Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

They were busy with the completion of their own work—work that had begun in the early hours of this day, when one or another had awoken with the idea to go back of the house, take the milk cow by a rope, or to open up the hen house and gather the fattest, or visit the pigsty and take a suckling—take those animals, and bring them down to the Cathedral. They didn’t know much when they did that, but now, the Nigger prophet had told them as clear as they could understand: God hungered, there in his Cathedral. He hungered, and He expected something to be done about that.

So the living formed into a column, moving up the ramp to the Cathedral’s great doors; past the Oracle, the Madonna weeping over a child, while another sang sweetly, her voice not hitching even as tears streamed down her cheeks. The dead man joined the throng, his filthy, blistering flesh inches from the smooth, near-to-perfect skin of a young blond-haired man with a thin moustache and bright, bright eyes. Sam didn’t know his name, but he’d seen him, working the team of horses that had cleared the southern slopes of the hill last fall. The fellow had a pair of chickens—one in each arm, kicking and pecking. He regarded Sam.

“You don’t look well,” he said.

“I been better.”

“Maybe you will be,” said the young man, nodding toward the great dark gates of their new cathedral. The song was met with the whine of the saw-blade spinning up. “I bet He’s merciful.” The dead man huffed, reached into the jar he carried, and dabbed him on the cheek.

“Bless you, son,” Sam said when the fellow looked at him oddly.

“Well bless you,” he said, touching his cheek and sniffing at his finger.

They drew toward the Oracle—a sickly girl who would have gone by the name of Feeger. Her eyes were hollow and wet, and Sam could see every section of her spine through her soaked-through frock as she bent over the dead girl—another Feeger, surely. Another one—black-maned like all of them, with thick shoulders and an idiot stare—tried to touch the Oracle; but his hand came away, as though burned.

Sam had heard tell of these Feegers often enough, visiting the other folk on the hill who lived in such fear of them. They were certainly terrifying enough, coming into the kitchen of a mansion with big home-made blades and axes, murdering rich men and their wives… setting the beams on fire, as a fellow emptied his iron into their bellies, and more came, stoking the flames and finally leaving that fellow for the dead… .

Here, grieving for their own—they were almost deserving of pity. Weeping, they reminded him of others living on the mountain slopes—poor folk living hard, sickly lives in Heaven’s shadow. The people Bergstrom would so methodically butcher.

He paused a moment, dipped his thumb into the jar, and touched the hem of the singing girl’s sleeve. The big lad looked up at him, and Sam thought this might be the end of his walk. But he turned back to the Oracle, and tried again to rest his hand on her back. The singer looked at him in such a way that caused him to think: She knows.

But she did not spare him by crying out. Sam Green huffed, and continued on through the wide doors of the mill.

“Oh my,” said a beautiful young red-haired wife next to him, carrying a pig under her arm, looking up at the dark rafters. Sam looked there too.

“Our Father,” he said, “who art in Heaven…”

“Hallow’d be Thy name,” continued the wife, not sparing Sam a glance as he dabbed her arm.

“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done,” said two men a little ways behind him, coaxing their nervous cow into the shadow of the mill, “on Earth, as it is ’n Heaven.”

Sam let them finish.

He would like to have prayed now—talked to God, asked Jesus Christ for forgiveness of his sins, because when a man knows the moment of his passing, that’s what a man does.

But looking up into the trembling maws of this God—he didn’t want to curry favour, be forgiven, granted entry into This One’s Heaven. And no amount of supplication before the true one and His Son would do much good. Not held against the thing he was about to do; the thing he’d already done.

As he stood there, he watched as the blond-haired man handed one of chickens to a black-haired Feeger who stood by the whirling saw. The bird squawked and struggled as the Feeger lowered it to the spinning blade. Blood fountained and sprayed high, and a stalk whipped down from the rafters. The Feeger tossed the bird into the air, and the stalk twisted and snatched, and the bird was gone. The Feeger took the man’s other chicken.

“Where’s your sacrifice?” asked the wife, holding the kicking pig like it was a baby.

Sam smiled as best he could.

“Right here,” he said, and held the jar from Cracked Wheel, Montana over his head. He dabbed two fingers in it.

“You sure that’ll please Him?” she asked.