How They Were Found (6 page)

He tells himself that it is not the girl he cares about, but the Motor. After she gives birth to his machine, Randall can have her. But not before. Spear is sure that, like Mary, Abigail must be a virgin to bring the Motor to life, and he cannot risk Randall ruining that. He decides that he will take the girl home to live with him, just until summer. She will become part of his household, and he himself will keep her safe. Although he trusts all those he surrounds himself with, it is only himself that he can vouch is above reproach.

Spear is no engineer, but he knows enough to understand that the New Motor is different. Where most machines are built in pieces, one component at a time, the Motor is being built from the inside out. It is being grown, with the sweat and effort of these great Spiritualist men, all excellent workers, excellent minds. Tsesler and Voichenko especially seem given to the task; their ability to translate the complexities of the diagrams and explanations into their own language is almost uncanny. The others work nearly as hard, including Randall. Despite Spear's misgivings about the boy, he knows the young man is as dedicated as any other to the completion of their work. Six days a week, for ten or twelve or fourteen hours, they slave together in the forge-heated shed to fulfill the task handed down to them by the Electricizers. By the time snow covers the hill, the machine has enough moving parts that a once useless flywheel becomes predictive, turning cogs that foretell the other cogs and gears and pulleys not yet known to Spear. The first gliding panel is set in the innermost groove of the table's concentric circles, moved all the way around the Motor once to ensure that it works the way it is intended to. The panel's copper face is inscribed with words that Spear does not know, but which he believes are the long-hidden names of God, revealed here in glory and in grace.

On the day of the fall equinox, the men work and work. When they finish after dark, Spear gathers them all around himself. He is covered in sweat and dirt and grease and grime. They all are, and Spear smiles, prouder than he has ever allowed himself to be.

He looks over his men, and he says, It took a quarter of a million years for God to design our last messiah, and even then, he could only come in our form, created in our image, a fallen man. Our new messiah will take only nine months to build, and when it is done it will show us who our own children will be, what they will become in the new kingdom.

This New Motor, it will be the beginning of a new race, unfallen and perfect, characterized by a steamwork perfection our world is only now capable of creating. God has shown the Electricizers and they have shown me and I have shown you, and now you are making it so.

The New Motor is his task, but Spear knows that there are others working too, all of them assigned their own tasks somewhere out in America. He knows this because even on the nights when the others fail to materialize, Franklin comes and takes Spear from his bed and out into the night. The two men walk the empty streets, Spear shivering in his long wool coat and hat and boots, Franklin unaffected by the cold. The specter tells him of other groups sent to help, of other spirits in need of a medium: the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers, the Elementizers, the Governmentizers, perhaps other groups unfamiliar even to Franklin.

Franklin says, I can't know everything.

Like you, he says, I am merely a vessel.

He puts a cold hand on Spear's shoulder, causing the medium's teeth to chatter together hard, too hard. If the specter doesn't release him soon, Spear worries that he'll break his molars.

A new age is coming, Franklin says. The Garden restored.

He says, Fear not.

He says, Through God, even one such as you might be made ready.

As the Motor grows in complexity, Spear begins to lose his temper more and more often, always at home, always behind closed doors. He tells his wife again and again that Abigail is not to work, that she is not to lift a finger, but more than once he comes home to find the girl helping his wife with her chores.

To his wife, he says, Why is it that you can't listen to even the simplest of my instructions?

Pointing to Abigail, he says, She's pregnant, with the growing king of our new world. Why can't you do what I say, and treat her accordingly?

His wife begins to weep, but her fury is uncooled by the tears streaming down her face. She says, sounding as tired as he's ever heard, She's not pregnant, John. The only reason she's here is that you want her instead of me.

To Abigail, Spear says, Child, return to your room.

He waits until Abigail has left the room before he strikes his wife across the face with the back of his hand, then says, Christ forgive me, but you watch your tongue. You either recognize the glory of God or you do not. Only you can choose which it will be, and in the end, you must choose.

