Harvest of Changelings (26 page)

“This is the Gospel of the Lord,” Jamey said.

“Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” the congregation answered and in the soft rumble of bodies and fabric on wood, sat down.

“Today,” he began slowly, as he scrutinized the congregation, his gaze roaming from pew to pew, lighting on first one face, then another and another, “today, I want to tell you a story.” After two months, a few of the faces now had names—and a goodly number were familiar. Around a third, barely glimmering, he could see auras: golden, white, blue, green, red, brown, and purple. Faint ripples
of light, flickering, appearing and reappearing, like a candle in a breeze.

Ah, there they were: the golden-eyed boy and his father. Their auras weren't faint or flickering—more like small fires, especially the boy's. White flames burned on the tips of the boy's pointed ears. Jamey carefully ran his fingers through his own dark red hair, lightly tracing his own pointed ears. Then he cleared his throat, shuffled his homily notes, and smiled out at the congregation.

“Today is Michaelmas, the Feast Day of St. Michael. According to the liturgical calendar today is the Feast Day of all the Holy Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Only the fourth, Uriel, is left out—I couldn't find out why when I was looking all this up in the library at State. Probably should have driven over to the Divinity School at Duke. Anyway, by tradition this is St. Michael's Day. Who is he and why does the Church venerate him? What significance does St. Michael have for modern American Catholics in Garner, North Carolina, in the latter days of the twentieth century? In England, this is a day for roast goose. And don't pick any blackberries after Michaelmas Day. Any young animal born on this day is thought to be particularly rambunctious. Kittens are called blackberry kittens and if tortoiseshell, considered lucky. If you wish to have money in your pocket, put three leaves each of blackberry, bergamot, and bistort—I see you shaking your heads, I am not sure what the last two are, either—inside it on Michaelmas Day. Now, how many of you, not counting those who took St. Michael's name when you were confirmed, had any idea, until now, that today was St. Michael's Day, Michaelmas? Come on, raise your hands.”

A scattering of hands rose nervously across the church. The parishioners of St. Mary's weren't used to being quizzed by the priest during the homily. Jamey noticed with no surprise that the golden-eyed boy, Malachi, and his father, raised their hands.

“I thought so.” Jamey glanced quickly at his notes and cleared his throat, wishing he had thought to have a glass of water tucked away in the lectern. “Well, then, who is St. Michael? There is no historical figure anywhere in the Church's long two-thousand-year history that matches the St. Michael of tradition and story. But the Catholic Church believes in angels, and I do, too,” Jamey added. He saw one woman in the back pew stand up, look hard at him and then at her watch, and then left. The auras of a dozen more glowed even brighter. He felt as if he could warm his hands by their fires.

“In Hebrew Michael means
who is like unto God.
In the Book of Daniel, we learn he is one of the chief princes of the heavenly host.
Indeed he is the great prince and the guardian of Israel; he is their patron angel. Michael is also the patron saint of soldiers and knights, and of the Catholic Church herself. Michael is the great captain and the slayer of dragons, according to Revelation 12: 7-9. He is the helper of the Church's armies against the heathen. He is the Prince of Light.”

Jamey paused and shuffled his notes. A couple, three pews from the rear, slipped out the back door, their exit opening and closing a brief box of white light.

“You are, I know, wondering why I am telling you all this in this morning's homily. More than a few of you are trying to look at your watch without anybody seeing you. Yes, this homily is a little longer than what you're used to. But I do have a purpose and it is one that I feel is important, especially today, now, here, in Garner and Raleigh, in North Carolina. I will explain—but let me get back to Michael. In Acts 7:38 there is mention of the tradition that he gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Sinai. When Michael is portrayed in art, he is a young man, strong, in full armor, but barelegged, and wearing sandals. Often as not his sword is drawn and a dragon is prostrate at his feet. But Michael is not just God's chief warrior. There is more.”

Someone cleared his or her throat. Two other people coughed. A woman two pews back from the front sneezed.

“Michael is the patron saint of soldiers. But he is more than that: Michael is an angel considered so powerful that his intercession can rescue a soul from Hell. This is reflected, surprisingly, in the song we all sang at summer camp:
Michael, row the boat ashore,
Michael, the saver of souls. High places are sacred to Michael; there are churches and chapels across Europe built on hilltops consecrated to the saint, the most famous being Mont-St. Michel in France. Any hilltop is sacred to Michael.” Jamey cleared his throat and again wished for water. Nobody was leaving; they were all watching him intently. A few, he was sure, were wondering if this new, young priest had gone over the edge. After all, Garner was a flat, little town, with no hills worthy of the name. The Southeast Regional Branch of the county public library system, which had replaced the old Garner Public Library a few years ago, was built on a slight rise—hardly a hill. St. Mary's was on very flat ground—so flat Jamey had been reminded of the beach.

