The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (4 page)

“The final novel Mr. Brigham began was
The Gunslinger and the Giant,
which went unfinished due to his sudden and unfortunate passing this year. It was to recount the Battle of Ostlyn, the outcome of the war, and the conclusion of Normand’s vendetta against Tem Lucas. It saddens all of us to see this long-told tale go uncompleted.”

I felt my heart quicken. Frozen mice scurried through my veins. Bayard looked over his shoulder at me, the windows glinting on his eyeglasses.

“I would like to take this opportunity to inform everyone assembled about—ahh—a petition that was started on the online
Fiddle
forums soon after this terrible news reached the internet fan community,” said Judith.

I was very aware of this petition; it was the source of my current anxiety. She adjusted her glasses, bumping the microphone with the Batman-style swordbreakers running down her bronze gauntlet. A muffled thud reverberated throughout the room. “Excuse me. It started slowly, but soon reached over twenty thousand signatures.”

If I was drinking something, I probably would have spewed it all over the person sitting in front of me.

“This petition began half in jest, according to the man who put it together, Sawyer Winton,” the girl said, then paused, squinting into the congregation. “Sawyer, could you come on up, please?”

Someone stood up behind me; I turned to see a slim young man in a sweater and cargo pants. His black hair curled rakishly over one piercing gray eye, and he had the scratchy beginnings of a handsome Jack Sparrow goatee. His healthy, clean-cut look gave me a sense of maturity that would give him conviction and purpose.

My father’s agent saw it too, and I expect he also saw the weird feathery quill that Sawyer was carrying, some sort of ridiculous ostrich-feather pen. He was also carrying a little camcorder, a GoPro. He was actually filming the funeral.

“You know what they’re gonna want,” Bayard had said on the phone. “What do you think about it?”

“I think I’m in big trouble,” I had replied, which was the absolute truth.

Winton stood beside the girl. To my alarm, his voice was confident. “Thank you, Judy.”

Judith continued. It struck me that she looked rather old to be wearing such an elaborate costume; she had to have been in her thirties or early forties. “But once it caught on, it burned like wildfire. What this petition requested was that continuing authorship of the
Fire and Fiddle
series be passed onto another writer, one particularly familiar with Mr. Brigham, as well as his style and subject matter. That writer would of course be Mr. Sidney Ross Brigham, his only son, a notable author and artist in his own right.”

I experienced something not unlike being sprayed in the face with gasoline mid-cigarette. As soon as her scripted speech finished, everyone turned to admire my now-crimson face. I managed to smile, although I suppose it might have more resembled the snarl of a cornered timber wolf.

“Mr. Brigham?” Judith indicated, and as I rose from my seat, I felt like a helium balloon slipping a toddler’s grip. I approached the podium through a chaos of applause, feeling a bit lightheaded, shaking their hands when I got there.

Sawyer leaned toward the podium, tugging the mike closer to his face. “We feel that your father would have wanted you to finish his magnum opus, and we as fans of his work hereby request authorship to be passed down to his son, so that the series can end on a proper note. Or, perhaps, even continue if need be.”

If need be?
I was beginning to feel like a virgin sacrifice on his royal bamboo sedan being carried up the mountain to be offered to the tribal volcano god. Sawyer Winton held up the ostrich feather like a trophy goose and thrust it in my direction. I resisted the crazy urge to stick it in his throat like Nicholson’s Joker and accepted it, taking Judith’s place behind the mike.

As she turned to leave, her broadsword scabbard bumped one of the full-length candlesticks standing next to the casket and set it metronoming. I slid into place and grabbed the candle, settling it before it could fall over into the fake spray of flowers around Ed’s casket and start an open-casket cremation. I could just see the headlines in tomorrow’s paper.

“Hello, everybody,” I said, way too close to the microphone. My muffled voice erupted from the speakers flanking the dais. “First, I would like to thank you all for coming. From what I understand, my father loved all of his fans from the bottom of his heart and put every drop of blood, sweat, and tears he had into telling his stories for you guys.

“Second, I’m going to admit that I’m no good at public speaking whatsoever, and I have a very limited imagination, so in lieu of a visual aid to help me with my stage fright, I’m going to have to ask all of you to remove your clothing.”

No one laughed. My face felt like I’d been bobbing for ice cubes.

“I’ve actually been following the progress of the petition since not long after its inception,” I said, “—and I am deeply moved by your dedication to my father’s life’s work.”

I turned and glanced into the coffin behind me. My father lay face-up in the box, against his lifelong wishes, his hands pressed around the handle of a quicksilver broadsword, his eyes closed (thank the stars), dressed in an incongruous white robe. I realized with disconnected bemusement—and a vague horror—that he looked like Gandalf Lebowski, ready for entombment in the catacombs of a bowling alley.

I faced the crowd again, biting my lips to keep from laughing at my own imagination.

Ahh, the Inappropriate Laugh.

Most of them were looking at me with sympathy except for my mother, who I was glad had the restraint to keep from hurling her purse and sensible shoes across the room at my face. I took a second to gaze at the floor and compose myself again. “However, I regret that I must inform you: I was not remotely as familiar with his fantasy series as you, his eternal fans.

“Some of you may be aware that I was very young when my parents separated, and although he was awarded visitation custody, I did not see my father very much at all. Indeed, after a couple of years, my mother Caroline had to move up north for business, and I only saw my father Ed on holidays,” I said, staring down at the novel on the podium.

