The Book of Lives

By C Wayland Brown

  If your lover, son, or brother confided that you and he had shared many lives, for better and worse, over thousands of years, would you laugh? Recommend a psychiatrist? Or wonder? Perhaps find yourself on a journey once unthinkable?

  Two-year-old Preston Clark tells his mother that he'd reigned as her king till he drank poisoned wine from a golden chalice. At first the family thinks his tale inspired by Grandma's tincture of opium. But one sister speaks a strange, private language with him. His other sister wrestles with jealousy of Preston and a less explicable aversion to him. His childhood sweetheart casts herself as his ancient queen.

  Growing up, a gifted and scholarly Preston eschews flights of fancy. But as he, his family, and his sweetheart cope with love and mortality, perplexing and troubling new visions from ever more distant eras trace their relationships through millennia. Figments of a brilliant, idle brain? Disguised incest-wishes? Collective Unconscious, erupting into consciousness? Schizophrenic dreamscapes? Everybody has a theory or a smirk.

  Sure to resonate with readers of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Susan Barker's Incarnations, or Michael Newton's Journey of Souls, The Book of Lives links transgressions, transformations, hidden balances and hidden purposes that serial lives could encompass. It provokes an itch to think, wonder, and revisit the meaning of "Now".

• Language: English
• Publisher: C Wayland Brown
• Release date: Jun 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201198206

C Wayland Brown

After growing up Middle-American--Class of '62, Crystal Lake, Illinois--miscarrying a college education, and graduating from the Haight-Ashbury School of Experience, Class of '67--C. Wayland Brown came in off the streets and in time settled down to a three-decade career in Physical Therapy. In 2009 he retired, moved to the country, and spent an unexpected decade on this debut novel. He lives on a wooded creek in Tennessee with his companion, Muse, beta-reader, and some would say keeper of nearly four decades.

Book preview

PART ONE

1

Years before bearing her scandalous prevaricator, paramnesiac, or prodigy, whichever he was, Samantha showed her own readiness to climb out on limbs with a crosscut saw. Eldest and most appealing of the Reverend and Mrs. Powell’s seven progeny, the Mary of every Christmas or Easter pageant, she had a comely, virginal, large-eyed earnestness that lifted young and old men’s gazes from her corseted, flowering figure. Yet at seventeen, cost what it may, she nailed a series of schismatic theses to the gates of a flimsy, once-dreadful phantasm. In the cramped, cluttered Congregational parsonage study one Saturday morning in July 1899, she drove her first nail.

"Even God couldn’t cram every species into Noah’s Ark! Cobras? Tarantulas? Platypuses? Seventeen species of penguin? A hundred thousand beetles? Nine species of dinosaur? What’d the tigers eat? Who cleaned the messes?"

The Reverend, busy mining sermon material from Robert Ingersoll’s front-page obituary, reddened, but had years of practice at oiling troubled waters. ‘Kinds,’ sweetheart, not ‘species.’ Maybe the Lord got rid of dinosaurs by keeping them off the Ark. Maybe the tigers ate fish. Maybe the messes disappeared by magic. With God all things are possible.

His smile, if it was one, closed a casket around her questions but failed to calm the tempest inside. "Maybe," she conceded like a kidnapped hostage whose blindfold had slipped. A light had seeped in—Science. Its methods made sense. The merest of glances compelled. Its light showed a landscape not a bit like Papa’s tales.

At the peak of Prune Flats’ summer, a line of intensifying squalls darkened and thickened the air in the parsonage. Hebrews 11:1, First Corinthians 13:12, and Second Corinthians 4:4 bounced like paper wads off a wall of dinosaur bones and adolescent indignation. Poor Canaanites! Poor heretics and heathen! Poor Prune Flats, cringing before a Monster with a taste for blood, massacre, and burning flesh!

Absence from church confirmed Samantha’s ruin. Rumor hopped wooden fences, galloped down dusty streets with hitching posts, wafted from paper mill and prune packing shed to blacksmith shop and saloon as fast as if Reverend Amos himself had been caught upstairs at Miss Felicity’s. At Pitt’s General Store, Rebecca Powell received sympathetic looks she knew hid solemn mockery.

