"Our Lady of American Sorrows" is one of the short novels in American Sorrows, which is copyright © 2004, Jay Lake, all rights reserved. Introduction copyright ©, James W. Van Pelt. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.
American Sorrows ISBN: 1-931305-02-1
Cover photograph: Life Sentence, Copyright © 2004, Aynjel Kaye
American Sorrows is also published in a print edition (ISBN 0-9755903-0-8) by Wheatland Press.
Scorpius Digital Publishing
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There are more people to thank in this year of my life than I could ever put names to on this page, so this one's for Bronwyn. The rest of you know I love you, too.
Introduction - James W. Van Pelt
Author's Foreword
Introduction to “Our Lady of American Sorrows”
Our Lady of American Sorrows
About the Author
American Sorrows, by Jay Lake
44 Clowns: 11 Stories of the 4 Clowns of the Apocalypse, edited by Jay Lake and Mike Brotherton
Scorpius Digital Publishing Catalog
introduction
Aficionados of fantasy genre literature have been discussing lately what the trends are. Have we entered the world of the “new weird?” Has “slipstream” replaced the older traditions? Has the word itself, “genre,” lost its meaning?
Whatever the case is, you can be sure that when a writer sits down with pen and paper (or word processor), that literary discussions of today’s movements drop away. They become moot. What matters most after a few minutes in that special reverie which is the writer’s own, is the story. And among storytellers, there’s a select group who not only have a story to tell, but also have a compelling voice to grab you by the ears and make you pay attention. “Something vital is going on here,” it will say. “Something that will move you and entertain you and leave you thinking.”
That’s a Jay Lake kind of storyteller.
In this collection you will find four assuredly told stories by Jay Lake, who both has the confidence in his own tales to plunge in without hesitation, and faith in the readers to follow him. These stories take us immediately into real worlds not quite like our own, but so unerringly told that you’ll be asking yourself if maybe, just maybe, they aren’t fantastic at all.
In “Our Lady of American Sorrows,” a parallel history to ours plunges us deep into political intrigue, high adventure and Mayan mysticism. While I was reading, though, I found myself wondering if the events of that world weren’t real. Did I miss a day in my history class? Did the Pope really have access to nuclear weaponry? What were the effects of the second great war on South American politics? I don’t know, and in that area of ignorance, Jay has woven his story.
The setting of “The River Knows Its Own” is a Portland I recognize, complete with achingly funny caricatures of grunge environmentalists and the fringe folks who practice environmentalism like it’s a black magic, except in Jay’s world, the magic works. The story never ceases to be a dead-on portrait of one segment of our society, and all the while it isn’t about our world at all, at least not the part of it you will be familiar with.
Clearly the Texas of “Into the Gardens of Sweet Night” isn’t ours, but everything within it is, warped and twisted and familiar, even the talking pug and the very purposeful wolves. In this, my favorite story in the collection, Jay takes us on a ride that is reminiscent of pulp fiction at its best. A rollicking adventure filled with surprises. Readers had best hold onto their wits while reading this one.
“Daddy’s Caliban” is the only piece here that doesn’t seem firmly grounded in a place you’ll recognize, at least not recognize like you would Portland, Texas, or New Albion, or America’s west coast, but it’s a place you’ll recognize emotionally. This is a child’s world told from a young person’s sensibility. It’s a world of brothers playing together, investigating river currents and the mystery of adults.
But where I think Jay excels best as a storyteller is that he has a love of things. Sandra McPhearson, a poet I admire, once said that a poem can be judged by its “thing count.” If you consider a poem as an envelope, how many things does it have in it? Can you open the envelope and shake a pile of things out? If you can’t, then the poem might be lacking. Stories can be considered that way too. Jay’s stories are filled with things to see, touch, taste, smell and hear. There are elusive green parrots and Panthera tigris sumatrae and dirigibles and ragged dragons, and a host of other solid, concrete persons, places and, well, things.
Jay is a thoughtful and articulate person. I’ve heard him expound on writing theory with the best of them. He knows his way around the academic version of the writers’ world, where sometimes it seems that writers don’t consider themselves to be successful unless they are writing a work that only the smartest five-hundred people in the world can appreciate. Jay’s stories aren’t like that. They’re informed by his profound thinking about language and narrative, but they are always stories first.
If this book is your introduction to the work of Jay Lake, and it leaves you wanting more, rest assured that there is a lot of it out there. Jay has been writing up a storm. Reading a Jay Lake story is like settling in around the campfire. The wood crackles cheerfully; the smoke curls pleasantly into the forest around you; the stars glitter with that special hard edge that mountain air provides, and just when you are comfortable, Jay joins you at the edge of light. “I have a story to tell,” he says.
And he does.
James Van Pelt
July, 2004
Author's Foreword
Writing is a sufficiently challenging journey in its own right to daunt all but the most foolish. And then there is publishing. Courage does not even begin to describe the requirements for that peculiar endeavor. Willful blindness, perhaps, and a deep and abiding love for the word made story.
Here is a new publishing experiment for me, then: an e-book with my name upon, with thanks to the support of Bridget McKenna and Marti McKenna of Scorpius Digital. I've been all about the electronic press in my career to date, yet curiously never managed to land in this outlet before.
That this book exists at all is through the good offices and strong encouragement of Deborah Layne, publisher and editor of Wheatland Press. Deborah has played a large role in my career since before I even had one. She has been friend, confidante, cheerleader, marketing guru par excellence, and above all the one who has kept me honest.
American Sorrows was Deborah's idea. I'd been grumbling about the difficulties of marketing a novella I quite liked, and she pointed out that there had been increasing interest of late in longer works by various authors in the field. So we noodled tables of contents for a collection of novelettes and novellas to be built around my Hugo-nominated novelette "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night."
A little while later, through the intestinal magic of publishing, the excellent Jim van Pelt produced a kind introduction, Aynjel Kaye supplied a stunning cover photo, and suddenly we had a book. I say "we" -- I presided majestically over some unruly words, while Deborah wrestled with page layout demons and Bridget and Marti took on file formats two falls out of three. The end is a first for me: a simultaneous print and digital release of my fiction.
Be that what it may, here is American Sorrows, a collection of work that might loosely triangulate on the history of a continent, a nation, a people, or even the life of just one author. Or perhaps, as I believe, they are just stories.
Enjoy.
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introduction
our lady of american sorrows
This story literally came to me in a dream, or at least the first scene did. I was on a flat-topped roof in a dusty Central American town with my best friend—we were both in high school—watching a convoy of red Chevy Suburbans roll by, filled with priests. It was utterly clear to me, in that way that dream knowledge can be, that these big, burly men with their hard, narrow eyes and their dog collars were French Legionnaires Étrangères, come to do mischief in my town.
I woke with that image dense in my head and wondered what they were about. The rest flowed from the keyboard, surprising me as most of my stories do.
There’s a discussion that all writers get in to from time to time, a variation on “what exactly did you mean by thus-and-such.” If I could answer that question, I’d be teaching contemporary lit somewhere. All I do is write them. Interpretation is an exercise for the reader.
But I look at a story like “Our Lady of American Sorrows” and I see echoes of many things. My childhood in Asia and Africa, transmuted to the boy Peter in this other version of Central America. Edd O’Donnell’s Chevy Surburban, years ago back in Austin, Texas, though it was white rather than red. The Orthodox monasteries of Bulgaria I visited in my late teens. My long fascination with the very concept of an anti-pope, and eventually learning some of the history of the Avignon Papacy which infuses the backstory of this piece.
All this probably means something. What, I don’t know. But New Albion was an interesting place to visit, though I wouldn’t want to live there. If I could, I’d walk Water Avenue out to the monastery, just to see that cliff wall over the river. I’d explore the sacbe, hoping to meet who Peter and Rodger met there.
our lady of american sorrows
I SAT WITH MY FRIEND RODGER—two months older and taller than me, but otherwise close as any twin brother—on the flat stone roof of my family’s house, second from the end of the row on the steepest block of Rondo Street. We were both sixteen, and this was our last summer of freedom before our final year at Latin School, before we had to work for our livings. The day was so hot it felt as if the sun itself reached down to press on my head.
We shared our perch with a handful of iguanas and a pair of dusty-winged crows. We could see half the town, from the landing field along the river to east, back to the Civil Palace downtown. A series of open-topped trucks belched black smoke as they strained up the cobbles of Charles Avenue, coming from Ostia, New Albion’s little port at the river’s mouth. Four in three hours!
Each was filled with straight-backed men in black cassocks, their dog collars visible like white slashes against their throats even from our distance. They all were heading for the monastery west of town—Our Lady of American Sorrows, a great fortress of a holy house inhabited only by solemn Cistercians.
Until now. I sincerely doubted these were more Cistercian brothers come to call. “Four trucks,” I said. “Perhaps a dozen priests in each.”
Rodger snickered. “Are there enough souls in danger here in New Albion to need fifty new priests?”
“No one needs fifty new priests,” I said darkly.
Papa was a theist, which was legal in New Albion, sort of. Even though Mama had raised me well I found his skepticism daring. Last Sunday at Mass at St. Cipriano’s, Father Lavigne told us that Pope Louis-Charles III had sworn a renewed mission in the Americas when he had elevated the Archbishop of Teixeira. But fifty priests? If the Holy Office were coming to test the faith of our parishes, Papa would be in trouble.
I tried to imagine another reason for the priests to be here, hoping to conjure some little word-magic to offset my newfound fear. “Perhaps they are headed for the interior, to the native countries.”
Rodger’s snort was answer enough for that. “Just you watch,” he said. “Something big is brewing.”
No more trucks appeared, and the next aeroplane wasn’t due until Friday, so after a while we got our fly rods and crickets to go fishing for bats off the seaside cliffs at sundown. The catch was always difficult, but they crisped so well on the fire, and tasted delicious with sea salt, lime and ground peppers.