“Which I don’t suppose inconvenienced him very much, because after the move, the few times I ever spoke to him was when I sought him out myself. I’m not sure that he was aware of my birthday at all, nor did he acknowledge me on Christmas. Or Easter. Or Thanksgiving. Or Yom Kippur. Or even Kwanzaa. He didn’t even come to my Army graduation or come see me when I got home from deployment.”

The resentment made me brave. My voice seemed to carry farther than it had before, rolling out of me on wheels greased by bitter memories. “In fact, I’m not one-hundred-percent sure that my existence registered in Edward Brigham’s mind at all after 1986,” I said with a shallow sigh, opening the book. On the title page, my father had written
To Judy Raske — To The Bounds of Behest and Beyond!

“So, I must admit that I may not be the most suitable replacement. I am deeply, deeply sorry that I must tell you that I have to decline the inheritance of E. R. Brigham’s series
The Fiddle and The Fire.”

The entire gathering seemed to freeze in time, and each of the one hundred or more people I could see from the podium bore the expression of the proverbial “deer in the headlights”. I flinched at the sight of the near-instant transformation of the hundred-odd people before me from bereaved mourners to astounded lynch mob.

It’s also when I noticed the cameraman and his news correspondent standing next to him, standing in the back of the chapel, nestled in amongst the other attendees, ready and waiting to make sure the revolution would be televised.

The longer I studied their shock waiting for pitchforks and torches, the darker their faces got, until they were all murmuring to each other and glaring at me as if I’d changed the formula for Coca-Cola. This entire vignette, by the way, seemed to stretch on for three hours, but it in fact persisted a mere twenty-five seconds.

“Really?” asked Judith, her eyes wide and bright in the window-filtered afternoon sun.

“That—kinda sucks,” said Sawyer, and I watched the joy drain out of his face. The mild satisfaction I was feeling at cracking his boy-band confidence faltered, and the result of my insolence pierced me to my core.

“Look,” I said, sighing, “I apologize for the reaction, everybody. I really do. My father and I just really weren’t on the best of terms to put it mildly, and I don’t know a whole lot about his series. I read some of the first book when I was in the Army, but with work and everything over there, I never really got into it. And after that, well—I pretty much missed the boat, I think.”

Bayard got up and joined us on the dais. “We knew this was coming,” he whispered to me, cupping the microphone with one bear-paw hand, leaning into my face, filling my nostrils with his coffee breath.

I could see my own honey-colored cornered-wolf expression in the reflection of his 70’s bicolor glasses. It struck me that he looked like Hunter S. Thompson if Thompson was thirty pounds heavier and given to picking out ties to wear to Olive Garden.

“And you have no idea just how much this is going to blow up if you agree to step into your father’s shoes,” he was saying. “This could be the next big thing with this Comic-Con crowd. To that end, I’ve been working on a little something in my spare time. A little deal. Something to sweeten the pot.”

“What would that be?” I asked. “Max, you know I’m an artist first. I haven’t written anything worth a crap in ages other than that ghostwriter project, for the climber guy that got stuck in the Colorado mountains a couple years ago. I got a couple graphic novels and advertising jobs on the table.”

“HBO wanted to talk about doing a
Fiddle
TV series before your father passed. Nerf wants to license foam swords and dart revolvers. I’m even getting word of a video game. Of course, you would only see a fraction of it—but this all would make your residuals from
Bear With Me
look like hobo change.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Sawyer, and his eyes were like scalpel blades. “I’ve read some of your stuff, man. You’re not as bad as you think you are.”

I studied Bayard’s rubbery face and considered his intel, then stared down at the ostrich feather until the world around me faded to gray.

Once I’d had enough of pretending to think about it, I looked over to Sawyer and Judy, staring straight into Sawyer’s camcorder, and said loud enough for the microphone to catch, “You know, they say you can do anything if you put your mind to it. Let me sleep on it, okay? Let me catch up on the series, and I’ll see where we can go from there.”

They both grinned. A few people in the funeral party applauded softly. I scanned the people before me and saw quite a few more beaming faces than just a few minutes prior. Even the teenagers that looked like they woke up in a cave and came straight to the funeral were glowing.

Sawyer leaned into the mike and said, “We won the battle, guys. Here’s hoping we win the war!”

I smiled back at them. Their enthusiasm was infectious—I felt a little excited to be part of this. And then the enormity of the task before me came rushing back in a blast wave of fear.

Ravens and Writing Desks

A
FTER THE VIEWING, I STOOD
alone at the side of my father’s coffin, looking down at his aged body with a growing sense of sadness that threatened to eat at my edges. Conflicting emotions warred with each other.

Regret, at never bothering to get to know him better, at never closing that gap he created himself. Anger, at myself, for just writing him off as a reclusive hack. Anger at him for disappearing from my life until now. Satisfaction at having an opportunity for achieving something wonderful thrust onto me.

A cool, hollow void where a great weeping sorrow should have been at losing my father.

“I don’t think for a moment that talent is genetic,” I told the man in the coffin. “I’m no writer! At least not the kind of writer that twenty thousand people sign a petition over. I am definitely not my father’s son. What the hell am I going to do?”

My father said nothing, of course. The broadsword he clutched in his spotted hands gleamed bright, blinding bright, in the dusty light of the octagon window in the back wall where the slopes of the roof met. I turned around to what I thought was an empty viewing room and Bayard was standing there with his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket.