THE GOLDEN FRUIT

By Andrew Marr, OSB

Chapter the 1st

Michael Bullinger lit a cigarette in front of the church to celebrate the safe delivery of all the copies of the Milton Gazette entrusted to his care. As he did every day, he studied the sign in front of the church: St. John’s Episcopal Church. He would likely forget the name again by the time he was a block away. He wondered why they couldn’t give their church a name that was easy to remember, like the Lutheran or Catholic or Congregational Church. Not that he cared about church or cared about anything else. School. Paper route. Loafing. Just being bad in a boring sort of way. That’s about all there was to life. If the mills in town ever opened up again, he might have a boring job to look forward to when he grew up. At least he would have some money while living a boring life. It seemed more likely that the mills would stay closed and he would have a boring life with no money.

Michael took a long puff from his cigarette and chuckled humorlessly about the caterpillars he had placed inside the paper delivered to Father Clement, rector of St. John's. He wondered why he liked being mean to the clergy. They weren’t any worse than everybody else. Maybe the reason was it was their job to be good, or try to be, and he liked to challenge them.

Michael gave the front porch of Mrs. Lear’s house another look. He liked the way the Gazette stuck out of the stone lion’s mouth. The old woman would not be able to reprimand him for leaving the paper in her garden. Mrs. Lear’s house always looked to Michael like a misshapen shoe, reminding him of the nursery rhyme. The house had only half a second story with a sloping roof curving down the other side. It was hardly the sort of house that belonged in a steel town in Pennsylvania. Michael liked to think that the house had been tossed from another world just to make things interesting. For that matter, Mrs. Lear was odd enough to have come from some other world herself. As if to confirm Michael’s suspicions, Michael heard a sound that could pass for a lion’s growl. Then the eye facing him turned bright yellow and glared at him Michael glared back at the lion until the eye turned back into stone. Satisfied that things were back to normal, he looked down the hill which gave him a bird's eye view of Milton.

At the foot of the street, Main Street cut through the Monanghehela Valley. Beyond the street was the river, lined with steel mills. Few of the smoke stacks offered any smoke to the environment. All the more reason to make up for it by smoking cigarettes. The good news was that the factories were not polluting the air and the river as much as they used to. The bad news was that the factories didn't have any money or jobs to offer the town. The worse news was that Michael’s father was always home because he was one of many who no longer had a job. The paper he had just delivered had a the usual reprint about the next set of layoffs. The pile of empty beer cans in his living room was going to turn into a mountain at this rate. The autumn wind gusted and gave Michael a chill. He tightened his jacket but it was too threadbare to do him much good.

Sometimes Michael wished he could make up the headlines for the Gazette and have them come true. Everybody in western Pennsylvania would be back on the job, and the Pittsburgh Steelers would win the Super Bowl. There would be no more wars, and no threat of a nuclear holocaust. Michael wondered, though, if life was worth saving from such a war. Maybe he should write a happy story where a nuclear war caused a bunch of mutations that made people so nice to each other that they stopped fighting wars.

"So, you want me to have a chewed up newspaper, do you?"

Michael almost thought the lion had come back to life to talk to him, but he knew Mrs. Lear’s voice all too well. Although it seemed impossible that she could have appeared without some warning, there she was, standing in the driveway, dressed in work clothes, and holding a dirt-filled trowel in her hands.

"If you let the lion digest the news, you won't have to read as much,” Michael replied in his deadpan voice.

Mrs. Lear raised her trowel as if she were about to use it as a magic wand and turn Michael into a horned toad.

"What you don't know, young man, is that this lion will chew up the news that should never have happened.”

“Good for it,” said Michael with a shrug. “Now, how do I get a newspaper to print stories about something going right somewhere, somehow.”

“You could try doing something right somewhere yourself,” Mrs. Lear suggested.

"I'll think about it," Michael replied as he turned his back on Mrs. Lear and quickly went on his way before her piercing stare made him crumble to the ground.

Michael thought of going down to Main Street and blowing his money on the slot machines in the arcade there, or meeting his gang at Donna’s Donuts, but neither alternative appealed to him. But the only other alternative was to stop by his house. If he did that, his Mom wouldn’t be able to keep saying he was never home. It hadn’t occurred to Michael that home would almost seem interesting if he stayed away most of the time.

“I guess I don’t like anybody or anywhere,” Michael muttered to himself. “I don’t like doing anything, either. You’d think there would be a world somewhere that’s fun to go to, but I just can’t think of what it would be like. Streets that change direction without warning would help, I guess. Too bad I can’t do something like that here in Milton.”

As she shuffled down the street, Michael tried to think of some things he could do that would cause better news stories to appear in the paper. Making the honor roll at school would be earthshaking news but doing the schoolwork wouldn’t be any fun. He could rat on his friends and put a dent in the crime in Milton, but then he wouldn’t have any friends. Not that his friends were very good friends anyway. Michael’s next idea was to take another town and mix it up with Milton just so everybody could be lost in their hometown. That sounded more promising.

When Michael turned on to the street where he lived, he extinguished his cigarette in case his mother should see him coming. He knew she didn’t care about his getting lung cancer; she only liked having something to yell at him about. He heard rock music devouring his house. That meant at least one of his sisters was home. Once he was at the house, Michael had a hard choice. He could go in the front door and take a chance of meeting with his Dad slumped in front of the TV, or he could try the kitchen door where he might run into his Mom. Michael flipped an imaginary coin and it came up Dragonheads. He decided that meant the front door. He thought he heard the TV but it was mostly drowned out by the CD player upstairs. As usual, several broken toys lay on the stairs as booby traps for the unwary. Michael wasn't sure if he was thankful that the toys remained in position for weeks at a time so that he knew the way round them by instinct, or if life would be more interesting if the little demons of the house would rearrange the toys every other day.

"Michael!" Pam called over the record she was playing.

"What!"

Michael's teen-age sister stepped into the hallway, her hair half-combed.

"When are you going to open your letter?" she asked him through the wad of gum she was chewing.

"What letter?"

"The letter you got."

"What letter?"

"YOUR LETTER! It's been laying around the living room for days and days."

"Nobody writes me."

"Then there isn't a letter for you!" Pam yelled as she slammed the door, leaving Michael to shrug off that puzzling intelligence.

Michael decided to make the trip downstairs in case what his sister said was true. He checked the table next to the vestibule where he found a disordered pile of mostly unopened mail, but saw nothing addressed to him. He looked in the kitchen where his mother was sipping coffee and reading a newspaper with screaming headlines filled with scandal, but still saw no letter on the counter.

“What do you want?” his mother asked without looking up from the paper.

"Where's my letter?" asked Michael.

"Don't have one," his mother grunted as she took another sip of coffee.

"Pam said I got a letter.”

"Then ask her for it. I've never seen you get a letter in my life."

"Neither have I."

Michael shuffled out of the kitchen and tripped over one of the booby traps on the stairs. Upstairs, he yelled an obscenity at his sister through her door and then slammed the door of his own room which he shared with his next youngest brother. Luckily, his brother was not around to tell him to shut up. A divider split the room down the middle, the result of the only project the two brothers had cooperated on. On the soiled pillow of his unmade bed Michael found an envelope resting. He picked it up and stared at his name written across the envelope in an ornate script. His house address was not given and there was no return address and no stamp. Michael carefully opened the letter and found himself staring at a drawing of a dragon winding its body around the edge of the notepaper. The dragon's mouth was wide open as if it were about to devour the reader. On the other hand, the dragon did not look unfriendly. The letter itself was written in the same fancy handwriting as the address on the envelope. It read:

            Dear Michael,

                        It is time for you to come visit us here at Carelin. Your Aunt Edith and I would love to have you. So would your cousins Amarilla, Roger, and Samantha. We can use a paperboy, for one thing, and we can use your talents for another thing. The bus from Milton leaves at 11:20 pm. It is a long trip but should be worth it to you. Our address is 3457 Perrifell Lane. You can probably find it if you don’t get fooled by all the other streets. I don't have time to write any more but I should be seeing you soon. Don't put off coming; there is too much to imagine.

The letter was signed "Uncle Martin."

Michael read the cryptic letter a second and third time but could not make any sense of it. He knew he had an uncle in Detroit who had been mugged in the streets a month ago, and he had heard of an aunt down in the Carolinas. But if he had an Uncle Martin and an Aunt Edith, they were a well-kept secret. But then any relatives his parents were too ashamed to talk about had to have something good about them. The letter was so far out that Michael would have assumed it was a practical joke if he thought anybody in his family or any of his friends were capable of such a thing. He looked at the handwriting and the drawing of the dragon yet again and concluded that the letter could only have been caused by his wish to live in a town where the streets rearranged themselves when they felt like it. Much as he tried to resist the feeling, Michael was overcome with longing to meet the uncle who wrote the letter and his family.

Michael took the letter downstairs to the living room where his father stared into the television set and sipped his beer as if he were chained to the place. Unread newspapers stacked beside the couch high enough to function as a side table for his father's beer. His father obviously hadn't shaved that morning. Michael's youngest siblings were running toy cars along the floor and occasionally looking up at the picture on the television screen.

"I got a letter from Uncle Martin," Michael announced.

The burly man grunted.

"He's inviting me to his house in Carelin."

"Where?"

"Carelin."

"Who?"

"Uncle Martin."

"You don't have an Uncle Martin."

Michael's five-year-old brother threw a toy truck at his younger sister. His father shouted them down without otherwise moving a muscle of his body. Michael withdrew from the growing pandemonium as one, then both, of the children began to scream and his father’s bellowing got louder. Michael took the letter to the kitchen where his mother was still reading her scandal newspaper. Some hot dogs were boiling in a pan on the stove, but his mother did not appear to know they were there.

“I found my letter,” said Michael. “It’s from Uncle Martin.”

"You don't have an Uncle Martin."

“How do you know?”

Michael’s Mom slammed her paper on the counter and glared at her son.

“Awright, I don’t know you don’t have an Uncle Martin. Maybe he got put into the nuthouse and my husband forgot to mention him to me.”

“He and Aunt Edith and my cousins—my cousins—“ Michael looked at the letter—“Amarilla, Roger and Samantha are all inviting me to visit them in Carelin.”

“Where’s that.”

“No idea.”

“Then how can you visit them?”

“By taking the bus.”

“What bus?”

“The bus that goes there.”

“Try finding it in the Greyhound schedule and good riddance.”

“Good riddance yourself.”

And Michael was out of the house before his Mother could think about calling him back. He hadn’t packed for his trip but he didn’t care about taking anything he had. He didn’t have much anyway. His pockets were already stuffed with what money he had. If he saw his friend Scott, he would tell him to deliver the Milton Gazette for a couple of days. If he didn’t run into Scott before the bus came, maybe no papers would be delivered. Maybe nobody would notice that there wasn’t any news.

Proceed to Chapter the 2nd