Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas (i read books txt) 📕

take it. It’s warm in my hands and it cries until I stroke it, I sing softly to it. It curls up in my hands until it’s a baby, until it’s got gold-flecked eyes that look up in wonder, until the book is me.

The book is me and I can read every word. The symbols in the clouds, the scribbles in the bark, the holler of wolves out in the distance. All of it a new language that I can read with my bones, the blood from my heart, the tingling in my fingers. Every tiny thing is a word somebody’s speaking, God singing the sunrise. This is how you do magic, I realize. You read the stories in everything, you speak the stories of the world.

Momma smiles at me. She smiles and smiles until she crumbles to dust.

The book screams and I drop it. I try to scoop Momma up, all the wind-scattered ashes of her, but the dust rises in the wind and my momma is in the air, I can’t see a place where she isn’t.

The cardinals in the trees cry out. They flap their wings and burst into flames, all of them a tiny fire each that becomes a big fire. The trees, the whole woods are burning. A family of deer burst from the tree line, their fur on fire. A white kitten out in the woods licks its burning paws.

“Goldeline,” says a voice. I turn around and it’s Tommy, fire in his hair, skin blistering, his clothes blackened and burning in front of me. He opens his mouth to scream and fire billows from his mouth. He’s crying tears of flame and I look down and my own hands are fire, they’re made of fire, and everything they touch burns.

I snap awake.

“I was dreaming,” I say.

“Shhh,” says Lance. “He’s here.”

NINETEEN

Through the window I see the Preacher, his long black coat, black wide-brimmed hat, standing alone in the rain and moonlight.

“He’s been out there near an hour,” says Lance. “Just standing there. Ain’t said a word.”

Chester’s huddled up next to us.

“What’s he doing?” says Chester.

“Not a clue,” says Lance. “Waiting I guess.”

“Waiting for what?” says Chester.

Lightning strikes and a big grin flashes across the Preacher’s face. I know what he’s waiting for.

He’s waiting for me. He was waiting for me to wake up.

As if by magic he calls to me.

“Goldeline,” says the Preacher. “Can you hear me, sweet angel? Come out now, Goldeline.”

The wind moans, the trees groan with the weight of the rain, bending low in the storm. The wind hurts the trees. Chester blows out the candle. In the house it becomes all dark, the fire just embers, the lightning tossing its whiteness through the window in flashes.

“Come on out, Goldeline. It’s time for you to be healed, darling. Don’t you want to be free of all this running, all this wickedness and sin? Don’t you want to be cleansed? Like the Book says, ‘To the creature who longs for the fire, so shall the fire be granted to it, and it shall be made clean.’”

The Preacher’s voice is so lovely, full of scrape and holler like the low notes of a fiddle, rich as the saddest songs.

“That ain’t all the Book says,” says Lance.

The Preacher walks toward the house. A gun blast rings powerful in my ears. Lance fired at him through the open window. The shot kicks up mud on the Preacher’s shoes.

“Now I wouldn’t take one step closer, Preacher, if I was you,” hollers Lance. “This is my land. You got no authority here.”

“The earth is God’s, and everything in it,” says the Preacher.

“Yeah, but you ain’t God,” says Lance. “Lest you forgot.”

The Preacher claps his hands.

“Isaac Lancelot Jeffries, that must be you!”

Lance shakes his head.

“Good Lord,” he says, “how does he remember my full name? How’d he know it in the first place?”

Because there’s power in a name, but I don’t say it.

“Who wants to know?” hollers Lance.

“Oh, you know good and well who I am.” The Preacher grins. “And you know why I’m here.”

“And if you know anything else about me other than my name,” says Lance, “then you know I ain’t gonna give them to you.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” says the Preacher. “I’m assuming you have your fairer half in there with you.” He cups his hands to his mouth. “Chesterfield Leonides Paul, you in there?” he yells. “Your mother is ashamed of you. Ninety-three years old, still weeps for you daily, sick in your sin, judgment yipping at your heels like an old mutt.”

I turn to Chester and he’s crying. The lightning makes crystals of his tears. Lance puts a hand on Chester’s shoulder, touches his face, wipes the tears off his cheek. The closeness they have is theirs and they can’t share it, not with me. But it feels so good, so real to see it, love in all the sick dark of the night.

“We have blasphemers in our midst.” The Preacher looks around the house, beyond it, to the woods, like there’s a whole mass of people I can’t see, like he’s preaching to the trees. “Sinners, given over to a reprobate mind. Oh, they shall receive the full recompense of their error.”

The Preacher shouts into the darkness, waving his hands while the lightning flashes like he’s controlling it, like a dark magician of the skies hollering out to a ghost congregation.

“Filthy dreamers they are, defilers of the flesh, the despised of kings, speaking untruth. Clouds without water, blown about by strange winds. Poisoned trees, without fruit, nothing but chaff for the fire. Wandering stars, for whom is reserved the blackest darkness forever.”

I know that bit. The Preacher’s quoting from the Book, one of the strangest passages, and also one of the loveliest. Too bad it’s about sinners and all the bad stuff that’s going to happen to them. It’s so pretty it should be about the heroes, the good ones that God is glad to have in his heaven.