Alistair Fryer

ARE CHILDREN THE VOICE OF GOD?

by

A.D. Fryer

Epigraphs:

‘In the arts, as in life, everything is possible, provided it is based on love.’
[ Marc Chagall ]

'If a real little Angel can fly, love will never die.'
[Anon ]

Genre: Adult Literary Novella (complete manuscript 14 Chapters.)
Style: 3rd Person Past. USA spelling.
Page Turner Awards Extract – 6 Pages
2nd Submission – Silver Package Plus 2. Best Written Genre + 2 critiques.
(Writer: 60+)

Chapter 1.

This is something that happened …
Something that moved into an unfilled space of lost hopes and dreams …
And became ….

In the long, hot summer drought, a lone pickup truck bucked and swayed along a rough dirt track in a lost corner of America’s farmland. A lonely way that seemed to lead nowhere in this parched and timeless land. A land of low windblown sagebrush, peppered with dried grasses, and carpeted in pale, dry dust …
That pale, dry dust.
From a distance, the punishing sounds of her beat-up engine echoed across the sun-baked land and rose into a cloudless azure sky. A sky of eternal blue. She heaved and groaned as her flayed tires ground the baked earth into choking dust, churning in her wake, mixing with an exhaust of burned smoke that swirled and danced a toxic blues high into the air. The smell of oil-filled dust hung heavy in the noonday heat.
Inside the dust-covered cab, a young voice shouted above the engine’s whining roar. ‘Drive careful, Pa. We promised.’

Angel sat rigid, up front next to her pa as they bounced over the deep potholes. He grunted a low reply.
Her bitten little fingernails gripped the sun-bleached dashboard with fearless determination, her ever-watchful eyes took in every single blade of dried grass. She was only ten, but her blue eyes, flecked with silver light, were much older, full of a life already lived.

She glanced across at her pa’s hunched shoulders, his pale gray eyes that squinted against the sun’s glare, and the sweat that ran the furrows of his brow. A great weariness lined his face. Angel sighed. Did he still want to do this?
She watched his huge, gnarled hands wrestle the palm-worn steering wheel, a farmer’s hands, roughened with calluses and ingrained with that pale, dry dust. Angel chewed her lips. Was this what Ma wanted?
She stared back out through the bug-smeared windscreen, searching the endless sky for an answer. Tangles of blond hair framed those bright eyes and the pale skin of her face, burnt tender by the scorching sun.

The old pickup gave a sudden shudder, and Angel winced. They jerked over rutted washboard ridges that rattled every bone in their bodies. The windscreen juddered, and metal rasped as Pa’s hands gripped the wheel tight. Angel twisted around and pressed her face against the rear cab window.

Her anxious eyes watched the rise and fall of the burlap cover that lay on the rear flatbed. From beneath its coarse canvas, she heard the thump, thump of the long wooden box as it thudded up and down, hollow wood against hard metal. She felt each thud, each jarring jolt. Her fingers twisted in her tangled hair. Would the box be all right?

The jarring stopped. Pa shifted his tired body on the bench seat. His voice, dry like the land, stammered and rasped. ‘You ok ... okay?’

Angel caught the fear in his voice. Like Ma always said: 'When Pa doesn’t like something he doesn’t understand, he gets sorta scared, and stammers.'
She knew what Ma had meant. Her fingers unwound the twist of hair, and she smiled across at him.
‘Sure, Pa, I’m okay.’

But the fumes of burning engine oil that seeped up from the heaving floor beneath her feet betrayed her. The acrid haze stung her nostrils and smarted in her eyes. She closed her eyes tight and fought back welling tears. Somewhere from behind those closed eyes, her mother’s voice reached out to her:

‘Remember, my Angel, big girls don’t cry. Use the Secret Power of Three ‒ three wishes, three tests, and three gifts ‒ like in the faerie tales we read together. Tell Pa it’ll all be okay.’
Angel nodded and whispered, ‘Yes, I remember, Ma. The three of us together, always.’ And she blinked three times. And no tears fell.
She turned back to Pa. Ma said it’ll all be okay. Old Jalopy will make it, Pa.’