“So, St. Michael is the warrior-archangel, one of the chief princes of the Heavenly Host. Now, you have some context for Michael, context for what I want to talk about now, what I think is
important to us here at St. Mary's today. Michael is not far from God in Heaven. He knows the secret of the mighty word, by the utterance of which God created heaven and earth. A lot of you are thinking right now: so? Well, we all read the newspapers and watch the news, listen to it on the car radio. Most of us either saw or heard President Bush speak last night. Surely most of you read about his speech in the paper this morning; it was the front-page headline story in the
News and Observer.
How many of us believe what he said was true? Go ahead, raise your hand.”

Jamey waited as a sprinkling of hands raised in the sanctuary.

“I thought so. What did the president say—it's sunspots or atmospheric phenomena, NASA is going to send up a shuttle to investigate? But we know better:
something
out of the ordinary is happening. Things we would normally call impossible, out of fairy tales, have and are happening, and are witnessed by thousands of sober, reliable people. And not just the happy magical things from fairy tales, but the bad, dark things. The New Agers are proclaiming the Age of Aquarius. I don't think so. I think it is this, friends in Christ—that God is changing the pronunciation of the secret word of creation that Michael knows. The world, the universe, is transforming.

“It scares me.

“I know it scares you. I can hear it in your voices in confession; I see it in your faces—even from up here. So, my message for this Sunday morning, this Michaelmas, before we take communion, is to remember God loves you. He sent Jesus who loves you. And because God loves us, we must love one another. Love is, I believe, the single most powerful force in the universe and when we love and accept love, we are the closest to God we will ever be in our lives. Love will get us through these crazy dark-and-light times we are in. It's going to get crazier folks, darker and lighter. But if we love one another, as Christ taught us to, we will survive. Remember the words in the creed we recite every Sunday:

Jamey counted to ten, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. At
least they were listening; some were nodding in agreement; others looking as if he were completely crazy. Maybe he was. But he had told them what they needed to know, given them the armor to protect themselves in the coming craziness. Most of them would get through it in one piece. More or less.

“God from God, Light from Light. Through him
all things
were made. All that is happening now—the banshee wails in the night, the shadows of dragons, the flickerings of light and shadow through which we see no place on this earth—all this comes from God. It is a mystery as to why they come with fear and darkness, but they do. And what isn't from God, the evil, the malevolent, the wicked—we must resist with love, the force, the strength, the power of love. Jesus is this love incarnate; we must remember this. There is no other way. God is changing the pronunciation of the Word. We must remember to call on the saints like Michael to shield us with love, to help us fight the wicked and be who God meant us to be. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

Yesterday went on forever. I should be in bed—getting some sleep before I have to go to work this afternoon, instead of sitting here in front of this computer, babbling on. I envy Malachi tonight—being ten-going-on-eleven, being a boy, no matter how unusual a boy he is. We spent the day with Jack in Charlotte, at Hilda's funeral, got home late last night and after futzing around the house and grazing in the kitchen, he asked me to tell him again Valeria's story.

“Again?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I want to memorize it, okay, Dad?”

“Sure.”

So I told the story again.

“I dreamed about the swimmers, Dad,” Malachi said sleepily, interrupting the story. “They aren't really big frogs, you know.”

“Yeah, but that's how I picture them,” I said and tapped my head. “Anyway, then ... And you're still a pretty good looking boy,” I said at the end, “now go to sleep.”

“Night, Dad.”

 

I watched him as he slept. He looks so small—light and little, like a bird. He's still losing weight. I wish—what do I wish? That he would stay ten forever and that none of this had ever happened—that I
wouldn't have to keep telling him his mother's story, that he was a human boy and not half-Daoine Sidhe? That when I turned off the lights in his bedroom, I wouldn't be able to see light leaking from his fingers, his nose, his ears, his eyes—tiny flecks of light on his eyelashes? Not see the tiny snakes of light twisting through his hair, like tendrils of ghost ivy?

I don't know what I wish except that I could go to sleep as easily as he does, and not pace the house, rearranging magazines, the salt and pepper shakers, the bottles in the medicine cabinet. Or sit down and write everything out, while sipping on Sleepy time tea.

He was worried about me when I drove him to school this morning—that I was too sleepy, that I wouldn't be okay driving home alone. I'll be fine, I told him, you go on. I'll be fine.

