#paying a lot of money to be a part of a giant petri dish really doesn't seem my thing

[christopherwatsonbooks]

Covenant Spring, Chapter One

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. I’m terrific at touting someone else’s work -- it’s something I’ve done for decades to pay the bills. But when it comes to my own writing, my inherent aversion to calling attention to myself gets in the way. It just feels unseemly to boast. I’m also sensitive that others, like you, might find it off-putting.

Unfortunately, no one’s going to discover my writing unless I keep talking about it. And unless I also do something else I find quite difficult, which is to ask for help.

I need lots of people -- like you -- to read Covenant Spring and then write a review for it on Amazon, as well as spread the word via social media, word of mouth, book-loving friends and clandestine dalliances. As I said before, I just want to get the damn thing read. I really would give it away for free, if I could, but Amazon wants money for doing their part to help. Which seems fair.

But that doesn't mean I can't share some of it here. Maybe all of it. So let's give that a go.

Below, you’ll find the first chapter to Covenant Spring, which you can purchase on Amazon in ebook and softcover formats.

I'd really appreciate your help getting the word out about Covenant Spring. It’s about love and God and murder and sex and truth and lies and finding one good thing in your life to believe in, something to make weathering the rest of the s**t worthwhile. There’s also some excellent inside scoop about car sales. Really.

Check out the first chapter below and let me know what you think.

Chris

***

Covenant Spring

Foreword

All of the places in this story are real but I've changed their names and where they are, so if you try to follow the directions I give to Covenant Spring you’ll wind up someplace else entirely, past the New Covenant Presbyterian Church and Miz Dori's neat white house, past the dirt road into the woods by the swamp where Mister Silas lives, over and beyond the little cement bridge, where I held Aaron's hand and faced down Pastor Lamm, with the storm black and howling over our heads and the world a tick from ruin.

Some of the events I have changed for certain reasons that ought to be clear by the end. I've also changed the names of everyone involved, except my own, for the same reasons. So if you think you see yourself in here it’s not intentional but you can’t say it's all that surprising, the world being what it is.

. . .

Chapter One

My name is Daniel Ivy and I live in New Jersey. I’ve lived in Jersey all my life. I was born and raised in a typical Jersey town, which I know won't mean a thing to you if you haven't been here. There are worse places to grow up, and any place is fine when you’re a kid and don’t know any better.

My hometown is small. You might find it on a good state map. It's about an hour west of New York City, identical to the towns that surround it, like interlocking amoebas in a petri dish. Millions of squirming souls captured in a drop of dirty water, fighting over parking spaces. It’s home because it’s where I was born and grew up, and that’s the end of it. It’s difficult to get sentimental about asphalt and strip malls.

When I was younger I liked to search maps for my hometown. Big paper maps, atlases, the kind that showed the entire world. My town was never more than the smallest dot if it was listed at all, but I was always glad to find it. It meant we were real.

Our existence, officially confirmed.

. . .

There's a place one town over from where I was raised. It’s called Washington's Rock. During the Revolutionary War, General Washington is said to have stood there on the high ridge and observed troop movements in the valley below. It's also said he often went there to meditate, whether he would win or be hanged, I suppose. People drink there now and get stoned, and scrawl obscenities and the names of who they’re hooking up with at the moment on the tall granite marker erected where a ghost once stood and contemplated death, hope and honor. The limbs of the trees at the bottom of the ridge drip with sun-faded trash and used condoms, like tinsel.

I spent a lot of time on Washington's Rock as a kid. The road to the top is long and narrow, and it plunges at the shoulder into trees and rock. Trucks are banned from it. It’s alpine steep, and laid in serpentine turns around which it's impossible to see a chubby kid on a bicycle until the last moment.

It is a dangerous road, my parents warned me, back when I was the age when dangerous was intoxicating. The feel of a dangerous thing, a forbidden thing, was sexual in its allure. To brave the slender bending limbs at the crest of a tall tree, or to dash across the teeming interstate with my friends. These are the trials of early manhood for suburban boys. We would dance nervous on the highway shoulder and then dive into the diesel avalanche, through doppler-shifting horn blasts, knowing even then, even that young with our legs shaking and gulping breaths coming precious and hard on the other side, that we’d done something. You weren’t quite the same person you had been moments before. You had done a dangerous thing, a stupid thing, and had been changed.

But it wasn’t stupid. It built me by small degrees like daubs of clay pressed on a frame. It gave me weight in the world, an earned power that was mine alone, and was important.

It took everything I had to pump the pedals and make it to the top of Washington’s Rock. The passing cars kicked their grit in my face, their horns blasted hurled curses. But I dared not stop. The road was so steep that if I stopped, I knew my legs wouldn’t find the power to push the pedals anew, and I would think about giving up. And if I gave up, I would be that much smaller, diminished by it forever, and I might never try again.