Mrs. Peters suggested cold baths, Rebecca made a point of telling her daughter. Mrs. Garraghty suggested exorcism.

Curious, censorious, or concupiscent glances followed Samantha all over Prune Flats.  Pursued by a few intrepid swains at peril of their souls, she couldn’t wait to shake hometown dust from her feet. Her parents, praying day and night, forgot to bolt the door.

The right-thinking folk of Wilkes, Washington, a hundred miles away on Puget Sound, hired Samantha as schoolmarm the same year they voted to re-elect William McKinley. But she showed an impressionable youth her contraband copies of Origin of Species and The Descent of Man—works she was struggling through; works whose trailing trains of subordinate and independent clauses she had to triple-read; works whose frequent references to procreation and sexual selection disturbed and distracted. The shock-wave tossed her clear across the state.

Hard by the Idaho border, mushrooming Hill’s Station—a Great Northern stop called into being by the eponymous railroad builder—teemed with Scandinavian and German immigrants lured by Hill’s overseas advertisements. Blocks from the brand-new Hill State College, schools under construction laid out sawdust-covered red-carpet remnants for any aspiring teacher while a heavily male population opened arms to prospective brides.

In a din of hammers, saws, and workmen’s casual oaths, obloquy flipped on its back. A desperate Superintendent begged Samantha to head up the Hill High Science Department. Never touched a microscope, a test tube? No matter! She crammed all summer.

Lessons in Elementary Biology began with a seven-chapter prelude to bacteria. After two germ-y chapters, Chapter 10 starred a one-celled parasite of frog intestines; Chapter 11, an exquisite protozoan that lived on the legs of water-fleas. Multi-cellular creatures evolved in Chapter 12, sexual reproduction on page 253. Starfish, crayfish, mussels, and dogfish stood in for the animal kingdom. Afterthoughts or concessions to popular taste, flowers and trees crowded into the last two chapters.

Luckily, the General Science textbook, subtitled For Use in Grammar Schools, pitched itself at Samantha’s level. Experiments gave visual proof of principles she’d grasped only verbally back in Prune Flats. Could be fun! But first she’d have to equip the lab.

CLARK’S HARDWARE AND Feed sold everything, even fuel by the can for the few horseless carriages that roamed the dusty, dung-y streets and scared the horses. Going in, Samantha smelled gasoline, lumber, an oily whiff of metal. Amid barrels, burlap sacks, new stoves, wooden shelves stretching back out of sight, and a wall of handsaws, tea kettles, soap, mousetraps, devices for who-knew-what, and drawers with minutely lettered labels, the young clerk in collarless shirt and rolled-up sleeves seemed her sole hope of finding anything. His trim build, erect bearing, and presentable face relaxed her somewhat.

Her heart took up gymnastics nonetheless. I need—everything on this list?

He shuffled her pages, scanned her meticulous printing. Bottles, stoppers, funnels—pitchers, tumblers—candles, beeswax—wire, string—window glass—charcoal—we’ve got. His finger darted. Spring balances, glass and rubber tubing, test tubes, zinc, hydrochloric acid, powdered alum—we can order. Lime comes in sacks, you could have a fistful or two for free. Gravel, as little as this, I’d scoop from a creek. What’s all this for, anyhow?

Freshman science lab. This is for Chapter One!

"How many chapters are there?"

Seven. I’ll need to open an account.

His brows went up. While she read the list aloud, item by item, he opened drawers, escorted her down aisles, climbed ladders, held out samples, narrowed down sizes and quantities with deference a shade more than courteous. Piles on the counter mounted.

Can you deliver?

‘Course. After six, if that’s all right. Will you be the one receiving?

No one else to do it. Can you take it around to the back, where the lab is?

I’ll be there as soon after six as the horse can pull the hill.

Business done, Samantha saw no choice except to leave. She wasn’t sure what had just happened.

NERVOUS SWEAT SOAKED her chemise, corset, camisole. Students laughed as apparatus leaked, came unstuck, or flew off in the wrong direction. But she had a sense of doing something useful. They never suspected she was winging it.