He frowned and tried to swallow his stammer. ‘Ma to ... told you?’ Angel grinned.

‘Yeah, it’s her way of talking, Pa. Lots of unspoken bits.’

Pa’s jaw hardened. ‘I guess, bu ... but Jalopy’s already bl ... blown an oil seal.’

‘I know, but Jalopy’s a strong’n Pa,' she said.

Old Jalopy moaned and gave another violent lurch as rusted springs and grinding metal protested her pain. Angel leaned forward, her tiny fingers loosened their tight grip on the molded dashboard, and soothed Jalopy’s pain with gentle strokes.

‘Come on, Jalopy,’ she whispered. ‘We promised Ma. Remember?’

Yes, Old Jalopy remembered. Remembered how they had named her, just like the old‵uns had called them bone-shakers all those years back. As Ma said with a giggle. ‘She may be a beat-up old Chevy, but she’s got a big heart.’

Angel smiled and remembered how they’d rescued Grandpa’s old marble-capped soda bottle from the back of a dusty cupboard. They'd filled it from a fizzy can of 7 Up and laughed as they broke it on Jalopy’s twisted front bumper to christen her, like the past welcoming the present. Jalopy was already second, or even third-hand, and ready for scrap when they had bought her off that smarmy, jowl-faced dealer in town. But they didn’t mind. They liked the look of her. ‘She’s got soul,’ Ma had said, ‘unlike that dealer.’

The Dealer had rubbed his sweated palms, spat into the dry dust, and sworn there was no sawdust in her gearbox. Ma had raised one eyebrow, cut him deep with ice-blue eyes, and a blade-edged smile that drove the price down. Pa had paid with hard-earned cash from the sale of that year’s steady corn crop.

Angel smiled and whispered to the dashboard. ‘We’ll make it, won’t we, Jalopy …’ It wasn’t a question.

Then, without warning, a tiny blue butterfly fluttered in on the wind through the open window beside her. Angel watched as it beat its fragile wings against the back of the windscreen, desperate to escape to the freedom of the eternal blue sky. She leaned forward, cupped her hands around its delicate body, blew a gentle kiss onto the butterfly’s tiny wings, and guided it back out into the airstream. ‘Fly away home now.’
Angel watched as it disappeared across the browned grassland, searching … forever searching.

Its visit was a sign, she knew it. She shouted across at Pa. ‘We’s almost there.’

Pa nodded, hunched his shoulders, and twisted his head to relieve the stiffness that knotted at the back of his neck.
Angel turned back to the windscreen. Yes, the smear of bouncing bugs had come alive, dancing in celebration, and the azure sky was now streaked with threaded clouds and filled with the cries of skirling gulls. A place where the earth meets the ocean, a place Angel knew was right.
I must introduce myself, though, she thought. Mustn’t forget my manners; Ma wouldn’t like that.

So, above the whines of Jalopy’s laboring engine, Angel spoke her mind to the sky and the gulls, with the intuition of a child who believes more in the unseen than in any ordinary reality.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name is Angel, but we don’t go to church anymores. That preacher lied to us, and that God of his dun Pa and me bad, so we don’t talk to Him now!’
Old Jalopy gave a sudden anguished cry as if struck by a lightning bolt, and dived headlong into a deep pothole for cover. Her engine screamed in fear as her front bumper buried itself in the dirt. Angel grimaced. Maybe that God had just replied?

Pa’s huge hands yanked at the wheel, trying to drag her and his words out in one spat of dry breath. ‘D-d-damn it!’ he cried.
Angel turned back to him, half-afraid. Her tiny fingernails dug into the bleached dashboard. ‘We’ll make it, Pa.’

Pa’s mouth twitched as he swallowed hot, dry air. He slammed the column shift into reverse, the wheels spun, and Jalopy struggled to raise her shaking hood back out of the deep pothole. Pa crunched back into first gear, his boot jammed down hard on the accelerator. Old Jalopy whined with pain, leaped forward, and then – found flat ground again.
Pa sighed, his jaw chewed hard down on his words. ‘Jalopy is g ... getting old and cr-crotchety like me.’ Defeat flickered for a moment in those pale gray eyes. He glanced across at Angel and gave a broken smile. ‘You, ok ... okay?’

