an important part of the social fabric of the town, even if she wasn’t often invited to polite gatherings other than to work. She entered through the kitchen having arrived at the house through the servants entrance. In a shapeless black garment with a mess of tangled white hair, she waddled into the room and past the assembled ladies into the middle of the circle.
The baby was laid before her, naked except for a diaper. Items symbolizing the professions were scattered around the child: the mortar and pestle of an apothecary, the lawbook of an attorney, a farmer’s scythe —dulled to prevent injury of course. These were the items the child’s mother had brought herself. Items brought by the other women were more exotic: a barber’s razor, a dentist’s pliers, even the five pointed star of a lawman.
The baby cooed while the old woman waved a wand of turkey feathers and chanted. It did not seem to be a language the crone was speaking, just repeated nonsense syllables. Na-na-na-nahee! Giga-giga-giga-mee! Confused, the child just stared into her eyes and thrashed his legs back and forth. The women, inpatient, tried to coax the baby with words of encouragement. He just thrashed faster. The crone’s chanting grew louder until finally the baby rolled over and reached out.
And then his mother screamed. The other women gathered to comfort her, as she wailed and bawled like the child she almost was. The baby was left, temporarily forgotten, on the floor, and was nearly stepped on by one of the guests. Someone in the room stifled an inappropriate chuckle.
In the baby’s tiny fist was a raven’s feather.
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While his father publicly dismissed the crone’s prediction as nonsense, the shadow of that day hung above the boy’s childhood. He was the product of the man’s second marriage, but he was his first offspring. When the feather told him that this child would never be able to inherit his estate, the father, being the practical sort, focused his efforts elsewhere. At first these efforts included his young wife. But as the years passed and no more children were forthcoming, his attentions began to wander.
The boy did little to help the matter. While he grew up tall and healthy, he also grew up strange. After learning to read at a precious age, he rarely wanted to leave his father’s library. He was the first to crack the spines of most of the books there. His father, despite being a lawyer by profession, had little patience for reading. Most of the volumes had been purchased for show. His father’s real passion was breeding and breaking horses, and when he was not needed in the courthouse he could usually be found at a ranch he had purchased outside of town. This normally left the boy undisturbed in the library, pouring over the same thick folios again and again.
His favorite books were about the sea. He loved stories of maritime adventure, and atlases and tales about faraway countries. The whole idea of a seafaring life as a ship’s captain seemed perfectly suited for him. He could travel the world and never leave the comfort of his home, or his library, behind. By the time he was old enough to start attending classes at the one room schoolhouse, he had already committed an enviable education to memory, by reading and rereading books.
Rather than ignore him like his father, his mother used his impending doom as a reason to dote on him. As a toddler they were inseparable, even though the other ladies of the town would break into whispers whenever they appeared together in public. These whispers grew louder as the boy’s hair came in crow black and his skin far darker than either of his parents. There were rumors that either the mother had indigenous blood in her that had finally presented itself, or that the father of the boy was someone different than her husband. Perhaps as a result of this loss of status, his mother discovered a great love of drinking alone that eventually drove her and her son apart. The separation was not immediate. They just spent progressively less time together as more and more of her day was consumed by sitting in the front room with a glass of ‘fortified’ lemonade, staring out the picture window at nothing in particular.
Despite this, his life was a fairly happy one. He did not have many friends but he had an active imagination to compensate. He went through his days in a reasonable facsimile of a blissful childhood until two events threw that comfortable life into turmoil. The first was the more predictable of the two: starting at age seven, he was expected to go to school.
School for him was difficult. Not academically, though his penmanship lagged behind the other students, due in part to a near-constant hand tremor that plagued him. His library-earned education put him almost on par with the teacher, a fact that earned resentment from both the teacher and other students. By the end of his second week she had him sitting next to the twelve and thirteen-year-olds and sharing their studies. By the end of the month he was allowed to sit in the back of the classroom and read silently during lessons. Normally, when the son of a wealthy member of the community reached the point where he could learn no more in the town’s one-room schoolhouse, he was sent back east to further his education in a boarding school. The boy, however, was still too young for the type of boarding schools for which he was academically prepared, and his father was unlikely to spend money like that on a child who would only be his responsibility for another year or two.
