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queenlucythevaliant · 3 years

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Lucy Pevensie, Soprano 1

The choir loft was the loveliest place in the whole church, Lucy thought. From its high vantage, she could see the whole congregation spread out before her. She could hear the music ringing in the cupula, a fullness of sound that one simply couldn’t appreciate from the pews.

When she’d first made inquiries about joining the church choir, the director had asked her which part she sang. “Soprano,” Lucy had replied. Then, with a little smile. “My first teacher was a Lark, you know.”

(She tried not to make a habit of mentioning such things around the uninitiated. It only served to confuse them, and at any rate it was hardly their fault that they hadn’t been to Narnia. Still, when she was at her happiest, sometimes she couldn’t help herself. It had gained her a reputation as a bit of an odd duck, but Lucy didn’t let it trouble her much.)

To his credit, the director only raised his eyebrows in response to Lucy’s odd comment. “A lark? Well, in that case, it had better be first soprano. We can always move you down to second if it turns out to be too high for you.”

As it turned out, first soprano suited Lucy quite well. There was something about sustaining a high D that made you feel wide awake and bubbly. It was like riding very fast on a charger into battle, or standing at the prow of a ship sailing into the sunrise. Lucy wouldn’t give it up for the world.

Unfortunately, her section leader was rather less than impressed with Lucy’s sightreading. Lucy had a vague recollection that she had once been able to read Narnian music and was fairly sure that if she had the score to a tree-ish opera before her she would suddenly remember again. However, as it was, Lucy’s understanding of English music theory was a cobbled-together thing that occasionally failed her. When she stumbled over difficult passages during rehearsal, Lucy breathed deep and imagined herself standing among rows of dryads, singing their wild and leafy hymns under starlight. She wasn’t certain, but it seemed to help.

There was a kind of industrious magic to choir rehearsal. Most weeks, the choir accompanied the congregation through six hymns and sang an offertory on its own. “It’s important,” the director would say, “to spend our rehearsals working towards technical excellence. During the service, we want to be so well-rehearsed that we can focus on worship without having to worry about our sound.” So, when the choir met on Tuesday nights to rehearse for the week, it was a flurry of pencils in scores and running difficult passages until they were perfect. By the end of rehearsal, the week’s hymns rang through the sanctuary in crisp harmony. They filled the space, pulsating, as though the music had its own heartbeat. It made Lucy’s chest ache in a way she could never quite put into words.

The best weeks were those when they sang new music. The hymnal had more than eight-hundred pages, after all. Lucy wasn’t sure if anyone could ever learn them all.

The second-best were the weeks that they sang Lucy’s favorites. Several months into her choir tenure, Susan picked her up from rehearsal for dinner and Lucy gave her a piece of notebook paper with Hymns for my funeral written neatly across the top.

Susan frowned as she scanned the page.

--O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

--Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

--Crown Him with Many Crowns

--How Great Thou Art

--He Who Would Valiant Be

“Isn’t this a little macabre?” Susan asked.

“I don’t think so. I only mean that they’re my favorites.”

Susan didn’t answer, but she folded up the list and put in in her pocketbook. She never lost it.

At Christmas, the church choir always sang Handel’s Messiah. For Lucy, it was something of a revelation; a kind of Christmas joy that harkened back to snowmelt and spring and Father Christmas with fire-flower cordial. The gentle, falling opening melody of “Comfort Ye” captivated her from its first notes. “And The Glory Of The Lord” swept her into a world of divine promises and light coming into the world, so bright and golden that she could almost smell the fierce gold of Aslan’s mane. “Rejoice Greatly” made her want to get up and dance (she did once, and the director didn’t even seem to mind, although her section leader glared at her). The sheer ebullience of the Hallelujah chorus simply made her weep.

After she performed The Messiah, its music ran through her head for months. In February, she went with Edmund for a drive in the country and hummed “Unto Us A Child Is Born” until he threatened her with violence.

“I can take whatever fight you give me,” said Lucy, raising her chin.

“Whatever you say, Lu,” Edmund replied.

Singing in a choir was different, so different, from singing on one’s own, or even as part of a congregation. “Did you know that when a choir sings together, all the members’ heartbeats become synchronized?” Lucy asked Peter once. (He didn’t, but he didn’t seem terribly surprised by the factoid.) Singing hymns to God in a choir was still more profound. In a church choir, the singer becomes a small part of a whole organism, reaching heavenward with one voice and two lungs and one pair of hands. (Or were they wings?) It was the purest expression Lucy knew of the longing she felt to be in the presence of God. Come into his presence and sing. Sing together. Make something more beautiful than the sum of its parts and direct it heavenward with all your heart.

When Lucy lifted up her voice each Sunday, it felt the way running to Aslan once had. The fullness of sound enveloped her, and it was almost like the Lion’s mane.

#i spent almost an hour editing this and then realized that i liked the original draft better #seriously though church choir lucy is one of my most treasured headcanons #she's exactly the type #choir is simply the best and that's that #narnia #dear darling heart-daughter of Aslan #pontifications and creations #Leah stories

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aprillikesthings · 4 years

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Thoughts on praying. (Well, actually; on a lot of subjects, that’s just one of them, lol)

(behind a readmore for ppl who’d prefer to skip this kind of thing)

Praying is a weird thing, for me.

The fact is--I’m coming back to some kind of faith after...hm. Fourteen years of atheism? I missed religion and especially ritual, and would openly admit that in conversation if it came up. I was, in fact, a practicing Wiccan for a good year or two after realizing I didn’t believe in any kind of divinity anymore. I only left my coven after it became less important to me and I kept skipping rituals in favor of things like group bicycle rides (the drunken party kind, at night with loud music).

I started going to church again because I missed singing Christmas music. But I went to a “liturgical” church because I knew I wanted something ritual-heavy; old-fashioned in form but liberal in spirit. (An ELCA church would probably have been just as good; but I didn’t know about them--just that I couldn’t do a Catholic church and Episcopal was the closest thing I knew of that was affirming of LGBT people.)

And here I go bumping up against this again--this church fits me so well, the people in it are so good, the priest is fantastic; I keep finding out she’s friends with liberal Christian authors like Nadia Bolz-Weber and Rachel Held Evans--and it feels like fate. I mean, the first time I walked up to the building, I was greeted by a rainbow flag with parts of my fave Bible verse on it. (It’s on our nametags, too.) That might as well have been a flag saying “Hey April, this is the place for you.”

But do I believe in fate? Or destiny, or my life being guided by god? I don’t know. I still think the idea is hard to believe when so many people’s lives are shit through no fault of their own.

Anyway: prayer.

When I pray, who the fuck am I even talking to? I sometimes do feel like someone is listening. But so many people have prayed over the years and not felt like anyone heard them; so many people have poured out their hearts to god and gotten jack squat in response. It feels incredibly presumptuous to think Jesus is listening to me and not them.

But I do it anyway.

As I’ve mentioned, the Episcopal church is a liturgical one; they’re big on things like set prayer formats. The Book of Common Prayer (BCP, which I still sometimes misread as “birth control pills”), in some version or another, unites the entire Anglican Communion and is only changed very slowly over many years of arguing; some of the prayers in it have barely changed since the 1500′s. There’s a little wiggle room for each congregation, but step into any Episcopal church in the United States and the basic structure will be the same between them every Sunday: the readings from the lectionary, chanting a psalm, passing the peace, the Eucharist--there’s only a few versions of the Eucharist given in the BCP.

And I do like the set prayers. As I’ve mentioned, sometimes the collect for a given day feels really apropos. Sometimes the ones we do in church feel aimed directly at my own heart, and there I am feeling strangely exposed by words hundreds of thousands of people will be saying that same morning.

But I’ve also started, in my own uneven way, to do personal prayer. I’ve leaned heavily on Nicole Cliff’s essay called How I Pray that she wrote for The Toast (RIP), not long after her conversion. Her daily prayer comes down to (my own summation):

1. A rote prayer such as Our Father to separate this time from the rest of the day 2. Fearless moral inventory! What could I have done better? Where did I fuck up? (For Nicole this includes sometimes stopping prayer to go and apologize.) 3. Gratitude! 4. Ask for things I want 5. Pray for other people

And as Nicole points out, you don’t have to believe in anything at all for this kind of private reflection to be useful. Many books have been written about daily gratitude practice, for instance. She noted that taking the time to be grateful for her husband every day has improved her relationship with him, and that makes sense.

Nicole says her fave part, by far, is praying for other people; and honestly? That’s my fave thing as well. I did not expect that. And while I do keep a running list (in a private just-me discord server), frequently edited, of people I’m praying for on the regular so I don’t forget; I find myself doing it all the time at random during the day. I will see someone’s post on twitter talking about something hard in their life, and I’ll pray for them. A coworker will mention that they’re having trouble finding stable housing, and I’ll pray for them.

(To my eternal amusement--when I pray for people I know through fandom, I usually end up using their fandom name, not their real one; even if I know it! I figure God knows who I mean.)

They’re usually not eloquent prayers. Sometimes it’s more of a feeling than words--a weird fuzzy ball of compassion that grows and moves through me. Sometimes it feels like I’m a toddler tugging on God’s sleeve to get their attention and then wordlessly pointing at someone. Look, look! This person needs you.

And sometimes I find it difficult to pray to big-G God outside of the set prayers. Sometimes I can only do it if I’m praying to Mary. (Episcopal opinions on Mary devotion vary a great deal; from folks who pray the Rosary, to folks who think it’s Papist Bullshit.) Mary is easier. And she can pass things along. Praying to Jesus still feels intimidating to me sometimes, so I talk to his mom instead. I feel like I can be less formal with her.

I’m not going to claim this is making me an amazing person. But I do think that, whether or not anyone or anything is listening, taking a few seconds to pay attention and actively feel compassion towards other people is helping me be kinder. Sometimes. I just started, y’know, give me time.

#my life #anne lamott has a book (that I haven't read yet but it's on the list lol)#that says all prayer is some variation on three things: Help! Thanks! and Wow!#and tbh she's right

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plumandfinch · 6 years

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Just Enough the Same

Wishing a Very Merry Steggy-mas to my Steggy Secret Santa, @evilythedwarf - hope the holiday season is treating you well!

In an instant, the room falls silent.

“Margaret, I will tell you for the last time, girls may not play the Wise Men. You and Helen will go and collect your -” this was punctuated with a disdainful snort, “- angel wings from Mrs. Taylor or you may go home and not return.”

Terrible Marjorie Johnson, cast inexplicably as the Head Angel, titters into her sleeve as Peggy’s hands clench and the heat rises into her cheeks.

“But Mrs. Davies, we’ve already found Helen a robe that fits her and I brought my own crown-”

And that was how Peggy found herself standing slightly sorrowfully between her mother and father, catching every so often Helen’s quiet sniffles from several pews away. She didn’t mind it, if she was being honest with herself. It was much better to be sneaked peppermints by Dad then to spend the night being bossed about by Marjorie Johnson. And out here, when everyone’s hymnals creaked open, she was surrounded by sound. Mum’s light but passable soprano, Dad’s plodding baritone, Mr. Pargetter in the row right behind them gallantly and enthusiastically barking out the bass line.

During the pageant itself Michael winks boldly at her from his place among the other shepherds (“Even I didn’t get to be a Wise Man, Peg.” he says later to further mollify her) and Marjorie trips over her own robe, blushing furiously. Peggy’s sure it isn’t Christian to sigh so loudly and happily but she wonders if perhaps the Good Lord wouldn’t mind so much if He remembered what Marjorie Johnson was really and truly like.

They get passed the small, white candles for the final hymn and the church goes dark but for the flickering points of flame. This is usually her favorite part of standing in the front as part of the angels, looking out into all that light. But hearing the voices around her is comforting in a way she cannot yet name. As the congregation wends its way through the verses, they get quieter and some voices drop away. She’s surprised to see a tear rolling down Dad’s face and to feel Mr Pargetter shaking the back of their pew. She had overheard Mum and Dad whisper once about Mr. Pargetter’s time during the War. “Ypres”, Dad had said, “he was there for the Christmas truce,” and she had dragged the almanac from the bookshelf to find out where that was. She hadn’t asked any questions after that.

“Are you sure, Ma? It’s really cold tonight and your cough…”

It’s something that they do not discuss. And it turns out tonight is no exception. Ma raises her eyebrow and winds her biggest scarf around her neck.

“Well, if it’s so cold then we best bundle up. And let’s get a move on. Father O’Leary won’t appreciate if we’re late. It’s Christmas Eve, young man, and on Christmas Eve, we go to church.”

The street is awash with lights, sounds, and running children even though the hour is late. The Schneiders in the next building are lighting five candles in their window as the Rogerses walk by. When they reach the church it is warm and full and they slide into seats in the pew with the Barnes clan.

“It’s James’ first Christmas Eve Mass as an acolyte,” Winifred whispers to Ma as they get settled.

“I’ll say some extra prayers.”

Bucky nudges him as he processes by, accompanied by a bawdy wink, which makes the candle in his processional candle holder wobble. Winifred hisses and he can feel Ma’s shoulder’s shake. She leans down to whisper in his ear. “You could be an acolyte next year.”

“Nah, I like being out here with you.”

There is a beat as the congregation swings into the first verse of the processional. Steve sings along quietly. Ma doesn’t sing anymore but she wraps her arm around his shoulders and taps the beat lightly against his sweater.

There is a gasp from further down the pew and he looks up just in time to watch Father Doyle, the more spry of their two priests, extinguish a small fire near the high altar and very near a bashful looking Bucky. He can really feel Ma laugh now and he laughs too. Even Mrs. Barnes starts to laugh, once the air of urgency has died down and that’s all it takes for the whole pew to giggle silently almost the entire service.

It’s after midnight when Bucky gets cuffed on the back of the head by his father as they scramble into coats, scarves, and hats and and after a flurry of hugs and handshakes, step out into the night.

She thinks it is the most brusque tone she has ever heard Dugan use.

“I said shut it off.”

A private rushes to switch off the small transistor radio that had been quietly playing in the corner of the command tent.

Peggy catches his eye and raises a well-manicured eyebrow.

“Everything alright, Dugan?”

“Just fine, Carter, I’m fine. We’re out here in this freezing muck and the damn Germans keep shootin’ at us. And I sure as hell don’t need to be hearing that crooner, Crosby, while we’re out here in this wasteland. Also, it’s too damn loud, Private,” he all but growls.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, as long as everything’s fine.”

Dugan runs his hands over his face, wearily. “I didn’t sign up for this to have a good time. It’s just been a long war, Peg.”

“Why don’t you go grab a cup of coffee and we’ll continue this later.”

The tent now silent, Peggy rubs her numb hands together. It is indeed freezing and damp and Dugan is not the only one who is miserable. Their mission was supposed to be a quick one, before they were back to London to begin work on the next big offensive. She sighs, quite loudly in the quiet, and closes her eyes for a moment. Phillips had trusted her with this mission but absolutely not one piece of it was going to plan. They would be lucky if they got back to England by the spring thaw.

And it was almost Christmas, she admits very quietly to herself, as the distant rumble of mortar fire starts up again, and Steve was back in London. That may have been the worst bit of all.

Hearing Dugan’s voice along with Monty and Bucky’s coming nearer the tent, she squares her shoulders and reaches into her knapsack for her field notebook. As she pulls it out a piece of paper flutters out onto the tabletop. She’s still staring at the finely detailed drawing of the team sitting around a campfire, her own face the centerpoint of the picture, each of them seeming to glow in the light, when the boys tromp back into the tent. Bucky catches her eye with a lopsided smile as he nods knowingly toward the paper in her hands and she feels her cheeks color.

She looks back at the drawing before tucking it away and feels a little warmer then, smiling at the memory of hiding a small surprise for Steve in his compass before they left for France.

In the end, they choose the Presbyterians. The huge wreaths on the stately red front doors and the Sunday School kids who made Peggy laugh long and loudly when they went to choose the scraggly Christmas tree from the fundraising sale that now stands, tottering, in their living room seals the deal.

It’s cold and it snowed a week ago. The ancient radiators in their apartment knock and hiss and Peggy grumbles that she has dried out. Steve makes a note to add hand cream to her stocking.

On the night they have to call four diners before they find one that’s still open and have breakfast and strong coffee before they climb back into the car and drive to the church with red doors, cheery wreaths, and kind young people.

They had agreed one night laying on the couch wrapped around each other that this, this second chance, was more than they could have ever asked for but that there were moments when it was too much, too overwhelming. It would happen suddenly, to one or the other, and at the end of November, Steve had found Peggy standing in the Christmas section, nothing in her basket but with a wide-eyed, blank stare that he recognized. He steered her back home and made tea and it was then they agreed they would keep it simple, their first Christmas together again.

So they go to the Presbyterians and it is just enough the same and just enough different to match this new future that they are in together. The candles get passed around for the last hymn that gets quieter as each verse goes by and when Peggy stops singing, he loops his arm around her and they let the music be around them.

It is snowing again when the congregation spills out onto the sidewalk and they walk back to the car in silence, hand-in-hand, listening to the calls of “Merry Christmas” ringing through the night.

#steggysecretsanta #steggy #allied forces #peggy carter #steve rogers

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bligh-lynch · 4 years

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And It Came To Pass In Those Days

23d December 1995, Lynch Mountain, Tempest, West Virginia For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. _________ Carl Sagan, Contact

Throughout his life, Pappy was known by many names, but it was one Christmas Eve that he truly felt he earned the only one that really counted.

He began as Gustavus Simeon Lynch, but was very soon Gus. His birthname was too grandiose an appellation - it was given to him in gratitude by his father, Simeon, for Gustavus Olafsen, a Minnesotan of Swedish extraction who saved Simeon's life from the debacle onboard the USS San Diego during the Great War. But it proved too highfalutin for the boy who grew into a man.

That boy, Gus, was too often a cutup who disobeyed his Pa and had his hide tanned more times than he could count. He and his delinquent older cousin, Allen, would get drunk on badly-made shine out in the woods - they would play music together under the white oak on the other slope of the low mountain that belonged to their family, and Allen would tell him, hitting his fiddle with his bow gently to make a singular dulcet tone, Gus strumming his banjo to accompany, the old family legend that their ancestor, Patrick Lynch, had planted the great druid as but an acorn to mark his property when he came over from Ireland. Twice, Allen had kissed him passionately when they were both drunk - love, love, careless love - as Sodomites would, making him promise to never tell a soul, and though later in life Gus became concerned with both drink and sin, when he remembered those Summer afternoons underneath the mighty boughs of his family oak with his cousin, his first friend, his first love, all he could do was blush, and sigh, sad for bygone days. Years later, Gus heard that Allen, who married a girl he didn't love and fathered a child who grew up in the family as Cousin Bobby he didn't want, ended up going crazy and ripping out his own teeth, an eerie repeat of Gus' own father losing his teeth at a young age also. Hoping to be better than a backwoods moonshiner who did furtive and sinful things, the boy, Gus, became a man, with a new name to match: Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Company E, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. He and his boyhood friend from Quinwood, Ralph Pomeroy, were shipped off during the Korean Conflict, where they stuck together because their fellows mocked their thick accents and yokel way - slights that he, Gus, never forgot or forgave. But, soon enough, there was that hopeless situation at a place that history would remember as Triangle Hill - Gus was one of the key witnesses to Ralph Pomeroy's dauntless actions that led his friend to be awarded, posthumously, the Medal of Honor. Then and there - seeing Ralph E. Pomeroy dedicate himself to something so completely larger than himself - Gus determined that he, too, would dedicate himself to something, and he fell on his knees, beseeching the sky above him, to say that he would devote his life to God. Soon, though he wouldn't care much for it, he became Corporal Gus S. Lynch, Silver Star Medal, but he scarcely remembered those October days in 1952 - his bright blue eyes, remarked on by his superior officers, always blurred by the tears as only men put through that awful fire can understand, blinded by dust and smoke...as though possessed, he dragged what injured he could, the same men who mocked him for being a hillbilly and who would pointedly ask if he was born in a coalmine or if he wore shoes but whom he swore to protect nonetheless, back to the medic tent, again and again and again, no man left behind. There were gruesome spectacles that would make any man doubt the sanity of the world, and still a lesser man repulsed by humans for the rest of his life, but Gus was swallowed in humility by his friend's actions and he wanted to somehow be brave himself - not for himself, but for the spirit he saw Ralph Pomeroy summon. And for these courageous actions - that he never, not once, felt courageous for - he had a Silver Star pinned to his breast by General van Fleet. When he returned home, honorably discharged back to West Virginia and back to the mountains, he wanted to make good on the promise he had made to the Almighty for saving him in Korea, and so he took the G.I. Bill money and crossed the border to Virginia to attend Bluefield College, where he read the Theology he would need to preach the Good Word and save souls for the Lord. In time he graduated, and he took still yet another name: Reverend Gus Lynch - he grew the thick, handsome chinstrap beard he would wear for the rest of his life, and, taking inspiration from the travelling preachers that comprised many of his proud ancestors, he rambled up and down the Appalachians in his big white Surburban, praising Jesus and baptizing the anointed, down to the river to pray, studying on that Good Old Way. Two fateful things happened as he journeyed from place to place, filling the spiritual needs of the wayward. The first was in Pennsylvania and not too long after New York, because they happened so close together. There, the people gave him names too, but this time they were bigoted slurs: redneck and hillbilly and inbred, they mocked his accent and his manners and his earnestness, so that Gus found himself rather like Jonah, wishing that these Yankees, like Nineveh, would perish rather than find salvation. He never forgot how those prejudiced Northerners treated him, treated him different, simply because of who he was and where he was born - he had met kind Negros, strong in the Lord and the love of their families, down in the Carolinas, and he knew they had it far worse than he did, but that made him all the more bitter, how man could treat his fellow man, regardless of how he spoke the English tongue, or even the color of his own skin. This led to the second event: one night at a revival in Summersville, having returned to West Virginia feeling he should go back to put down roots in Tempest - soured forever on the idea of rambling after his experiences up North - he met a beautiful little slip of a girl, dark-headed with soft grey eyes, who had a ready and sarcastic wit. Her name was Iris - Iris McComas, named for where her people had settled in that tiny coal town in McDowell County, many, many years ago. She was the prettiest thing in the room, with the purple-and-gold silk corsage she wore of her namesake, an iris...Gus' eyes followed her everywhere, finally, he got up the nerve, and he asked her to dance, and soon they got to talking. "Ye were in Korea?" asked she.

