The way that all things, future and past, are now being swept into a timeless cyberspace present, I figure that my next novel, #5, might as well be posted online, as it develops . . . as it morphs up from the past, leaps out of my mind onto the keyboard into electronic eternity.
Here is beginning of first chapter:
“Over here, by the pathway, please, George, let’s see what it looks like, right here” she commanded. Leona pointed earthward and stepped away.
Carrying the angel between their outstretched arms, her two dutiful gardeners performed the deed, easily.
“Hmm. . .” she intoned, considering its position in her front yard. She gazed at the statue for a moment. “Have a seat on the porch. Take a break. I need to think about this for a moment.”
George and Willie were only too happy to accept her gentle command. And so they did. Leona walked out to the front edge of the yard, to get a street view. The angel—pudgy little darling that it was—she had encountered in an antique shop in Charleston. After a moment, she walked southward on the sidewalk, toward town square. A block away, she turned back to have a look from the block-away perspective. But Leona knew immediately that that distance was not to be the determining factor. Her little angel was just too insignificant, too miniscule, from that distance. It would have to occupy, by its placement, a more commanding position in her cultivated arrangements.
Arriving again at her front yard, Leona spoke across the scape to her twice-blessed handyman-gardener. “George,” put it there, in the middle.”
George set his cup aside, lifted himself from the front-porch rocker. With Willie, they traipsed down the four steps, along the sidewalk. Lifting again the angel, they carried it the sixteen-or-so feet to the yard middle. Arriving there at the appointed midpoint target, the two ole codgers paused. George set his eyes on his employer again.
“Yes, that’s it. Perfect. Thank you.”
Lowering the angel to earthward brought down upon the ages an ancient legacy. But who knew?
A hundred years went by.
*** Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel.
Back in the day, a hundred or so year ago, Leona Baresford—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed gardeners to place her angel in the front yard, in the middle of the front yard.
Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, Moses? understood. Noal was still trying to figure it all out.
Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions.
But hey, it doesn’t really matter now. That must have been in a time so long ago, and originating so far away, that he could assign, in his mind, no time nor place for it.
Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim omnipotence with his apple trick.
Now the guard angels had been assigned from on high. Their duty was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected, in a time so long ago and oh so far away.
Yes, so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place that— were Moses himself inclined to give an account of it— he would be perplexed re the manner in which he would—or even could—document the official, historical account of what is happening here and now in America, as if it were even relevant to what was happening way back when, back in the day, in the mists of antiquity. . . (to be continued.
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