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Yuletide 2022
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2022-11-24
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Genesis, Revised and Expanded

Summary:

"I was there for that ‘Let there be light’, and I tell you, there was ten million of us angels out there to gather it up, and not a steamer or a donkey-engine to haul it with, neither. I could write a whole book of the Bible about the hauling and the digging behind those ‘Let there be’s. For ten cents I would write one. That world of yours took us a solid week of work without so much as a dinner-break."

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

I

I don’t want to tell you about the war— what I want to tell you comes after that. But I should start with how I got into the prison camp, and what happened once I was released, and once I get up steam, I reckon the current will carry me the rest of the way.

Let me start in the army. I was the grandest soldier who ever wore out shoe leather— so I thought to myself when I joined up— and the Army of Missouri the grandest outfit since Alexander, or Julius Caesar at the very least. We were equipped with a general who had a talent I have never heard of in any military man before or since, which is that the stronger the enemy got, the more qualified he was to lick them. We marched out of Arkansas in August, and by September we were just about at St. Louis. But the Federals around there weren’t quite strong enough for him, and we moved on. He aimed to make his first demonstration a rip-snorter, and wanted the proper situation for it. We went to Jefferson City next, but it was the same kind of affair. He wouldn’t condescend to whip them; any dime-store general might have turned his hand to doing it, but he was a man of talent, which demanded the proper occasion, or it was useless. As well set a virtuoso in front of an audience of deaf-mutes— the feeling wouldn’t come.

Round about Westport, we ran into the Union army about as thick as snowflakes in a blizzard, and we set on to lick them. There seemed to be so many, I didn’t see any way we couldn’t lick them. What I heard afterwards was that they had sent some cavalry squadrons back east the week before, to help out Sherman in Georgia, and there weren’t quite as many Federals as the General had been counting on. I maintain to this day that if those men had been there, he would have risen to the moment. But they weren’t, and his inspiration deserted him.

Some of us died, a good many of us ran, but most of us ended up prisoners. I had thought it would be a great shame to be a prisoner, and that when the time came, I would draw my knife and fight till the last. But none of my friends seemed inclined to fight till the last. Anyway, I had broken my knife the day before in trying to shell a walnut, so I reckoned I would go along after all.

I was locked up in the old Rock Island Arsenal, and I can say that I never truly hated any Union soldiers but the ones who ran that operation. The place might have done for an ice-box, or a tannery. It would have made a tolerable pig-sty, if they had cleaned it out a little first. But they put five thousand men into it, and kept them there, on food a cat would have sneered at. There was plague of all kinds there, and chill, and misery. Many a boy went in there fit to pitch hay-bales from dawn to supper-time and came out a thin shaking wreck good for nothing but to stand up in the wheat field and scare crows away. Many a boy went in and never came out in this world. There are more mothers in some towns, I think, who weep over the name of Rock Island than those of Gettysburg or Antietam— not to win any glory, mind, nor to uphold any cause, but for want of clean linens and healthful provender.

I spent the winter there on tenterhooks thinking that I would catch ill and die. I made myself officer in charge of my body, and began to drill it. I marked every cough and sniffle as a sergeant notes down sharp talk around the campfire. Every morning, I called a roll of my organs as to any soreness or congestion. Lungs: present! How situated? A bit hoarse, sir, and wheezing. Guts: on deployment, sir, campaigning against that bit of salt pork you ate yesterday morning. Expected casualties? We are afraid they may be heavy, sir, but we hope for the best!

Every organ of the lot was promoted that winter, and I put in my guts for a medal, though I feared they would have to retire from active service when the war was up, and take on no more formidable opponent than toast and weak tea for a good long while. But I was tolerably pleased with myself for not dying, and kept up this way until the middle of March, when I caught ill in earnest.

It was no sneak of an illness such as I had been afraid of. No, this was a stand-up illness, an illness that meant to draw up in ranks and take on its victim at bayonet point. There were no preliminary barrages, no coughs or sniffles or sorenesses; on Sunday morning, I was perfectly well, and by Monday noon, I was laid out as flat as if I had tried to catch a cannon ball between my teeth. I went into the hospital that same day, and I think my friends despaired of my coming out again, although they did not tell me so.

For my part, I despaired just as heartily as they did, and I kept up the pretense that I would soon see them again, I fear, in just as unconvincing a fashion. It would have been a tragic and noble end to the story if I sank down in that lightless plague house and expired just as the war was drawing at last to a close. My friends could have murmured sadly to one another: “Poor Henry— another week would have seen him a free man. He was the very best of us, and the last victim of that terrible struggle,” and been awful sorry about the whole business.

In the end, I ruined it all, and lived. I did not think I would live; I did not know I still lived; I knew nothing the rest of that month. Of the flight to Appomatox, the surrender, the death of President Lincoln, I apprehended not a word. I was engaged in my own little war, in which I relived all the privations of the field. My threadbare blanket was as noisome and verminous as any I had suffered on the march, my meals as scant and unsavory. One hour I baked as hot as the scorched highways of Arkansas had ever made me, and the sweat streamed down my body like bacon grease over a griddle. The next, I froze to the depths of a Missouri winter, and blasphemed through my chattering teeth in the confidence that, if death should come suddenly on me, I could laugh at the torments of hell for an hour at least— it would have taken that long, I think, to thaw me out.

It was in this state that I lay while my friends and comrades were mustered out of the camp. From what I heard later, they were assembled in drafts of a hundred or so, the oath of loyalty to the Union administered to them, and their travel papers stamped; then they went forth, citizens of the country once more, to amble peaceably up and down streets where two months prior, they would have been greeted as the outriders of an invading power.

The hospital too was nearly empty by the time I returned to myself, its inmates scattered in all directions— temporal and spiritual in about equal proportions. It was about then, I suspect, that the guards made up their minds to play a mean trick on me. As I said, I hated them, and I could tell without any effort that they hated me just as much. They got me up with kicks and curses, marched me out to the parade ground, and had me salute the Stars and Stripes, though I was so thin that they had to stand on either side of the flagpole while I did it, for fear I would step in behind the pole and disappear.

