Boda

From CleanPosts

The sinking of Reina Regena in March 1917 with the End Dome Church's first prophet Mark Lange aboard (along with seven hundred other souls who could not take to lifeboats) was one of the biggest factors that changed US public opinion about the Great War from an attitude of cynical isolationism to moralistic idealism. A month later Congress approved a declaration of war against the Central Powers, and a month after that forced conscription began.

Despite Church of End Dome roots in the pacifist German Brethren, and the slight bias in favor of the Central Powers by many Americans of German descent, very few Endomites availed themselves of Conscientious Objector status after receiving their draft notification. Erik Lokken of Wiley accepted the call to go “Over There” along with nearly five million other Americans. After a brief period of the most rudimentary military training Eric found himself on a troop ship on the way to Bayonne, France.

America was late getting into position for the First World War, and as Pershing trained the American Expeditionary Forces to operate independently of the Allies, they would be late getting into battle. The war was in it's final two months before Eric entered combat as part of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, the third and easiest operation to straighten out the remaining German salients in the Western Front before the main Allied thrust to break the Hindenburg Line could begin.

The Americans were tasked to attack the German left flank against static positions they had held for more than three years while German, France, Britain and Belgium bled themselves white. But now the allies were getting a fresh shot in the arm from the merry but homesick doughboys who went into battle singing and whooping with the enthusiasm of a football team pouring out onto the field before kickoff.

The Germans knew the Americans were coming and began to pull out, but the Americans attacked before the Germans estimated they would, with 600 aircraft and 144 tanks commanded by Colonel George S. Patton Jr. St-Mihiel was Patton's first battle as well.

Casualties in this battle were very light as battles went in World War I, but the weather was miserable. The nearly three thousand pieces of field artillery unleashed by the Allied side as well as the bombs dropped from the air tore the battlefield into a pock-marked pig sty filled with mud.

The Germans might have been withdrawing, but they were quite capable of fighting a rear-guard action with a deadly bite. Erik took two rounds from a German Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18/1 that shattered the bone in his upper left arm and he was sent by truck to a War Department field hospital in the rear just beyond German counter-battery fire.

Due to the development of gas gangrene, which was part and parcel of the mud and generally unsanitary conditions on the front, the army doctors decided to amputate Erik's arm, leaving only a two inch stump, which unfortunately would too short to be usefully fitted with a prosthetic arm.

Since the amputation was performed in non-ideal circumstances, Erik was sent by hospital train to Paris for follow-up care. It was there he met Clara Lokken, a Red Cross nurse. They made a connection because the name Lokken was stenciled on Erik's uniform and also engraved on Clara's name tag. It was an uncommon surname. They talked for a bit, and Erik learned that Clara was from a branch of Lokkens who stayed behind in Pennsylvania, and she knew very little about the End Dome Church. They talked for a bit more, and they both discovered they shared the same great-grandmother. They were second cousins. That and her all-American girl-next-door good looks interested Erik.

What interested Clara was Erik's attitude in the face of his life-changing injury. He didn't feel sorry for himself after losing an arm. There was pain, but he kept a wicked sense of humor. They couldn't talk for long, but Clara passed along to him the address of her parents in Pennsylvania, because he said he wanted to be pen pals after they both got back home.

A pen pal relationship slowly blossomed into love, and in 1922 Erik drove nearly all the way across the country in his 1916 Model T. He took the Yellowstone Auto Trail and it took a month to get to Erie, Pennsylvania, averaging ninety miles and five dollars a day, not counting the cost of two major automobile repairs. This came out of his twenty-five dollar per month Veteran's pension, which had been supplemented by a job as a painter in Wiley. He could do his job with one arm, although with some difficulty.

After arriving in Erie he sold his Tin Lizzie to defray the wedding expenses. Although Pennsylvania was the original “anti-cousin marriage” state, it only prohibited marriage between first cousins, not second cousins. Still, it took some doing by Erik and Clara to get her parents to sign off on it. In the end, they had the blessing of both parents, and soon the newlyweds were traveling west across the country by train to start their new life in Wiley.