By December, there have been sixty-five revealments, and by the end of January there are thirty more. The New Motor is growing larger, taking up the entire table with its array of sliding panels and connecting tubes and gears. Loose bundles of wires dangle from the construct's innards, waiting for the places where they will connect and give life to extremities that only Spear has seen so far, to other appendages even he can't yet imagine.

This machine, it does not resemble a man, as Spear once thought it would. What's worse, it doesn't resemble anything anyone has seen before, causing the other workers to question him. He does his best to quell their worries, but as the team grows they ask their questions louder and louder, until their concerns leak out of the shed and into the congregation below. The collections that once went to feeding the poor or funding abolitionist trips into the South have for months gone to the Motor, and so the congregation's patience grows thin, especially among those who haven't seen it, who cannot conceive of what it is, what it will be.

Spear counsels patience, counsels faith. From the pulpit, he says, We have been given a great gift, and we must not question it.

But he does. He questions, he doubts. His resolve wavers. He opens his mouth to speak again, but cannot. He hasn't eaten or changed his clothes in days, and has taken to sleeping in the shed beneath the copper reflection of the Motor. He does not go home to the cabin except to fetch Abigail in the mornings and to take her back home at night.

On the next Sabbath, he stumbles at the pulpit, but the Electricizers at his side catch him with their frosty hands and return him to his station.

Spear shivers, wipes the drool off his lip with the back of a shaky hand. He waves his hand, motions for the ushers to pass the collection plate. They hesitate, look to the deacons for confirmation, a gesture not lost on Spear, who knows his authority has been questioned, his future dependent on the successful outcome of his great project.

Spear closes his eyes against his congregation's wavering faith, then says, God blesses you, in this kingdom, and in the one to come. Give freely, for what you have here you will not soon need.

Spear has to stifle a gasp when Maud Trenton comes into his office during the first week of February. She is as pregnant as any woman Spear has ever seen, her belly stressing the seams of her black dress. He can see patches of skin between strained buttons, and momentarily he desires to reach out and touch her stomach, to feel the heat of the baby inside.

Maud sits, her hands and arms wrapped around the round bulk of her belly. She says, I need your help, Reverend.

With quivering lips, she says, I don't know where this baby came from, and I don't know what to do with it.

Spear shudders, trying to imagine who would have impregnated this woman. He realizes it has been weeks since he last saw Maud at services or group meetings. She's been hiding herself away, keeping her shame a secret. The people in the village may not be ready to accept such a thing, but Spear prides himself on his progressive politics, on the radical nature of his insight. He believes a woman should be able to make love to who she wants, that a child can be raised by a village when a father is unavailable. This does not have to be the ruin of this woman, but there must be truth, confession, an accounting.

Spear says, Do you know who the father is?

Maud neither nods nor shakes her head. She makes no motion to the affirmative or the negative. She says, There is no father.

Through the curtain of gray hair falling across her downcast face, she says, I am a virgin.

She looks up and says, I know you know this.

Spear shakes his head. He does not want to believe and so he does not. He says, If you cannot admit your sin, then how can you do penance?

He says, The church can help you, but only if you allow it to. I ask again, Who is the father?

Spear asks and asks, but she refuses to tell the truth, even when he walks around the desk and shakes her by the shoulder. She says nothing, so he sends her away. She will return when she is ready, and when she is ready he will make sure she is taken care of. There is time to save the child, if only she will listen.

At night, Spear wanders the floors of the small cabin, checking and rechecking the doors. He locks Abigail's door himself each evening but often still awakens in the night, sure her door is open wide. He rushes out into the hall only to find it locked, as he left it. These nights, he stands outside her door with his face pressed to the wood, listening to the sounds of her breathing. Sometimes, he dreams he has been inside the room, that he has said or done something improper, only later he can never remember what. More than once, he wakes up in the morning curled in front of her door, like a guard dog or else a penitent, waiting to be forgiven.