“That’s it, Johnny Reb, you’re a regular American again, and as free as a pretty little birdy,” said the Lieutenant. “Now take your papers and go to—”

“I’m a free man,” I retorted, “I’ll go where I please.”

It was a happy thought, and it carried me in joy past the gates of the fort and half a mile down the road. It was only then that I thought to look at the papers they had given me. I had expected permission to take a train, and draw rations, and perhaps a new shirt and trousers, but all it said on the paper was that I was free to go to— where they had already told me to go, by the directest means possible, and that all United States officers were enjoined to assist me in doing so, per G. G., Chief of Ordnance. I spent a few minutes consoling myself by inventing torments for G. G. and his accomplices. They were a fine set of torments (though I say so myself). Next to them the destruction of Gomorrah would have looked like a penny firecracker. But my heart was not in it. Looking at that useless scrap of paper, and up and down that empty road, I felt so weak and friendless I could have wept.

II

I didn’t see anybody for another mile or so, and then I came up on a fellow who looked to be about my own age, and so forlorn and threadbare a figure I thought he must have been locked in the Arsenal as well— that, or he’d been put up in a clothes-press and the moths let to have him. There was nothing else that could have explained it.

I should explain that in pictures of the war, such as you might see hung in a gallery, or in any large house in Charleston or New Orleans, the Southern soldier is always represented in his gray coat. It is a fine coat, such as a tolerably rich man might wear to ride around his plantation, made of good broadcloth with big brass buttons. I have never seen the pockets of this painted coat bulge out with a promiscuous litter of matches and shotgun shells and green apples “smouched” from some wayside orchard. It has never been mended by a boy who has hitherto been accustomed to ridicule sewing as a feminine pastime, and in consequence fastens a patch with a mare’s nest of looping stitches like a banker’s signature. Nor has the dye, cheaply bought and scantily applied, run out, so that the fabric is gray only in that it is demonstrably no other color. But the Southern soldier’s coat, such as I saw it in the war, had all these qualities. Indeed, I wish I could have a few of those coats again, and hang one next to some of the paintings— it would do people a heap of good, I think, to draw the comparison.

The stranger’s coat was of the authentic wartime pattern, and so purely an exemplar of it that a stiff breeze would have torn it in two. Yet I looked at that miserable excuse for a garment and felt the same surge of hope as the traveler must feel, who wading through wet and clinging snow, sees firelight through the window of a far-away inn. For It spoke to me of a companion in my adversity!

“Hold up, now,” I said to myself. “You don’t know this fellow and he don’t know you. If you leap on him and embrace him as a brother, he’ll think you have brain-fever, and shun you, and then where will you be?”

So, drawing myself up, I walked on past him, and only when I was just level with him did I turn my head and address him.

“Good afternoon,” I said, but I tried to make my tone as cheerful as that utterance would bear.

“Why, it’s not such a fine one,” he said. “It looks like rain coming to me.”

This response pleased me even more, for the stranger’s dialect was Southern.

“That’s true,” I said jubilantly. “It’s awful cloudy.”

Here the conversation lagged. It was the stranger’s place to speak; I was shy of putting myself too far forward. But the stranger didn’t speak. I began to feel a little heated, for there were all sorts of things I could have said to him— if he would consent to make an opening— but he didn’t. He strolled along, looking around him as though the dull gray sky and rocky fields around us were a scene of endless interest and pleasure, requiring no conversation to brighten them.

“Why, what business does he have going along like that?” I thought to myself. “It ain’t natural. If a man lays down his end of a conversation, it’s his business to pick it up again, and not leave it dangling— no more than a man ought to step away from the saw-pit and leave the saw blade flapping up and down fit to cut a body.”

“Why, if I were a trifle stronger, for ten cents I’d make him talk to me, or else—”

But upon the instant, he turned and looked me full in the face. It was as if he had read the thought as it flashed across my brain— the very notion made me regret that I had ever been angry at him. It is one thing to resent a man, comfortably, in the privacy of one’s own mind, but quite another to think him conscious of it.

“I’m mighty sorry,” he said. “I’d have been happy to talk if I’d have known you wanted to, only I was thinking of something else. But here, let’s talk now, and be friends.”

He held out his hand and I took it with pleasure.

“I’m Henry Green,” I said.

“They call me Forty-Four,” he replied.

Poor fellow, I thought. It must have been his number in the prison camp roll call.

“But you have another name as well?”

“Oh, several! But they’re for formal occasions, mostly. “

“Well, what do your people call you?”

“I haven’t seen them in ages.”

“Since the war started, you mean?”

“Yes, indeed. My uncle was a great rebel, but my father was a true-blue loyalist, and they got to hate each other so, they haven’t spoken in years. I was always a favorite of my uncle’s, but I was awful torn up about which side I ought to end up on.

“I couldn’t rightly choose one or the other, and the two of them were always hovering around me, wondering which of them I’d settle on, till I thought I’d go mad of it. Finally my father said that if I wouldn’t pick a side, he’d pick one for me, and he threw me out of the house.”

I thought to myself how I missed the little house I grew up in, with mother fussing over the stove and father sitting in his big rocking chair with his pipe ready to hand. How I longed to see it again! And how hard it would have been to be shut out of it!

“Your father sounds like a pretty hard man,” I said.

“Hard! Hard ain’t the word for it. You could whet a diamond on him. He’s rich as anything— makes Croesus look like a pauper. Lives in a house big as the world and owns the whole country round it. Had it all built at his own expense. You know how that takes a body. Take the kindest, humblest man you ever met, and give him a pile of money and land, and after a few months of everyone crawling and scraping and agreeing with him, he’d get it in his head that he was a mighty big bug, and swell up like another Napoleon.”

I was beginning to like Forty-Four immensely— partly out of pity for his miserable story, but also because he was a pleasant, cheerful fellow and because the sound of a Southern voice was meat and drink to me after those months in the pest-house. The thought even crossed my mind that we might work our passage back together, if Missouri were not too far from his direction of travel. But he was surely bound to stay with his other relatives, if his father wouldn’t take him back in.

“Where are you traveling?” I asked.

“I reckon I’ll roam around for a while,” he replied. “I don’t think I’ll go to visit my uncle— it’s mighty hot in his part of the world, and I have an aversion to it. I’ve heard that Missouri is a fine place in springtime, and I might enjoy seeing it, once I earn some money to travel on.”