When it came to Erik's parents, however, they were a much harder sell, and he became more or less the black sheep of the family because he had passed over a perfectly good (if plain) first cousin who shared the same grandparents, and had to fall in love with Clara who only shared the same great-grandparents with him, never mind that she was pretty. Love was fickle. This was permitted by End Dome doctrine, but it wasn't a brave choice, because any heathen could do as much.

Kimberly Lokken was born to Erik and Clara in 1925. She would be their only child. And she would become the most famous person in the world since Yeshua Bat-El.

Kim had known her two best friends Sofie and Dory for as long as she could remember, perhaps as far back as the summer 1928, when they shared their days at the same nursery while their mothers also found work. This was nearly the peak of the Roaring Twenties, when unemployment dipped below five percent. Then came the stock market crash in 1929.

By 1930 the Great Depression was just getting started. Their mothers were soon booted from their jobs, followed by Kim's father, as employers suddenly found many other men willing to paint who had two good arms. Still, Erik did not despair, but retained the good spirits that had caused Clara to fall in love with him at first sight in France. And it soon turned out that Erik's optimism was justified.

Peter Two Feathers had been chosen by Prophet Mark Lange to be the successor to the Apostle Malekwa upon his death. Peter in turn had automatically ascended to the chair of Mark Lange when he was lost at sea and he immediately appointed a new Apostle from among the elders of the White Wing of the End Dome Church. Thus the lifetime office of Prophet alternated smoothly between the White and Red wings of the Church, and there could never be a succession crisis.

Prophet Two Feathers had compassion upon Erik Lokken and gave him employment that involved a deep and sacred trust. With his single arm, he was to wield the Golden Gift to carve a network of tunnels under Wiley. For there were rich seams of coal under the townsite, but they were isolated by an overlay of hard volcanic rock that covered the area during the formation of the relatively young Enfilade mountain range and it had never been feasible to reach and exploit the older layers of sedimentary rock underneath. With the Golden Gift at full bloom, Erik Lokken could create passageways through this rock as easily as walking between rooms in a house, and others followed in his wake to remove the coal.

While the rest of the country wallowed in unemployment that reached twenty-five percent, the area around Wiley experienced a boom that hadn't been seen since the gold rush days, when the town swelled with the ranks of '69ers. Great heaps of black gold from the Wiley mines piled up on docks as far away as San Francisco. River City was platted out to the north to take the overflow of miners and their families, and in years to come it would far outstrip Wiley in population.

Financially, Erik Lokken did far better than he ever did as a one-armed painter in the 1920s. Soon enough he had a nice new brick red Ford Model 48, his first car since selling his Model T, and he also paid off his modest home. Erik set some money aside in a rainy day fund. There was even enough money to send Kim to the End Dome parochial school in Triplett rather than the free public school, so she could be with her friends, but especially because it was an excellent school that stressed getting students engaged in learning experiences outside of the classroom as well as within.

In 1937 Kim, Sofie and Dory were twelve, that wonderful last year of their "tweens" when their bodies were gathering power for the changes soon to come. They talked about boys in idealized, abstract terms that had little bearing on the clumsy, stinky, stupid little barbarians that happened to be actual boys. In slumber parties they would practice necking with each other, so long as it was understood that one of the neckers had to be a boy, at least in theory.

Sofie Krause "at great personal sacrifice" would play the role of beau nine times out of ten, especially when it was Dory Fuchs' turn.

Likewise, in class, the tight trinity of friends would send flowery little love letters to each other. The girl-love of tweens was love of a high order that knew no jealousy. Share and share alike. But they dreaded having one of their masterpieces of amorous soliloquy discovered by a classmate, or God forbid, the teacher. So they created their own secret language called Relbimian. And in that language, the word for "group of three" was boda.