The Electricizers fill Spear's bedroom with more specters than ever before. He can see some of the others, the older spirits he long ago intuited, can hear the creaky whisper of their instructions. These are past leaders of men, undead but still burdened by their great designs, and Spear can sense the revealments these older ghosts once loosed from their spectral tongues: their Towers of Babel, their great Arks. His fingers cramp into claws as he struggles to write fast enough to keep up with the hours of instruction he receives, his pen scratching across countless pages. Near dawn, he looks down and for one moment he sees himself not as a man but as one of the Electricizers. His freezing, fading muscles ache with iced lightning, shooting jolts of pain through his joints. Spear understands that Franklin and Jefferson and Murray and the rest are merely the latest in a long line of those chosen to lead in both this life and the next, and Spear wonders if he too is being groomed to continue their great works. He looks at Franklin, whose face is only inches away from his own. He sees himself in the specter's spectacles, sees how wan and wasted he looks.

Spear says, Am I dying?

The ghost shakes his head, suddenly sadder than Spear has ever seen him. Franklin says, There is no longer such a thing as death. Now write.

February and March pass quietly, the work slowing then halting altogether as supplies take longer and longer to reach High Rock through the snow-choked woods. Spear spends the idlest days pacing alone in the snow atop the hill, watching the road from Randolph obsessively. There is so much left to do, and always less time to do it in.

In June, the nine months will be over. The Motor must be ready. God waits for no man, and Spear does not want to disappoint.

Spear spends the short winter days in the shed, checking and rechecking the construction of the Motor, but the long evenings are another matter. Being trapped in the cabin with his wife and children is unbearable, and being trapped there with Abigail is a torture of another kind. From his chair in the sitting room, he finds his eyes drawn to her flat belly, to the lack of sign or signal. From there he wanders to her covered breasts, and then to the lines of pale skin that escape the neckline of her dress, the hems at the wrists of her long sleeves. He watches her while she plays with his own children on the floor, watches for the kindness and grace he expects to find in his New Mary.

Mostly, what he sees is boredom, the same emotion that has overwhelmed him all winter, trapped by snow and waiting for the coming thaw that feels too far off to count on. While they wait, he expects some sign, something to show her development into what she must become. He knows she will not give birth to the Motor, not exactly, but she must give it life somehow.

Spear wishes he could ask the Electricizers for reassurance, but he knows they will not answer. Despite their long-winded exposition on every facet of the Motor's construction, they have been silent on the subject of Abigail since he first plucked her from the flock.

Spear decides nothing. He stops touching his wife, stops holding his children. He tells himself he is too tired, too cold. Food tastes like ash, so he stops eating. The Electricizers keep him up all night with their diagrams and their inscriptions and their persistent pushing for speed, for completion.

Jefferson tells Spear that by the end of the month he will know everything he needs to know to finish the New Motor. The revelation will be complete.

By the end of the month, Spear replies, I will be a ghost. He spits toward the ancient glimmer, sneers.

The specters ignore his doubt. They press him, and when he resists, they press harder, until eventually he goes back to work. He writes the words they speak. He draws the images they describe. He does whatever they ask, but in his worst moments he does it only because he believes that by giving in he might one day reach the moment where they will at last leave him alone.

THE ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SIXTH REVEALMENT

The PSYCHIC BATTERY must be cylindrical in shape, constructed of lead and filled with two channels of liquid, one containing a copper sulfate and the other zinc. Copper wires will be run from the GRAND REVOLVER into each channel, with great care taken to ensure that none of the wires touch each other as they ascend into the NEW MOTOR. There is a danger of electrocution, of acid burns, of the loss of life and the destruction of the machine. From the moment of CONCEPTION to the moment of BIRTH, always the NEW MOTOR has been in danger, and in these stages there is no safety except for the careful, the diligent, the righteous. When the PSYCHIC BATTERY has been successfully installed, the NEW MOTOR will be complete in one part of its nature, as complete as the MEDIUM alone can make it. Men have done their work, and now it is the women's turn.