Gene Doucette: The Spaceship Next Door

“I…”

“Son, I’ve just become convinced I left the gun cabinet in my cabin in Nebraska unlocked. I’m about to drop everything to make some calls before someone gets hurt.”

“Who?”

“Sheriff’s a friend, he has keys and… dammit, look where the beam is.”

Ed did.

“I don’t see anything.”

Morris waved the beam around. “Look at the difference,” he said.

“Okay, there’s a patch, kind of. It’s a little brighter, I guess.”

“That’s right, and it’s not true anywhere else.”

It wasn’t far up the side of the ship, not really. It was at about chest height for an adult male.

“Nobody noticed this before?”

“I think maybe someone did but thought like you did, that it wasn’t anything, just a curiosity of shading or something. Or plant matter got on the ship.”

“Something could have come down with the last snow.”

“Maybe, but doubtful. Snow doesn’t stack up.”

One of the many minor curiosities of the ship was that snow melted off of it. Yet the heat was almost undetectable. It wasn’t so much that the ship generated warmth; it was that the snow failed to cool it.

“So there’s a splotch on the side of the ship.”

“Yeah.”

“Did it turn up because of the first anomaly?”

“Unknown.”

“I’m under-impressed.”

Morris grabbed Ed’s wrist and pulled him four paces closer.

“Look at it again,” Morris said.

Ed realized he wanted to call his mother because she was dying. She hadn’t said so, he had no evidence it was so, but it was as true as anything he’d ever felt. The damn ship wasn’t going anywhere; he could look at it any time. But he had to call her.

He looked.

“Do you see now?” Morris asked.

“I have to make a call.”

“So do I. Do you see?”

What Ed saw looked like a handprint. It contradicted everything they understood about the spaceship, and it was incredibly important, and in that moment he didn’t care even a tiny bit.

“I see it. Now let go of me or my mother is going to die.”

There was an enormous mural on the wall of the library. It greeted all persons upon entry, and was the subject of endless hours of scrutiny among the staff employees and volunteers, and many a patron. It was easily the most dramatic—and certainly largest—piece of art in town, if not the state.

The painting was called Sorrow Fell , and the most tragic thing about it—aside from what was depicted—was that nobody knew the name of the artist. The town commissioned the artwork to commemorate the foundation of the library, which was in itself odd, as there was nothing in the painting to imply that greater knowledge might be found through books. More curious, all of the historical records detailed the commissioning, installation, and aggrandizement of the mural’s creator, but in every last document the name of said creator was either omitted or excised. He or she was only ever referred to as The Artist.

What The Artist painted was the tragic, mundane, and borderline comic founding of Sorrow Falls, which aside from a particularly unusual interpretation of the Bible was an extremely non-literary event.

In the center of the piece was the heroic figure of Josiah Foster Sorrow, depicted not at all accurately. The Josiah of the painting was a strapping, powerful man with an open collar to reveal his impressive chest hair, traveling in a canoe in the most ridiculous way imaginable: standing, one knee up on the edge of the boat, hips squared and pelvic region unquestionably augmented for artistic reasons. It looked vaguely like the pose one might expect of a man on the cover of a paperback romance novel.

The real Josiah Foster Sorrow was a cult leader of sorts. Over three hundred years earlier, Josiah fled what he considered religious intolerance in the colonies, taking along his family and many like-minded religious zealots. It was an inconvenient detail that the intolerance the Sorrowers fled was in regards to his peculiarly unpleasant set of beliefs. Such beliefs involved worshipping a God who told them to ignore property rights, marriage banns, and the social and legal standards surrounding the minimum age of sexual consent.

Like an earlier band of Massachusetts settlers, Josiah had been fleeing religious persecution for a little while, having first self-exiled from the Massachusetts colony for what would later be New Hampshire, then for what would later be Vermont, before heading down-river on the Connecticut, into Western Massachusetts and Native American tribal territory.

The Connecticut River was never one of those rivers that could be traversed at length via canoe. This was a detail lost on Josiah and his people, and made for slow going, as they frequently had to stop, beach themselves, carry their boats downstream, and get back in. It was frustrating, and Josiah’s God was an impatient deity, so one night his God told Josiah to stop stalling and hurry on down to the Promised Land already.

According to at least half of the legends, what happened next was that Josiah and his Sorrowers came upon a large drop in the river, at dusk. When his followers began heading for the shore, as always, their leader excoriated them for their lack of faith and vowed the Lord would protect them from harm if they only stayed in their canoes.

There were doubts, as most of the Sorrowers—while being unswervingly dedicated to their leader—also had a passing familiarity with gravity and its consequences. So they recommended that Josiah go first.

He did, falling roughly twenty feet to his death upon a rock at the base of the falls—Sorrow’s Stone, it was now called—and putting an end to the wanderings of the Sorrowers. For as soon as Josiah perished, the rest of them looked around and concluded that this must surely be the Promised Land they had been told to expect.

They named the place Sorrow Falls, not for the waterfall that claimed Josiah’s life, but because this was the place where Sorrow fell.

That was not precisely what was depicted in the painting.

There was second version of the story, one that saw Josiah not as a determined fanatic who thought he could defy the laws of physics at a very bad moment, but as a peerless leader who was unaccountably distracted at exactly the wrong time.

In the painting, the strong, square chin, and determined blue eyes of Josiah Sorrow were pointed upward, at the sky rather than straight ahead. In his line of sight was a bright streak of light—a sign from the heavens.

Unfortunately, this sign arrived at exactly the wrong time. The river beneath Josiah’s canoe was disappearing over the falls, but as he was looking up he didn’t notice.

The depiction captured, almost comically, the moment just before his death: nearly half of the canoe was pointed over empty space, like something from a cartoon.

It was probably an apocryphal version of events, as the holders of the historical record—the founding Sorrowers—no doubt had cause to re-examine the suicidal last decision of Josiah Sorrow, and perhaps make it come off as less silly and more tragic. No , this version said, there was no talk of God protecting Josiah, it was only that he was leading and became distracted by a light in the sky.

The mural, then, paid respects to both versions. Yes, Josiah can be seen distracted by a light in the sky, but look at him. What an idiot. He doesn’t even have his paddle in the water. Who would go canoeing like that?

Unsurprisingly, after the spaceship landed outside of town, the light in the sky responsible for Josiah Foster Sorrow’s death became a lot more interesting to a lot more people, and the painting in particular ended up gracing the cover of enough magazines to convince the town council to put some money into getting it restored.