Phantom Gardens

By Christopher Bowen

Orphaned in a graveyard and raised by its grave tenant, Jude Manson Frank goes on a journey of self-discovery alongside a sorrowful priest and a swashbuckling, RV driver. Irreverent and gut-punching, taut and lean; this novel takes its reader on a journey of both the grandiose and the mundane. Nothing is as it seems in this Southern Gothic tale of the abuses of power and the inner heart’s quest for love and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387851225

Book preview

Phantom Gardens

A Novel by Christopher Bowen

Phantom Gardens is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2022 1st Edition

Copyright 2022 by Christopher Bowen

All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781387851225

And he shall judge between the nations and reprove many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

Dedicated to anyone who has ever felt lonely or discouraged.

Dramatis Personae:

Jude Manson Frank: His birth in his kinfolk's graveyard, next to his deceased mother, gives the young boy an unimposing expectation of what life is supposed to offer a human being.

Edgar Manson: The gruff grave keeper who keeps the orphaned Jude, rearing him with his own resources and time.

Harlow Wilder: His rural, Oklahoma upbringing had instilled in him a quiet perseverance, an unbending will to labor, an immaculate urge to make use of every morsel of his existence, while bringing just the right amount of guilt and conscience to remind himself he would never be immaculate. This pathway, this course, with its vagueness; this, Harlow reasoned, was life and living and following the Lord's Christ with but only a mustard seed of faith. Just as I am. Just as I am.

The Father Paul Manson: Stern and sorrowful, he strives to endure the sufferings of his cross, while biting back at his inner fear of being crippled beneath it. He is a delver into the silent, inner workings of God in the hearts of men. He vows to not die from the earth until he has made wrongs right in the life of Jude.

The Very Reverend Archbishop Santander: With all their strengths, faults, passions and follies, he is the grand summation of Jude, Manson, Harlow Wilder and Fr. Paul. Yet, he fancies himself greater than the sum of these parts. He is the tier of every knot; and, yet he might tie a knot he is unable to undo.

A Southern Gothic novel with wide, overlapping twists of the yarn, coming to a decisive resolution at the end of the string….

Phantom Gardens

Chapter 1

Before the newborn’s mother faded away, she laid the child on the dirt heap of his father Henry’s resting place, piled not a day before; and, now, the dirt heap would soon neighbor a new hole to be dug for the recent widow, and now deceased woman herself, Emily Frank. The child was odd and ugly, which was a strange happening considering both his parents were handsome. Perhaps some bygone gene from a bygone generation of his line’s blood had broken through normalcy and shouted, kicked, and screamed louder than the genes of his precedents.  

The Henry and Emily Frank tombstone was bright and new. The surrounding stones were all an ugly, algoid green, however, from years of resting in that graveyard. The Franks were a prominent family, and ‘a Frank must always be buried with Franks.’ Henry had been the last, blood-Frank in his line. Now, Emily Frank was no longer alive to carry the name. The only Frank of blood and name lay on the dirt heap of his father’s grave, adjacent to his dead and bled out mother. The graves of his precedent family witnessed the last of their line lying helpless in the coming night. He was surrounded by death, so what good could the child ever expect in life?  

The sky was torn between day and approaching night. Phantasmal hues of violet blotched the dome of sky, made stark by the burning, dying orange on the opposite spectrum. Farther on the night-side of sky, murky, black rainclouds threatened to visit the graveyard. They cared not whether a newborn lie out in the open. They roared thunder ahead of their approach, and the child cried as his tiny ears pounded with booms and bangs. He cried roughly and his tears were eager to escape his slimy, newborn eyes.  

This little man-son lay bare on the earth, bare before violet sky, gnarled trees, and algoid tombstones. The clouds soon loosed their first drops, and the child knew his first rain. He protested the alien touches that pattered all over his face and body. He felt his body tightening, and knew himself to be cold, though the word itself he knew not. He knew he would not live, whatever that meant; and, he knew there was nothing he could do to escape his predicament. So, he cried harder. He cried loud and angry and violent. His little, red and rain-soaked chest heaved on the ground to ring out all of his essence, all of himself, all of who he was; whatever these things meant. And then, in a natural, pendulum-break between thunder bangs, there was a weird silence. The silence occurred just as the rain dissipated but a fateful moment, and then the little son’s cries were heard by someone other than himself.  

The one who heard the cries was the tenant of the graveyard, whose ancient house was paces away. The tenant had been standing under his open-door garage tinkering with tools at his worktable. He heard a baby crying, and he turned from his table to look out into the pouring rain. He saw no baby or mother. He grabbed his umbrella and stepped out of the garage. He left the house behind him and stepped over the cemetery fence served to protect the more ancient graves. And there was the child. The mother lay open-mouthed—dead.... He immediately removed his burly coat and nestled the baby into its folds. He set off quickly back to his house, where he washed the baby with a gentle, warm sponge, and gave him milk to drink. The little boy slept under a roof his first night—after all.  

Chapter 2

Jude Manson Frank was the boy’s name. Manson was the name of the grave keeper who found him helpless that night. He imbibed the child with his own name to make some claim to him. He had fed and gave the best he had to him, so why should the child not bear his name? These charities were done out of spite, however. His providing of love was not lovely. He begrudged all the years he wiped the boy’s ass and tried to teach him numbers and letters and had had great difficulty having to bear the boy’s slow wit and restlessness against sitting still.  

Manson decided the boy should keep the name of his heritage. Thus, from the earliest understanding of the boy’s mind, he was taught that his ‘mom and dad and all his family were dead and lying just outside in the near yard under stone and earth.’ 

Manson walked with an unsteady gait and thundering step. His face was broad and ugly, and would have resembled the most unskilled, worst-bred peasant in elder times. His tight-skinned face was pallid and worn with age-spots. His bald pate shone deceptively in the light. The yellow, cracked teeth in his mouth could tear through the toughest leather while he sat at his work bench tinkering. These teeth were currently destroying a steak he was consuming at the dinner table, with Jude sitting across from him on the other side. The steak was devoured easily, and had contained more red than a proper chef would have allowed. He had emptied his plate, and followed his custom of lifting the dish to his face and licking off the remaining juices and sauces with the palate of his albino, discoloured tongue.  

Jude dabbed the wrist cuff of his shirt to his mouth to wipe away some grease. All of the food had finally been consumed. The dinner table was coloured with vegetables from their own garden, eggs from their own hen houses, and meat from their own hunting expeditions. They did not venture into town to peruse the markets.  

The two of them, in the summer months, would stroll the house in bare feet. In the winters, they insulated the windows and doors with wool. A stone fireplace in the small, clustered den baked the house with heat.  

The estate was several miles from town, in open country. The house sat at the bottom of a sloping hill lined with graves. The graves on the hill were under open sky and rested single people, town newcomers, and strangers in general. Most of the graves of families whose residencies extended further back in time were adjacent to the hill, in flat land under gnarled trees with dried, peeling trunks. Jude’s family lay in a plot among the older graves, enclosed in an iron fence.  

Routine filled their lives. It was quiet, safe and peaceful, but routine. One morning, a stranger knocked on the grave tenant’s door. No one ever knocked on the grave tenant’s door, at least not the door of this grave tenant.  

Chapter 3

Father Paul prayed Mass alone in his chapel day after day. He had no congregation but himself and God. He had not had a visitor in many years. 

 Every day, the old presbyter would wake to hold the chalice and pray. He would even say out loud, with hands extended, The Lord be with your spirit, though there was never a reply of, And with your spirit. He prayed the rosary in solitude. On his walks through the woods, even when he had no physical rosary, he would hold his hands in the posture of holding beads. He prayed every prayer and held every invisible bead.  

His chapel and residence were in a wyrd woods ever full of dusk and owls and rustlings in the underbrush. The smell of evergreens and droppings and damp, musky air extended past the edge of the wood where the chapel rested and into darker regions never explored.  

Fr. Paul had woken at his usual early hour one morning to hold Mass. He always did this, day after day. Every day was the same. Empty pews. Empty confessional. Only one man receiving the Eucharist. Only one man blessing and being blessed.  

What is life without change, and what is a river without a bending course? After years in solitude, after he held Mass that particular day, Fr. Paul left the chapel and went to visit a man he had not seen in many years.  

It was Fr. Paul who knocked on the door of the grave tenant, Manson, where the young Jude also took residence. Upon seeing the aging priest standing in the cold and swirling leaves, Manson immediately slammed the door, though the wood of the door was