Word Made Flesh

8

Wormland Farm sits out on the northern border of the city where the elevation makes winter come a little earlier and last a little longer. The official name of the estate is Brockden Farm, after the founder, E. C. Brockden, but to the consternation of the historical commission, everyone knows it simply as Wormland.

Edgar Carwin Brockden was one of Quinsigamond’s original legends, the myth by which all of the city’s future mayhem could be measured. By all remaining accounts, he was a brilliant but unstable man with an unhealthy passion for language, books, gnostic tradition, and, later, parasitology. He was born in Ireland to a rare family of shepherds that had escaped the charisma of Saint Patrick and vehemently, if covertly, maintained their pagan ways over generations. Edgar, the eldest son, born of vigorous intellect and natural enthusiasm, nevertheless came to either disappoint or horrify his parents, depending on which account you read, by claiming a devout belief in monotheism at some point during adolescence. Refusing at the age of sixteen to participate in the rituals of the equinox, Edgar was banished from the family and so began a series of wanderings about which we can only speculate.

In one of the first biographies, Dunlap’s The Heretic, we learn that Brockden, though unrepentant regarding his belief in a Judeo-Christian God, retained his clan’s obsession with the mystic and occultist traditions. Clark’s detailed Tongues of Fire and Madness suggests that young Brockden’s “missing years” were spent traveling around the Far and Middle East where he began in earnest collecting a variety of fabled, esoteric, and some might say, diabolic texts. But there is no direct evidence of his whereabouts until his arrival in Quinsigamond with his common-law wife, Lucy, heiress to the Courtland Publishing fortune and daughter of the famed vermesophile, Cecil Stritch.

Brockden moved his clan to New England at the turn of the eighteenth century and it was here that he came to feel his true life began, came to believe there was something in the earth itself that clarified and unified his many obscure theories and grounded them in the flesh. Finding Boston already too settled for his notions of a new and unspoiled Eden, he pushed westward and, for “a pittance and a promise,” as one commemorating folk song later put it, Brockden purchased just shy of fifty acres of stony land from a Packachoag chief named King Mab. And on this plot Brockden set out to make concrete his peculiar, and finally tragic, vision. He founded his own sect, and though the entire congregation was limited to his small family, he named them anew as Babelonians. Their place of worship would be the farm-house, which Brockden called, perhaps, as Grabo suggests, more in mockery of than tribute to St. Augustine, the City of Words.

The structure was designed by Brockden with the aid of a mysterious Italian named Santarcangelo. It almost resembles a storybook castle replete with peaks and spires and featuring a stone tower rising out of its center. The tower consists of a series of floors, one spiraling into the next and each level housing an esoteric library, the fruits, presumably, of Brockden’s early years of traveling and collecting.

Using Lucy’s dowry, Brockden spared no expense importing workmen and materials into this neverland. His wife and two children, Theo and Sophia, survived a trio of spirit-breaking winters in a one-room shelter until the family manse was constructed. Upon completion, their suffering appeared to prove worthwhile, because as far away as Gloucester and New Bedford, people spoke of the paradise that Edgar Brockden had forged in the middle of the heathen wood.

But just three years later, this City of Words was deserted, the culmination of the tragedies that stubbornly rained down upon the Brockden clan until the patriarch was pushed beyond his breaking point. Now the place is just Wormland. And to Gilrein, it is home.

Or, rather, the small section of barn loft where he keeps a bed and a child’s dresser is the closest thing to a home as he’s likely to get in the foreseeable future. And this haven exists only through the good graces of Frankie and Anna Loftus.

He parks the Checker in the barn and climbs up the ladder to the loft. It’s a modest setup, wood-plank floor and walls, slanted dormer ceiling, a roughed-in bath. But it’s clean and it’s quiet and that’s all he wants to allow himself these days. He strips off his clothes and moves into the bathroom, running a hand over his bruises as he goes. In the center of the room there’s a porcelain tub with claw feet. He turns on the radio, and the air fills with Imogene Wedgewood singing, in her Creole-accented French, “Last Chapter (in This Sad Book of Love),” then he starts the hot water and climbs inside, lays his head back over the curl of the edge and stares out the window into the distant cluster of dead apple trees just barely tipped inside the borders of his vision.

Frank and Anna Loftus are the only people left that Gilrein can call friends. The other indie hacks are his associates, colleagues he values and trusts. But when Ceil was killed and Gilrein fell apart, it was Frankie and Anna who brought him to Wormland and saved his life. He hopes he never comes to hate them for this act of compassion.

Frankie Loftus is the son of Willy “The Mortician” Loftus, the neighborhood mayor of the Irish Acre. Frankie and Gilrein met when both were students at St. Ignatius College. Frankie’s family duties at the time involved running the Castlebar Road Boys, the family’s street muscle, a real beer-and-speed crowd that was usually reliable for battering each other instead of their rival gangs. It made for a ludicrous and often schizophrenic existence that found Frankie spending mornings at lectures on Thomas Aquinas and evenings trying to keep up with the CRB ass-kicking parties down in Bangkok.