"I were," answered he. "Served with Ralph Pomeroy."

"Oh my, he was a hero."

"He was."

"If the army had more Pomeroys we'd've won that war."

Gus' expression turned serious. "We did have an army of Pomeroys - but y'only hear bout the famous ones."

"What a sad thing ta say - are ye a sad man, Mr. Lynch?"

"When the occasion calls fer it, my dear."

"My dear?" She gasped, pretending to be offended. "How forward!"

"Well then what would ya like me to call ye?" He gave that famous smirk, a crooked half-smile that many people knew him by. "My doe?" She burst out laughing. "Sly, too! My word, I can scarcely tell what kind o'man y'are - are y'always like this, Mr. Lynch? A man of God but a mystery ta women?"

"When the occasion calls fer it--" The smirk grew. "My dear." It was mid-December and the stars outside shone diamondiferous to join with the lavender half-moonlit snow - the congregation gathered together before they dispersed to sing one more hymn: Go! Tell it on the mountain! Our Jesus Christ is born! And as they stood together to sing, Iris put her hand in his. They took to courting, and soon were married, a fairytale, and they gave each other twenty-four of the happiest years of each others' life - they moved back together to Tempest where Gus became senior pastor of Living Hope Baptist Church. But it did not begin auspiciously. When Gus passed his thirty-fifth year, he was beset with toothaches that would not go away, wracked with pain that no medication or herbs would seem to salve. This went on for a week straight, until - one night - and to his horror, he found his eyeteeth, both of them, were being pushed out by something new in their place...when Iris came into their bedroom she flung her hands to her mouth as he turned to her so that she could see: for in his mouth were two, long, sharpened, canine fangs. Gus had always been aware of the morbid stories, the haints and the phantom creatures and the deep, shadowy weirdness that crawled all over Tempest, all over Adkins County - there were family legends for nearly each of the little clans that called this obscure corner of the Greenbrier Valley home, the Barnes and the Lightfoots and his own family, the Lynches...but he never thought that he would be privy, let alone part, of his own ghost story, his own monster-tale. Now he understood - now he understood the story about Cousin Allen, ripped out his own teeth and had taken to the drink too hard and died pitifully young...now he understood why his own father had a set of ivory chompers rather than what God gave him. Some malign ancestral curse had curdled in his blood and manifested itself as a hideous mutation of the mouth, something that made him look for all the world like a creature of the woods more than what he was - a man adapted for hunting and timber and subsistence living now reabsorbed by the forest he so loved to be a haint, a creature, bewitched and obscene to the world of men. At first Iris tried to help by filing his new additions down, blunting them so people would not notice - but horrible to relate, night after night, the things grew back, sharpened themselves to points as a form of growth. Several times they tried this, panicked husband and supportive wife - several times they were thwarted, right back to where they were. Desperate, and without recourse, they did, together, the only thing they thought left - even though he had not drank in years, Gus procured some fine whiskey from his friend, Ironside Lightfoot, guzzled it down until he was three sheets in the wind, and instructed his wife to take a wrench and do the unthinkable. When she was done, the teeth kept in a small box under his bed to remind him that this was not some kind of hideous vision sent to him from a Hellish delirium, near-feverish with pain and drink, and his mouth full of bloody cotton gauze, he looked on his wife with tears streaming forth from those uniquely blue eyes, begging her to forgive him for whatever sin he had done that had led him to be changed, however momentarily, into a monster. "Oh Iris - woman - what ye must think o'me - what kinda man I am--" "Gustavus Lynch," Iris answered without hesitation, "I know exactly what kinda man y'are." "N'what--" he was scared to finish the question. "What kinda man that be?" She said nothing - she just hugged him tight, and reached for his hand, taking it and squeezing it close to her own heart. They passed this crisis together as husband and wife, and with new teeth, dentures, procured from a dentist down in Roanoke, their life resumed its sunny way. Never did they talk about it, not once, even when Gus was troubled, year after year on the same day ever since, by quare visions of icy blue streams deep underground...when he would awake, dazed and vulnerable in the dead of night when nightmares seem realest, he would feel for his wife's hand, grasping her fingers into his own to feel grounded and unfraid once again. When they built their big house on Simeon Lynch's ancestral lands, on the day they knew their hard work was finished, she put her hand in his and squeezed it - when it became apparent she was with child, and told him the news, she took both of his hands and brought them to her belly... when she was in labor and he prayed over her, his heart full of joy and fear, she squeezed his hand again, as hard as she could - when the infant boy, who they named Gustavus after his father and so went through life as Junior, reached manhood and brought home a kind, mousey girl from Wetzel County to introduce as his fiancée, she squeezed his hand once more. They were blessed to have lived so full and fruitful, all those years together. But it all did not last. After, soon after, Iris contracted cancer of the breast, and she fell very ill very suddenly, she wasted away and was in great pain, such that there was nothing the doctors in Charleston could do. On her deathbed, she put her hand in Gus' one last time, and she said to him: "Oh, I finally know what kinda man y'are, Mr. Lynch." And with his eyes once again blurred with tears as they had been all those years ago in Korea, Gus answered: "N'what kinda man that be - Ms. McComas?" "Why - yer the man who loves me..." Then her hand slackened, it fell away - Gus' hand was empty, and she was gone. Gus knew he would never get over her and indeed he never did, and for years after would regard the day of her death - a clear, azure-skied day in October - as little short of cursed. Every year on her birthday, on the anniversary of their marriage, and to commemorate the day she died, he would pace up the side of his mountain and lay by her graveside, with space for him to be buried beside her when his time came, a bundle of her namesake, amethyst and gold - iris. One night, a year or two after her passing, driving back to the house that he and Iris had built and which now stood lonely and empty without her in it, Gus parked his Jeep that he had gotten by trading in his old Suburban on the side of a dirt road - he got out, and took a look, on a whim, above him, to the Winter stars. He had wrestled and grappled with the questions - theologically, spiritually, even psychologically - and still he had come up empty, empty as the indigo spans that one would have to traverse to get from star to star, how to properly mourn, how to properly grieve. And then he knew. He just - knew, somehow, a revelation, an epiphany, that she was up there...he knew, somehow, that in the crystalline twinkling of the stars, the same stars that twinkled just the same way the night they met, that she was watching. And - that she would not want him to be like this, not after all this time, all this wasted energy trying and wishing and praying for things that could no longer be. So he got back in his car, laid across the steering wheel and wept, one last time, and he let the heavens have her, let her watch over him and never let him go. Even after this the grief he felt never went away, but it was eased some after Junior had his own son, Gus' grandson, born en caul and destined for either second-sight or greatness or both, named Bligh after a distant patrilineal descendant - he had been too afraid to ask his son about his teeth, if it what happened to Gus had happened to Junior, but he was told by Susan Anne he had needed dentistry to fix some kind of abnormal growth...and knew the unspoken truth. Too soon, tragedy roared back into his life, another October day, this time grey and rainy, when Junior and his wife, Susan Anne, died in a car crash - Junior's Eldorado had careened off a sharp turn, killing them both, with little Bligh Allen, who had just turned five, miraculously surviving in the backseat. It was all, all enough for Gus to invoke old Job, and to have his faith, so sure even before his conversion all those years ago, shook so hard he wondered if Hell could hear it: why, why after so many years of faithful service, would God curse him so? Was it not enough to rob from his beloved, for whose touch he pined every day for the rest of his life - now his son, now his daughter-in-law too? And if I am a Christian,