In Hill’s Station’s hotbed of courtships, she outlasted many of her peers, who by contract lived in adjacent boarding houses. Impressed with her industry, durability, and abstinence—mistaken for principled—from liquor, cards, or dancing to ragtime, the Board appointed her a housemother. The Superintendent talked of making her a principal one day. She took courses at Hill State.

Higher-ups didn’t realize how hard she’d fallen for the hardware clerk, the owner’s son. Ben’s down-to-earth temperament impressed her. What he lacked in curiosity he made up with rock-solid grounding in what no one could deny, what was certain. Is that a fact? he’d smile when regaled with the latest fossil find in Argentina, Egypt, a Kansas back yard. His take-it-a-step-at-a-time-and-make-sure philosophy of life made her feel protected.

He made regular deliveries to the Science Lab. Conducted a breathless step at a time, nocturnal experiments there left her pregnant by the spring of 1906.

2

The Board fired her . The Powells disowned her. She had to drop out of Hill State. But Ben’s parents, Theophilus and Rachel Clark, had taken a liking to her. They insisted Ben do the right thing.

The Clarks’ two-story, five-bedroom white clapboard house stood walking distance from the college. Rachel, who believed in God and Education, had hoped her five children would study there. But her girls had gotten married one-two-three, her older boy had rushed to get his head shot off in Cuba, and Ben leaned toward tangibles.

While Theo and Ben commuted downtown in a black Olds Runabout steered by tiller, Samantha, fallen from grace and pedagogical perch, helped wash, clean, and cook. Rachel ruled the roost. She urged but luckily didn’t force church attendance and poured forth a nonstop stream of prenatal counseling: fresh air, cleanliness, Lydia E. Pinkham, Scott’s Emulsion, Brandreth’s Pills, maternity corsets, and to soothe your baby, laudanum syrup.

Isn’t that opium? Samantha quailed. But Rachel had raised five. Who’d know better?

THE ORDEAL AND CLIMAX of Preston’s arrival made Samantha’s prior life all prelude. Never mind knowledge! The meaning of life was the feeling of flight, the itch for contact, the stab of unbearable sweetness, the rearing of young—a cycle as old as Cambrian seas. Hypothesis, evidence? Peeks behind the backdrop of the visible? Please. Her arms held the answer.

And yet—was it gas? Wet bottom? Her milk? Shouldn’t a mother be able to tell? Nothing—not breast, burp, changing, cuddling, dandling, gripe water, warm bath, or dark and quiet room—calmed him for more than a minute. But the very first drop of Rachel’s laudanum reached the tiny, savage heart in its secret distress.

Over time it took more of the reddish-brown liquid to soothe, but Preston closed his tiny mouth around the dropper with anticipation. Samantha worried. But Grandma’s whole teaspoons for her numerous complaints did no harm beyond frequent naps.

When Preston sat up and began to babble, his tones, faces, gestures begged reply. He’d throw up tiny hands, gaze around moodily, stare into space as if thinking.

So cute! Samantha rhapsodized, and strained for meanings. Certain gutturals seemed to mean the dropperful of medicine—they preceded wails. Waking from the latest dose, he’d sit as if stunned, indifferent to rattles or shiny things. Once alert, he spouted gibble-gabble questions.

He started walking but the gibberish continued. A trifle backward? Rachel whispered to Theo, who whispered it to Ben, who carried the whisper upstairs. "She’s backward! Samantha flared. She doesn’t understand him!"

Not till Samantha, heavily pregnant again, was bathing her backward toddler in the tin washtub, did he pipe up, hand on his head, as if reading from a glossary, I—was—your—king.

She beamed. You’ve been my king all your life!

Before—th’—poison—wine.

Huh? Surely she’d misheard.

Poison wine—t’ get—rid o’ me.

What an imagination! Sweetie-pie, nobody wants to get rid of you.

No—not now.

SAMANTHA THOUGHT SHE’D read or heard about Coleridge and opium. But this tale!