“Honest to God, Gilrein,” Frankie used to say to his friend, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be Stephen Dedalus or Sonny freakin’ Corleone.”

Frankie’s real passion was for pop culture in all its cheesy forms, but he never spurned the fat scratch that the mob world provided. He learned to put up with the contradictions of his life and eventually found a way to see an ongoing and ever-expanding humor in his dual existence.

Today, everyone forgets that Anna Coleman wasn’t a local girl. She came to St. Ignatius out of Galloway, north of Boston. Galloway, like Quinsigamond, was a factory town whose massive textile mills on the banks of the Passaconnaway attracted the first hordes of European peasantry to crash the industrial revolution. Anna was the daughter of a one-time boxer — cum — railroad cop and a registered nurse, the youngest of one of those teeming Irish broods that took over an entire tenement and made its walls swell to bulging with offspring.

It was probably clear, right then on that first night, when Loftus and Gilrein, both wildly drunk and pissing next to the Jesuit cemetery at dawn, bumped into Anna Coleman, studying century-old tombstones, that somebody was bound to get hurt. To this day, Frankie will claim that he saw Anna first. But all Gilrein can remember is zipping up the fly of his jeans and turning around to see this stunning young woman, backlit by the rising sun, peering at him from behind a faded slab of marble.

What she was doing in the cemetery is now a matter of debate, though it likely involved a study of missionary martyrs. What’s more certain is that Frankie paid the check for the endless breakfast the trio went on to share at the Miss Q Diner down by the rail lot. And by the time the boys argued over who would leave the tip, it was apparent something had begun.

There were a few sweet years there, the three of them inseparable and probably a little giddy with the Jules and Jim allusion, insulated in the way only college brats can be and living out of Frankie’s well-stocked wallet. They took the requisite road trips and stayed up all night arguing about French pedants, pop music, and how many people Frankie’s dad might have whacked. They gnawed pizza crusts and worried over what kind of pesticide might be coating their dope, scrounged the Ziesing Ave book shops for old Levasque paperbacks and spent countless days sealed in movie theaters. And if, at some point, Gilrein began to sense he was becoming the useless third wheel, it wasn’t long before the Transubstantiation Scandal and his subsequent dismissal from St. Iggy.

Frankie and Anna married the week following graduation. After much internal debate, Gilrein showed up at the ceremony, late and feeling sorry for himself, finally drinking so much at the reception that, unbeknownst to the bride and groom, one of the Mortician’s meatboys, an enormous and legendary ex-cop named Toomey, but more commonly known as the Antichrist, escorted him out the rear doors of the Hibernian Social Hall and dismissed him from the affair with a good-old-boy joke whose punchline was Jaysus, I thought that was your teeth chattering.

Gilrein stayed away, did his year of sorrows down the Canal Zone bars among the hopelessly affected young artistes until he was so disgusted by artifice of any type that he put down the bottle and chose the only career he felt capable of — bunko cop. He kept occasional tabs on his old friends through the humps in the Organized Crime Unit, found out the couple had used the Mortician’s substantial wedding present to buy and restore Wormland Farm. Everyone in the department was more than suspicious when word came that the newlyweds were turning Wormland into a nonprofit corporation called Sanctuary Ltd. Half the cops in OC were betting on a new smuggling line. The other half were split between money laundering and some kind of narcotics stratagem. But after countless wiretaps and stakeouts and the shakedown of every mick informant in town, the enterprise, unbelievably, proved legitimate.

According to the intelligence profiles that Gilrein sometimes secreted home at night, Anna had begun traveling the globe on the Mortician’s nickel, figuring there was a way to wash blood money clean. Using her father-in-law’s connections with the other neighborhood mayors, Anna slipped into a series of similarly blighted holes that the planet’s bureaucrats called refugee camps, shanty towns, tent cities, anything but what they were — a particular circle of hell reserved for that most viciously and relentlessly exploited form of chattel in human history, the innocent child.

With equal parts bribery and physical threat, the latter backed up by certain signs and signals known only to the local mob bosses and political hatchet boys, Anna began bringing the orphaned and the starving and the abused back to Quinsigamond with her. By the time Gilrein made plainclothes detective, Wormland Farm was filled with children of every size and hue. By the time Gilrein met Ceil, Anna had decided to expand the parameters of her mission to include adult casualties of political torture, souls victimized in ways unconceived by even the better-than-average imagination. By the time Gilrein and Ceil got married, Anna was in a Central American jungle getting hustled, for the first time, out of a big chunk of the Mortician’s cash by a death-squad cop who failed to turn over the prisoner they’d negotiated for.

And when Ceil was killed in the Rome Avenue raid, Gilrein was brought to Sanctuary by Frankie and Anna Loftus, a victim, though he couldn’t have known it at the time, of Quinsigamond’s own, uniquely twisted brand of political terrorism.

Gilrein agreed, by lack of argument, to stay a month. In his numbness, the time mutated into three years. His leave of absence from the force segued into an inevitable resignation. It was as if he was replaying his postgrad lost year down in the Zone, only this time the performance had been restaged from indulgent melodrama into a kind of endless, absurdist, horrific opera, a surreal fable of meaningless loss whose Greek chorus was played by a multicultural crop of children heard only, always, from a distance. Gilrein never learned whether the children had been cautioned to stay away from him or simply sensed the barrier of gloomy emptiness he emitted like organ music, perpetually warning of the madman hidden around the corner.