So I did not allow myself to quit. The trial made me real. There was nothing else I had then that possessed the power and magic to make me much of anything.

. . .

I knew a girl in middle school named Shelly. I saw her one day in class pressing the point of a nail file into her arm under her desk until she bled. Her face was as composed as a cameo the whole time. She saw me watching her and she put the file back in her purse and returned her attention to the blackboard like nothing at all had happened.

I read years later that a lot of young women hurt themselves like that, mostly women, but nothing I ever read explained why. It was a disease. It was a disorder, a warning sign. A warning of what, no one seemed to know. But if you saw it, you were supposed to tell someone. You were supposed to take action.

Shelly was beautiful. She was pale and doe-eyed and slender. She wore nice clothes and got excellent grades. She waited every day after school out front, her books embraced against her chest like body armor, waiting for her mother to come in their giant SUV and pick her up.

They found Shelly that summer in her bedroom. She had found some pills and washed them down with liquor from her parents’ wet bar. The local paper wrote about it on the front page, how Shelly might never wake up and how it was such a senseless tragedy, as if there was such a thing as sensible tragedy. How it was such a shame that it had happened to so beautiful a young woman, as if good skin should have been enough for her.

“She was so beautiful,” everyone said. As if that was all they could see.

Kids visited Shelly for a while in the hospital. They took turns caring for her, talking to her, playing her favorite music for her, brushing her hair. The nurses showed them how to turn Shelly every few hours and position pillows under her so she wouldn’t get bedsores, and how to clean the site where her feeding tube punched a hole into her stomach, and how to empty her urine and colostomy bags. Shelly’s friends at school set up an online crowdfunding site for her and held fundraisers for the family to offset medical bills when insurance ran out, “We Heart Shelly” dances and 10K walks and bake sales. A local car dealership held a raffle for a new vehicle. Save Shelly, win a Toyota.

Then after a while, no one talked about it anymore. Everyone forgot about Shelly until she died two years later, a wax doll skeleton in pink sweat clothes, resembling her former beautiful self as much as a paper sack resembles a tree.

It would have been better if Shelly had been shot in the head, or had died in a car crash. I’ve heard others say it, families and friends of people injured like Shelly, the ones who have to live with the unromanticized pain, who can’t go home and leave it behind. The ones who have to wear the rubber gloves and clean the fluids and feces, and exhausted wrestle tormented with their love against the slow expiration of hope, and the guilt of wishing more each day for death’s blessed mercy.

If the crease from living Shelly to dead Shelly had been sharper, it might have cut us more than it did. A knife to awaken us. Useful pain, instructive pain, stopping our lives, making us ponder more than it did.

Remember Shelly? What a shame. Her poor family. Gee, how long ago was that?

The newspaper ran a story: Local Girl Dies After Two-Year Battle.

It wasn’t a battle. It was decomposition. The battle ended when Shelly said so.

Two years for the edge to dull, until it drew no blood at all. Maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have so easily forgotten her. But Shelly Christ did not give her life with the intention of making us see. It was about us, but it was never for us.

. . .

I’ve never told anyone about what I’d seen Shelly do, until now. Maybe if I had said something, I sometimes think, she might be alive now. But I think that’s arrogant. I don’t have that power. I don’t know what I would have said or done. I didn’t know her.

Maybe if I’d tried, maybe she would have let me be her friend. I don’t know if it would have made a difference. Maybe I only would’ve gotten in her way.

I think I should have tried, though. I still feel that I missed something big by not trying. And I didn’t understand power, not then.

. . .

I wondered why I was drawn to Washington’s Rock. Sometimes I would just find myself there, having set out on my bike with no conscious intention of going. I’d find myself at the bottom of the hill, waiting for the silent something that moved me from stillness — some hunger shown food, some decision I never was conscious of making, an impetus like a whisper, the only evidence of which is the echo I hear after I’ve begun.

Washington's Rock was my trial, my very own. Making it to the top gave me power, and freedom.

I walk around the trees, hot and panting and sweat-soaked and then, there is the entire world, spread out below me.

I stand on the marker and extend my arms, I outstretch my hands over it all. I can feel the press of the tiny houses and the billows of green against my palms. I spread my will over them and hold it suspended, like the sky. How lucky they all are to be ignorant of me, those tiny, stupid people. So ignorant of my power, for all I have to do is lower my hands and crush them all. And in their last moments, only then would they finally understand. Then they would know how stupid they were, how they had until that last terrible moment, when it was utterly too late, understood absolutely nothing.

But other times, I would fly. I would raise my hands with my palms upward and feel myself becoming light and I would rise like a flock of birds set loose from my heart, so high above the dull world and the stupid people in it. Soaring through the clean, cold air, my blood and breath transformed to joy, knowing at last that I was free.

I didn’t think of it then as prayer.