I am the least of all-- But this was how Gus would soon become Pappy, the name that stuck at first as a tease and thereafter as how he would be known forever after, even amongst folk in Tempest outside of his own family - because his grandson Bligh, started calling him that. Bligh had always been a strange child - the circumstances of his birth alone were the subject of some comment, not just being en caul but having to be delivered in Barnes' veterinary office because of a great and terrible storm that at last blew down that old druid that Gus and Allen would play music under, but this was joined with his oddly quiet nature, as though observing everything around him in a troublingly mature kind of way. He did not speak as other children did - when Archie Lightfoot, the latest scion of that storied family which antedated Gus' own and the son of Gus' friend Ironside had his own son, Andrew, he was, by contrast, a bright and happy child, a chatterbox whose constant babbles exasperated his father...yet Bligh remained uncomfortably quiet. Then, one day, Junior, passing the peculiar newcomer to Gus to hold, murmured in babytalk: "Go see ya Pappy, go see ya Pappy now--" And Bligh burst out, his first words, when he was safe in Gus' arms: "Pa-pee! Pa-pee!" Junior was dumbstruck - but Gus, Pappy, was transported with happiness. He had been his grandson's first word. But...when Bligh came to live with Gus after his parents died, he did not like it, and made it a point, in his own sullen preschool-age way, to let Gus know he did not like him, throwing monstrous tantrums - howling like a wolf, which Gus would shake his head the hardest at - throwing his toys, refusing to come out of his new room in Gus' house, except to hastily eat and then steal back upstairs. It was bad enough that because of this withdrawn, traumatized behavior at school it was recommended he'd be held back a year, but really it seemed like there was no way, no way at all, for Gus to get through to his grandson, damaged in his young existence by being robbed of his parents. Weeks turned into months - Gus tried to cope the best he could, Christmastide drew nearer and he did his yearly rituals, cleaning for Baby Jesus' birthday and putting up a fresh, fragrant pine for a Christmas tree, all while his grandson remained dangerously introverted and reclusive. And then, finally, it occurred to Gus - what had happened to him nearly a decade before, ruminating on how Iris was gone, and what Iris would have wanted, and where Iris still was. Little Bligh would have to somehow see the same thing. So, carrying that little hope in his heart that he could fix things that shone distant but clear like the Star of Bethlehem, with the memory of Pappy as the boy's first word, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Gus came into the boy's room, and instructed him in a firm voice to get on something warm, they were going to go outside. It took some doing - thrice more did he have to be told, and the last time in a loud clear voice that was almost a threat - but eventually little Bligh tumbled down the steps and, his grandfather putting a guiding hand on the small of his back, they came outside. Gus made sure that Bligh followed every step he took, so that he would not get lost - eventually they came down the mountain, a gentle slope that was easy to traverse up and down, and arrived just where Gus needed them to be. �� The night was a masterpiece of Appalachian Winter - silent, neither sound nor movement, with a light snow dusting the ground that made a faint crunch beneath the feet. The cold was not biting or unpleasant as there was no wind, so that there was only the rejuvenating crispness that enlivened the nerves and thickened the blood. They came to a great, ruined, rotting tree - the big druid that his ancestor had planted, where Gus and his cousin would play music together, and where Gus had his first kiss, all those wistful bygone years before. Gus gently took his grandson's wrist. "Ya seen this tree here, boy?" Bligh shook his head - Gus let go, kneeling to his level, pointing. "This tree here fell the day ye's born...n'yer great-great--" He paused, tittering to himself. "Well let's say a feller ye n'me's both related ta, waaay back when - he planted it!" A spark of something like recognition seemed to wash away the sulky stubbornness that had possessed the boy's face lo these many weeks. "Someone - we related ta?" Bligh asked, his voice quiet to match the night. "S'right," Gus affirmed with a grin. "Our ancestor - our family been here a long, long time, understand." Bligh nodded, slowly, as though absorbing what his grandfather was telling him. "I want ya ta see sumthin else, too--" Using his boot, Pappy kicked part of the hollowed-out trunk of the old druid-tree hard - there, on the inside, was a cluster of phosphorescent vegetation, an unexpected symphony of fulgently radiant light hiding in the tiny cavern of the oaken log. Bligh recoiled - he had never seen anything like it before in his life. "Wha - wha?!" "Walk while ye have the light," Gus pronounced resolutely. "Lest darkness come upon ye - see that there glow?" Bligh nodded, his eyes wide with amazement. "That there's foxfire - it shines right here on the Earth sometimes - like the stars shine up in Heaven." "H-Heaven?" Bligh asked, his voice suddenly hushed. "Like - where Ma and Pa live now?" Now it was Gus' turn to nod. "Yes, boy - yes indeed." He swept up his grandson to lift him up so that he could see the stars shining - Heaven - above them. As he held Bligh up and then set him on his shoulders, he called out in his loud, clear voice that he used at Living Hope:

"Consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained!"

Right as Bligh grabbed hold of Pappy's head to balance, and just Pappy had finished - he sucked in an amazed breath.

Of course he had seen the stars, and of course he had asked about them, but he had never - so like a little boy - understood, in focus, what infinity meant, what the constellations and asterisms and shapes of the heavens meant, what lay beyond his playroom and the kitchen and the trees and the backyard.

And it was the words of King James that made him understand - the Word of the Lord that Pappy knew and practiced and had a bon mot for, sometimes clever and sometimes poignant, since that terrible day in that faraway place of Korea when he had devoted his life to the Good News.

Bligh's eyes beheld the stars not for the first time, but for the first time that really mattered. "Them stars up ere, boy - lookin down on us - there's ya Ma n'Pa, up ere - there's ya Mamaw Iris, who ye never met, but who - who woulda loved ye all the same..." "They - up there?" "That's right boy - all of em, watchin over us." And then grandson murmured the first true words of coherence in months: "Pappy - I wish they wudn't up yonder - I wish they was here." "Well me too, boy - me too." He sighed, swallowing back a wave of emotion that came with the words. "But we down here, for the time bein - n'we gotta make the best o'what the Lord God gave us." He took a hand to reach up and stroke his grandson's cheek. "So happens - the Lord God gave me a little boy - a little boy named Bligh."

A long silence followed, which Gus gently broke: "Just like em stars bove us shine, boy - n'like the foxfire aneath the log - I'll always shine fer ye. They watch over us up ere - but down here--" He let himself grin, for the first time in he couldn't remember approaching something like inner peace. "Down here - ain't nuthin gonna happen ta ye, long as I'm around - ain't nuthin ever gonna happen ta the boy the Good Lord gave me."

The Winter skies of West Virginia provide intangible proof in their starry voids of the ancient and the impossible, so that on a clear cold evening, with one's head tilted up to behold brumal Orion in the frigid air that turns the breath into the steamy vocabulary of Fafnir, it seems perfectly feasible that - on a night just like this - the Virgin Mary had a baby boy.

Go! Tell it on the mountain! O'er the hills and ev-ry-where!

And there was time enough for Lovecraft's mad spaces, and there was time yet still for Tyson's patient navigations, because there was time enough for little Bligh, already an orphan and doomed to a life against the grains of modernity, to understand the cruelty and the meanness of existence - but now he was wonderstruck, starstruck, at the cosmos that swirled above him in chilled clarity, the very Universe that Pappy's God in wisdom untold had designed and made, and so could he understand that this same cruel, mean place was also, at the very same time, full of kindness and love. "Pappy?" he heard his grandson whisper. "Yeah boy?" "I'm - I - I'm sorry..."

Now Gus - Pappy - felt that the wall that needed to come down had come down, now he knew that he could raise his grandchild and shelter him and protect him and guide him into manhood and carry on the Lynch name with honor and with pride and respect. Now - now Pappy lowered him down so that they were face to face, so that their identical eyes, gelid, frozen-over, but warm in this and all the Winters they would share together, now met. He pointed, down the mountain slope, the trees that twinkled with ice, and he whispered: "G'out with joy." He grinned an encouraging, knowing smile. "Be led forth with peace - the mountains -n'the hills shall break forth before ye into singin, and all the trees o'the field shall clap their hands..." He hugged his little grandson so tight he knew he would never forget. And right then, right that very second - everything was worth it. There had been a road here, there had been a journey undertaken, ever since Iris had blushed to see him watching her across the room at that little church in Summersville - ever since he had clutched Ralph's body in Korea and begged for him, screaming, to get up, to wake up - ever since he would join his cousin's melody on the banjo on those fine Summer days. They were all gone...but Bligh, his grandson, his blood, his flesh, his true legacy, was here. And of all the names, all the titles, all the ways he was or would be looked at - none of them would ever matter as much as the one that this serious, black-haired boy would foist upon him: "Pappy," little Bligh said again, and his eyes glimmered and became overfull with tears. Gus - Gustavus, Pappy - grinned at him, a full and proud smile, and kissed him gently on the cheek. "S'right boy," he whispered, but loud enough that the silent night of the approaching Christmas Eve allowed it to echo across time, space - and names. "I'm yer Pappy."

#Bligh #Pappy #Before Time After

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tanoraqui · 7 years

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can i has more cr sense8 au percy pls? (if your up for it of course)

*slams 2,000 words on your desk five months later* MY HOBBIES INCLUDE PROCRASTINATING FOR FINALS BY WRITING SCENES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE HYPOTHETICAL PLOT OF NICHE CROSSOVERS WITHOUT GIVING YOU ANY CONTEXT SAVE A COUPLE OLD POSTS OF BULLET POINTS (posts here. Take this fic as the inter-seasons holiday special, basically.)

“I’mstill not certain we should be doing this.“

Itwas a meaningless statement even before he said it. With her arm in his, withthe warmth of her against his side and the tinkle of her laugh fading in theair, Percy thought he would trust Vex to lead him down any icy path through thewoods, with any blindfold on or off, even if he had never known her moreintimately than he knew himself. Even if they had just met, somehow, one day,and she had smiled and beckoned, he would have followed.

Exaggeratedgagging noises broke into his thoughts—Vax, visiting as almost always, makingVex laugh in the cold Northern darkness. The drugs all but gone from his veins,Percy could feel him again, that knife’s edge of sarcasm prickling overdevotion deep enough to fill the sea.

Two(one? three?) months of isolation was turning him poetic. It was horrifying.

“It’llbe fine,” said Vex, tugging him forward. “Turn right—”

Percyfollowed her instructions obediently. “I don’t know where you get theconfidence that she won’t be looking, just this one night. It’s not like theholidays have stopped them before.”

“Becauseshe’s loony, Freddie,” Vax said with overwhelming fondness.

“BecauseI don’t care!” Vex proclaimed, and Percy felt her toss her hair within herselfbefore it smacked him on the cheek. “We’re taking Christmas back. What they didto your family was horrible, yes, and we willkill them for it, I promise—”

Theothers nodded in agreement, the heroin finally losing its grip.

Vexput her hands to his face—cold, calloused, but the kindest Percy had felt—andpushed up his blindfold.

“Buttonight,” she whispered, wild and soft and fey in the moonlight, “let’s justnot be afraid.”

Theplace she’d led him was beautiful. Vex was beautiful, already shrugging off herbag and dropping down to swap her boots for skates, lithesome and lively as theswaying trees and stars above. They shone down on the iced-over pond, in the centerof the ancient forest, just as they must have in Jerusalem two thousand yearsago. There wasn’t another human being for miles, Percy knew without asking.

“Doyou even know how to skate?” he asked, amused, watching her fumble with thestraps.

“No.”She grinned up at him, entirely impish. “But you do. And Scanlan, I think.”

“Ido,” the man himself confirmed with a smile, making hot chocolate in his LosAngeles apartment.

“Ifyou’re getting gross, I’m leaving,” Vax announced, and vanished—as if thatmeant anything, as if they couldn’t all feel him and see him as well in hiscell in Osaka, or Los Angeles or the Outback or wherever Percy and Vex were.(He didn’t know and she wasn’t telling, and that was how they were safe.)

“Allright!” Pike chirped to her choir straggling into line in her little woodenchurch at the eaves of the Amazon, so newly rebuilt it still dripped tar. “Youready?”

“Let’sdo this!” said Scanlan, bringing two frothing mugs into the living room, whereKaylee was doing her best to scowl at the bright tree and heap of presents.Tary echoed it, squaring his shoulders for a much less amicable familybreakfast, and Grog smashed a beer bottle as he shouted, because it was aChristian holiday but fuck it, it was a holiday, and the peace was still goingand the dirty thugs and criminals of Ankara were going to have a fuckin’ party.

Asfar as possible from any gritty urban party, and more importantly any evilbrain surgeon, Keyleth sat by her campfire and took out her guitar, andlaunched into an offkey rendition of “Jingle Bells” on the warm Australianevening. Across the fire, Kashaw stared at her like she had to be kidding, butwithin a verse she’d smiled enough to draw out his surprisingly rich tenor.

Scanlanblew them both out of the water, of course, and Kaylee didn’t blink as she toreinto a box that she would soon find contained mostly just increasingly smallerboxes, because Scanlan singing was like the sun shining. It just happened. Halfwayaround the world, Turkish pop music blasted out of the bar and down the street,and Grog jumped up and down with Zanror and Worra, mostly on the beat.Tremulous voices strengthening as the sun slipped through the high window andthe rest of Puentamáre’s congregation filed in, swelled by all those coming tovisit the “little angel,” Pike’s choir sang the day in, and Vox Machina stoodand sang with them.

Theydanced in the bar in Turkey, bright lights and pop music pounding against theancient sandstone walls. They laughed over brunch in New York, until Lydiaasked if something was the matter and Mary-Anne kicked Tary under the table,and both his parents shot him dirty looks. They clambered over rocks in theOutback and Tary squealed in fear at a giant spider as Vax laughed and held itup to his face.

Theyjust managed to hold onto the iPhone to film Kaylee furiously flinging sevenlayers of boxes and wrapping paper at their heads, in retaliation for spendingten minutes unwrapping a single guitar shop gift card. But she was laughing,too, so it was okay. Turning state’s witness earned Vax a couple extraprivileges; he spent one on a phone call to Zahra, left bear-sitting, and Vexcried on Percy’s shoulder while they all made kissy noises at the phone andassured a confusedly lowing Trinket that his mama would be home as soon as shecould, and she loved him very much. Percy hadn’t ice-skated since he wassixteen, years before That Night, but they did waltz steps and figure-eights ona moonlit frozen pond somewhere in Siberia, and held each other tight. It wasChristmas and Vox Machina laughed and sang and cried, and held each othertight.

“Whata lovely way to spend the holiday.”

Percyslipped before she finished speaking, eyes clenched shut; he didn’t know whenthe ice was coming until his hands hit, hard, and the spray his face.

“Percy?”Vex.

“Really,Percival,” Ripley said, “You don’t have to so childish about this. I’m not hereto hunt you down, tonight.”

“She’shere,” he gasped, pulling himself across the ice. Eyes shut, don’t even look.Don’t even think. “Vex, she’s here,you have to– get the–”

“Shit!”Vex fumbled for her bag, still on the shore. “Fuck, fuck! Fuck her!”

Ripleyclicked her tongue in disapproval. She stalked silently across the ice, inlight boots rather than heavy winter skates—but then, she wasn’t really there.

“Ithought you might like to go on a trip, actually.”

Andthen they were standing in a corridor, and Percy was the one mis-dressed forthe occasion, bundled up for the frigid wilderness. He had half a foot inheight on Ripley, and he’d worked to keep his machine shop muscles while pentup in…wherever he and Vex were. None of it did anything to ease the way hisstomach turned as Ripley eyed him up and down, judging him for the failedscience experiment he didn’t need to be in her head to know she deemed him. Shelooked almost identical to how she’d been that week starting eight years agotoday, staring down at him. A few more streaks of grey in her bun, but the sameslim glasses, the same purse to her lips, the same damn style of lab coat,sleeves stained red at the end of each day as she peeled him apart. He knew whyshe’d done it, now. It didn’t help.

Thebarest hint of a smile curled up her lips as they both remembered. Then sheturned and strode down the corridor, calling over her shoulder, “Come along.”

Percyfollowed, scanning the hallway for clues as to Ripley’s location. He wasn’tsurprised to find none. The walls were stainless steel and the white-and-blacktile floors were sanitation-clean. It was another Vecna facility, but god onlyknew where in the world.

“Ireally thought you’d be doing better at this, Percival,” Ripley chided, withoutgiving him so much as a backwards glance. “I’ve gotten so much informationabout you and your little group, and you’re just lagging behind.”

“Whatdo you want, Anna.”

Hewas lagging behind, as they walked, but not so far that she’d think he wasn’tplaying along. Every extra second here bought more time for Vex to get theneedle and knock him out.

“I’mgoing to share a secret with you,” she said, with a much younger woman’s senseof mischief. “Just to liven up this little game.”

Theyreached a door at the end of the hallway, steel and locked with a keypad.Ripley smiled at him as she entered the number, sickly sweet. “After all, it’sthe holidays—it’s only right that you be with family.”

Fora long, horrible moment as she swung open the heavy door, Percy thought he wasgoing to see corpses, or worse. A freezer of strung-out piles of tissue andorgans. Eight brains in tanks, still with electrodes attached. He’d seen, onthe opposite side of the laboratory, what they’d been starting to do to hisfamily.

Itwas a teenage girl’s room. The walls were unpainted, but they were decoratedwith posters, of scientific infographics and famous historical women and acouple people Percy vaguely recognized as famous actors. There was a carpet, anelegant shag thing, and a pair of stuffed bookcases, a desk with a very nicecomputer, and a bed with at least two dozen stuffed animals, all of which Percycould name. At least one of them had been his. The girl on the bed, lying onher stomach and reading a book with her legs kicked in the air, was even morefamiliar.

“Cassandra.”

She’dlooked up when the door opened, polite coolness chasing annoyance chasingwariness from her eyes.

“Dr.Ripley. What do you want?”

“Iwas in this wing and I thought I would check on you, my dear.” Despite theendearment, Ripley’s tone had reverted to the crisp professionalism she seemedto show everyone but Percy.

Cassandraclearly didn’t buy either façade. But she rolled to a sitting position withonly a faint sigh, and held out her left arm. There was something attached toit, a cuff with a small screen that flashed first her blood pressure then, asRipley pressed the buttons on the side, several other measurements—BPM, neuralconductivity, and things Percy didn’t recognize. A slim wire ran up from it toa handful of electrodes attached, clearly permanently, to the side of hertemple.

“I’llkill you. I’ll kill you.” His voiceshook.

“Ihaven’t noticed anything unusual,” Cassandra said as Ripley checked thereadings. A bored patient answering unasked questions by rote. “The new anxiety meds are doing fine.”

Ripleymade a non-committal noise. “Look at me.”

Cassandramet her eyes obediently.

“Leaveher alone. What are you doing?” Percytried to put himself between them, but there wasn’t room. And he couldn’t touchhis sister, couldn’t touch either of them—couldn’t drag Ripley away andcouldn’t take Cass in his arms and just run.(Like that had worked so well, last time.)

“Doyou feel anything unusual right now?” Ripley asked, still holding Cassandra’sgaze. “Physically or emotionally. Really search.”

Awrinkle appeared between Cassandra’s eyes as she frowned. There was a widestreak of white in her hair, family to Percy’s complete bleach. That hadn’tbeen there before. When he’d last seen her, when she was bleeding in the snowfrom bullet wounds as he ran— She was 23 now, the spitting image of Vesper whenshe’d died, except for that streak. The room was still decorated for a teenagerbut Percy’s youngest sister was an exasperated 23.

“Cass.”

Ripley’seyes sparkled at his anguish, but Cassandra remained impartial.

“Nothing.Should I?”

“Youknow better than to ask questions that could influence an experiment,” Ripleysaid. But she stepped back, letting Cassandra’s gaze fall. It returned to herbook.

“Don’tforget,” Ripley added as she re-opened the door, which had automatically lockedbehind them. “The Briarwoods will be expecting you for Christmas dinner.”

IfPercy had thought Cassandra’s expression polite before, when she looked up asecond time it was utterly impassive.

“Ilook forward to it. Was there anything else?”

“Oh,no.” Ripley smiled thinly at them both. “I think everything I need will bearriving soon enough—”

AndPercy was back on the bank, in the snow, in the woods, and everything but Vexfaded as she thrust the needle into his arm and released, the familiar,dizzying haze of cheap heroin washing him clean. Ripley disappeared. Cassandradisappeared. Keyleth, Vax, Grog, Pike, Tary, Scanlan disappeared. Safe. Percystayed as freezing and alone as eight years ago, running from his sisterbleeding out in the snow, assuming she was dead.

“Percy?Percy, are you alright? Is she gone?”

Vex’swarm hands tugged at him and he rolled over obediently, and opened his eyes.She was still beautiful, bright and concerned and fierce. The moon above wasalmost as lovely. Percy lifted a hand to her cheek and caught his breath whenshe held it—no, choked on a sob. That was what his body was doing, now.

“Cass.She– they– I don’t know. She’s alive.” His whole body shook, drugs and cold and every ounce of adrenaline racing through his veins. “They have mysister.”

#critical role #sense8 #hm...#vox machina #percy de rolo #anna ripley #cassandra de rolo #perc'ahlia #the hellbound gunship #(i don't care if no one else uses that tag; it's my tag and i love it)#my fic #fanfiction #i haven't watched s2 yet but i'm very excited to do so #i might rewatch s1 first #quartus saeculum ascendans #quartus saeculum irruens #nivis saxi sol

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frankwallace · 4 years

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New Life for Easter

Diagnosis

Yesterday was the anniversary of my diagnosis of liver metastasis. A truly momentous occasion and reason to celebrate re-birth. For I have been born again — not in the common sense that I have adopted Christianity as my fundamental belief. But in the true sense, my soul has come alive in the past year like no other time in my life. I am grateful for life, for love, for music, for family, for friends, for ancestors, for breath, for the Earth and all its beautiful inhabitants.