“Why, I’m Missouri-born myself,” I said, “And bound for Pike County as soon as I can scrape together my passage. Why don’t we look for work together, and then I can show you the state from top to bottom, and I’ll go bail you won’t find a better one this side of Heaven.”

“Give me your hand on it,” he said, and we shook.

“What we’ve got to do now is, to settle on some kind of work we can get. Look here, Henry, have you ever worked for a printer?”

I was forced to admit I hadn’t.

“Mended watches?”

I was ashamed to say it, but this too was a little beyond me. Nor had I dived for pearls, nor raised peacocks, nor caught a falling star and butchered it for ambergris…

“Now, Forty-Four, you never did a one of them things either! You’re making fun, ain’t you?”

He looked at me with a look of such wounded simplicity that I immediately regretted the accusation.

“I have done them all,” he said, in a tone of such gravity that I believed him— though every word of it was impossible.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me, please, and I’ll never call you a liar any more. Just say what job we’ll go in for and I’ll go to do it, even if I have to skin the Great Comet with a pocketknife and weave bridal veils out of its whiskers!”

He smiled, and all of a sudden was his cheerful self again.

“Why, that wouldn’t do, Henry,” he said. “A pocketknife would rip comet-hide all to flinders. But we’d never get you set up at the head of a respectable profession, without you come up through the hawse-hole, as they put it. There are old hands of twenty years experience lined up to sign on to one of those comet-hunts, and the captains take their pick of them.”

He looked me critically up and down.

“You’d do for a stoker, in a bad light. Any idiot knows one end of a shovel from the other, and I reckon I can get you enrolled— if you keep your mouth shut. Now, you follow me as close as a shadow, and you don’t say a single word, mind me, not one word unless I tell you, and I’ll get us hired aboard before sunset.”

I was pleased as anything at this plan, and about to pour out my approval when I remembered Forty-Four’s strict injunction against speaking. Instead of this, I shut my mouth as tightly as I could, but nodded and gestured vigorously in dumb-show.

“Good man, Henry!” he said. “Put her there one more time!”

He took my hand, and instead of shaking, made a vigorous upwards gesture. And suddenly we were rising up through the air like a pair of soap bubbles!

III

Well, this was too many for me, somehow. I would have broken my promise without even thinking and asked a question— asked a hundred questions! But my brain was going a deal faster than my tongue. If you’ve seen an engine going nineteen to the dozen, the steam shrieking through the gauge-cocks fit to wake the dead, and the engineer with the sweat standing out on his forehead, waiting for the crash that will blow him through to the next world entire, with nothing left to fill the casket— I reckon you’ve seen the inside of my skull at that moment, and I could no more have uttered an intelligible sentence than I could have— than I could have flown, I was about to say, but I reckon that won’t do for a comparison.

“It’s perfectly safe,” said Forty-Four, and I suppose it was, for him. He must have done this before. I couldn’t think how or where, but it was a certainty, for he kept floating along with no concern or hesitation.

“I have done it before. I was doing this before Montgolfier mounted his balloon, before Ben Franklin flew his kite— before Icarus got fresh with the paraffin wax and dunked himself.”

What was this creature? Was he angel or devil, djinn or spirit?

“Oh, angel, definitely. You may rest easy on that score. My father is a little tetchy with me sometimes, but I always talk him round after a thousand years or so, regular as clockwork.”

It bore in on me suddenly who his father was— who his uncle must be— it was all too incredible! It could not be true— no, I was mad, safely mad, and this fantasy nothing but a passing dream.

“It is all true,” he said. “Look down! In a dream you would fall. But you’re perfectly safe, safe as if you stood on solid rock.”

I looked. I had not had any great impression of speed as we traveled. If I had had to guess a second before, I would have said we were a hundred feet high, and could look down as the soaring hawks did on cows and horses the size of a child’s wooden toys. But we had risen far higher than that. As I watched, the Missouri dwindled into a little blue thread like a line on a map, and then all of America shrunk away into a patch of green and yellow, and finally the whole turning world became nothing more than a tiny blue marble I could have covered up with my thumbnail.

I wondered where we were going, and as I was beginning to expect, he answered me without my having to speak.

“Aldebaran,” he said. “They’re putting up a new world out thereabouts, and should be looking for hands for the job. And it’s a mighty fine sight, if you’ve never seen them do it. I have, of course— I could about make up a world on my own, if I was let to do it. But I thought you’d like to see it, and then we can take our pay and go back to Missouri in style.”

I was about to object that, if he could fly us to Aldebaran, we could have gone to Missouri just as easily, and not waited to earn our way, and “style” be hanged. But I remembered in time that I had promised not to speak. I thought yearningly of my father’s little cabin, and waited for him to reply to the unspoken thought. I am not sure what makes a thought loud or quiet, but I tried to shout, thought-wise, until my mentation felt hoarse. Still Forty-Four said nothing more, and we flew along in silence until by and by we arrived.

IV

Once, when I was very young, there was a two-week downpour; the levee split in three places and a score of people were drowned. When the rain finally stopped, my father took me by the hand and walked me out to Chandler’s wharf. But there was no wharf there anymore.

The river had come up level with Main street, and lapped gently against the cobbles, a mirror-smooth expanse of brown water that stretched off to the horizon, untouched by snags or ripples. The water joined the land so gently that it might have been one great mud-puddle, on which we careless boys might pilot paper steamers and timber-rafts, undisturbed by any hint of breeze or current. And yet beneath it, I knew, was Mr. Chandler’s warehouse and Mr. Harper’s general store, and next door to it, the Congregational church sunk so deep that even the steeple was nothing more than a little black twig poking above the surface.

The wharf where we alit reminded me of that day. We stood on dry land, but all about us, darkness moved on the face of the deep. The air was dim and cool; the sky was gray.

But I had no eyes for that dismal prospect, for moored at the edge of the wharf was a steamer. She was long and clean-lined, and every inch of her was whitewashed, with red and black trim on the railings and along the edges of the pilot house. There were lamps all up and down her, and hung on the hog chains and strung from wires between the smokestacks. The smooth surface she floated upon cast back up her reflection so that she hung in a pool of light.