Maybe that’s what Shelly felt. Maybe that’s why I can’t forget her. Maybe I could have taken her with me and shown her another way, given her a trial that she could weather. Maybe she would have come out on the other side born anew, even if only for a little while, with a defining something other than pain that was completely hers, that was earned. And maybe she would have kissed me in thanks, the one person who understood, and we would both have had another thing to make us real.

But then always, I would feel my weight again, and I would open my eyes and be standing on the rock. But maybe just before, just moments before, I truly had been free. Maybe the world returned only because I opened my eyes expecting to see it.

The world is strong, but one day I would be strong enough to remove myself from it completely, I vowed. One day, I would ascend into the real and become my true self, forever, with no hope or desire of returning. I would be awesome and terrible to behold, and everyone then would know how deadly stupid had been their decision to dismiss me.

I carried this with me as a comfort. It is the closest thing I had to religion then. That, and searching for myself on maps.

. . .

My mother and I argued. I screamed at her but my voice was never strong enough. If only it had been, I could have blasted her with my power and then she, too, would know. That she had better stop and ponder, and wonder if what she was doing would one day prove dangerous.

I did not like my mother. I felt no obligation to. Any animal can give birth. Ten seconds after that’s done, you have to earn the rest.

My mother didn't understand. She would tell me to stop shouting. It didn't matter what we were shouting about or whether she had shouted first. "Stop shouting!" she would hiss, as if we were creating a scene in a restaurant. She would repeat it over and over, never looking at me until I went away, and she would make another drink.

I learned to give my mother my silence. I made myself easy for her to ignore. I gave her nothing, other than what was necessary to pass through her space. I learned to turn my mind from the wet crawl of her eyes on me, the slurp of her taking a drink. Sometimes she would say things but they were just rocks. I was too far away, and she didn't have the reach. I think she was grateful.

That silence was all we had in common. Except for blood, which can't be denied but is easy to ignore, once you make up your mind to do it.

. . .

There was a time when Dad tried to play peacemaker. I would stop arguing when he did, for him.

I love my dad. When I was still at home, I would hear my mother shouting at him downstairs, sometimes in fury, other times with words that cut but held no truth. She only wanted to hurt him. Usually dad would speak so low I couldn't hear him, so it sounded as if my mother was cursing a ghost.

Many times the front door would slam hard enough to rattle the windows in my bedroom. Then I would hear the fridge door open, and the cabinet where she kept the bottle, which was right beneath my room. And sometimes I would hear her cry, and I would turn up my music, just enough so I couldn't hear her but not so loud that she could hear me do it. It made me feel something that I had enough left to give her that, at least.

"Your mother is having a tough time," Dad would explain, though he never said with what. I don't think he knew. If he had, I don’t know how he could have explained it to me then so I would understand. I was in their world, and what bound them together was to me like a monster swimming in a dark swamp, a great merciless shape obscured in the murk whose silent approach I felt like a wave as it neared.

I would make myself small then, I would press myself against the walls in fear and pray it did not crush me as it passed because whatever it was, it did not see me at all.

It terrified me worse than dying.

Dad rescued me. His familiar footsteps on the carpeted stairs, the squat shadows of his feet against the crack of hallway light below my closed bedroom door. Three light taps. I never played my music so loud that I wouldn't be able to hear them.

Sometimes we talked for hours in the dark, with long silences between clumps of sentences like the highway between towns. Sometimes he drove and sometimes I did. And then, there would come a stretch of highway and I would feel his weight rise from the end of the bed, and his warm hand would squeeze my arm, and the door would close softly behind him, leaving the faint odor of after shave and cigarettes.

Dad always goes outside when he smokes. I would hear the screen door creak and close, and I would rise from my bed and go to the window and see him on the back patio. Sometimes he would just stand there, and sometimes he would walk slowly around the little yard that I mowed every weekend. He would move in and out of the next-door neighbor's yellow porchlight spill, in and out of the shadows cast by the high forsythia bushes along the fence. His hand would come up to his mouth, and I would see the little orange dot flare bright in the dark as he inhaled. His hand would swing down by his side and I knew he was exhaling but I would watch the cigarette cherry as it faded, seeing how long I could make it out before it went away completely, counting the seconds.

Sometimes he would be like that for an hour, smoking one cigarette after another, like he knew he had to smoke them all right then before he went back inside for the last time that night. Back on duty, back to my mother who with her vodka breath had ordered him and his cigarettes out of his house.

I always made sure there were no lights on in my room when I watched him. I didn't want him to look up and see my silhouette in the window. I wasn't afraid he would be angry. I didn't want to rob him of his religion.

Dad amazes me, what he tolerates. I don't know what my mother once was that made him fall in love with her, but it's gone now. Maybe there's just enough of it left that only he can see that keeps him there.

I think it's more that he feels sorry for her. If she can't love him, then he will protect her. That at least he can still do. He will be dutiful. It is the only way he has left to show her his love. The only way she will accept, even as she curses him for it.

If I think about it too long, the sadness of it breaks my heart.