This, then, was the state of the Boda in seventh grade:

Dory Fuchs: Blue eyes, long jet black hair tied in the obligatory pony tail but with the cutest bangs ever. She was the skinniest member of the Boda but the first one to begin to grow breasts. She liked to read books by English authors about dragons and elves and wizards and unicorns. Already, at age twelve, Dory had pinup model stems.

Academically, Dory deliberately aimed at getting straight B's to strike the middle ground between pleasing her parents and not appearing to be a bookish girl. In the Boda Dory took the middle ground, becoming "all things to all women" and she became the glue that held them all together. If the Boda could be said to have a leader it was Dory, yet the character of her role was persistently one of support. Instead of dragging them along she pushed from behind.

Sofie Krause: A tomboy who kept her ash-blond hair cropped short in a crew cut, with no pony tail in defiance of the Church. Not even her father had anything to say about that, for already Sofie had the physique of a wrestler. She was the only girl on the football team. One time a boy at school said her football uniform made her look fat and she flipped him to the ground and pasted him good. Knocked out his front tooth. No one said that to her again. She was, however, like all the girls at school, required to wear skirts rather than pants in the classroom, and this annoyed her to no end.

One Halloween morning Dory came to school dressed as a pirate's wench and she had ripped her dress into long strips so that when she walked her slender legs would poke out now and again. Susan sat there with her mouth wide open and felt a sexual frisson from her face to her toes. In that moment she knew what she was. Sofie had graduated from the tomboy phase to full bore tribade. After that, Sofie lost all interest in sports, and everyone could hardly believe it. But chasing Dory had become the ultimate sport to her. Sofie was a scrub, but Dory eagerly helped her do her homework, which kept Sofie hovering in "D" territory rather than a hard fail.

Kim Lokken: Auburn hair about halfway between mahogany and carrot-top. Light green eyes. She had a pretty face but she was a little chubby. Or perhaps just Rubenesque. In temperament she was the most classically feminine member of the Boda, for she took after her mother. She was compelled to wear her hair in a ponytail at all times, of course, like her mother and father and elders and all other good little Endomites, male or female.

Kim was an infidel. She didn't really believe any of that stuff about Chief Malekwa and the Golden Gift written in the Holy Buron, which was testimony to how tightly her father Erik was capable of keeping Peter Two Feather's secret. But Kim wasn't prepared to let her folks down. So she gritted her teeth, wore the damn ponytail, and when she ventured out of the Black River area she ignored the comments at the edge of her hearing like "Oh there goes another Pony. Look at her hair."

In eighth grade science class the teacher paired everyone off for lab partners. Kim ended up with Sofie, and Dory ended up with one Jerry Shy Bear, the youngest grandson of the original Shy Bear who played a role in the early days of the End Dome Church.

"No offense, Pally," Sofie muttered as she kicked Jerry out of his seat and send him shambling towards Kimberly. No one was going to separate Sofie and Dory.

Jerry was one of the few Original Inhabitants who attended the Temple school on End Dome Hill, and he was a skinny boy, and shorter than Kimberly even, but the other boys were afraid to pick on him because he had already demonstrated a hidden wiry strength in a series of earlier fights, and all of them learned why young men in the Red Wing were called “braves”. He became the fourth member of the Boda, sort of, which was an oxymoron, like having a fourth novel in the Galaxy's Fall Trilogy.

Jerry could tell right away that Sofie and Dory were a unit, so he gravitated towards Kim. At the skating rink they would even hold hands, since Sofie and Dory weren't afraid to do so. He was not her first or even second cousin, and therefore he could never be her husband someday, so it was fun to experiment, but they both knew it could never turn into anything serious. Then again, thirteen year old kids never take anything serious.

There was no body modesty in the Boda, and if Jerry wanted to be a part of it, they would have to break him in. The first time they went skinny dipping at Volcano Lake Jerry liked what he saw, and so did Kim. She began horsing around with him at every level short of a full jackpot. Naturally she had to keep Sofie and Dory appraised of every move.

"So what's it like to kiss a boy?" Dory asked.

"Just like kissing Sofie. Same pressure. He smells different up close though. Not bad, just different."

"Did you pitch woo?"

"We did indeed pitch woo. He feels like a rubber wet suit stretched out over a suit of armor. Soft on the surface but with a hard core underneath. I liked it."

"They look like beer bottles instead of Coke bottles," Sofie complained.

"There comes a time when you grow up and move from soda pop to beer," Kim replied, but only Dory seemed to agree.

The great common ground of the Boda was music. Their parents were sufficiently well-off to provide their instruments, except in the case of Kim, whose only instrument that early on was her own voice. She was a member of the End Dome Temple women's choir, and an amazing soloist with a rich, breathy, lyric mezzo-soprano voice that belied her youth and bordered on being too sultry and sensuous for spiritual music.

In band class Dory Fuchs played double-bass standing on a shortened end-pin so she was more comfortable. She especially liked to set down her French bow and pluck the strings pizzicato, playing meandering bass lines that made her imagine she was a cat slinking around at night. The bass remained mostly in the background but provided harmony and structure to a song, the same role Dory performed in the Boda.

Sofie Krause pounded the skins with all the power that made her a formidable offensive guard. She could practically read Dory's mind (and vice-versa) so they became one of the all-time great rhythm sections. Sofie was inspired to change her name to Hunky so people would refer to them as Hunky-Dory. This was more than just a nickname. By dropping her 'patriarchy slave name' of Sofie Krause and replying only to her freely chosen name of Hunky, she actually inaugurated the Name Ritual that became an important part of the Boda when it expanded and became the Women's Democratic Forum.

Jerry's “axe” was a saxophone, and in the beginning he wasn't very good at it, but that was the reason he was taking band class, after all. He gradually improved and by the close of 1938 the kids had the bare bones of an actual jazz ensemble on their hands. They called themselves Hunky-Dory and that never changed.

Their earliest performance as Hunky-Dory alone came during the end-of-semester band class recital, during the encore, when they performed “It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)”. It was a triumph, but their first paid performance would come in the Forties, and their first recording in the Fifties. Money was never the focus of Hunky-Dory at any rate. They did it mostly just for fun.

One time when Kim was fourteen she was picked up at school at mid-morning by an elder of the the End Dome and driven home, but he wouldn't say what was wrong. When she got home her mother was crying, and of course Kim started to cry in sympathy before Clara even said a word. After a while Clara looked at her daughter, immersed in grief and too horrified to face blurting it out to her, but finally she wailed, "Kim, your father is dead!"

Now Kim's tears welled from her own red hot pain and not merely from empathy with her mother's grief. She cried until there was nothing more to give, and when she was dry she was still wracked by dry sobs and whimpers that trailed off at length to silence.

After an hour of this she started to speak. "Why?" she asked, over and over again until her mother came clean. Peter Two Feathers had explained everything to her. For years now, he had lent the Golden Gift to Erik at night to honeycomb the land under Wiley and the surrounding area with tunnels to access the coal. This was the bread and butter of the whole town. But overnight there had been a cave-in that smashed his helmet lantern, plunging him into total darkness, and he couldn't dig his way out, even with the Golden Gift, because he got turned around somehow and was boring deeper into the mountain rather than back the way he came, and as he made a greater volume of space to walk in, the air he had was stretched too thin to breathe, not to mention the suction losses through the Golden Gift itself.

It wasn't until well past dawn that miners with picks and shovels broke through the cave-in and reached Erik's body. Peter assured Clara that he died without injury or pain. He simply fell asleep and never woke up again.

As for Peter, while he mourned the death of Erik he was more troubled that the men who retrieved Erik's body were members of the Church, and it was impossible to hide the fact that Erik had been in possession of the Golden Gift, which was the most sacred End Dome relic. This was already causing unquiet among the faithful. Lee Hansen, his chosen Apostle from the White Wing, was starting to make a bid to unseat Peter before his time.

Children weren't supposed to be confronted with death so early. Kim thought about her own death. She wondered what it was like for her father right now, and if there really was an afterlife. If there was not a second life, then her father didn't even know he was dead. He didn't know that he had ever lived and married Clara and fathered Kim. So what was the point of anything? The End Dome Church was supposed to have all the answers to all these questions, but what if they were wrong? Added to her personal grief, all these thoughts were intolerable to Kim.

She didn't go to school for a week. Sofie and Dory came over after a couple days to see if she was well. She was not well, but their visit lifted Kim from her grief a microscopic bit, and Clara saw that. When Sofie's mother came to pick her up, Clara asked her to stay until Dory's parents came as well, because she wanted to ask all of them something.

"The funeral for Kim's father will be this weekend," she said when they were all together. "I'd like to take Sofie and Dory to be with Kim when we go."

"I don't know," Sofie's mother demurred. "These are just fourteen year old girls, and a funeral is a pretty solemn thing."

"Besides," Dory's father added, "this should be a private family time for you and Kim."

"That's precisely the thing," my mother replied. "We have no family here in Wiley. My parents are back East and my husband was a sort of black sheep in his own family. We've never been close to them. Kim has taken the death of her father very hard, but when Sofie and Dory came over to see us today there was a visible improvement in Kim. I could see it come right out to light up her eyes again. That's when I realized, Sofie and Dory are Kim's family."

"Clara, I still don't think a funeral is something little girls should see," Sofie's mother insisted.

"And they won't see the actual Rites, not even Kim. Look, my husband is dead. I have to go lay him to rest, and I have to bring Kim. And I think she needs to be with her best friends right now."

In the end they consented to let the girls remain together for the weekend.

For Clara this was her first time to see the Golden Gift in action, the central mystery and devotion of the End Dome Church.

The children were not allowed to attend the actual ceremony upstairs in the Temple Sanctuary, and it would have been unseemly to run around and play while Kim's father was sent to his long home, along with five others from across the globe, so they sat around in the Temple basement getting quite bored as volunteers prepared the noon meal for a thousand parishoners.

Jerry Shy Bear joined them after breaking away from a group of boys smoking outside. The original Shy Bear had been his grandfather and he seemed to know a lot of secrets about the Temple. Jerry led the girls into a gigantic supply room which wasn't locked, and they went along because there was nothing else to do.

There was no electric light within, only a window with blinds, and it was gloomy outside, so it was even more gloomy inside. There was an old piano which was probably broken, a map of the Black River area, and heaps of the sort of things one would find in a church. Old hymnals, stacks of old bulletins, and dozens of folding chairs. The children could hear organ music and the vocal choir bleeding through the ceiling from the main Sanctuary upstairs.

There was End Dome scrapbook albums, End Dome cookbooks, End Dome paints and brushes, End Dome wood carvings, End Dome homespun, and broken End Dome furniture.

Sofie found a walking stick made from a gnarled old piece of wood and shifted it from hand to hand to get the feel of it.

One of the walls was unfinished, and Jerry moved aside a piece of plywood to reveal another dark space beyond. It was so black inside it drank the vision like a sponge. "I've never been in there," he said.

None of the girls wanted to go in there either, but Jerry dared them to go, so naturally Sofie was the first one through. Then Jerry followed her to show he wasn't afraid. Dory and Kim were both afraid of the dark hole, and they were not afraid to show it, but they didn't want to be left behind so they squeezed in after them.

It was too dark to see, but Jerry, a smoker at age fourteen, lit a series of matches, which only lasted a few seconds. This gave him time to find an ancient dusty candle, and he lit that. Now the kids had a little bit of light and they could see where they were.

There wasn't a tile floor. Just natural stone and dirt, and a stone "igloo" in the center of a circle of stones.