So I came home to sit down and write. Taking my thoughts and making them into concrete, tangible words appearing one after the other on a computer screen or a Piece of paper makes them real and manageable. I worry out problems by writing down questions for myself, possible solutions, alternatives. Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that “writing is more than living; it is being conscious of living.”

I believe she's right.

I got up early this morning, before Malachi did, and went to the six o'clock mass at St. Mary's. I liked the walk—few cars, a sky with a few stars left, a fading moon. I felt foolish, though, to be going to early morning mass on a weekday. Most of the people there were little blue-haired old ladies, clutching rosaries. I never went to early mass at St. Anthony's with Father Mark. Emma wasn't a morning person, and after moving to Garner, well, it was just too far to drive into Raleigh.

Jack has asked me why I still keep going to church.

For Malachi, I told him, but he wouldn't have it. “Come on, Ben—it's more than that. Why don't you convert to Wicca, then, or whatever faith Valeria professed?”

“Because Val said they were all the same.”

“Yeah, right.”

He asked me again, yesterday, at Hilda's funeral. And here I am, Tuesday morning, trying to come up with a good answer. They are all the same, but there is more to it than that.

I was raised a Presbyterian in a little country Orange County church whose roots go back over two hundred and fifty years to a group of Scotch-Irish settlers coming down from Pennsylvania looking for farmland in the Carolinas. The Scotch-Irish are from Ulster and were supposed to be pretty hardcore Presbyterian—I imagine my Presbyterian forebears spinned in their graves when I was confirmed a Catholic.

I started attending Catholic
confirmation
classes (Jack always said RCIA: Rite
of Christian
Initiation
of
Adults,
sounded like joining some fraternity or lodge, where you had to eat raw eggs or
something
t
o be initiated. So speaks the confirmed
agnostic-and
I told him it wasn't raw eggs: it was the fresh blood
of
a
chicken)
just to make Emma and her parents happy. But
after
we were married, and I was attending church regularly, I found the mass to be
poetry,
rich,
tex -
tured, symbolic poetry that struck a chord in my soul that the Presbyterian services of my childhood never did. Religion is, after all, imagination before it is anything else: to believe in God, you first have
to be able to imagine the concept of a god or gods, something greater and larger than yourself. Instead of just pleasing Emma, the faith journey became mine and to my surprise, I stuck with RCIA and on Easter a year after we were married, I was confirmed and took my first communion as a Catholic.

And I stayed Catholic, more or less, after she died, because of the poetry.

So, this morning I went to the 6 A.M. mass. I wanted to talk with Father Jamey, especially after his Sunday homily. He knows. He looks at Malachi and sees more than his yellow eyes. He sees the pointed ears and the glow in the eyes, the sometimes too-visible shifting lights of Malachi's aura. And that all that is happening is not, as President Bush tried to explain, a result of sunspots, disturbances in the ionosphere-no, not causes, symptoms.

Okay, okay, I know the president is trying to calm and reassure everybody, take away some of the fear I see in almost everybody's eyes. Just Saturday, at the library, Mrs. Carmichael told me she sleeps with all her lights on: “I don't know, Ben, but the lights do keep away the dark and, well, things have just been so strange at night lately. Every - body on my street keep their lights on-like Christmas. It is more than just being scared of the dark; this dark is different. I know that sounds crazy, but the dark does seem, well, alive and purposeful.”

Alive and purposeful? Yes, with the Fomorii and their minions.

I lit a candle this morning and then knelt in a pew near the front. I Prayed for strength and wisdom and love and that my son be safe and that he live. And I felt guilty: are my prayers selfish, do I say the same things all the time, am I—Father Jamey talked about love being the force we need to get us through, to sustain us for what is coming. And what is that? I have to get Malachi to Faerie before he dies and I still don't know how to and where to go—when, Halloween, I guess, Samhain. Is it the call to come home, to return to Faerie that is causing all the weird stuff? It has to be.

I talked to Father Jamey
after
mass. He came by to
visit after
I got back from taking Malachi to school. He seemed to know the wards Valeria
left
around the house were there. He pushed to enter the house, paused, as
if
waiting for the magic to recognize him, and then,
a
sudden
pop,
and he was in.

Father Jamey sat at the kitchen table as I poured coffee, and then put milk on the table, spoons, checked the sugar bowl to see
if it
was full.

“So, Ben, what do you want to talk with me about?”

“Your Sunday homily, I guess, the
craziness,
all the
strange things,” I said as I sat down across from him and spooned in sugar and then milk.