A crew of workers swarmed all over her, washing and tidying, coiling lines and shoveling coal. The captain strode back and forth on the ‘texas’ deck, bellowing orders at the top of his lungs.

“Confound it, Selaphiel, is that how you coil a rope? Take it down and do it up proper, or I’ll larn you with the end of it, you hear?”

The recipient of this stern advice looked much abashed as he bent down to his length of cable. But the captain was already haranguing his next victim:

“Now, Jegudiel, how are those boilers warming up?”

“The fore one’s coming up nicely!” called up the person so addressed. He was a tall, thin angel in a robe rather stained with black dust. He was bent over the coal bunker with a long-handled shovel, flicking in the coal so deftly that not a piece grazed the door of the firebox.

“I can see the fore one’s coming up,” growled the captain disdainfully. “I s’pose in a day or two, you’ll move along to heating up the aft one, and then next week we can cast off, eh? Now, if that there boiler was a tea-kettle and we was a passel of maiden aunts a-coming for tea and refreshments, I’d say you were doing right well. But there ain’t any aunts, is there? And I don’t see any tea neither. So what in tarnation you think you’re—”

“Don’t I know we’re under contract?” Jegudiel broke in plaintively. “Don’t I know we’re two days from going bust?” As he spoke, the shovel went flick, flick from the coal-pile to the fire-box as if it weighed no more than a fly-whisk. “I’m a-shoveling as fast as I can! I wish Raguel hadn’t took his pay and gone home, but tarnation! Whose fault was that? If you wouldn’t wear a body out so…”

Forty-Four nudged me with an elbow.

“Why, here’s a stroke of luck for us! Remember, not a word.”

He turned to the deck and raised his voice. “Hello, the deck!”

The captain peered over the rail of the texas and grunted.

“We’re looking for work,” Forty-Four persisted. “We’re right capable hands.”

At this, the captain brightened.

“You willing to stoke the boilers?”

“That I am,” said Forty-Four cheerfully. “Why, I’ll sling that coal so fast, you’ll think you hear a tin roof in a hailstorm.”

“Might be,” the captain replied. “I ain’t hiring you to talk. What about him? He ever been a stoker?”

“Oh, Henry— Henriel. He’s quiet, but he’s a deep one. Shipped ten times as a stoker on the comet-hunters out of Deneb. He came here by way of a vacation. This little boat is nothing to him, eh Henriel?”

I took my cue.

“No, nothing at all! I wouldn’t take it if it was offered to me on a silver platter, no sir. Why, this boat—”

The captain’s whiskers curled. I began to perceive I had overplayed my part.

“What did you say, boy?”

“I said—” Here Forty-Four stepped firmly and painfully on my foot, and I recollected the virtues of silence.

“Here, now, don’t you listen to Henriel. He ain’t much for brains— practically a half-wit, really— but he’s a peach of a stoker. The rest of us despaired about him till he was big enough to work, but then, why, get out of his way and let him at it!”

“Git on board, then, the both of you,” snarled the captain. “And I better hear that coal-pile ring, or I swear on my halo—”

But I never did hear what he swore, for by this time Forty-Four and I had scampered up the gangplank like a pair of squirrels and run aft to the firebox, and I was bending my back near to double trying to lift that long-handled shovel. I’d let myself be called a half-wit to get the job, and I was blowed if I’d lose it for want of muscle-power. But that shovel! If it weighed any less than I did myself, I reckon it was only by a featherweight.

V

All aboard seemed perfect chaos. The captain strode the hurricane deck, demonstrating the breadth of his vocabulary in a manner that struck me as a little less than angelic. The engineer rushed fore and aft, eyeing the gauges like a heron and letting great shrieking gouts of steam through the valves where the pressure looked high. I could hear Jegudiel’s shovel sing as it sliced into the coal, and Forty-Four’s shovel and my own holding just about even with him. And above it all came the voice of the leadsman in the bows, calling out the depth of the channel in a high droning cadence, and the lordly commands of the pilot, dancing through a maze of reefs and snags as if he had another pair of eyes fastened to the keel to look at the bottom with.

I heard all this, mind you. I saw nothing except coal, and the square iron mouth of the firebox, and the fire built up so hot inside it that I had to look sidelong and toss the coal through by feel. After about half an hour, the engineer came by and peered and prodded again.

“She’ll hold for a while now,” he said, in a quiet, pleasant drawl. “Lay ‘em down, boys, and rest yourselves a spell.”

I didn’t know which I wanted more: to drink, or to lie on the deck and rest. Luckily Forty-Four seemed spryer, and ran off to fetch a dipper. I sat up enough to drink, and then, since I recollected we were surrounded by water, or its celestial equivalent, I dipped out more and poured it over my head. The coal dust ran off me so thick you could have set the tailings alight. I looked at Forty-Four; he would have passed for an undertaker, if his skin hadn’t matched his jacket. He took the dipper next and tended to himself.

In a minute I was sufficiently recovered to complain.

“Forty-Four,” I began, “I’ll be a half-wit, ‘long as I never stoke an engine again. I swear that firebox burns like perdition itself!”

“It has good reason,” he said calmly. “Did you look at the engineer, when he came by?”

I had seen the engineer, and seen him a score of times, too, but I discovered now that I had not looked at him. At least, no particular detail of his appearance suggested itself, except that he was a slender, doleful-looking man.

“I can’t tell,” I said. “I was slinging that coal so fast, I didn’t pay any mind to anything else.”

“You did, though. But the human mind is made so carelessly, you hardly know what you know. Now, tell me, what kind of hat was he wearing?”

“Why, Forty-Four, he wasn’t wearing any,” I said. “It wouldn’t have fit over his—”

I gasped.

“He had horns!

“Indeed he did, and a fine set of them, too. Most of the engineers on these concerns come from the lower regions; they have a special talent for it.”

“Then the ship runs on hell-fire?”

“Nothing like it for efficiency. What do you think they’re doing now?”

I looked around us. Not ten feet to our right was a great, glowing mound, and as I watched, a few of our crew leapt across and started to hammer stakes into it and tie ropes onto them.

“That there is star-stuff,” said Forty-Four. “We’re gathering up all the stray lights from around these parts, and towing it up to the center. Then the captain will set a spark to it, and there’s our star set to burning.”

“Can’t they just say ‘Let there be light’, like in the Bible?”

He scoffed. “Think it’s that easy? I was there for that ‘Let there be light’, and I tell you, there was ten million of us angels out there to gather it up, and not a steamer or a donkey-engine to haul it with, neither. I could write a whole book of the Bible about the hauling and the digging behind those ‘Let there be’s. For ten cents I would write one. That world of yours took us a solid week of work without so much as a dinner-break— the same job this crew here has got two days to finish. I tell you, the old days were no picnic for us angels.”

I had never thought about it that way before, but I saw the sense of it. As I watched, the pilot cut us around the little island as neat as a cat tip-toeing between the glasses on a dinner-table. I could see it would have taken a thousand men to move it an inch, and here we were, towing it along as if it had no more substance than a thought.

“How did they start up using steamers?” I asked.

“Oh, that was my uncle’s doing! One day he was on his throne in the midst of all those miserable souls, and he wondered to himself, Why burn up these souls in eternal pain and torment, and get no profit out of it? A man might as well burn a wheat-field or a rolling mill! Here I am, a lord and a crowned king, owner of this vast fortune of souls, and nothing to do with them but set them on fire? It won’t do!

“So he sat himself down to study on it, and the next thing anyone knew, he’d invented the steam engine, and started selling off souls by the raft-load to power it.”

I looked at the coal-pile. “You mean—”

Forty-Four reached down and scooped up a chunk of coal about the size of a walnut. “Listen!”

I took it from him and held it to my ear. It was speaking! I couldn’t make it out, but it was a man’s voice, muttering in a low tone that sounded pained.

“He’s a Russian,” said Forty-Four. “He was a soldier for the Tsar, and burned down a good many houses, and cut up some peasants and such-like.”

He threw it down on the pile again and picked up another. “This one’s a priest, from Vienna. He was a great friend to the poor, but he read heretical books, too, and argued with the bishop and then died of consumption before he could take it back. Ah, and this one speaks English!”

Again, I took it and listened.

“Charlie?” It was a woman’s voice. “I can’t wait for you any longer, Charlie. I’m not strong enough to raise a child on my own; I’ve never been clever or pretty, and this town is so cold and strange! Oh, I was a fool to trust, a fool!”

I thrust the thing from me in horror.

“What happened to her?”

“Drowned herself,” Forty-Four replied, taking the little lump back and tossing it onto the pile again. “Ain’t it clever to get so much use out of them? And listen, your world is the only one that makes them!”

My world?” I sat down on the coal-pile, and then, aghast, rose to my feet again and paced back and forth along the deck in agitation, trying to count how many shovels-full of my fellow-creatures I had fed into that glowing maw. Why, Genghis Khan wasn’t a patch on me! It was too much to bear.

Forty-Four sat down on the spot I had just vacated, then stood up again as if he too regretted his treatment of the poor souls. But then he bent down again and I saw he was only smoothing out the seat with his hands to make it more comfortable.

“Well, there ain’t much special about Earth,” he said. “It’s not any particular kind of world, you understand. No, for scenery or modern conveniences, it can’t hold itself up to be much, except for one thing, and that’s hell. Why, where else can you even get a hell? This world we’re building now won’t have one. Nor do any of them out this way. Nor by Sirius, nor off in Andromeda. Go through every one of them and you won’t find enough hell-fire for a lamp-lighter’s wick. All those planets and stars and moons all full of people, and not a damnable soul among them, till you come to Earth— the mother lode of perdition, a coal-mine fit to fuel the galaxy!”

“But why? Surely on other planets they are tempted and sin, just as we do?”

“We? Why group yourself with me? I am not like you; I am not tempted. I have never sinned.”

“But don’t you tell lies? Don’t you talk back to your father, and speak unkindly to him? Ain’t those sins?”

“They would be, if you had done them. But I have no free will of my own, you see. When I do these things, I am only an instrument of a general destiny, and no more to blame than you would blame a stone for tripping you, or a piece of gristle for choking you.”

“Without free will, men would be no better than the beasts,” I said, remembering a sermon the preacher had given once.

“And with it, you are worse than them. Answer me this: would you rather have an apple tree with sweet fruit, or one that might be sweet, and might be sour?””

“The sweet one, of course.”

“And would you rather an axe that would bite every time, or one that might bite, or bounce up and cut you?

“Men ain’t like apple trees or axes,” I burst out.

“Why, of course not!” He laughed. “Trees and axes are good for something, or we throw them away. When a man plants a tree that might grow sweet apples, he cuts it down and plants one that will grow them.

“But it’s worse than that! A cheap axe may do you an injury, but it doesn’t want to. It doesn’t take any joy in it, or dream about it, or sit and wonder what it would feel like to cut up a man’s leg. But you take any collection of Sunday-school preachers who don’t so much as chew tobacco, and look in their minds, and you’ll find them dreaming a collection of sins such as Beelzebub himself would be proud of.”

“That may be true,” I said. “But that’s what makes those men so good, ain’t it? If it were easy not to sin, why, everyone would do it— even heathens without a scrap of the grace of God in them!”

Forty-Four looked at me sternly.

“Is your religion no more than a reason to look down on the heathens, as a centipede might look at an earthworm and call itself grand? Have you never wondered why it seems so hard to be saved— why God takes such pains about it, and singles out a few nations to teach religion to, and leaves them to civilize all the rest (supposing they can afford the ammunition to do it with), and chooses so few men within those nations, and tempts them so terribly to backslide? It does no good for most of you, and an awful lot of bad for some of you, but it grows the coal-pile— that’s all.”

I knew I shouldn’t get angry with Forty-Four for saying such things, because it was only his way and he didn’t mean anything by it, but it was hard not to do it when he seemed so down on Earth and humanity. On his side, he could tell I was getting riled, and although I think he’d have considered it beneath his dignity to brawl, he got the look on his face that he always had when I had offended him— as though I were a wild dog he’d made a particular pet, and bought a collar for and fed dainties to, and I’d turned and shown my teeth at him.

It was the engineer who saved us from arguing any further. He came up to us quietly and said, very gently, that the engine had cooled down sufficiently, and if we were quite rested, we might get the fire going again. I looked at the coal-pile with misgivings.

“Come on,” said Forty-Four. “You don’t want the crew to bust their contract, not after they took us aboard. And you a half-wit, too! I think it was mighty kind of them, and you don’t want to come across ungrateful.”

This was true; I could not argue it. I took up my shovel and went at it again.

VI

For the first two or three loads of coal, I was conscious at every moment of the miserable souls I was thrusting into the very flames of hell. I wished myself in their place, and one of them in mine, at every moment— wished that I might make that ultimate sacrifice to relieve one of them. I felt very noble and righteous about this, until the captain shouted down at me from the hurricane deck:

“Put your back into it, you young—! Perhaps them Deneb comet-hunters like to ship a load of flabby dust-gatherers and float along the current like driftwood, but I don’t mean to. If you ain’t fit to work, boy, jes’ get your useless carcass below with the cargo, and I’ll find a half-fed puppy to do your job for you. Why, Jegudiel was worth the both of you when you was fresh, and now—”

There is not much nobility in the world, I think, that can survive such a flaying. The next second, my shovel was flying again as fast as I could drive it, and with no thought in my head of any torment greater than the burning in my arms and the ache in my back.

We pulled that star-stuff along and piled it into a shimmering sphere as big as a mountain, but smooth all over, as if it were made of candlewax with a million candles burning within it. We drew up alongside, and one of the angels leaned out from the chains with a chunk of burning tow on a pole.

“Let there be—” he began, and the rest of them jeered and whistled. It seemed that old saw didn’t play with them. But the glow brightened and then the wax split and blazed up, and I had to look down at the deck, for the thing hurt my eyes to look at. When I did, I could see my own shadow printed there, and feel the heat on the back of my neck. When I looked up, all that dim twilight was turned to noonday, and I could see the light hit the water and show up the shallow and deep places.

We spent the rest of the afternoon dredging up the land out of the water. Dredging is less work on the stokers, as a rule. There’s no call to race, and the engineer can keep a middling steam on and sit easy, with a half-eye on the gauges. What I principally did was watch the pilot. If you ever wish to see a virtuoso perform, and have no money for the music halls, you may watch a river pilot sweep the dredge around a tricky part of the channel and be satisfied. He does not so much steer the boat as dance with her, flicking the wheels back and forward as a Spanish dancer waves her fans while she turns pretty circles in front of you. But while the dancer does not weigh a hundred pounds— not if she puts on every stitch she owns and eats the best supper she can afford— the boat weighs thirteen thousand tons. And yet you would swear one was as light as the other, and as easily maneuvered.

I watched this display in awe for a while. Presently I became aware that Forty-Four was restive.

“Say, Henriel. Are you going to watch them dredge up mud out of the shallows all day?”

“I reckon I could,” I told him. “You ever seen the like of that pilot up there?”

“Him? Oh, sure I have. There ain’t much that any angel can’t do, if he has a mind to it. Why, remember, I only signed on as a stoker myself for your sake. I could steer an old boat around some mud flats myself, if I cared to do it.”

I began to conceive of the notion that Forty-Four might be jealous. It seemed hardly possible. He was an angel, after all. Yet had he not sweated and struggled at the coal-pile with me, while Jegudiel went on tossing his loads of fuel through the air as if they were so many cotton balls? By now, I was used to Forty-Four hearing these private thoughts of mine as if I had spoken them out loud, and I made haste to banish it from my mind. But I was too late. He looked at me sadly once again, and I thought desperately of how sorry I was to have mistrusted him.

His manner brightened— he was always ready to forgive me if I wronged him, so long as I made up to him again after. He clapped me on the back.

“You’ll see,” he said confidingly. “That pilot fellow looks like a real thoroughbred when there’s no standard to hold him to, and I don’t blame you for thinking so— anyone would think so, if he hadn’t any experience. But he ain’t above middling, and he’s about the best of this crew.”

I took it from the expression on his face that the comparison he had in mind was none other than himself. But then, his miraculous tales and promises had proven trustworthy before, and if a fellow has a high opinion of himself, well— nine times in ten there is nothing but puffery about him, but the tenth time, you are looking at a master who has condescended to explain, honestly and without varnish, a little of what he is capable of. The times I succumb to temptation and make remarks, I have found, it is somehow always that tenth man I’ve run across. I took Forty-Four at his word, and watched the pilot no longer.

The next morning dawned. It was the very first dawn that new world had ever seen; the sun that was coming up had never seen war, or plague, or persecution. It shone through a cloudless sky on an empty land. I looked out on the expanse of that new country and thought of the people it would someday support, the famous names and histories that would enliven it. It was a wild and romantic vision. It occurred to me that it would be easier to appreciate, somehow, with breakfast and coffee— somehow I had not thought about whether angels ate breakfast, but upon consideration, it seemed likely to me that they didn’t.

Forty-Four, as always when I was thinking something particularly loudly, was there on the mark. He handed me a roll and a steaming mug— had materialized them from thin air a moment ago, I reckoned, but when a man’s hungry, he doesn’t scruple at eating an imaginary roll. You may ask me whether it was distinguishable at all from the food I had been used to eating. In fact, it was. It lacked a certain verisimilitude— by which I mean weevils— and I didn’t much mind. The coffee too smelled delicious.

“It is the very best Viennese,” whispered Forty-Four, and I was about to take my first luxurious sip of it when the captain sprung up onto the hurricane deck like a rooster stretching his chest to crow and sang out:

“All right, all you loafing so-and-sos! You may think the job is finished, and the cargo will just walk up on deck and unload itself while you sit back and polish your halos. And anyone who thinks that is welcome to take his ease and see what he gets for it!”

Generous as this offer was, nobody seemed to accept it; all at once, the deck was bustling like an ant-hill on a hot day. I tipped the coffee regretfully over the side (to this day I still dream of tasting it) and followed Forty-Four below deck.

By this point, I was getting tolerably used to finding out that every “Let there be” in the book was a mighty stiff job of work for someone to do, and so I wasn’t surprised to see the hold packed up with boxes and crates for every kind of plant and animal. There were sapling trees down there, and deer and antelope and buffalo. There was a crate labeled ‘Elephant’, even, though it hardly looked big enough to hold one.

