Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

The bonfire started to die.

RuthClaire said, “We’ve got to build it up again,” pulled herself to her feet, and trudged up the sand toward the cottage. Halfway there, she turned and beckoned to us with a tipsy wave. “C’mon, you guise! He’p me get some stuff fer th’ fire!” Adam, Caroline, and I struggled up and followed her on her drunken anabasis.

Over the next hour or so, we hauled from their storage niches inside the cottage all the paintings in RuthClaire’s series Souls . Then we tossed each canvas, whether loose or affixed to a stretching frame, right into the crackling pyre. They burned well. In fact, in the fire they had the kind of stunning luminous beauty that they’d had for me on only one other occasion—a memorable occasion in the upstairs studio at Paradise Farm. Soon, though, they scrolled and blackened and turned to oozy char. It amazed me that we were abetting RuthClaire in this activity—Adam as eagerly as anyone else—and yet I asked no questions until we’d flung the last painting in.

“You destroyed them because they weren’t popular, is that it?”

RuthClaire straightened, as best she could. “It was either them or my porcelain plates. Porcelain won’t burn.” She laughed so hard she had to grab Caroline for support, and, again, they shared a sisterly hilarity with a rationale impenetrable to male intellects. Adam and I had no choice but to wait them out. Finally, still leaning on each other, they regained a parody of uprightness.

“The concept was all wrong,” RuthClaire said, swaying a little. “In spite of what the hot-shot critics said, I did ’em okay. I mean, I executed ’em okay. But a soul’s not a soul’s not a soul.”

“Who said that?” Caroline asked.

“Gertrude Steinem,” RuthClaire said, and they both guffawed. Then RuthClaire waved her hand and said, “What I mean is, the pastels were to show the insubstantiality, the immaterialness, of souls—but souls are living bodies, and so my stupid concept is all wrong. My stupid paintings never lived except when the light hit ’em just right, and they looked better burning than they ever did in the morgue of my studio gallery. I had to get rid of ’em, I have to start over, thash— that’s —all there is to it.”

“Adam liked them,” I said.

RuthClaire broke free of Caroline, tottered over to Adam, and put her arm through his. “Adam’s my hushbin, Paul.” He grinned, and the bonfire illuminated his teeth as if they were a bracelet of ancient ivory charms.

Still later, a little more sober, RuthClaire fetched the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes to the beach and asked me to open it. I was T. P.’s godfather, after all, and the honor of scattering his ashes on Caicos Bay was rightly mine. If it weren’t rightly mine—by the standards of Emily Post or proper cremation etiquette—well, she and Adam had decided to countermand those standards with an appeal to simple sentiment. I took the urn to my chest with one arm and tried to unstopper it. Nothing I did budged its form-fitting lid, though, and I feared breaking either the lid or the urn itself.

“My hero,” Caroline said. She took the urn, set it on the sand, squatted next to it, fiddled with it for forty seconds, and successfully unscrewed the fire-baked clay stopper. Then she stood and placed the urn back into my arms. I accepted it, smelling sea and ash and particulate spirit.

“Go on,” RuthClaire said.

So with the urn in my arms the way small children sometimes carry a rubber boot into the water to give them both ballast and a fragile sense of security, I carried Tiny Paul into the shallows of Caicos Bay. Like his father, he was home. Without looking back at the people who had sent me, I sowed the murdered child’s ashes on the murmuring inlet. Those that stuck to my palm I washed away in the gentle lapping of the evening tide. They weren’t inconsequential, I told myself, and they weren’t lost: They were afloat in the consciousness of God.

And I tried like crazy to believe it.

Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel No Enemy But Time , the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel Unicorn Mountain , the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective , edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies Light Years and Dark , three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ , and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human . Soon to appear is his novel for young persons, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls , dedicated to the Bishops’ exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, a retired elementary school counselor who is now an avid gardener and yoga practitioner. They share a house with far, far too many books.

A Fairwood Press Book

September 2013

Copyright © 1985 Michael Bishop

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Fairwood Press

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Cover illustration & design by

Paul Swenson

Book design by

Patrick Swenson

First published in the United States of America by Arbor House Publishing Company in July 1985,

an imprint of Grafton Books,

a division of the Collins Publishing Group in November 1987.

ISBN13: 978-1-933846-39-2

First Fairwood Press Edition: September 2013

Printed in the United States of America

eISBN: 978-1-62579-328-7

Electronic version by Baen Books