“Tell me what you know—like why is there an invisible electrical fence around your house. The Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons aren't that bad in this neighborhood, are they?”

“There are only a handful of people who can feel that fence,” I said slowly and looked at the priest for a long moment, long enough for the lights in the kitchen to shift and change color. His dark red hair grew suddenly brighter and the freckles on his face glowed. His eyes—I am sure they were blue. Now, they were a silvery-grey, like pol - ished pewter. I would have guessed Father Jamey Applewhite to be about my age, late thirties, but now, in this new and unexpected light, he was no age, like Valeria, ancient young Valeria, who had no age. Father Jamey's aura shimmered around him, a pale blue shot through with gold. His ears poked out of his hair.

“You're one of them, too; you're a changeling,” I said slowly. “You're the first adult I've met—and there haven't been any JW's or Mormons about in a long time.”

Father Jamey sipped his coffee and looked back and slowly smiled, “Of course you would be able to see past the fairy glamour, wouldn't you? It started back the first of May—”

“Beltaine,” I said.

“Yes, and that was about the time the Diocese told me I was coming to St. Mary's here. But I started having dreams about Malachi before that—and three other children, and the dark ones,” Father Jamey said. “Got any more coffee?”

“Some instant dessert flavored stuff, Cafe Vienna, Italian Cap - puccino-I' ll get it—I can nuke it in the microwave. Which flavor?”

“The Vienna. You weren't raised Catholic, were you?” he asked as I first spooned in the coffee, added water, and set the microwave for two minutes, ten seconds.

“No, how can you tell?”

“Oh, you don't have that
pre-Vatican II
parochial school look about you. No scars on your hands from those
nuns' sharp
rulers. Any - way, by the time I came here, I was seeing auras; I could
levitate
—
not much
—
and
move things. You know, you are the first person I've been able to tell all this.”

The plastic milk jug on the table rose up and floated over to Father Jamey's hand. The microwave chimed and the door opened and the cup floated over to land in front
of the priest.

“I knew when I met you and your son that you both knew, but I thought maybe it would be better
if you
sought me out. Protect your
privacy—not expose you, you know. Ben, I don't know the purpose of our coming together here, but we are supposed to; I feel sure of that. My fate and yours and your son's and his three friends are tied together in all this.”

“But, Father,” I asked, wanting this priest, this priest-who-looked-too-young, to give me an answer that would explain everything. “This can't be just about my son. Yes, he is entering puberty and I have to get him to Faerie; I know that. But he is only one half-fairy child. Your mother isn't a fairy—these three other kids—they're human. I saw the ghost of a unicorn running down Vandora Springs Road last night. You are all being called, you are all becoming magical—why?” And I told him everything: Valeria, the dreams, the light-sicknesses, the Fomorii, everything I could think of.

Give me an answer. You have to know. You're a priest.

“You and James Thurber?” he said and laughed. I laughed, too. “It's the call from Faerie all right—and from everything you are telling me, everything I have seen, what people are talking about—here, here (he slapped the kitchen table) is a locus. Malachi is like, a magnet, and the center of a huge rippling pool—which metaphor is better, I don't know. Fairyness, sexuality, puberty, not-quite human hormones, the call: powerful stuff to be in one place. But I don't know why I am being called—or even if I am. I haven't had those dreams like Malachi; I am just changing. Maybe it's because of the story in Gen - esis, what happened right before the Flood. And I don't think we are really becoming magical—I mean, I can't work spells. I don't even know any. Rather, it's as if our bodies are waking up to what they are meant to do. Witches are different. They can manipulate the unseen forces—God, that sounds corny—the Force? They are learning another language; we are becoming that language.”

I nodded my head. “Malachi tried to explain all that to me, too.”

“Genesis 6, verses 2 and 4
: The sons of God seeing the daughters of men, that they were fair, took to themselves wives of all which
they chose. Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men, men of renown.
The story is in all the mythologies: humans bearing the children of the gods. Hercules, Perseus, Aeneas,” he said, and then raised his hand and his cup floated over to the pot and hovered as the pot poured him another cup. Then the cup sailed back to the
priest's
hand
.
“I've
been
practicing.
There have been fairies mixing in the human gene pool since forever, Ben.”

“Valeria
told me that Faerie-folk had been coming
here
for
centuries. Now they need their descendants back—all of them, it seems.”

“No, not all. Like I said: I haven't been called. I am to remain here. The crossing is soon, though, and the dark ones will do anything to stop it.”

I shuddered. “Have you seen the Fomorii?”