A palace. Lions on the walls. A royal father poisoned. Bearded nobles in robes, shaven-headed priests, a priestess. A queen selected for the new king, "me," pronounced with sad puppy eyes and proud, tiny hand on chest. A wedding. And ‘rare wine’ in a golden chalice.

Children spin yarns, Ben opined. Theo and Rachel agreed. But no more laudanum!

MED’CINE! THE LITTLE addict begged, sweating. Samantha spent nights with her arms around him, dozing off and on.

The trances alarmed her most. They could happen any time. She’d wave, halloo, snap her fingers. Nothing. After a minute or so he’d come back. The whole family saw except Grandma, nodding in her chair. Samantha flashed dark looks in her direction.

Shouldn’t he see a doctor? Samantha hazarded.

Not much they can do, opined Theo. Get it out of his system. He’ll be fine.

Over weeks her son recovered, but tales kept coming. A wild man tamed by a harimtu with dadu he couldn’t resist? A goddess of naku who took off her clothes one by one?

To tame that lively imagination, Ben believed the tyke needed chores. Come spring, take ‘im out to the garden. Have ‘im pick up stones, pull weeds.

He’s two!

I wasn’t much older than that. We had the farm then. 

Laura was born two weeks later, in mid-December. By April, distracted by a cute-as-a-button new daughter plus the bulk of the cleaning, washing, cooking, and now spring planting, Samantha took a soft approach to re-education by labor. Out in the vegetable garden, Preston would pick up a stone, gaze at it, paw at the tiny hole it left, stare down at the hole or off into space. Likely as not, he’d dig a different hole with his hands and with absorbed solemnity re-bury the stone. To keep him on track took more work than weeding or planting did.

Meanwhile, out of little trances came more outlandish tales. Goddess marries king? Tame enough. But—eyes alight with whimsy—a four-eyed god with fiery breath, riding a dragon with horns, splits a goddess wide open? Samantha cringed a little. A relief, if a minor jolt, to hear the next day of a book—tiny arms spread wide—that never ended. Wi’ pictures!

From the tale of the book came a brainstorm. As she nursed a baby girl whose normalcy relaxed the family’s nerves like a warm bath, lullaby, and spoonful of laudanum, it occurred to Samantha to divert her son’s precocious fancy into stories of boys and girls, dogs and cats, foxes and hens. From her ill-fated year in Wilkes, she still had the complete McGuffey’s Readers in a trunk. She’d teach her dreamy two-year-old to read.

WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT! The speed at which Preston learned his letters and breezed through McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer dropped jaws.

I knew it all along! exclaimed Rachel. He’s a little savant, it’s obvious. The more he reads— Her unfinished sentence saved room for future greatness.

He went on to sound out McGuffey’s Readers One through Six and perfect his articulation at a pace that brightened Rachel’s eyes and unnerved Samantha. Nightly performances made Theo chuckle and Ben scratch his head. As tots in nearby households grew into perpetual motion machines, Preston became a question machine. What were savages, soldiers, Indians, Jews? Who was Alexander the Great? William Tell? Hamlet? Washington?

When Rachel set Preston on her lap with Genesis before him, Samantha stifled laughter at his questions. Soon he was plowing through the Webster’s Unabridged that Rachel had bought long ago for her children’s never-begun college years. It had to be propped in front of him. He paged back and forth for definitions of the definitions and peppered the family with finds like abacinate, a medieval mutilation that made his horrified hearers reach up to cover their eyes.

As Laura began to walk, Preston zig-zagged into the B’s. Who knew that Baal, sun god of the Syro-Phoenicians, served as a title of lordship, as in Baal berith, lord of the covenant; Baal phegor, lord of the dead; or Baal zebub, lord of the flies? After Grandma, nudging him toward genius or sainthood, expounded the lessons implicit in Babylonian, defined first of all as resembling the Babylon of Revelation, Samantha beckoned her son to the kitchen and warned him once again to take Scripture and Grandma with a grain of salt.

The newly mobile Laura, left for a hot August minute with Grandma, ignored dissuasions and with cheerful, Houdini-like agility escaped a buttoned-up dress and pinned diaper. Samantha rushed back to find her eight-month-old, bare as she’d entered this world, toddling toward the front door.