Angel nodded, her faith may have been unfaithful, but her spirit was still unbroken. She reached down and lifted the folds of pale-yellow flowers painted on her summer dress, and checked a tall, battered tin hidden there, gripped tight between her little thighs. She twisted the tin around with her fingers and looked down.
Wrapped around its ancient sides was a print of a Marc Chagall painting, Les Amoureux; its once-bold colors now faded with age.

Angel had cut it out of one of Ma’s old art magazines and glued it to the sides of the tall tin. Ma had called it Dreams in my Sky, and of our Angel – it was one of her favorite Chagall paintings. Two moonlit lovers, locked in an eternal embrace, leaned against the roof of their humble house and gazed up at a small angel who hovered high above them.
Inspired by her love of Chagall’s mystical images, Ma had named her newborn daughter Angel. Farming folk roundabout had said Angel looked as if she had just stepped straight out of the painting, instead of her mother’s womb. Ma and Angel had smiled; they knew.
Often, when the two of them sat together looking at the painting, Ma would trace her slender finger over the figure of the angel, hovering high in the air. ‘You see, the same magic; the same eyes, face, and hair as yours.’

For years this tall, battered tin had sat on their old kitchen dresser, full of the mail-order coupons Ma had collected to buy her art magazines.
Ma had laughed and said, ‘Saving coupons is a magic trick, alive with mirrors and light and vivid color.’ But now this tin of magic tricks was destined for bigger things; Angel knew it. She watched as sunlight flickered the painted figures to life, on the tin before her eyes.
She bent down and whispered something to those lovers. For a moment, she listened with her eyes … then nodded, smiled, and turned back to Pa with a grin.
‘Ma is feeling car sick. Your driving and all, she says. Like always, Pa,’ she said.

He looked at her with a confused frown. ‘Ma, ju ... just spoke to you again?’

‘It’s like talk you have to imagine, Pa,' she said. It takes lots of practice, as Ma said.’

A shudder shook them as Jalopy bucked atop another pothole. She hung there suspended, rocking and unsure. Her beat-up body groaning in pain. Pa spun the wheel hard and pushed her hood back down into the dried dirt. He pumped the gas, and Jalopy lurched forward and then leveled out again.

Pa gave a weary sigh, his foot off the accelerator. He let Jalopy roll forward under her own momentum and then, with a gentle squeeze of the brakes, he brought them to a slow halt.

They had arrived.

Pa’s shoulders slumped. His broken fingernails twisted the worn ignition key. Old Jalopy’s tired engine spluttered, coughed, and died; she knew her journey was over.
‘Th ... thanks, old gal,’ Pa said, as air wheezed from his dry, dust-filled lungs.
They both leaned back on the cracked-leather bench and watched as the distant gulls wheeled and turned, riding out the thermals high above the rugged cliffs. Angel’s tiny finger twisted at a hole torn in the faded yellow flowers on her summer dress as she thought about Ma, Chagall, and that painting.

She recalled how Ma had been born in Belarus, many years after Chagall, and had emigrated to the new world in search of her own dreams, packing his mystical visions away in her mind for the journey ‒ images more real to her than the real world itself. And now Ma was about to begin a new journey.

Angel sighed and turned to Pa. ‘Ma will like it here … with us.’ But her voice hesitated.

‘U, huh,’ Pa mumbled. He wasn’t sure, either. He looked down at a red-raw burn seared onto the top of his right hand, and he frowned. How did that happen? He turned his hands over ‒ a farmer’s hands, parched as dry as the soil by that hungry sun. He closed his eyes. How he hated these hands. Hands that had failed them.

Angel’s fingers touched his bare arm; she'd read his thoughts. ‘But Pa, you built and polished Ma’s wooden box and filled it with those beautiful things made with your bare hands your own bare hands.’ Her imploring young eyes searched his lined face.

Pa turned and saw those eyes. He saw his wife’s young eyes looking back at him. Twinkling eyes of the brightest blue that shone with flecks of silver light, like stars in the night sky of Chagall’s painting that Ma had loved. He wiped a dusty tear from the crows-foot corner of his eye onto the rolled sleeve of his checkered shirt and gave a deep sigh.
‘Oh, B-Bella,’ he murmured.