Why JOY?

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wondering about why I called my Christmas CD of 2007 or so, JOY. That was not my modus operandi! I was constantly battling mild depression and though I loved what I did in life, I was not aware (shall we say) of just how meaningful and full it was. I was driven. Now I know. As I mention in JOY’s liner notes, my memory of Christmas Eve services in San Carlos CA were magical. Candelarios, hundreds of them, lined the roof and porch of our church as the congregation emerged from service singing and carrying more candles. I feel now like that was the most gracious and ritualistic moment of my youth. An annual call to feel life in its profound richness: light/dark, music/silence, congregation/individual presence.

My parents were deeply religious and active members of our Presbyterian church. They reveled in their new-found freedom from their deep roots in Texas and the southern Baptist and Lutheran denominations. But they did not care for ritual. The church was there to promote social good and service. The minister was to inspire congregants to do good work in the community. Raising money for a new organ or choir director was frowned on. And so joy itself was not central. Personal growth was relegated to private prayer with God.

I embarked upon adulthood with a fierce determination to do good in my way, and to pursue personal growth however possible. As most of you know, that was primarily a music-related pursuit: guitar lessons, breathing lessons, voice lessons, lute lessons, expanding my repertoire in unexpected directions—be it folk songs, medieval chants or Renaissance polyphony, while premiering contemporary works on the guitar by various Boston composers.

And so all that ground work, in all its madness, glee, and frustrations has brought me to where I am: a profound presence in the joy of life that surrounds me.

Guest blog

Let me conclude with a guest writer. My wife Nancy posted this yesterday on CaringBridge for our devoted friends and followers there. She says it much better than I…

Today marks the one year anniversary of Frank’s Stage Four diagnosis. We are all so proud he is still with us in spite of his rare and virulent ocular melanoma. Although he tires easily, has tumors inside and out, has digestive issues and is now on hospice, he is still doing his two-hour morning meditation and yoga, playing gorgeous guitar, writing blog posts, editing his new compositions and updating gyremusic.com (home to all his work), as well as clearing paths in the woods and hanging with me and our sons.

Adam left yesterday after being here over a week and Gus arrives today. Our greenhouse is getting warm enough for Frank to record his wonderful new pieces. With this heartwarming family time it is hard to keep up with thank you notes to all who have sent us their love (in myriad ways). We will write soon, but meanwhile please know we love you right back and you are all making a big difference for us as we navigate our way.

We both hope you are healthy and finding some peaceful moments in these strange times. The unknowingness around cancer has been one of our family’s biggest hurdles for the last three years, and one of the hardest feelings to express. The world now joining us in a state of unknowing is oddly comforting.

New Life for Easter was originally published on FRANK WALLACE

#cancer

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healthandfitnessrecipes-blog · 6 years

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Post-Op & Pre-Injection

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=4186 On December 19th, I had my second surgery and third round of anesthesia this semester. My surgeon straightened my nasal septum, changed up all of my sinuses, and removed my adenoids. I went into the surgery very nervous, but had to wait until after I signed consent forms to be drugged into a calmer state. So there I was, in my hospital gown, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on a small television in the top corner of the room, tears flowing steadily down my cheeks, when my surgeon came in and explained all of the slicing he was about to do to the inside of my face. I tried to block it out (disclaimer: informed consent is really important and I am not trying to minimize that) because I was in no position to object to anything given my lack of surgical knowledge and emotional distress and really preferred not to hear about all of the ways my face was about to be torn up. The nurses, anesthesiologist, and surgeon treated me kindly as I was wheeled back into the operating room and I came out in less pain than I expected, which was a pleasant surprise. Yesterday my septum splints were removed and the inside of my face was vacuumed out (and I have to go back in a week for more vacuuming - I wish I was joking). But all in all, I am just feeling very glad to be done with surgery for the foreseeable future.

I took this picture while we were watching "The Sound of Music" for no reason other than my love for nuns. Usually people think I am kidding when I say that I would love to be a nun, forcing me to explain, "No, I'm not kidding... I've genuinely looked into various orders and convents."

I have been delaying writing this post, because every time I thought that I was perhaps ready to publish something new I opened my phone to a conversation I had absolutely zero recollection of, and when I thought I was doing okay on the pain medications my sister informed me that I quite literally sobbed over a fortune cookie in an Asian restaurant. I sent pictures of my dog that I don't remember sending, asked questions that made no sense, posted on social media using way too many exclamation points, and uploaded a picture to Facebook of me dreaming about being a nun with a paper towel on my head while watching The Sound of Music with two actual, real-life friends who are saints for still talking to me after such an odd incident. So when I considered all of these things, I somehow made the wise decision to stay as far away from my blog as possible.

This little guy kept me VERY happy post-op!

During this entire academic break, I have found myself overwhelmed by how kind everyone has been to me, especially over the past three semesters. I visited New Orleans right before surgery and reconnected with many friends in the four days that I was there. Visiting all of the people who carried me through such a vulnerable time in my life infused me with the strongest sense of gratitude I have ever felt and offered a lot of closure that I had been unable to find in Chapel Hill. Right after my surgery, friends generously carved out time in their busy holiday schedules to come by and visit me, bringing laughter and hugs and empathy. One of my friends even took me to Target and helped me make my way down my shopping list ever so patiently as I constantly became distracted. Dozens of people checked in on me and asked how I was feeling even when my responses were slightly incoherent. I managed to attend three services on Christmas Eve, and even though I had to sit down during a hymn in the first one out of a fear of passing out and felt like I was running a fever by the third, it was a joyous time and I was so grateful that I was able to make it. My throat was so sore during the final service that I was unable to sing at all, but I embraced the moment as a time to hear the fullness of the congregation singing around me, an opportunity to listen that I do not take up as often as I should. I feel like the luckiest 18-year-old in the world. A life full of love and friendship and kindness - what more could I ask for?

Walking in Audubon Park, my very favorite place in New Orleans. This soil soaked up many of my tears last year.

It might sound naïve based on what a hot mess my last three semesters have been, but I am so excited to start my fourth semester of college and I am eagerly anticipating classes that I know I will fall in love with. I am dreading all of the "Hello, I'm Rachel, and I'm thrilled to be here but my body actually doesn't do college well at all" accommodations talks that I will have to have with all of my professors, but I am taking two of the same professors as I did last semester so hopefully this will ease the burden a bit. I am probably being way too bold with this and potentially setting myself up for major disappointment, but I have already been thinking about all of the things I want to do with the extra time I anticipate having next semester since I do not anticipate being ill. I want to be more involved in my church, I want to write more cards, I want to reach out more to my friends, I want to go for long walks bundled up in all of my winter gear. I am sincerely hoping my body will permit all of these things. Today I am starting Humira. My first injection will be in just a few minutes, since I am waiting for the syringe/medication to warm up a bit from the refrigerator, and while I am nervous about it given that the consensus from all of my arthritis friends seems to be that it is the most painful injection of all of the biologics, I am ready to try something to get my body under control. The gist I got at my last rheumatology appointment is that Humira works more systemically than my previous biologic, which targeted only my joints, so the hope is that it will control the damage all of the other parts of my body are incurring as well, even though we do not have an official diagnosis.

In just a few minutes I’ll be injecting my first Humira shot! A lil nervous but so excited to (hopefully) feel better soon ☀️🤞🏼

A post shared by Rachel Sauls (@rachelksauls) on Dec 28, 2017 at 2:00pm PST

I will be starting the new semester with a new septum, new sinuses, and a new medication. Hopefully this means I will be a better, healthier version of me. I have been thinking a lot lately about how people always say that all that matters is that a baby or child is healthy, or that they cannot complain about their struggles because "at least [they] have [their] health." Whenever I hear people say this, it first forces me to wonder whether or not I am a disappointment, and then I just want to take their hand and promise them that there is a wonderful life even in the absence of perfect health. I want to tell them that joy has existed alongside all of my flares and illnesses. It is not a joy that excludes sadness or terror or frustration, but it is a joy pervasive enough to make my life a thoroughly good one, with or without consistent health. During periods of good or at least fine health, we speak about losing one's health as inconsolably devastating. Sometimes, this is true. I have had my fair share of moments of crying on the bathroom floor or having to sit down in the middle of a high school hallway because walking hurt too badly. Yet I have also had my fair share of churches whose deacons send letters full of compassion letting me know that they are praying for me and friends who have held me in their arms as I shake with pain. And, of course, I have many joyful moments with no relation to my health at all. I have the delight of hymns that sink deep into my soul and lunch dates with friends with huge hearts and new eyeshadow palettes that glimmer with possibilities. I view health as an inherently good and important thing, as in obvious by my authorship of this blog, my passion for patient advocacy, and my medical treatment of my own illnesses, but physical health is far from the best thing to have. There is no need to glorify health or use it as the sole indicator of whether someone is doing well or not. I have many, many other things that are better. Credits: Original Content Source

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bligh-lynch · 5 years

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And It Came To Pass In Those Days

December 23d, 1996, Lynch Mountain, Tempest, West Virginia For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. _________ Carl Sagan, Contact Throughout his life, Pappy was known by many names, but it was one Christmas Eve that he truly felt he earned the only one that really counted.