This was the cairn of the Artifact in its original state, resting on the very summit of End Dome. The structure was completely unmolested. Superstition overcame Prophet Lange and the Apostle Malekwa, it seems. They built the whole Temple right over the top of the cairn, as if to hide it.

There was even a little commemorative mouse. Dory and Kim screamed together when they saw it.

Without a word Sofie let her cane fly in an arc over her head, and she brought it down, hoping to scare the mouse away. She ended up hitting the mouse instead, with a lucky shot.

"This is a church right? So there's your church mouse."

"You crippled it," Dory observed, shifting instantly from fear to maternal concern. It was in obvious pain and tried to stagger away.

"I didn't mean to do it," Sofie replied.

They all took a closer look at the creature. The head of the mouse was misshapen. There was a huge bump on the back that was nearly as large as the mouse's head itself. Dory said, “Look what you did, Sofie! Look at that bump!”

“That isn't from anything I did,” Sofie insisted. She put the end of her cane directly over the head of the crippled creature and pressed down hard to finish it off. "And I don't want it to suffer. This is better."

"Now what do we do with it?" Kim asked, disgusted by the sight of the dead creature with what looked to be a flat furry coin where its head had been. The bump was still intact, but no one knew what it was.

Sofie scratched the bare ground with the cane and dug a little trench. When it was deep enough Sofie slid the mouse in with her foot, and then both she and Jerry kicked dirt over it and stamped it down to finish the job.

“Now if you ladies will join me,” Jerry said, “I want to find out what's in that pile of rocks.” He went to the cairn and began trying to pull one of the stones loose.

Jerry wasn't making much headway. Hunky offered what little help she could, and one of the stones slowly gave way like a hinged door. They moved it aside just enough that they could squeeze inside the stone igloo one at a time.

This was it, the Holy of Holies, the very tippy-top of End Dome hill where the Artifact lay in its original position. It was a black sphere that had opened up like a clam shell. Inside was a form-fitted receptacle where the Golden Gift lay before Chief Malekwa took possession of it.

The exterior surface of the Artifact was dotted with thousands of tiny holes. Some of these holes had spines sticking out of them, like the needles of a black cactus.

Kim put an index finger close to a part of the sphere that was needle-free, and that was something that she ought not have done. There was a sound like a short squirt of steam and her fingertip was instantly skewered. She pulled away involuntarily before the pain even registered. "Ahhh! Dammit!"

Now the black ball sported one more extruded spine from its surface.

Dory was a little smarter. She grabbed a pencil out of her purse and leaned over the black sphere with the eraser tip prudently standing in for her finger. She verified the object was still active and just as nasty.

Jerry thought about kicking it, but a glance at his thin moccasins led him to change his mind. So it was a mystery. Best leave it at that. They all shook their heads and slid back out of the stone cairn.

When Dory and Kim were already outside they heard another sound and both of them froze. One of the elders of the Church was standing in the storage room cocking his ears to listen. The kids held their breath and tried not to make a sound. The deacon looked into the dark gap and could just make two silhouettes out.

"Get out of there!" he yelled, exploding in anger. With red faces Jerry, Kim, Hunky and Dory scrambled out of the hole, then out of the supply room, and sat down in a corner of the basement lunchroom. The deacon locked the supply room tight, and after that it would always remained locked so as long as the Temple stood.

When Kim saw her mother again during the meal after the ceremony she was somehow different. Kim could see she wasn't mourning my father anymore. "It's all true, Kim," she said with her soft lisping voice. "Everything in the Holy Buron, it's all true."

Of course Clara had always believed what she was taught with the ears of faith, but now she had seen the Golden Gift work with her own eyes and she came away with an unshakable bedrock foundation of belief she would carry with her until her own end. And that was precisely the intended effect of the Last Rite.

A week after that, Kim herself came down with the same disease as that little church mouse. She got a matching little bump at the base of her neck.