How They Were Found (8 page)

There is no midwife to guide her, no husband to comfort her, but Maud does not miss them. She requires no earthly assistance. The angels are beside her, and with them is her God. It is enough. Her whole life, he has come when she has called, and it has always been enough.

Spear watches from the cabin windows, waiting for the Electricizers to leave Maud's side and fetch him, but they stay with her and envelop her with their light. Eventually, Spear leaves the cabin himself and goes to the shed, where he sits down beside Maud and takes her in his arms, holds her sweating, convulsing body to his. He watches her clenched jaws and closed eyes, watches her legs kick out from her body. He tries to remember the birth of his own children, finds he cannot, then puts his past from his mind.  He whispers to Maud, telling her about the great purpose of what she is doing, about the great world she is bringing into being.

At last, he says, Push, and then she does. She spreads her legs, and her womb empties, and afterward Spear and Maud and the Electricizers all wait together, a long moment where Spear feels nothing except for the breath trapped in his lungs, the woman in his arms, the way his heart beats both fast and slow at the same time, as if it might stop at any moment, as if it might go on forever.

The New Motor begins to pulsate subtly, a motion so slight Spear can only see it if he looks at the machine sideways, out of the corner of his eyes. He smiles with a slow, crooked hesitance, nine months of doubt reassured only by this pulsation, by this slight swaying in the hanging magnets of the grand revolver. It is not much, and certainly it is less than he hoped for, but it is something.

Spear hopes—Spear prays—that this is only the beginning, that this infant energy will mature into the great savior he has been promised, that he has promised himself.

Her pregnancy ended, Maud Trenton is light, her body barely skin, barely bones, her cries producing so little water they are barely tears. He lifts her in his arms, carries her gently from the shed into the cabin, where he lays her down on the bed he once shared with his own wife. He waits with her until she falls asleep. It takes a long time, and it takes even longer for Spear to realize she was not crying in pain, but in frustration. A lifetime of waiting and a near-year of effort, and still she is without a child to call her own. Now Spear understands the terror that is the Virgin, the horror that is the name Mary, the new awfulness that he and the Electricizers have made of this woman.

Whatever this thing is she has given birth to, it will never be hers alone.

He whispers apologies, pleas for penance into her dreaming ears, and then he gets up to leave her. He will go down into the village and fetch the doctor, but only after he attends to the Motor.

First, he must lock the shed's doors and be sure that no man crosses that threshold until he is ready, until he can explain what exactly it is that has happened to his machine.

The next morning, he invites the other leaders of the congregation to view the Motor, to see the slight pulsation that grows inside it. They listen attentively, but Spear sees the horror on their faces as he tries to point out the movement of the magnets again and again, as he grows frustrated at their inability to see what he sees. They leave at once, and Spear stands at the top of the hill, listening to their voices arguing on the way down the crooked path. By evening, their deliberations are complete, and when the messenger arrives at the cabin with a letter, Spear knows what it says before he reads it: He has been stripped of his position in the church, and of the church's material support.

Spear locks himself in the shed with the Motor, where he watches it pulsate through the night until morning, when there is a knock at the door. He opens the door to find Maud waiting for him. She is beautiful, transformed by her pregnancy, and she takes him by the hand, saying, This machine is ours to believe in, ours to take to the people.

She says, I have listened to your sermons, and I have heard the words you've spoken.

She says, You cannot give up. I won't allow it.

Spear nods, straightens himself and looks back at the machine he's built. There is life in it, he knows. He looks at Maud's hand in his. It is but a spark, but one day it will be a fire, if only he nurtures it.

There is no more money to pay for what Spear needs—wagons and assistants, supplies for the great journey ahead—and so Spear splits his time between the shed and his desk, between preparing for the disassembly of the Motor and writing letters begging for financial support. He writes to New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Washington, asking their spiritualist congregations to trust him, to help fund this new age that is coming.

He writes, The Glory of God is at hand, and soon I will bring it to each and every one of you, if only you will help me in these darkest of hours.

The words he writes, they are his alone, and he finds himself at a loss to explain the New Motor without the help of the Electricizers. He calls out to them, begs them for assistance.

In his empty office, he cries out, All that you helped me create is crumbling. Why won't you tell me what to write?

His words are met with silence, as they have been since the birth of the Motor. The Electricizers are no longer distinct to him, just blurred specters at the periphery of his vision, fading more every day. Their abandonment is near complete when Maud begins to help him instead, comforting his anxiety and giving him strength with her words. She has not gone down the hill since the day she gave birth, and Spear knows that this is the reason his family had to leave, that his congregation had to abandon him. Even the Electricizers leaving him, he recognizes it not as an abandonment but as making room for what is to come next.

Like Mary and Joseph's flight with the newborn Jesus into Egypt, he and Maud will flee with the New Motor across America, taking it by railroad to town after town after town.

Like Mary, Maud will not love him, only the Motor she has birthed.

Like Joseph, he will have to learn to live with this new arrangement, this adjusted set of expectations.

Spear tears up all the letters he has written so far, then starts new ones, ones infused not with the bitterness he feels but with the hope and inspiration he wishes he felt instead. Soon, the Motor will begin to speak to him, and he must be ready to listen.

It takes a month for the letters to come back, but Spear receives the responses he requires. He runs into the cabin, where Maud awaits him. He says, They're coming to help us, with money and with men. They'll be waiting for us in Randolph, ready to assist me in reassembling the Motor.

He hesitates, then says, I'll start tonight. I'll disassemble the Motor, and get it ready for travel, and then I'll send word to Randolph for a wagon to transport it. The worst is nearly over, and soon our new day will begin.