I asked Forty-Four as we were carrying it up on deck how they fit it in, and he said it was a folding elephant.

“The old-fashioned way was to make them all full-sized, out of mud, you know. But that was a weary business, and dirty, too. Nowadays, we order them all from a catalog, and just carry them along till they’re needed.”

I would love, someday, to see the factory that made them all, from tiny blades of grass to an immense whale that we had to blow into shape with steam from the boiler, like a hot-air balloon. And there was a crate of mosquitos, too, individually wrapped, although I waited as long as I could to unpack those; it was hard enough work to unload it all without being bitten.

We got down the bottom of the hold round about dinner time, although of course there was no dinner. Forty-Four slipped me a bite of bread and an apple between crates, but it was hungry work regardless. I was thinking longingly that in another hour the contract would be up, and the crew paid off, and Forty-Four and I could go to Missouri, when the mate shouted up from the hatchway:

“There ain’t no man and woman down here!”

“Go look again,” shouted the captain.

“Look yourself!” came the reply. “I’ve gone through the hold twice, and if there’s any such thing as a man down here, why, he must be a mousy little creature, and his wife no bigger than a bumblebee.”

“You must be blind or drunk; we bought a man and a woman, and from a good reputable concern as well, and we loaded them, and if they ain’t taken apart the crate from the inside and wandered off with it, they can’t be anywhere else but where we put them.”

“That’s all true, Captain, but then where in blazes are they?”

The captain vanished below, muttering through his beard, and returned in a few minutes with his face as white as a sheet.

“They ain’t down there. For all I know they did walk away with the crate, and I hope they went all the way to Earth to find a hell to burn up in. The contract said in black and white that we had to finish the world in two days, complete with all the trimmings, and it ain’t done till it has a man and a woman. If they ain’t down there, we’re busted worse’n a basket of eggs in a gristmill.”

Forty-Four looked sidelong at me, and swelled out his chest somewhat.

“Reckon you’re up a creek, Captain?” he said, in a ringing voice.

“Up a creek, you wretched little pup?” the captain replied. “I’ll larn you to talk to me that way.”

But his tone was low and feeble, and I thought that the ‘larning’ he might deliver would land a deal easier than it might have an hour ago.

“Why, what would you say if I knew someone who could make a man for you?”

“Ain’t no such person aboard, boy. There’s few enough has ever done it, these days— not for ten thousand years.”

“Few enough, do you think? Why, I can do it; I’ve done it for a mere amusement. Shall I show you?”

“You think an awful lot of yourself for a stoker,” the captain grumbled, but the engineer whispered to the pilot, and the two of them muttered to the captain, and you could see them talking him around, easy as they might swing the steamer— not by force, you understand, but by persuasion. By and by he looked up and said that he didn’t think it could be done, and if it could be done, Forty-Four couldn’t do it, and he wasn’t asking him to do it as a demonstration, but only for the entertainment it might provide to watch him try to make good on his boast and fall down, but he might as well try it if he wanted.

Forty-Four stepped ashore and knelt down on the ground to shape the dirt. You never saw an artist as finicky and precise as he was; at first he scooped big handfuls of it this way and that, but soon he was smoothing it down with his palms, and then his fingertips, and then just brushing away little clods here and there. At the end of the operation, he even put in little pores and eyelashes with the tip of a pocketknife. If he’d made the creature out of marble, it could have stood in a museum alongside the masterworks of Praxiteles, and he’d have made old Praxiteles look downright slovenly, too.

By this time, the captain had fallen silent and the crew were gathered around so tight that Forty-Four had to ask them to stand out of his light and let him breathe. Then he set to work on the woman, starting with a rib out of the man as was traditional and building up from there. He slipped that rib from the body of the statue with barely a divot to show where it had been, and let me say, if the man had been a marvel, well, the woman left him in the shade. She had such a sweet and winning look on her face that if we could have taken her to Jackson in a wheelbarrow, and wheeled her from the docks up to City Hall, we’d have gotten a thousand dollars from the proprietors of theaters looking to put her on display, and a dozen proposals of marriage to boot.

Now Forty-Four rose to his feet, and waved back the onlookers. He made a few preparatory passes with his hands. The sun was sinking, the daylight now dim and foreboding. The crew stared awestruck, each man leaning forward slightly. I don’t think any of them thought of the contract at this moment, but only of whether Forty-Four could place the capstone on his miraculous achievement and do what nobody had for thousands of years.

He raised his hands.

“Live!” he commanded, and his voice cracked like thunder. And those lifeless figures of mud and clay— they rose! Up from the ground came the man, pushing with his arms as natural as getting out of bed in the morning. Up from the ground came the woman after him, blushing slightly at the attention. And her blush was a real blush, under real skin! They were flesh and blood, without a hint of mud left upon them. You could see the man’s chest move as he drew breath, his eyes blink, his feet look for purchase on the ground. The woman’s hair shone under the setting sun, every strand separate and perfect.

“Now,” said Forty-Four, “You are people, male and female, and all this land is yours to live in and to take pleasure in, and you will name all the beasts and the plants, and raise your children here. And you will remember that I made you in my own image, and give thanks.”

The man knelt down, and the woman beside him, and they said solemnly, “We will remember, Lord.”

Then they wandered off into the dusk to sleep under the new trees, and the world was finished. Now all the crew were standing around Forty-Four and cheering, and some of them took off their halos and waved them in the air or tossed them up and caught them again, for the contract was saved! But the engineer stood at the edge of the gathering with a frown, as if he had heard a noise from the machinery he couldn’t quite fathom, and the pilot kept silent as well, and the captain scratched his head and raked his fingers through his beard.

When at last he spoke, it was with all his old stentorian vigor.

“Well, boy, I own it: you were right, and you could make a man, and as pretty a one as I’ve ever bought from the best store in the celestial sphere. For that I owe you an apology, and I give it to you, and my word on it, I’ll never doubt your skill again. In that whole job there wasn’t but one mistake.