He began as Gustavus Simeon Lynch, but was very soon Gus. His birthname was too grandiose an appellation – it was given to him in gratitude by his father, Simeon, for Gustavus Olafsen, a Minnesotan of Swedish extraction who saved Simeon's life from the debacle onboard the USS San Diego during the Great War. But it proved too highfalutin for the boy who grew into a man. That boy, Gus, was too often a cutup who disobeyed his Pa and had his hide tanned more times than he could count. He and his delinquent older cousin, Allen, would get drunk on badly-made shine out in the woods – they would play music together under the white oak on the other slope of the low mountain that belonged to their family, and Allen would tell him, hitting his fiddle with his bow gently to make a singular dulcet tone, Gus strumming his banjo to accompany, the old family legend that their ancestor, Patrick Lynch, had planted the great druid as but an acorn to mark his property when he came over from Ireland. Twice, Allen had kissed him passionately when they were both drunk – love, love, careless love – as Sodomites would, making him promise to never tell a soul, and though later in life Gus became concerned with both drink and sin, when he remembered those Summer afternoons underneath the mighty boughs of his family oak with his cousin, his first friend, his first love, all he could do was blush, and sigh, sad for bygone days. Years later, Gus heard that Allen, who married a girl he didn't love and fathered a child who grew up in the family as Cousin Bobby he didn't want, ended up going crazy and ripping out his own teeth, an eerie repeat of Gus' own father losing his teeth at a young age also. Hoping to be better than a backwoods moonshiner who did furtive and sinful things, the boy, Gus, became a man, with a new name to match: Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Company E, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. He and his boyhood friend from Quinwood, Ralph Pomeroy, were shipped off during the Korean Conflict, where they stuck together because their fellows mocked their thick accents and yokel way, slights that he, Gus, never forgot or forgave. But, soon enough, there was that hopeless situation at a place that history would remember as Triangle Hill – Gus was one of the key witnesses to Ralph Pomeroy's dauntless actions that led his friend to be awarded, posthumously, the Medal of Honor. Then and there – seeing Ralph E. Pomeroy dedicate himself to something so completely larger than himself – Gus determined that he, too, would dedicate himself to something, and he fell on his knees, beseeching the sky above him, to say that he would devote his life to God. Soon, though he wouldn't care much for it, he became Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Silver Star Medal, but he scarcely remembered those awful October days in 1952 – his bright blue eyes, remarked on by his superior officers, always blurred by the tears as only men put through fire can understand, and blinded by fire and dust and smoke…as though possessed, he dragged what injured he could, the same men who mocked him for being a hillbilly and who would pointedly ask if he was born in a coalmine or if he wore shoes but whom he swore to protect nonetheless, back to the medic tent. There were gruesome spectacles that would make any man doubt the sanity of the world, and still a lesser man repulsed by humans for the rest of his life, but Gus was swallowed in humility by his friend's actions and he wanted to somehow be brave himself – not for himself, but for the spirit he saw Ralph Pomeroy summon. And for these courageous actions – that he never, not once, felt courageous for – he had a Silver Star pinned to his breast by General van Fleet. When he returned home, honorably discharged back to West Virginia and back to the mountains, he wanted to make good on the promise he had made to the Almighty for saving him in Korea, and so he took the G.I. Bill money and crossed the border to Virginia to attend Bluefield College, where he read the Theology he would need to preach the Good Word and save souls for the Lord. In time he graduated, and he took still yet another name: Reverend Gus Lynch – he grew the thick, handsome chinstrap beard he would wear for the rest of his life, and, taking inspiration from the travelling preachers that comprised many of his proud ancestors, he rambled up and down the Appalachians in his big white Surburban praising Jesus and baptizing the anointed, down to the river to pray to study on that Good Old Way. Two fateful things happened as he journeyed from place to place, filling the spiritual needs of the wayward. The first was in Pennsylvania and not too long after New York, because they happened so close together. There, the people gave him names too, but this time they were bigoted slurs: redneck and hillbilly and inbred, they mocked his accent and his manners and his earnestness, so that Gus found himself rather like Jonah, wishing that these Yankees, like Nineveh, would perish rather than find salvation. He never forgot how those prejudiced Northerners treated him, treated him different, simply because of who he was and where he was born – he had met kind Negros, strong in the Lord and the love of their families, down in the Carolinas, and he knew they had it far worse than he did, but that made him all the more bitter, how man could treat his fellow man, regardless of how he spoke the English tongue, or even the color of his own skin. This led to the second event: one night at a revival in Summersville, having returned to West Virginia feeling he should go back to put down roots in Tempest – soured forever on the idea of rambling after his experiences up North – he met a beautiful little slip of a girl, dark-headed with soft grey eyes, who had a ready and sarcastic wit. Her name was Iris – Iris Jones, whose family name had been something else afore her great-granddaddy had renamed them from an unpronounceable jumble of Cumbrian letters for a tiny coal town in McDowell County where the family had all settled many, many years ago. She was the prettiest thing in the room, with the purple-and-gold silk corsage she wore of her namesake, an iris…Gus' eyes followed her everywhere, finally, he got up the nerve, and he asked her to dance, and soon they got to talking. "Ye were in Korea?" asked she.

"I were," answered he. "Served with Ralph Pomeroy."

"Oh my, he was a hero."

"He was."

"If the army had more Pomeroys we'd've won that war."

Gus' expression turned serious. "We did have an army of Pomeroys – but y'only hear bout the famous ones."

"What a sad thing ta say – are ye a sad man, Mr. Lynch?"

"When the occasion calls fer it, my dear."

"My dear?" She gasped, pretending to be offended. "How forward!"

"Well then what would ya like me to call ye?" He gave that famous smirk, a crooked half-smile that many people knew him by. "My doe?" She burst out laughing. "Sly, too! My word, I can scarcely tell what kind o'man y'are – are y'always like this, Mr. Lynch? A man of God but a mystery ta women?"

"When the occasion calls fer it—" The smirk grew. "My dear." It was mid-December and the stars outside shone diamondiferous to join with the lavender half-moonlit snow – the congregation gathered together before they dispersed to sing one more hymn: Go! Tell it on the mountain! Our Jesus Christ is born! And as they stood together to sing, Iris put her hand in his. They took to courting, and soon were married, a fairytale, and they gave each other twenty-four of the happiest years of each others' life – they moved back together to Tempest where Gus became senior pastor of Living Hope Baptist Church. But it did not begin auspiciously. When Gus passed his thirty-fifth year, he was beset with toothaches that would not go away, wracked with pain that no medication or herbs would seem to salve. This went on for a week straight, until – one night – and to his horror, he found his eyeteeth, both of them, were being pushed out by something new in their place…when Iris came into their bedroom she flung her hands to her mouth as he turned to her so that she could see: for in his mouth were two, long, sharpened, canine fangs. Gus had always been aware of the morbid stories, the haints and the phantom creatures and the deep, shadowy weirdness that crawled all over Tempest, all over Adkins County – there were family legends for nearly each of the little clans that called this obscure corner of the Greenbrier Valley home, the Barnes and the Lightfoots and his own family, the Lynches…but he never thought that he would be privy, let alone part, of his own ghost story, his own monster-tale. Now he understood – now he understood the story about Cousin Allen, ripped out his own teeth and had taken to the drink too hard and died pitifully young…now he understood why his own father had a set of ivory chompers rather than what God gave him. Some malign ancestral curse had curdled in his blood and manifested itself as a hideous mutation of the mouth, something that made him look for all the world like a creature of the woods more than what he was – a man adapted for hunting and timber and subsistence living now reabsorbed by the forest he so loved to be a haint, a creature, bewitched and obscene to the world of men. At first Iris tried to help by filing his new additions down, blunting them so people would not notice – but horrible to relate, night after night, the things grew back, sharpened themselves to points as a form of growth. Several times they tried this, panicked husband and supportive wife – several times they were thwarted, right back to where they were. Desperate, and without recourse, they did, together, the only thing they thought left – even though he had not drank in years, Gus procured some fine whiskey from his friend, Ironside Lightfoot, guzzled it down until he was three sheets in the wind, and instructed his wife to take a wrench and do the unthinkable. When she was done, the teeth kept in a small box under his bed to remind him that this was not some kind of hideous vision sent to him from a Hellish delirium, near-feverish with pain and drink, and his mouth full of bloody cotton gauze, he looked on his wife with tears streaming forth from those uniquely blue eyes, begging her to forgive him for whatever sin he had done that had led him to be changed, however momentarily, into a monster. "Oh Iris – woman – what ye must think o'me – what kinda man I am—" "Gustavus Lynch," Iris answered without hesitation, "I know exactly what kinda man y'are." "N'what—" he was scared to finish the question. "What kinda man that be?" She said nothing – she just hugged him tight, and reached for his hand, taking it and squeezing it close to her own heart. They passed this crisis together as husband and wife, and with new teeth, dentures, procured from a dentist down in Roanoke, their life resumed its sunny way. Never did they talk about it, not once, even when Gus was troubled, year after year on the same day ever since, by quare visions of icy blue streams deep underground…when he would awake, dazed and vulnerable in the dead of night when nightmares seem realest, he would feel for his wife's hand, grasping her fingers into his own to feel grounded and unfraid once again. When they built their big house on Simeon Lynch's ancestral lands, on the day they knew their hard work was finished, she put her hand in his and squeezed it – when it became apparent she was with child, and told him the news, she took both of his hands and brought them to her belly… when she was in labor and he prayed over her, his heart full of joy and fear, she squeezed his hand again, as hard as she could – when the infant boy, who they named Gustavus after his father and so went through life as Junior, reached manhood and brought home a kind, mousey girl from Wetzel County to introduce as his fiancée, she squeezed his hand once more. They were blessed to have lived so full and fruitful, all those years together. But it all did not last. After, soon after, Iris contracted cancer of the breast, and she fell very ill very suddenly, she wasted away and was in great pain, such that there was nothing the doctors in Charleston could do. On her deathbed, she put her hand in Gus' one last time, and she said to him: "Oh, I finally know what kinda man y'are, Mr. Lynch." And with his eyes once again blurred with tears as they had been all those years ago in Korea, Gus answered: "N'what kinda man that be – Ms. McComas?" "Why – yer the man who loves me…" Then her hand slackened, it fell away – Gus' hand was empty, and she was gone. Gus knew he would never get over her and indeed he never did, and for years after would regard the day of her death – a clear, azure-skied day in October – as little short of cursed. Every year on her birthday, on the anniversary of their marriage, and to commemorate the day she died, he would pace up the side of his mountain and lay by her graveside, with space for him to be buried beside her when his time came, a bundle of her namesake, amethyst and gold – iris. One night, a year or two after her passing, driving back to the house that he and Iris had built and which now stood lonely and empty without her in it, Gus parked his Jeep that he had gotten by trading in his old Suburban on the side of a dirt road – he got out, and took a look, on a whim, above him, to the Winter stars. He had wrestled and grappled with the questions – theologically, spiritually, even psychologically – and still he had come up empty, empty as the indigo spans that one would have to traverse to get from star to star, how to properly mourn, how to properly grieve. And then he knew. He just – knew, somehow, a revelation, an epiphany, that she was up there…he knew, somehow, that in the crystalline twinkling of the stars, the same stars that twinkled just the same way the night they met, that she was watching. And – that she would not want him to be like this, not after all this time, all this wasted energy trying and wishing and praying for things that could no longer be. So he got back in his car, laid across the steering wheel and wept, one last time, and he let the heavens have her, let her watch over him and never let him go. Even after this the grief he felt never went away, but it was eased some after Junior had his own son, Gus' grandson, born en caul and destined for either second-sight or greatness or both, named Bligh after a distant patrilineal descendant – he had been too afraid to ask his son about his teeth, if it what happened to Gus had happened to Junior, but he was told by Susan Anne he had needed dentistry to fix some kind of abnormal growth…and knew the unspoken truth. Too soon, tragedy roared back into his life, another October day, this time grey and rainy, when Junior and his wife, Susan Anne, died in a car crash – Junior's Eldorado had careened off a sharp turn, killing them both, with little Bligh Allen, who had just turned five, miraculously surviving in the backseat. It was all, all enough for Gus to invoke old Job, and to have his faith, so sure even before his conversion all those years ago, shook so hard he wondered if Hell could hear it: why, why after so many years of faithful service, would God curse him so? Was it not enough to rob from his beloved, for whose touch he pined every day for the rest of his life – now his son, now his daughter-in-law too? And if I am a Christian,