New Albion sprawls across dusty hills that are almost never hidden from the sun. Despite what they say about us in Avignon and Londres, it does rain here, at least at certain hours of the day during certain times of the year. Our little country is known mostly for our heat and our cloudless summers, and beaches which stretch at the feet of pale cliffs two hours’ walk to the east.
We were also known, I suppose, for our coffee. That plant grows in abundance, both wild and cultivated, in the high hills far to the west of town, where there is shade and rain drifts down from the distant mountains. Somehow God arranged it so we had neither ocean nor coffee ourselves here in New Albion proper, but were rather simply caught in the middle ground between the salt spray and the morning’s benediction.
Papa had been working on a new kind of coffee mill ever since I could remember. He had a job as well, at the Ministry of Commercial Affairs in a high-windowed office down by the sluggish river that he sometimes took me to see. He sat under an old wicker-bladed fan that squealed in a slow tempo, stamping seals on forms after holding them in files for long periods of time. Since his mother was Brasilian, it was good that Papa had a civil service job—anyone with Brasilian connections had been under suspicion since the Second Great War.
Another reason to fear the new priests.
Papa went down to his office three or four days a week, stamped papers for a while, then counted the circling flies until the sweat beneath his collar drove him home again. The rest of the time he labored in the little workshop across the alley behind our block of whitewashed houses. Undershirt grimy with oil, Gauloise dangling from his lips, Papa sent sparks showering from his welder or patiently rewound electric motors. Somehow the heat did not bother Papa so much when he worked on his own projects.
There were two very old coffee mills built into the slope of the hillside just south of Papa’s workshop, where the alley rises higher. Each was as big as a small house, with a door into the lower level. They still had mule troughs alongside their loading platforms, and hand pumps to bring the water up to the separator tanks. Both were overhung by enormous banyan trees.
The mills always looked to me like kilns, great squat shapes with their tanks and pipes and chutes and gears. One even had the original wood-fired boiler still attached, which once had driven the pulping press, though it had long been reduced to a still for mash fermented from durians and coconuts gathered along our quiet beaches. The electric wires tied off to the banyan trees sparked in thunderstorms, but still the mills always worked when the grinding-men came to start them up in coffee season.
Papa sometimes stood before them at dusk, once he had lost the light in his workshop. He smoked, staring at the limestone walls and the teakwood separator tanks as if they, not the stunning heat or New Albion’s aching bureaucracy, were his true enemy. “Listen to me, Peter João Fallworth,” he had said more than once, stabbing the cigarette like a tiny orange comet in the dusk. “You are almost a man. Understand this: it is the coffee that keeps us poor. The factors from the commodities bourses in São Paulo and Londres own us through those damned beans as much as any plantation overseer of the last century.” Flick, the Gauloise blazed away to the center of the alley, far from the dry brush. Only its sharp scent remained, the smoke lingering like our pale dust always does.
“Slaves,” he would say. “We are as slaves.”
I never could understand why Papa’s coffee mill was better than the old mills, or how it was supposed to free us. Though Mama hated it, he liked to talk about political economy and natural rights over our corn and turkey stews, but New Albion was already free. There hadn’t been slaves here for almost a hundred years, and they’d almost all gone to Brasil when they were manumitted. Father Lavigne preached liberation on Sundays, and my teachers at the Latin School said the same during the week.
Me,
I was my own person only on Saturdays, except during the summers when I was free as any ex-slave. Even that was almost over, as next year would be my last at the Latin School.
On Wednesday Rodger and I were down in the free market, spending our few hard-earned Albion pounds on fried pies and shopping for rumors of the new priests. I wanted to know if they were Jesuits, who often worked for the Holy Office. We heard a rumbling in the sky above us that drowned out even the bleating of the goats in their pens.
We both looked up.
“That’s a jet,” Rodger said in an awed voice. Every month or so through the post he got an aviation magazine from Nouveau Orleans. It wasn’t really a proper magazine, more of a fly-specked thing folded down from a large sheet that was printed in French he could barely read, but it continually fueled his passion for flight. Aeroplanes were one of the few areas of life where I would admit to his superior wisdom without argument. “Look…” He used his half-eaten pie to point, jabbing me in the ribs with his free hand. “See, no propellers.”
The aeroplane was too big to be up in the air like that. Despite myself, I felt a tiny shiver of fear. “Where are the engines? How does it stay up?”
“The wings keep it up, dummy.” His tone would have withered bananas. “That’s where the engines are, too. See how fat the wings are close to the body? That’s why it’s a jet.”
We both stared. The usual aeroplane from Teixeira was short and fat, with a huge propeller engine in each wing. Rodger called it a gooneybird, and said it was a veteran of the Second Great War. This jet aeroplane was long and silver, like a flying cigarillo wrapped in foil. The tail was red, with the Papal key in gold, and a French tricolor on the top of the rudder. It roared like a jaguar, where the usual aeroplane whined like an enormous wasp.