Читать книгу Arborescent - Marc Herman Lynch - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

JEB BUCKLES

In short, Jeb Buckles could hand-hew timber but couldn’t check his email to save his life: electronic devices being the work of the Devil. In his old age, surely he had become humbled, self-deprecating even, but that never kept him from testing the sturdiness of limbs, always being out on one, that is.

In his seventy-second year, he built a trebuchet on the valley ridge a good fifty metres from his country manor. At one and a half stories high and with two human-sized hamster wheels, the pretty little chorus resembled a gristmill, its sentimental nature almost pastoral. He imagined naysayers asking, “How could an old fart, barely able to reach his own dick, manage to construct such an enormous bleached-wood siege engine?”

“Well, I’m not your typical geriatric bugger, after all,” would be his response.

He launched everything from typewriters to dumbbells to dishwashers into the valley floor. Once, he launched a hollowed-out Oldsmobile thirty feet into the air. Once, he landed a forty-pound filing cabinet squarely in the heart of a herd of deer, killing a doe and wounding two others. He told the story like a miracle: “Like hitting a pebble on a beach. Like tagging a moth in the woods at night.”

Sometimes, when thinking of his son, Jeb wished he could “launch the dumbshit into space.” He’d loved the boy as a tyke, but there was something to be desired about the slacker, goodfor-nothing bloom. Parasitic in essence, children needed rigid forbearance: “Give me a month alone with the boy,” he would tell Marchella. “A month in the woods would turn that bent rod into a Corinthian column. Believe you me.”

As Jeb Buckles’s eyesight deteriorated, he staked guidewires across his land. Jeb often walked down the valley to the river, two kilometres out, pinky hooked under wire, to stand in windswept snow. The expletives he delivered intensified with the wind: he told both the alpacas in their shelter and the yellow-beaked pilgrims under the trailer to “fuck off.” The wind tortured him until he threw down. But, rather than resembling a proper pugilist, he looked, Marchella said, more like a lady with a June bug down her dress.

His cataracts worsened, but no doctor was gonna fudge with his eyes. “Better to have an eye,” Jeb would say when the goose sausage came out like the offal from a freshly field-dressed deer.

His blindness worsened in the winter, when the light off the snow was biting, and there were only eight hours of sunlight. But the intricate lattice of guidewire did more than compensate for his disorientation. It amplified his touch, such that his reach stretched across the valley. He could feel the nose of a deer nudging the line on the opposite side of the estate, the light touch of a gopher’s tail, the sway of a copse, the roots wending through the matted earth.

Stepping outside his back door, Jeb reached for the hip-high stake hammered into the ground, the thread practically invisible against the hard-packed snow. He curled his pinky around the wire.

The trebuchet creaked with windmill-like sluggishness. The cantilevered counterweight was a hefty load the size of a small yacht. Jeb hoisted his own weight onto the tie, momentarily leaving the ground to allow the pawl to catch on the ratchet’s next tooth; the machine strained with tension. Foot-tall dead sunflowers stood in the snow along the edge of the escarpment, their stalks bent and discs covered in icicles.

With mitted hands, Jeb yanked the thick, braided rope. With a clank and wobble, the contraption shuddered and the counterweight dropped, followed by a rush of air. And here the rush of siege, the mounting pressure toppling bodies that jostled over bloody fields. For Jeb, history was nothing more than men swinging from gibbets and skulls spiked on ramparts. This was progress as largesse, violence shorn down to evolutionary impulse. For him, an eight-pound trigger pull, the drop of the plunger, the whine of a drone—these were the products of men being men, a call of the wild as distinctive as a roar.

His oohs and aahs died in the wind as the bathtub twisted, an awkward porcelain projectile turning from blackish blur to whitish speck, until it disappeared from his sight entirely; he listened intently, then heard the muffled explosion as the tub bounded to a halt among the other snowy lumps on the valley floor.

“That sure is something,” a woman remarked from behind.

Jeb turned around but could only see the haze of a figure mired by the light refracting off the snow.

“Marchella’s not here. She went into the city.”

“I was hoping to speak with you.”

“You know whose property this is?” Jeb asked, taking off his mitt and reaching for the guidewire underneath his hand.

“I don’t, actually.”

“The old saw ‘do me a kindness’ doesn’t roost here, friend. I’m sure you can find your own way home.”

His sight must be the shits, Jeb thought. Normally, he could make out shapes (the shadows or impressions of features, the depressions of the eye sockets), but the woman seemed all but faceless. A strange course of electricity seemed to ripple through her body.

“You a godly man?”

“You a nun?”

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m more like a debt collector.”

“That so?”

“To astronomers, the stars are nothing more than red shifts, distance, and chemical composition,” she branched off. “These people ask us to acknowledge our insignificance every time we look at them: ‘The sun is larger than a million Earths. The stars are billions of miles away.’ But for most of us, when we look at the stars, we don’t feel insignificant. In fact, we’re buoyed. The stars do more than ‘exist a long ways away.’ They connect us through history and through time: from the Blackfoot to the Greeks. There’s a spiritual dimension that is exempt from empirical measures. This is how I see humanity—to study the stars is to study the light of humanity.”

“That’s all well and good, but you’re in the Bible belt. We believe in the good Lord and saviour here, not your mumbo-jumbo.”

“You’re absolutely right. And I’m here to collect that,” she persisted.

Jeb just waved her off, becoming impatient. “I’m sorry if I wasn’t being direct before. Maybe you would prefer I told you to fuck off!”

Jeb began to make his way back home, but the woman stepped in front of him. Even this close, Jeb couldn’t make out distinguishing features. Like a roiling mist, she seemed to have no solidity. The figure reached out and touched the guidewire, and suddenly Jeb felt cut off from the world, as though the neuronal pathways between his brain and limbs had been severed. Panic began to well up in him—thinking about his rifle mounted on the boot-room wall.

“You’re swimming in the dark,” she said.

“What do you want?” Jeb said.

“Like I said, I’ve come to collect on your debt.”