I am the least of all— But this was how Gus would soon become Pappy, the name that stuck at first as a tease and thereafter as how he would be known forever after, even amongst folk in Tempest outside of his own family. his grandson Bligh, started calling him that. Bligh had always been a strange child – the circumstances of his birth alone were the subject of some comment, not just en caul but having to be delivered in Barnes' veterinary office because of a great and terrible storm that at last blew down that old druid that Gus and Allen would play music under, but this was joined with his oddly quiet nature, as though observing everything around him in a troublingly mature kind of way. He did not speak as other children did – when Archie Lightfoot, the latest scion of that storied family which antedated Gus' own and the son of Gus' friend Ironside had his own son, Andrew, he was, by contrast, a bright and happy child, a chatterbox whose constant babbles exasperated his father…yet Bligh remained uncomfortably quiet. Then, one day, Junior, passing the peculiar newcomer to Gus to hold, murmured in babytalk: "Go see ya Pappy, go see ya Pappy now—" And Bligh burst out, his first words, when he was safe in Gus' arms: "Pa-pee! Pa-pee!" Junior was dumbstruck – but Gus, Pappy, was transported with happiness. He had been his grandson's first word. But…when Bligh came to live with Gus after his parents died, he did not like it, and made it a point, in his own sullen preschool-age way, to let Gus know he did not like him, throwing monstrous tantrums – howling like a wolf, which Gus would shake his head the hardest at – throwing his toys, refusing to come out of his new room in Gus' house, except to hastily eat and then steal back upstairs. It was bad enough that because of this withdrawn, traumatized behavior at school it was recommended he'd be held back a year, but really it seemed like there was no way, no way at all, for Gus to get through to his grandson, damaged in his young existence by being robbed of his parents. Weeks turned into months – Gus tried to cope the best he could, Christmastide drew nearer and he did his yearly rituals, cleaning for Baby Jesus' birthday and putting up a fresh, fragrant pine for a Christmas tree, all while his grandson remained dangerously introverted and reclusive. And then, finally, it occurred to Gus – what had happened to him nearly a decade before, ruminating on how Iris was gone, and what Iris would have wanted, and where Iris still was. Little Bligh would have to somehow see the same thing. So, carrying that little hope in his heart that he could fix things that shone distant but clear like the Star of Bethlehem, with the memory of Pappy as the boy's first word, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Gus came into the boy's room, and instructed him in a firm voice to get on something warm, they were going to go outside. It took some doing – thrice more did he have to be told, and the last time in a loud clear voice that was almost a threat – but eventually little Bligh tumbled down the steps and, his grandfather putting a guiding hand on the small of his back, they came outside. Gus made sure that Bligh followed every step he took, so that he would not get lost – eventually they came down the mountain, a gentle slope that was easy to traverse up and down, and arrived just where Gus needed them to be. The night was a masterpiece of Appalachian Winter – silent, neither sound nor movement, with a light snow dusting the ground that made a faint crunch beneath the feet. The cold was not biting or unpleasant as there was no wind, so that there was only the rejuvenating crispness that enlivened the nerves and thickened the blood. They came to a great, ruined, rotting tree – the big druid that his ancestor had planted, where Gus and his cousin would play music together, and where Gus had his first kiss, all those wistful bygone years before. Gus gently took his grandson's wrist. "Ya seen this tree here, boy?" Bligh shook his head – Gus let go, kneeling to his level, pointing. "This tree here fell the day ye's born…n'yer great-great—" He paused, tittering to himself. "Well let's say a feller ye n'me's both related ta, waaay back when – he planted it!" A spark of something like recognition seemed to wash away the sulky stubbornness that had possessed the boy's face lo these many weeks. "Someone – we related ta?" Bligh asked, his voice quiet to match the night. "S'right," Gus affirmed with a grin. "Our ancestor – our family been here a long, long time, understand." Bligh nodded, slowly, as though absorbing what his grandfather was telling him. "I want ya ta see sumthin else, too—" Using his boot, Pappy kicked part of the hollowed-out trunk of the old druid-tree hard – there, on the inside, as a cluster of phosphorescent vegetation, an unexpected symphony of fulgently radiant light hiding in the tiny cavern of the oaken log. Bligh recoiled – he had never seen anything like it before in his life. "Wha – wha?!" "Walk while ye have the light," Gus pronounced resolutely. "Lest darkness come upon ye – see that there glow?" Bligh nodded, his eyes wide with amazement. "That there's foxfire – it shines right here on the Earth sometimes – like the stars shine up in Heaven?" "H-Heaven?" Bligh asked, his voice suddenly hushed. "Like – where Ma and Pa live now?" Now it was Gus' turn to nod. "Yes, boy – yes indeed." He swept up his grandson to lift him up so that he could see the stars shining – Heaven – above them. As he held Bligh up and then set him on his shoulders, he called out in his loud, clear voice that he used at Living Hope:

"Consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained!"

Right as Bligh grabbed hold of Pappy's head to balance, and just Pappy had finished – he sucked in an amazed breath.

Of course he had seen the stars, and of course he had asked about them, but he had never – so like a little boy – understood, in focus, what infinity meant, what the constellations and asterisms and shapes of the heavens meant, what lay beyond the playroom and the kitchen and the trees and the backyard.

And it was the words of King James that made him understand – the Word of the Lord that Pappy knew and practiced and had a bon mot for, sometimes clever and sometimes poignant, since that terrible day in that faraway place of Korea when he had devoted his life to the Good News.

Bligh's eyes beheld the stars not for the first time, but for the first time that really mattered. "Them stars up ere, boy – lookin down on us – there's ya Ma n'Pa, up ere – there's ya Grandmamma Iris, who ye never met, but who – who woulda loved ye all the same…" "They – up there?" "That's right boy – all of em, watchin over us." And then grandson murmured the first true words of coherence in months: "Pappy – I wish they wudn't up yonder – I wish they were here." "Well me too, boy – me too." He sighed, swallowing back a wave of emotion that came with the words. "But we down here, for the time bein – n'we gotta make the best o'what the Lord God gives us." He took a hand to reach up and stroke his grandson's cheek. "So happens – the Lord God gave me a little boy – a little boy named Bligh."

A long silence followed, which Gus gently broke: "Just like em stars bove us shine, boy – n'like the foxfire aneath the log – I'll always shine fer ye. They watch over us up ere – but down here—" He let himself grin, for the first time in he couldn't remember approaching something like inner peace. "Down here – ain't nuthin gonna happen ta ye, long as I'm around – ain't nuthin ever gonna happen ta the boy the Good Lord gave me."

The Winter skies of West Virginia provide intangible proof in their starry voids of the ancient and the impossible, so that on a clear brumal evening, with one's head tilted up to behold cold Orion in the frigid air that turns the breath into the steamy vocabulary of Fafnir, it seems perfectly feasible that – on a night just like this – the Virgin Mary had a baby boy.

Go! Tell it on the mountain! O'er the hills and ev-ry-where!

And there was time enough for Lovecraft's mad spaces, and there was time yet still for Tyson's patient navigations, because there was time enough for little Bligh, already an orphan and doomed to a life against the grains of modernity, to understand the cruelty and the meanness of existence – but now he was wonderstruck, starstruck, at the cosmos that swirled above him in chilled clarity, the very Universe that Pappy's god in wisdom untold had designed and made, and so could he understand that this same cruel, mean place was also, at the very same time, full of kindness and love. "Pappy?" he heard his grandson whisper. "Yeah boy?" "I'm – I – I'm sorry…"

Now Gus – Pappy – felt that the wall that needed to come down had come down, now he knew that he could raise his grandchild and shelter him and protect him and guide him into manhood and carry on the Lynch name with honor and with pride and respect.

Now – now Pappy lowered him down so that they were face to face, so that their identical eyes, gelid, frozen-over, but warm in this and all the Winters they would share together, now met.

He pointed, down the mountain slope, the trees that twinkled with ice, and he whispered: "G'out with joy." He grinned an encouraging, knowing smile. "Be led forth with peace – the mountains –n'the hills shall break forth before ye into singin, and all the trees o'the field shall clap their hands…"

He hugged his little grandson so tight he knew he would never forget.

And right then, right that very second – everything was worth it.

There had been a road here, there had been a journey undertaken, ever since Iris had blushed to see him watching her across the room at that little church in Summersville – ever since he had clutched Ralph's body in Korea and begged for him, screaming, to get up, to wake up – ever since he would join his cousin's melody on the banjo on those fine Summer days.

They were all gone…but Bligh, his grandson, his blood, his flesh, his true legacy, was here.

And of all the names, all the titles, all the ways he was or would be looked at – none of them would ever matter as much as the one that this serious, black-haired boy would foist upon him:

"Pappy," little Bligh said again, and his eyes glimmered and became overfull with tears.

Gus – Gustavus, Pappy – grinned at him, a full and proud smile, and kissed him gently on the cheek.

"S'right boy," he whispered, but loud enough that the silent night of the approaching Christmas Eve allowed it to echo across time, space – and names. "I'm yer Pappy."

#Bligh #Pappy

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