Maud rises from the dining table and takes Spear in her arms, cradling his head against her shoulder. She does not tell him what the angels have told her about what must happen instead, about what has always happened to those who have served God with hearts like his, too full of human weakness, of pride and folly and blinding hubris. She does not tell him about Moses at the border of the promised land, about Jonah in the belly of the whale. She could, but she chooses otherwise, chooses to repay his one-time lack of faith with her own.

Despite his intentions to start immediately, Spear finds that he cannot. Once he has locked himself in the shed with the New Motor, he is too in awe of its ornate existence, of the shining results of all the months of effort and prophecy that went into its construction. He watches the pulsation of the magnets and tries to understand what they might mean, what message might be hidden in their infant energies. He doesn't know, but he believes it will be made clear soon, even without the Electricizers' help.

Spear sits down on the floor of the shed and crosses his legs beneath him, preparing for the first time in many months to go into a trance, to purposefully pierce the shroud between this world and the next. The trance comes easily to him, in all of its usual ways: a prickling of the skin, a slowing of the breath, a blurring of the vision. He stays that way for many hours, listening, and so he does not hear the knock at the door, or the raised voices that follow. By the time something does snap him out of his trance—the first axe blow that bursts open the shed door, perhaps—it is far too late to save himself.

The men of the village surround him, swear they have come only to help him, to set him free of this thing he's made. Men who were once Spear's friends promise they won't hurt him, if only he'll lie still, but he can't, won't, not in the face of what they've come to do. Held between the arms of the two Russians, he watches disbelieving as one of High Rock's deacons steps to the New Motor, emboldened by the encouragement of the others. The deacon reaches up toward the grand revolver and takes hold of one of the magnetic spheres suspended from its crossbeams, and then he rips it away from the Motor.

Spear waits for intercession, for Electricizer or angel to step in and stop the destruction, but none appears. He struggles against his attackers, tries to warn them against what they plan to do, against the wrath of God they call down upon themselves, but they do not listen. Eventually he twists free and attempts to take a step toward the Motor, where others have joined the deacon in dismantling the hanging magnets. The Russians stop him, knock him to the ground, fall upon him with fists and boots, and when they tire of striking him they step aside so that others might have their turn. Spear no longer cares for himself, only for his new god, for this mechanical child gifted not just to him and to Maud, but also to all of mankind, if only they would accept it.

By the time Maud arrives in the doorway to the shed, he is already broken, in body and face and in spirit. The motor is crushed too, axe blows and wrenching hands tearing its intricate parts from their moorings, rendering meaningless the many names of God written in copper and zinc across its components. He cries to her for help, but knows there's nothing she can do. All around him are the men he once called to himself, who followed him to High Rock and up its steep hill to this shed, where he had meant for them to change their world. He watches the Russians and James the metalworker and the carpenters, all of them striking him or else the machine they themselves built. When they finish, when his teeth and bones are already shattered, he sees Randall, the youth he once admired above all others, and he lowers his head and accepts the vengeance the boy feels he's owed.

Before the beating ends, Spear lifts his head to look up at Maud, to take in her restored youth and beauty. For the last time, he sees the Electricizers, sees Jefferson and Franklin and Rush and Murray and all the others assembled around her. He cries out to them for protection, for salvation, and when they do not come to his aid he looks past them to Maud, who glows in their light, but also with a light of her own, something he wishes he had seen earlier, when there was still some great glory that might have come of it.

HER BABY IS A JOKE, just a tiny bundle of cells dividing, too small to be taken seriously. For another week or two, it will still be smaller than the benign tumor she had removed from her breast two years ago, a realization that leads to her touching the place where that lump once was whenever she's alone. She jokes about this to her friends, who don't find it funny. She doesn't either, but she can't stop herself from sharing about her tumor-sized baby, growing and growing and growing, taking over her body. This time, no one wants her to stop it or get rid of it. This time, people say congratulations and hug her instead of pretending she's contagious, instead of forgetting her number until they hear she's better. Like before, she's only angry because everyone always assumes they already know exactly how she feels about the events that happen to her. She is careful to keep her true feelings to herself, to see that, as with the tumor, there is much she could lose.

Her baby is a seed, barely planted but already pushing roots through its waxy coat, searching for the dank soil it needs to grow inside her. She pictures it flowering but knows it'll be years before her baby is old enough for flowers, for seeds of its own. Her doctor emphasizes nutrition, suggests she drink six to eight glasses of water every day. She doesn't respond, doesn't tell him how many more she's already drinking. At home, she holds her face under the faucet, her throat pried open to swallow all the water she can. When she stands, her face and neck and shirt are soaked through, but it is not enough. She puts her lips back to the flowing water and drinks as deep as she can, as deep as she knows she must.

Her baby is a stone, and she wonders, How can I love a stone? It is cool and dark, something formed not in an instant—as she always assumed her baby would be—but instead over an age, an epoch. Everything about this feels slower than she'd imagined it would. She pictures her stone skipping across the hidden darkness of a lake, each point of contact a ripple expanding and then disappearing. She practices skipping stones herself while she waits for the baby to come, transforming every ditch and puddle and pond and lake into a microcosm, into a point of departure, a possible place where one day she will have to let go.

Her baby is a thunderstorm, a bundle of negatively and positively charged ions about to interact violently. It is a hurricane or a monsoon or a tsunami, but she doesn't know which, doesn't know how to tell the difference. She feels it churning inside, growing stronger with each revolution. Her levees will not hold. What happens after the baby comes will be different than what happened before. Whole countries she once knew will be swept away, their inhabitants scattered and replaced by new citizens, by other mothers and other children she has not yet met but in whose company she knows she will spend the rest of her life.