Frustration as some of this seemed, the real trouble came before and after school. He was expected to play games with the other children. These games he had neither interest in, nor aptitude for. Tug-of-war tore his palms. Anthony-I-Over seemed pointless and confusing. Baseball required him to both throw and catch, neither of which he could do with even basic competence, and he had nowhere near the hand-eye coordination to actually hit a ball thrown by any but the most helpful of pitchers. The journey to and from school became a gauntlet of jeers and embarrassments. When he failed to respond to the mocking, these escalated to kicks and smacks. Eventually he learned to fight back, and this actually made it worse, as the older children made it a game to see how many of them it took to beat down the scrappy first grader. He would return home each day, bruised and battered to a mother who was already far too drunk to notice. He retreated into himself. Becoming a seven-year-old monk who spent his days meditating on the nature of suffering. The library was his only refuge.
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The second calamity was the result of seemingly random chance and would take the solace of the library from him. His father has attended a card game with a number of other prominent men from town. As is common with men of a certain age, the conversation turned to the accomplishments of their sons. It’s hard to tell what prompted it, but when it was the father’s turn to talk about his child, he, in a very uncharacteristic show of support for the boy's interests, began to brag about the boy’s intelligence and prodigious reading habits. This met with silence from the other town fathers, except for one man who was already well in the wind who said something to the effect of “It’s good the boy has mastered the ancients, for he can’t seem to master throwing a baseball.” This weak joke was met with roaring, drunken laughter.
As a result of this public embarrassment, the boy was pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and thrown on the back of his father’s saddle. In a feat of riding that was truly impressive considering the amount of liquor he had consumed, his father delivered the boy to the ranch outside of town in half an hour. The boy spent the rest of the night sleeping on a bedroll in an empty barn stall, thinking on the instructions his father had given him during the trip. According to his father, starting the next day, the boy would learn to “Ride and break horses like a man” or, failing that, “at least provide an honest day’s hard labor.”
In the morning, a new mortification began. The boy discovered that living in the bunkhouse were a half dozen of young ranch hands each about ten years older than the boy. These young men, while not blood kin to the boy’s father, each embodied more of what the man wanted from his son than the boy could ever hope to. Universally shaggy haired and well-muscled with wide smiles, they seemed to epitomize the virtues of youth and the vigorous life. And they each respected and learned from his father, dutifully completing all the tasks needed to keep the ranch running smoothly. The boy learned they even sometimes accompanied him on trips to the East to race his prized stallions. The bunkhouse had a small separate room for the boy’s father on days when he stayed too late for the ride back into town. If the man also sometimes entertained guests other than his wife there —well that was none of the ranch hands’ business.
The animal husbandry lessons began immediately and were almost wholly unsuccessful. The horses just hated him, as they could smell his distrust and dislike of horses as he approached and had each decided to preemptively reciprocate in kind. Even the tamest mare would throw him and when he was tasked with brushing the horses or cleaning their hooves they all seemed to try to bite and kick the child. His suffering was not the ranch hands’ fault. As the son of their boss they were always respectful, but his father had made clear that he was to pull his own weight on the ranch and would have to earn his bed in the bunkhouse. Until then he could stay in the barn. And so he continued to lay on the bedroll each night beneath a thin blanket, nursing the new bruises and humiliations of the day.
The only exception to the animosity the boy provoked in equines was an old and nearly blind mule that had been resident on the ranch when it was purchased. The creature had not yet had the good sense to die and make way for a lucrative animal and none of the ranch hands had the heart to put the poor beast out of its misery. The mule has patches of hair missing from it’s coat and was prone to random fits of shaking, a condition the boy’s hand tremor led him to identify with. Hearing the ranch hands use it, and not understanding that ‘John Mule’ was a common term for a male gelding of the species, the boy took to calling the animal John as he assumed that was his name.