He couldn’t bear to live in the main house. Anna came up with the barn-loft alternative. They never talked about Ceil’s death, never discussed the raid and what went wrong, as if to bring up the subject, voice it, give it sound and attendant meaning, would be to make Ceil die once again. Gilrein spent his first season at Wormland walking the orchards daily, trying but never managing to lose himself in the gnarled maze of lifeless fruit trees.

Until that Friday when Frankie came to the barn and yelled up to the loft asking for some help with the furnace. Gilrein tried to shake him off, swearing ignorance regarding the mysteries of plumbing and heating. But Frankie wouldn’t listen and Gilrein ended up following him through the weaving jogs of the farm-house and down the foolishly steep stairs into the basement. It was pouring that day, as it had for most of the previous week, and the cellar seemed even more dank and oppressive than usual. Anna had bundled the kids up and taken the whole lot to a story hour at the public library, so the unnatural quiet of the farm accentuated the standard undercurrent of timber and joist groan that the stress of mismatched carpentry work had engendered over the years.

They wound their way toward the farthest rear reaches of the basement, came to a stop at an industrial-size oil burner looking like a horrible, grease-scarred green oven salvaged from some long-abandoned detention camp.

“So what’s wrong with it?” Gilrein asked, immediately abandoning hope in the face of dozens of unlabeled valves, half of which were dripping rust-colored water. Frankie had enough money to heat the place with uranium if he wanted, so why didn’t he just phone up a repairman?

“Not a damn thing,” Frankie’s voice holding that barely repressed burden of restrained glee that in college had been, if not endearing, then at least pardonable, and now was just taxing on the patience.

“So what are we doing down here?”

By way of answer, Frankie led the way past the furnace and oil tanks to a narrow plywood door held closed with a padlock. He fished a key from his pocket, popped the lock, threw open the door, and stepped aside to reveal a closet housing nothing but stale air.

Gilrein stared at him. Frankie took a silver penlight from a rear pocket, snapped it on, and shined it at the closet floor. Set into the concrete was what looked like a municipal manhole cover. It was made of tarnished brass, maybe two feet in diameter, and in its center was a recessed bolt with an inlaid, swing-up handle below it. Gilrein got down on one knee, brushed away a thin cover of dirt. Above the bolt was some sort of design cut into the plate — something like a snake spiraling up out of the center of an open book. Below the bolt was an inscription.

“It says,” Frankie answered without being asked, “Liber Vermiculosus Vertit.”

Then he kneeled down next to Gilrein and began to unscrew the bolt. His face was apparent even in shadow, spreading into childish smile.

“You’ll get a little dirty,” he said, “but it’s worth it.”

Gilrein pulls the plug in the tub and sits still until all the water drains away. Then he climbs out, towels off, throws on some clean clothes and runs to the main house before he can debate the consequences of what he’s about to do.

The entire Loftus clan is currently in Miravago, ostensibly touring an obscure Inca ruin near the mouth of the Urubango River, but in reality bartering for the freedom of a nun, a Sister of Torment and Agony, who has been alternately captured, raped, tortured, and released by both rebel and governmental forces in a kind of round robin of philosophical sadism.

Unlocking the rear door, Gilrein lets himself into the massive kitchen, all wainscoting and ceiling timbers, overstuffed rockers and a central table so large and heavy you could park a car on it. He knows this is where the family tends to congregate and Anna once remarked, without any sign of mockery, that this was where the bulk of healing at Sanctuary took place. Gilrein wouldn’t know — he’s never eaten a meal here.

He quickly unbolts the cellar door and makes his way down into the basement, grabbing a flashlight off the first stair. He moves past the furnace and the oil tanks, comes to the closet and opens it. He unbolts the manhole cover and opens the lid, then lowers himself down into the earth, into the burrow where Edgar Brockden tripped over the line that separates the sane from the demented. The chamber where this new Eden was transformed into Gehenna.

The box is down here somewhere. He just needs to get his bearings. He sets off along a random corridor and begins taking turns based on instinct more than memory. He gets lost a half-dozen times but manages to find his way back to the starting point and try again. And finally, just before giving up and acknowledging that this is probably not a smart thing to do, he comes to the section he’s been seeking, the place where someone, possibly Brockden himself, graffitied the floor with the words THE SPIRIT GIVES UTTERANCE.

Gilrein goes down to his knees and begins to push books off the shelf closest to the ground, lighting up title after title until he comes to a series of books that have no title, a trio of odd-sized, ramskin-bound notebooks, imported from France, affixed with ridiculous taxes and tariffs. And filled with the handwriting of Gilrein’s dead wife, Ceil.

Three years ago, when he squirreled the notebooks down here, he believed he could never bring himself to either read them or destroy them. Now, he folds himself into a sitting position, fixes the flashlight into the crook of his neck, and opens to page one.