Angel’s fingers tightened on his bare, weathered arm as she watched him. She leaned her head on his shoulder and breathed in the pungent scent of sweat that rose from his worn overalls. Sweat caked with that pale, dry dust and wreathed in burnt smoke …
That burnt smoke.

Their silence deepened.

Angel looked up at his stubbled chin and closed her eyes. A soft, broken whisper drifted from her dry lips. ‘We promised, Pa. Remember? We promised Ma, we’re all going with her.’ Pa nodded.
He remembered. They both remembered.

Chapter 2.

Remembered Ma’s gaunt face painted the palest shade of white as it lay still upon the pillow. And her paper-thin skin stretched taut over high, protruding cheekbones before it fell into the deep valleys of her sunken face. And her once-shining blond hair now matted yellow and stained with sweat, and the faded patchwork quilt pulled tight up under her chin, even as hot air slowly choked the room. But most of all, they remembered her twinkling, bright blue eyes that had once sparkled with flecks of silver light, now bloodshot with pain.
Ma had refused to return to the hospital and dismissed the morphine injections meant to dull the pain. ‘I need to see where I’m going,’ she had said to the bewildered doctor and dismissed him with a wave of her frail arm.
They had wheeled Ma’s metal-framed bed from the darkness of the back bedroom into the front room, as she had asked. Here she had views over the yard and cornfields beyond, and the windows opened wider to help move the slow, hot air that clung to everything.
But most of all, Ma had wanted to be near the other faded Chagall painting, The Couple of the Eiffel Tower, that they had cut from another art magazine and hung framed in the front room above the crumpled sofa. Two wedded lovers floated high above Paris, riding on the back of the chicken of fertility, and smiling down upon her as she lay on her sickbed.
Ma knew the end was near, and she had taught Angel about the unseen power of Chagall’s mystical images; to believe in their unseen reality to transform pain and loss, rather than ordinary reality. The painting held hope and distant magic for her as she gazed up at it through pain-filled eyes. Ma saw the dreams of the entire world, with all its pain and love, in Chagall’s mystical images and his bright, vivid colors.

Angel had sat at Ma’s bedside and watched her mother’s face. A tired fan rattled its weary breath and streamed faded colored ribbons into the stifling air. While the metal whirred, Angel stroked her mother’s raw-boned fingers, lying stretched outside the faded patchwork quilt, and in a soft voice, she sang the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s famous cradle lullaby, which Ma had sung to her in Belarusian when she was a baby.

‘Sleep, my fine young baby,
Lullabye, a-bye.
Quietly the clear moon looks down,
Into your cradle.

I will tell you stories,
I will sing you a song,
Sleep on, close your eyes,
Lullabye, a-bye.’

Pa stood at the end of the bed, head bent, shoulders stooped as he listened to the sound of her young voice. His mind flickered in thought: how strange it is, how this child has now become the mother, and this mother has now become the child. He shook his head in bewilderment. Where did that come from? Angel was still a child, wasn’t she? It must be the sun or the sickness playing tricks with his mind. Or maybe it was something he remembered that holier-than-thou preacher had said when they had christened Angel in their local church.
As the preacher’s prying fingers had anointed her baby-smooth brow with a sprinkling of holy water, he had piously proclaimed, ‘As the corn grows from seed, so its seed becomes the new corn.’
Huh, Pa thought, what did that preacher know about children or corn? He shook his head in disbelief, and his weather-beaten arms fell limp. It was far too late for thinking. He stared down at his dust-caked clothes and the worn work boots that chafed at his bare ankles. These were the ordinary things he understood.

A breeze blew in from the west and fluttered the lace curtains at the window. Pa looked up and blinked. Through their mist of old lace, he saw his cornfields beyond. The once-green corn stalks, now browned and wilted, bowed their heads in pain towards a dusted earth, parched dry by that relentless scorching sun. He gave a husky sigh, a sigh as resigned and tired as the land itself.
Nothing can change, nothing, he thought.

End of extract.