Season of Wonder Read online

  I went to the priest where he lay in his dirt-caked blood, and I raised his head. He stared at me in wonder, as he had the first time.

  “Who are you?” he asked, coughing blood.

  “Matty Simon,” I said. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  He smiled. “Mattisyahu’s son, Shimon?”

  I started to say no, Matty, not Mattisyahu; Simon, not Shimon. But I didn’t say that. I had thought he was one of the sons, but I was wrong. Had I been a more knowledgeable Jew, I would have known: he wasn’t the Kohane Gadol. He was a Levite from Moses’s tribe; one of the priestly class; sent ahead as point man for the redemption of the Temple; like Seabees sent in ahead of an invasion to clear out trees and clean up the area. But now he would die, and not do the job.

  “Put your seal on this cruse,” I said. “Did the Kohane Gadol give you that authority, can you do that?”

  He looked at the clay vessel, and even in his overwhelming pain he was frightened and repelled by the command I had made. “No . . . I cannot . . . ”

  I held him by the shoulders with as much force as I could muster, and I looked into his eyes and I found a voice I’d never known was in me, and I demanded, “Can you do this?”

  He nodded slightly, in terror and awe, and he hesitated a moment and then asked, “Who are you? Are you a Messenger of God?” I was all light, brighter than the sun, and holding him in my arms.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Yes, I am a Messenger of God. Let me help you seal the flask.”

  That he did. He did what was forbidden, what was not possible, what he should not have done. He put the seal of pure oil on the vessel containing half a log, two riv-ee-eas, of long-chain hydrocarbon oil from a place that did not even exist yet in the world, oil from a time unborn, from the future. The longer the chain, the greater the binding energy. The greater the binding energy, the longer it would burn. One day’s oil, from the future; one day’s oil that would burn brightly for eight days.

  He died in my arms, smiling up into the face of God’s Messenger. He went toward the light, a prayer on his lips.

  Today, at lunch in the Commissary, Barry R. Levin slapped his tray down on the table across from me, slid into the seat, and said, “Well, Mr. Pretend Jew, tomorrow is Chanukah. Are you ready to light the candles?”

  “Beat it, Levin.”

  “Would you like me to render the prayers phonetically for you?”

  “Get away from me, Levin, or I’ll lay you out. I’m in no mood for your scab-picking today.”

  “Hard night, Mr. Simon?”

  “You’ll never know.” I gave him the look that said get in the wind, you pain in the ass. He stood up, lifted his tray, took a step, then turned back to me.

  “You’re a Bad Jew, remember that.”

  I shook my head ruefully and couldn’t hold back the mean little laugh.

  “Yeah, right. I’m a Bad Jew. I’m also the Messenger of God.”

  He just looked at me. Not a clue why I’d said that. All scores evened, I didn’t have the heart to tell him . . .

  It just seemed like a helluva good idea at the time. The time of miracles.

  Considering the modern concept of Santa began only in 1822 with Clement Clarke Moore’s poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (now known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas), then further refined with seventy-six (1862-1885) Christmas engravings by Thomas Nast—Santa, although based on older traditions, is really very new. Ken Scholes provides us with a glimpse of what new, very different, mythology/theologies might arise . . . given time . . . while still providing a touching story evocative of the season.

  If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear

  Ken Scholes

  Muscles tire. Words fail. Faith fades. Fear falls. In the Sixteenth Year of the Sixteen Princes the world came to an end when the dragon’s back gave out. Poetry died first, followed by faith. One by one the world-strands burst and bled until ash snowed down on huddled masses whimpering in the cold.

  The Santaman came reeking of love into this place and we did not know him.

  This is his story.

  This is our story, too.

  Prelude The Santaman Cycle,

  Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  I buried my father on Dragon’s Mass Eve. I dug the grave myself, there on the hill overlooking our homestead, beside the grave he dug for my mother some thirty-five years earlier.

  As I worked the shovel, I tried not to cry. I failed. And I recited the Cycle, just the way he taught me, as I cut the sod and turned the dirt out into a pile.

  Muscles tire. It was as if he stood with me. I could hear his voice grumbling on the wind that rose as the sun dropped and the air cooled. “Pause, Melody Constance,” he said. “Feel what the writer intended with the words.”

  I felt my foot upon the shovel, my shoulders as I bent and lifted dirt. I felt the hollow empty place inside that tried to swallow me whenever my eyes wandered to the wagon and the red-wrapped body laying there.

  Words fail. Again, a hesitation, a waiting. Silence to honor the moments no words can carry.

  Like this one.

  Only, it didn’t feel like a moment—it felt like a year, in the cold, working the shovel. Alone. Orphanhood settled onto my back and shoulders with a weight I’d never felt before. I had no memory of my mother; she’d died the morning I was born. So it was a loss I assumed and grew into, never really knowing what I’d missed out on, other than those times I stayed with neighboring families when my father needed to travel. But even then, it was only the slightest taste of someone else’s life. Working the mine and farm with my father was my life. And so was Dragon’s Mass Eve—his favorite and only holiday—spent quietly at home in our red paper hats with our fruit salad and rice stew while the faithful gathered at church.

  Faith fades. Fear falls.

  My mind blurred with my eyes as the tears overpowered me. The questions began to rise even as the fear fell upon me. What will I do now? Where will I go? How will I ever learn to live around this vast hole in my heart?

  They were all things we’d talked about in passing when he talked in the midst of his illness about not getting better. And I knew that I would find the desk in his office perfectly organized with carefully written instructions for everything that needed to be done and everyone that had to be contacted. He’d learned to be meticulous during forty years working in the Bureaucracy’s supply chain, and he’d instilled it into me. I think I was six when he put the first of many carefully scripted lists into my hands and sent me off to do my chores.

  But having a plan and executing said plan were not the same thing.

  My eye wandered to the wagon again and I tried to tell myself it was because I was measuring how much further I had to dig. But I knew better. It was because I was close to finished. And when I was done digging, when I eased my father into that hole, he would be gone. I would only ever see him again in memory and dreams, in the half-dozen photographs tucked into our leatherbound copy of the Cycle.

  This would be our last Dragon’s Mass Eve together. My last time reciting the words with him. Our conversation earlier that morning would be the last we ever had, and it broke my heart open even further.

  I went through the Cycle three times before I finished digging, from muscles tire to upon his back, a world, quoting from the Authorized Standard Version that my father had studied during the single year he spent in seminary. It was the version he’d memorized as a part of his training, and though he’d set aside his faith years before, he still felt it had enough merit that his daughter should know it. So now I said the words, felt none of them, and gentled my father into his grave.

  The night was clear and cold but I paid it no mind. The hymn might’ve promised that the Santaman’s grace would find us here, but the reality was I’d already seen at least a half-dozen clear and cold Dragon’s Mass Eves and the Santaman had yet to come back, reeking of anything, much less love. There had been, according to my
father, over two hundred and thirty-seven cold, clear Dragon’s Mass Eves to be exact, to the great consternation of the few remaining theologians.

  We were on our own.

  I was on my own.

  I shoveled the earth over him and went through the Cycle another three times for good measure. But even as I did, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. It was my first lesson in grief—that there never, ever was enough when it came to those we lost.

  On my last Dragon’s Mass Eve with Father, the rice stew grew cold upon the stove and I did not kneel and pray to the north. Instead, I cried myself to sleep, still covered in the dirt and drying sweat of digging my father’s grave.

  If Dragon’s Mass Eve be cold and clear

  The Santaman’s grace may find us here.

  But if Dragon’s Mass Eve be clouded sky

  The Santaman’s grace may pass us by.

  Hymn #475,“If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear”

  Hymns of the Dragon and his Avenger,

  Contemporary Edition

  Verity Music, 2623 YD

  “Like this,” my father told me, unfolding the red paper and then folding it again in a different place, pressing the new crease into it with his massive thumb.

  I watched, then took it from him and folded it again. It was my tenth Dragon’s Mass Eve and it had gone like all of the others I could remember. First, he pulled out the jars and cans he’d collected over the year, separating the fruit from the vegetables and the cans of potted meat. The fruit came to me along with a notation on my morning chores list and I mixed it into a fruit salad. His own list called for preparing the rice stew, and while it simmered, we moved on to the hats.

  “I can never get it right,” I said.

  He chuckled, and it was a low rumble in the brightly lit kitchen. “Getting it right isn’t always required.”

  I watched his hands as they moved over his own sheet of paper, a fold here and a fold there, followed by a dab of paste and a cotton ball. I looked at mine and sighed. “Yours is better.”

  Lifting the hat, he placed it on my head and then pushed up his glasses. Then, he swept my paper and cottonball away with a giant hand and started over with them. “Mine is a wreck,” he said with a toothy grin. He nodded to the hat I wore. “Yours looks pretty good, actually.”

  We laughed and after, he put the battered hat onto his head. “Now,” he said, “we are ready.”

  We stood and went outside into the night. We climbed the hill out behind the homestead and faced north, kneeling at my mother’s grave. The stone that marked it was plain, dark granite.

  Harmony Angelique Sheffleton-Farrelly, it read. Then, after the date of her birth and the date of her death: Public servant, beloved wife and mother.

  My knees were cold. “I don’t understand why we do this,” I said. Ten was the year that I mastered the art of the subtle complaint.

  “We do this,” he said, “because it’s important to remember where we come from.”

  Of course, I’d heard the story of how he and mother had met, and about their first Dragon’s Mass Eve together in the supply basement of the Bureaucracy. He’d been one of a small number of trolls in public service to the Bureaucracy, his trollishness coming in handy for safeguarding their supplies. My mother had been his replacement after thirty years in the supply chain, but meeting her had caught some part of him on fire and he’d decided to forgo retirement. They spent another decade improving efficiencies, easing the government back to some semblance of functionality. Then they’d ridden west with some of the world’s last hope lining the bottom of an old coffee can to seed a mine that had long before gone dry. They raised a litter of love, selling off each pup that survived, and made do on their pensions.

  Somewhere in the midst of it, they decided to have me, and that choice changed everything.

  I put my hand on the stone. “But we don’t believe in the Santaman,” I said.

  “No,” he said, and winked. “We don’t have to.”

  We said our prayer quickly as the wind rose to threaten our hats. When we finished, I looked up. “Clouded sky,” I said.

  Father chuckled again. “Yes.”

  “Last year was clear, though.”

  “Yes,” he said again. “There have been quite a few clear, cold Dragon’s Mass Eves.”

  I kicked the dirt. “The song got it wrong.”

  I felt his hand settle onto my shoulder. “Getting it right,” he said again, “isn’t required.” We went back into the house and I pulled the door closed. He went to the stove and ladled the rice stew into simple wooden bowls that came out each year just for this tradition. He didn’t speak again until we were seated at the table, the fire crackling nearby.

  “Besides,” he said as he tucked his napkin into his open-collared shirt, “they changed the song a long time ago. While I was in seminary there were a lot of people wanting to update the Cycle and the Hymnal. The song used to say ‘will,’ which implied a guarantee that the clergy couldn’t afford to underwrite once the cold, clear nights started showing up again.”

  I’d heard this one before and I nodded. “So they changed it to ‘may.’ ”

  He grinned, his broad face lighting up. “Yes.”

  I tried to imitate his deep, gruff voice. “So when we sing it, we sing it as it was written—”

  He joined in and we finished in unison. “— just as the writer intended it to be sung.”

  I paused, my spoon paused above the rim of the bowl. “But it isn’t true.”

  He paused, too. “No, it doesn’t appear to be.”

  “So aren’t the new words more . . . accurate?”

  He took a bite, swallowed, and thought for a moment. “Only if the underlying premise is accurate. I can sing about flying fish that might bring little girls vast wealth for Dragon’s Mass Eve, but if there are no flying fish. . . . ” Here, he shrugged.

  I smiled and mimicked his shrug. “And so we return to my initial question. Why do we do it?”

  My father sighed. “Someday, when you have a child, you’ll understand it better, I think.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I will.” Then, I wrinkled my nose. “And I don’t want a child.”

  “Ah,” he said, “but do you want your present?”

  I nodded. “But let me get yours first.”

  That was the year that I’d written him a story about the two of us fighting Black Drawlers in the north while we searched for the Santaman’s fabled sword. I’d written it out in my best penmanship, and Miss Marplesbee, the sole teacher at the small one-room school in town, helped me bind it between pieces of cardboard with bright red yarn. I was particularly pleased with the cover—one of my better drawings of Father lopping the head off a Black Drawler, with me poised carefully on his back, a dagger clenched in my teeth.

  And it was the year that he gave me the picture of Mother, wearing the dress she wore when she met my father, leaning against a desk in the drab cubicle wasteland of the Bureaucracy’s fifth floor. He’d built the frame himself.

  I was pulling the paper aside when I woke up. I lay in bed for a minute and blinked the dream away. It was a good Dragon’s Mass Eve. But it was twenty-five years behind me now, and the truth I swallowed made my stomach hurt.

  I looked up to the picture of my mother that had hung above my bed since the night he’d first given it to me.

  I forced myself up and drew a bath. When I walked past my father’s open door I did not let myself look in upon his empty bed, upon the spectacles that lay on his nightstand, folded closed and never to be opened again by his large, clumsy fingers.

  Muscles tire. It’s all we really knew. The dragon’s back held up the world. The poetry and faith of the Singing Literocrats held up the dragon by the will of the Sixteen Princes. One Literocrat fell to the sword, another to plague, a third to famine. Halved in this way, the choir faltered in its song and the dragon caved in on its spindly legs. The Sixteen Princes had no time to act, to change the course of th
is sudden, sweeping end.

  They drank wine and spoke of lemon trees instead.

  We sat in the cold until the Santaman came.

  The Breaking of the Dragon’s Back

  The Santaman Cycle,

  Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  The first week crept by with varied weather. Storms of sorrow blew in at the slightest provocation—the smell of him on his clothes, his pen laid carefully to the left side of his desk blotter, the notes he’d written and organized for me. And on the heels of the sadness, a calm and foreboding hollowness that I didn’t know I could feel. Followed suddenly by inconsolable rage that had no place to go but inward, or else it might burn down the world.

  I went through the pile of papers, mailing what needed mailed and making the calls on Father’s list. I loaded the granite marker he’d kept in the mine all these years onto the wagon and drove it into town. He’d had his name and birthdate carved onto it when he had mother’s made. The rest is up to you, his note told me. And so I dropped it with Anderson, Bauer and Sons’ Stonework, picked it up a week later, and planted it at the head of the fresh grave.

  Drummond Angus Farrelly, it said, along with his dates of birth and death. Public servant, cherished father, beloved husband.

  The government men showed up about a month after, briefcases in hands.

  “Miss Farrelly?” the man in the suit asked when I opened the door.

  “Ms. Sheffleton-Farrelly,” I corrected him. “Melody. Call me Mel.”

  The man looked uncomfortable and his partner looked away, clearing his throat. Their pinstriped trousers and jackets looked out of place here on the edge of the world and I wasn’t sure how they kept their shoes so shiny. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  I nodded toward my father’s office—a shack near the gated entrance of the mine. I dried my hands and laid my dish towel over a wooden chair. “Across the way,” I said.

  I led us across the hard-packed yard and used the key to open the door. There had been little to do in the office, and I’d spent most of my time here arranging and rearranging the items on his desk.