Solomon Gursky Was Here Read Free Page B

punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim’s igloo. There was a good deal of hollering and singing and clapping and what sounded like dancing. The Reverend Columbus Green, who had been urgently sent for, bundled up and listened by the shore, not going too close or staying too long, a Bible held to his breast. Then he reported to the men waiting in Crosby’s Hotel. “I think they are singing in the language of the Lord in there,” he said.
    â€œDon’t sound like English to me.”
    â€œHebrew.”
    â€œThat’s just bullshit,” Ebenezer Watson said, affronted.
    Pressed, the Reverend Columbus Green allowed that he wasn’t absolutely sure. The wind had distorted things and it had been a long time since he had studied Hebrew in the seminary.
    â€œWhat’s the Church of the Millenarians?” Ebenezer asked.
    â€œI’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”
    â€œFiggers.”
    The next evening the little brown men and women were gone, but before they left they had erected a sizeable sailcloth tent on the ice. There was something else. White robes were being aired on lines supported by pine poles, maybe thirty of them exploding like crackers each time they were slapped by the wind. The men in Crosby’s Hotel drank several rounds and then descended in a body to Ephraim’s igloo on the frozen lake.
    â€œWhat are them sheets for?”
    â€œThem aren’t sheets, my good fellow. Them are ascension robes to be worn for the ascent into heaven. Those among you who can read raise your hands.”
    Six of them raised their hands, but Dunlap was only bragging.
    â€œWait here.”
    Ephraim was gobbled up by his entry tunnel then emerged a moment later to distribute pamphlets: Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1851 .
    â€œIt is more difficult,” Ephraim told them, his eyes hot, “for a rich son of a bitch to enter heaven than to piss through the eye of a needle. Do not comfort yourselves, my good fellows, thinking hell is an abstraction. It’s a real place just waiting on sinners like you. If you have ever seen a hog on a spit, its flesh crackling and sizzling, squirting fat, well that’s how hot it is in hell’s coolest regions. The first meeting is tomorrow night at seven in the tent. Bring your womenfolk and your children. I have come to save you.”

Two
    1983 it was. Autumn. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. One of them wakened Moses Berger with a start, slamming into his bedroom window and sliding to the grass. Responding to the brotherly call of another dipso in trouble, Moses yanked on his trousers and hurried outside. He had turned fifty-two a few months earlier and was not yet troubled by a paunch. It wasn’t that he exercised but rather that he ate so sparingly. He was not, as he had once hoped, even unconventionally handsome. A reticent man of medium height with receding brown hair running to grey and large, slightly protuberant brown eyes, their pouches purply. His nose bulbous, his lips thick. But even now some women seemed to find what he sadly acknowledged as his physical ugliness oddly compelling. Not so much attractive as a case to answer.
    The partridge hadn’t broken its neck. It was merely stunned. Flapping its wings it flew off, barely clearing the woodpile, undoubtedly pledging to avoid fermented crab apples forever.
    Some hope.
    His own head far from clear, Moses retreated to his cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog and reheated what remained of last night’s coffee, lacing it with a shot of Greysac’s cognac, now yet another Gursky brand name.
    The Gurskys.
    Ephraim begat Aaron.
    Aaron begat Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who then begat children of their own.
    Morning rituals. Moses conceded