If she shows her bottom, give it a swat, urged Rachel, herself grown too hebetudinous to chase a child. She won’t remember later, but she’ll learn.

Samantha flashed a look that discouraged advice. No one has children like mine, she sighed to herself, unaware she was pregnant again, and scooped up her daughter.

THE NEXT MAY—WHILE Rachel, puffing upstairs for the last time, educated the midwife; while Ben, downstairs, kept Laura entertained and clothed; and while Preston, parked at the dining room table with lax supervision, meandered from thirteen meanings of damn to twenty-two of dark—Lucy was born, eyes wide with wonder.

None of the Clarks had beheld a brighter smile. Lucy walked early, scribbled early, and aimed her first phonemes, syllables—no one ever established what they were—at Preston.

Knelt on a dining room chair and a cushion that had crossed the country in a covered wagon, bent over his propped-up Webster’s Unabridged, he leaned back, peeked beneath the table, and babbled something in reply. Gibberish flew back and forth until Samantha, who thought he’d outgrown it, loomed above them.

We were together! Preston shouted. "In Ba-bi-li!"

Lucy babbled something.

"She was my kezertu in kikittu!"

Lucy giggled.

He could teach her some King’s English, Rachel grumbled from her chair.

LAURA, TOO, HMPHED at the whispered sound-salad conversations. But Lucy soon babbled English and, in breaks from scribbling with crayons, shadowed not Preston but Laura.

Winters, the sisters made nameless snow-creatures and formless mini-snow-forts. Summers, they slipped from sight when they could and gravitated toward the cattail-clogged cattle pond beyond the back fence. Neighbors knew Laura as the one to keep an eye on, Lucy as the follower enmeshed in escapades that trod the line of license.

Preston, the neighbors knew only by hearsay. Lucy—never Laura—tried to lure him outside. Samantha tried to shoo him; his shrugging reply knocked her back on her heels.

‘Fresh air and sunshine’ don’t teach much. With words, now—the deeper you dig, the more depth you find. Any word’s a kind of miracle.

Rachel applauded. And no one in the household outranked Rachel.

PRESTON WAS MARCHING through ninety-one meanings of hand the night before Rachel, bottle and spoon in her lap, departed this world from the living room chair where she slept.

Finding her next morning, Theo let out a cross between yell and moan. Ben, stricken but unsurprised, shepherded his father back to his room and called the undertakers. Samantha rushed to throw a sheet over the bottom-heavy mass.

One by one, the children crept or bounded down the stairs and discovered the unthinkable. Two-year-old Lucy flitted ethereally past the shrouded lump. Four-year-old Laura gaped and got Samantha’s Gone to Heaven talk, mouthed by reflex when the flat fact thudded like a sealed book dropped from the sky.

Six-year-old Preston’s sigh could have meant anything. Realization? Resignation? Relief like Samantha’s, only more candid? Who knew? At breakfast, Lucy stopped chattering when no one answered. Laura brooded. Preston, absently downing Mapl-Flakes, looked like a beardless dotard struggling to remember a forgotten address.

Preston’s learning—a hoarder’s museum, flea-market, and menagerie, open daily if next to impossible to walk through—sprawled in plain sight and stretched every which-way beyond it. But his feelings were a black box stored in the basement. He went on after breakfast to school, where Principal, teachers, and fellow students still struggled with where to put him.

3

Margo in much later years would trace her cascading descent—its priceless reward and its bumping, vertiginous, free-floating drops—to a time or more narrowly a moment when she was too young to see how one thing led to another.

Her first morning of fifth grade in September 1914, she found herself arm’s-length from a strange, undernourished-looking boy who’d passed her hilltop house last year on his way to school. She’d privately nicknamed him Stick-boy for his likeness to a stick-figure drawn with an oversized head. On the playground she’d seen his fellow second-graders make fun of him for carrying a book as big as he was. Jeerers had thrown him, book and all, into a snow-bank. Now, for the first time, she heard his full name: Preston Clark. In a fifth-grade class, he looked like a lost second-grader. Miss Rayburn made Margo, a Connors, sit behind him.