But that mistake! Confound it, of all the thunderous, crack-brained stupidities— of all the ways you could have taken that perfect creature and broken him! You could have given him one eye, or put his mouth in his armpit, or twisted his head around backward, but none of that for you! You’re a master— nobody can doubt that now— and you had to make a master’s mistake, a mistake to be remembered for eons! Of all the blasted fooleries you could have attempted, you had to go and give him religion!”

VII

Was there anything Forty-Four could have replied to this charge? It was self-evidently true; he had done it before witnesses, and deliberately. Suddenly, the whole throng around him remembered that they did not know him, and there was a general rush to establish that none of them had ever trusted him. It was agreed that he had come aboard under suspicious circumstances, and that the mistake, if mistake it was, marked him out as a dangerous and unreliable meddler.

The officers settled on an immediate interrogation, which Forty-Four faced with his customary careless smile. He admitted without any fuss to being from Earth— being, in fact, the nephew of its most famous inhabitant. The shock that resulted was general, but it was overshadowed by the massive tumult which followed when he admitted that his companion was a mortal creature from that benighted planet, a creature capable of actually sinning.

“You mean to say you’ve brought that nasty beast in among us and had us treat it like regular folks?” said Jegudiel.

“You wait till your father and your uncle hear about this! And you won’t have long to wait, you rascal! I’ll send for them soon as we touch port— ‘fore I go ashore myself. And won’t your hide get tanned so it’s a thousand years before you can sit down comfortably.”

“Oh, but wasn’t it fun,” laughed Forty-Four contentedly. “And you made your contract anyway.”

“That’s so,” admitted the captain. “I’m ashamed to have my name to a world like this, with the stain of religion on it, but it’s a world right enough, and we’ll draw our pay regardless. But, you best believe we’ll be telling your story around all the other crews, and you’ll get a pretty hot reception the next time you try this game.

“Now, it’s not my place to give you the licking you deserve, but I ain’t about to hand you over to your father with that dirt all over you. Come on boys, let’s take him to the rail and give him a good washing!”

As the crew descended on Forty-Four, the captain looked over his shoulder at the engineer.

“Oh, get that critter out of here before it does someone a mischief.”

The engineer looked me over critically.

“Well, where am I putting you back to?” he asked.

“Missouri,” I stammered. “Pike County— right after the war.”

“Well, then,” he said, and I felt a sudden shudder, as if I had stumbled over a doorstep.

VIII

I rose to my feet in another world. The steamboat, the angels, Forty-Four being ducked over the rail— all were departed, if indeed they had ever existed. Around me hung the drowsy heat of a Missouri summer, and in front of me, a few miles distant, I could see the little town where I was born. I set off, marking my course by the church steeple, and an hour of brisk walking brought me to the outskirts.

As I went along, I overtook a boy dressed in black, and walking as though his leather shoes pained him, from which I gathered that I had come home on a Sunday, and caught one of the children of the outlying farms making his uncomfortable way to church in his Sabbath finery.

“Say,” I hailed him. “I’m just coming home from the war. Is the town much changed since I left?”

He turned to look at me, and I saw dawning excitement spread across his face.

“Were you in Manila? In Santiago? Did you see men killed? Did you see Admiral Dewey?”

I realized that I had let myself in for this line of questioning. When I was twelve, I recollected, I would have been just as eager to hear tales of severed limbs and bloody exchanges of fire.

“I never saw Admiral Dewey,” I told him gently. “I was never near New Orleans at all, nor anywhere in Louisiana (for there I took to be the location of Manila and Santiago). I saw plenty of men killed, though more of them with cholera than bullets.”

I spun a few yarns in as innocent a style as I could make them, of marching and camping and drilling. He in turn told me some outlandish tales he had gotten from the papers, which I took to be about three parts youthful embellishment to one part journalistic lies; the land battles were all fought with Gatling guns and smokeless powder, and the naval ones with ironclad ships and torpedo shells. But his tales of combat were a deal more entertaining to me than my own; therefore I encouraged him.

We came to the edge of town, and I was amazed at the changes that had taken place. The old rail station, if it deserved that name, had been no more than a water tank and a woodpile; now there was a fine whitewashed edifice with a tiled roof to it. From it, a paved street ran into the center of the town. It was lined with new stores and houses, all freshly painted, and Harper’s general store with a new front porch, and glazed windows in front to display his goods. Opposite the old church was a new building, equally tall and a deal wider, which a sign announced was Claiborne’s Hotel.

We passed by all these delights and distractions, and walked up to the old homely church, which indeed was little changed since I was of an age with the boy who walked alongside me.

“Thank you for keeping me company,” I told him. “I hope I’ll meet you again, now that I’ve come back to live here, and you can tell me more of your stories another time.”

“I’d like that, Mister! Say, where should I come to visit you by and by?”

“I’m Henry Green,” I said. “I mean to live with my father, Mister Josiah.”

He looked at me with shock. “You’re Henry Green? Mister Josiah always said you got killed— killed in the last war, thirty years ago. You better not go in there yet. You ain’t heard—”

But I had already pushed the door open. In front of me stood the congregation, row on row, with Judge Stern and old Mister Giddens up at the front, and the minister at the lectern facing them. Between him and the congregation, I could see the shadow of an open coffin. A chill came over me.

“We are here,” the minister intoned, “To pay the last respects to our departed brother, who has departed this life for a better. A loving husband, a generous neighbor…”

I waited for no more of the eulogy, but rushed to the front of the church. I could hear the congregants exclaim as I passed them, some deploring my manners and others my ragged clothing, but I cared nothing for any of them. I threw myself to my knees beside the coffin and gazed at the old man’s face within— old, though he had been but forty-five when I left. It was the body of my father!

Notes:

I really enjoyed revisiting this book, especially since it turned out that the version I knew when I signed up is the notorious composite edition hacked together by Twain's biographer after his death, which meant I had never actually read any of the three manuscript versions. Having now read them all, I agree with your dislike of Schoolhouse Hill. Hopefully my choice of an American setting here does not come too close to that version; given your request for worldbuilding, I thought it would be fun to tackle a setting somewhat further away from Eseldorf. In any case, like Twain, I have used the setting as a springboard for whatever fanciful cosmic adventures I could cram in. Thanks to my beta reader!