FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

_ 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?!" "W_alk 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."