Miss Rayburn’s face reminded Margo of a wrinkled hatchet. Three times that morning, with a voice the Army could use as a weapon, Miss Rayburn bellowed so hard at Preston—for inattention, for having no idea how to multiply, and lastly for working out multiplication tables on his own while he was supposed to be copying the One Hundred Seventeen Spelling Demons off the blackboard—that Margo, despite her casual dislike of misfits, felt sorry for him. That wrath might turn on anyone.

Ask me any word, I’ll spell it! he challenged Miss Rayburn on his way to five minutes in the corner. Margo liked that pluck.

At lunchtime, head down as if hiding, he was easy to catch on the walk uphill. After a short sprint, pigtails flying, Margo fell into step with him.

Battle-axe, isn’t she?

She has to keep order so everybody learns, I guess.

What! Would praise for vegetables come next? But Margo wouldn’t give up on him yet.   I saw you with your book last year. Your brain must be ready to burst.

He kept his head down. I’m not much good with numbers.

I am. I want to make a lot of money when I’m grown. You need figures for that. What’s the biggest number you know?

I never thought about it. A billion, I guess.

Well, a thousand billions make a trillion— She walked him up the scale, strings of zeroes lengthening, fathomless magnitudes mounting, through decillions. Beside her wrought-iron gate she invited him in.

With a hesitant homeward glance, he followed her. Mother looked him up and down for signs of youthful devilry but smiled despite herself when Margo, leapfrogging evidence, introduced him as the smartest boy in class.

Quite a distinction! Margo’s pretty smart herself. She’d know.

Black-clad, narrow-gauged Maeve Connors smiled again when Margo trotted out pencils and paper. Quintillions times quintillions, the pair calculated over sandwiches, gave decillions. Decillions times decillions gave—Mrs. Connors, who’d taken Greek, supplied vigintillions. Beyond that, she allowed, they could make up any names they liked.

That afternoon, evading Miss Rayburn’s detection like hardened delinquents, they traded numerical challenges in stealthy notes. How many seconds since the Pyramids were built? How many inches from Earth to Sun? How many boogers up Miss Rayburn’s nose?

Stung at hearing ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clark’ at recess, even from Sally and Liz, Margo held back tears and made up her mind after school to show the dummies how little she cared. Looking neither right nor left, she strolled uphill with Preston, veered into the woods, and viewed the old tree where, on fair days during dreadful second grade, he’d hidden the Book.

Webster’s Unabridged had been his companion, he explained, since he could remember. He’d dropped Webster only last month. His reason startled her.

I used to be a king, a long time ago. I died of poison. At my own wedding! But— Asquint, as if nervous or bewildered, he clutched the top of his head. He seemed to be trying to hold it down. I don’t know where it happened! Or when! So, I’ve switched to reading history. And now I feel like you were—maybe—with me?

Margo’s head turned hot-air balloon. Her mind’s eye saw vague whitish figures in a dark gray void. The feeling passed but an irresistible conclusion drew her in. I was his queen! She went home with him.

His house, while lacking turrets or a wrought-iron fence, put her at ease. In place of a busy, tidy parlor, the Clarks had a living room littered with dolls, a doll house, magazines, newspapers, books, a huge dictionary, and scraps of scribbled brown wrapping paper. Giggles, squeals, and screams took the place of the echoing silence at home since her sister had eloped. With a month-old Will to nurse and wipe, and with Laura and Lucy, six and four, underfoot and loudly curious, somehow a plumpish Ma Clark, in dowdy housedress and splotched apron, glided with equanimity from clamor to crash or cry or suspicious silence and still found time to whip up ginger snaps.

On the living room couch after cookies, Margo looked over Preston’s shoulder at a book on cave men.

A king in a cave? Kings have palaces!

"I had a palace. But begin at the beginning, right? We might miss something."

We? She had to be his queen! Wait, he was explaining the beginning.

"—gas and dust and empty space, they say. Then stars, planets, sea creatures devouring each other, and so on. Pretty dull till it gets to cave men. They made paintings, carved figures, buried their dead. No animal did these things. They must’ve imagined something—"