HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY WERE by BOSTON TERAN

Author:BOSTON TERAN [TERAN, BOSTON & Teran, Boston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HIGHTOP PUBLISHING
Published: 2019-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 49

Nathaniel rented a horse and rode out Broadway to Troy Road. From there it was about another two miles or so. Both sides of Troy were lined with orchards, apple orchards for hard cider mostly, at least that is what a farmer explained to him as he rode past. The day kept shifting between brilliant warm sunshine and spikey grey storm weather.

He had not slept. He did not know what to make of himself. He was as contradictory as the weather. An actor searches for a character’s motivation to know how to play him on stage. But Nathaniel could not understand this character that was himself. At times he felt he was riding into the teeth of a terrible judgment. And the last time he’d felt that, he’d killed a man. He should turn back and let her desire to meet die a natural death. But he could not. He was compelled by irrational needs, as if she had some power over him that he could only exorcise by meting out a measure of his rage. But he detested himself for these feelings, because they made him seem weak to himself just like he detested the fact that he’d shaved that morning in anticipation of seeing her. That he’d wanted to look his best seemed to him a slap in the face of his own manhood.

He could hear singing from a choir long before he sighted the buildings. It wasn’t a church so much as a meeting house where they were to come face to face. It was well off the road in an open plat between orchards. There was a barn and a mill and set about the place were saddled horses and wagons, enough for maybe one hundred people.

She had written she would be at service, and they could talk afterwards. He assumed the setting was to keep his darker impulses in check.

The sky had blackened considerably, and a wind had blown up as he entered the service. The long pews were filled with parishioners and to his surprise there were black people sitting among the whites there. The person administrating the service turned out to be a woman who sat in one of those three wheeled chairs for people who can’t stand or walk.

She was a reedy thing with plain unorthodox features, and as Nathaniel scanned the other faces, she talked of a new world order where the races would share God’s bounty together. And women like herself would not be forbidden to speak in churches or from offering their insights on the world. That the “new Christian” religions such as the Swedenborgian Church were at the front of the human revolution that saw equality in all things as the foundation for everlasting peace. But look as he tried, there was no Genevieve Wells.

There was a small loft that had been transformed into a gallery where the choir of about a dozen or so stood and sang. She was not there either. And with the grey sky upon the windows, he did not understand.

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