John became a close companion for the boy, and was of use to him as the boy was still expected to attend school. Apparently his father felt that sitting bored in the back of the classroom and enduring regular beatings was somehow valuable. While riding the mule really did not take any time off the long walk back to town for school, the companionship and the body heat was appreciated during the long winter months.
He did not hear from his mother at all for the first several months he was there. Then in late spring, without warning, she showed up one day in a hired buggy with a driver and whisked him back to the house in the town. There he received a warm bath, a hearty hot meal, a new suit of clothes and the chance to tell his mother all his stories of the ranch. She seemed to listen too, even if her eyes sometimes wandered. That evening she presented him with one gold eagle coin and a kiss on the forehead. Then she deposited back at the ranch. It was only on his bedroll that night the boy realized the day had been his eighth birthday.
It was late that same night the boy was awoken by noise, the sound of heavy boots against a wood floor and breaking glass. He quietly pulled on his trousers and shoes —the old ones, not the new finery from his mother— and crept quietly to the door. Peeking out he could see a light at the end of the bunkhouse, in the room his father kept there. The child deduced that his father had come from town and the stumbling noise told him the man was drunk. The cackling laugh of a woman told him his father was not alone.
He returned his makeshift bed and began to underdress. The noise died down and was soon replaced by his father’s loud snores. He was almost back to his undergarments when he smelled smoke. Returning to the door, this time barefoot, he looked back toward the bunkhouse. There he saw smoke coming out two of the glassless window frames. The breaking glass must have been a lantern, not a bottle.
The boy ran over and began pounding on the walls of the large open bay where the ranch hands slept. The young men were in their cups like the boy’s father, and roused themselves only slowly. He ran to the other end of the building where his father slept. Linseed paint was responsible for the building’s red exterior, and it also aided the fire in spreading much faster than if the wood had been left untreated. The roof was soon aflame.
“Dad! Dad!” he yelled. The boy used the word so rarely it felt unnatural leaving his mouth. “Fire! Fire!”
He was right below the window to his father’s room, but too short to see clearly inside. From his angle, he could see the yellow flames reflected on the ceiling of the bunkhouse. His father’s companion had roused herself and was now standing outside in the mud, wearing only a thin blanket. The boy was still too young to have a biological response to the nudity, but sheer curiosity caused his gaze to linger on her for an extra moment. The ranch hands appeared to have all successfully extracted themselves from the burning building, but the drunkenness seemed to prevent them from providing any response beyond basic self-preservation.
The boy’s father had not appeared. He looked to the adults, the woman and the ranch hands, for some guidance and found none. Grasping the window frame with his hands he pulled his body up and scrambled through the gap into his fathers bedroom. He was immediately assaulted by the heat and smoke and could see nothing in front of him. Feeling his way forward with his bare feet his shin first discovered the wooden bedframe and then his toes found a soft, pliant but heavy and immobile object that he guessed was his father.
The child felt around until he found the elder man’s legs and began to drag him. At this point he made the mistake of taking his first breath since entering the burning structure and was overcome with a coughing fit. He lowered his head to near the floor and managed to find enough oxygen to clear his lungs and resume his task. The man was multiple times the youngster’s weight, but somewhere the child found reserves of strength to move his prone form towards the bunkhouse door. He could feel saliva and mucus pouring from his face like water from a spigot but he struggled on and made it to the door, and they tumbled together down the three wooden steps to the farm yard. They landed beside each other in the mud. His father was naked and filthy but the boy could hear him breathing, so at least he was alive.
The intoxicated ranchers had organized themselves enough to start doosing the barn the boy slept in with water to protect it from the sparks coming off the bunkhouse, which was now a raging inferno —far beyond any hope of salvation. The woman had disappeared into the night. The boy dutifully rose from the mud and went to help the ranch hands.