Chapter 2
For those untouched by savagery, those who have been blessed never to have lost a loved one to torture, starvation, and murder there is an official fiction out there, offering solace. Surely, murderers are always brought to justice, aren’t they? Surely, that’s what protects us from mayhem, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, crime pays. Intimidation works. In many American cities, the rate of unsolved homicides approaches 50 percent. The television news, with reporters stationed outside of courthouses, anxiously awaiting a verdict, promise closure. The crime dramas that manage to pack the murder, the investigation, the trial, and the sentence into one 43 minute span create the illusion of universal, and swift, justice. Everyone gets caught, don’t they?
“No,” Felix Perringdale would say, quietly, a century ago on a 1907 summer evening to the the council of the faith’s most ardent followers, the twenty four elder disciples known as the Council of High Trust. “If a society keeps its secrets, if a believer comes to understand that no sin is so black as the betrayal of a trust, then there is no limit to how perfect our justice might become.”
By justice, Felix meant, of course, the idiosyncratic verdicts of his own councils, the ones that were spreading out now quietly across the land. If a mocker was found to be walking alone on a moonless night, and several ardent Perringdales had been so ordered, was it really that difficult to make the offender disappear? The most effective detectives in the country were no match for an oath of blood loyalty and a working furnace–and every Perringdale council began, as a requirement, with a working, large, remote furnace — and a vow of silence.
But these unsavory scenes, and others like them, came many years later, after Felix was kicked up out of his slumber by his father’s boot — in the barn, nearing midnight, on what later become known to Perringdales as “the Day of the Swine.”
Felix gathered up his journal and pen, and was confused to see something different in his father’s face. He couldn’t put a name to it at first, and wouldn’t for a few years. Elijah Perringdale still had that bearing of distracted anger, the same glower of a man between bottles, but Felix himself felt something different. He couldn’t name it yet, but what he was experiencing was something like liberation. Before he had limped into the kitchen, bleeding, earlier that day, a corner of his soul wanted to see something larger, and heroic in his father, something brave and generous underneath the booze, but that all died, completely, when he heard his father complaining about the wasted bullet. Felix was taking in the image of the angry old man as though he were a stranger.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Let us have a look.”
Felix felt the man’s great paw rip away his journal. He knew resistance was pointless. Elijah squared off, pondering the words of the journal, as though he were about to read them underneath a stage light.
“‘It is all wrong,'” Elijah read aloud. “‘You must know this first, above all else: it is all error; it is all cruelty; it is all deceit.”
Elijah looked down at his son. “Declarative,” he observed. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a short sentence man.”
“May I have it back, sir?” Felix asked.
“In time,” his father responded. “If the work has merit.”
Elijah fumbled around in a tool box, lifted out a small tin of nails, and retrieved a half-bottle of rum hidden beneath the tin. He held open the boy’s journal in one hand and stumbled out of the barn. On the way to the house, Felix could hear his own words being bellowed into the Iowa night.
“‘We lay down in lies, and we wake up in lies! We are fed truth and we belch cruelty! We pray for love and we are paid in ridicule!”
Felix could hear the door of the house slam, a second or two of silence, and then the door slamming back open.
“Credible!” the old man yelled. “Entirely credible!” The door slammed shut again.
A few more minutes went by and this time the door slammed open with great purpose, followed by hurried footsteps that made Felix brace for what was coming. Elijah Perringdale grabbed his spindly son by the collar and dragged him out of the barn and over to the pig pen, where, in the moonlight, Felix could see all of the sows asleep, and the great eye of the boar opening at the spectacle of Elijah pressing his son up against the planks and yelling at him.
“That hog over there, Mr. Felix. He is many things. He is foul. Remorseless. He’s a creature of indeterminate lusts and appetites. He will mount any sow within fifty miles and eat damn near anything he sees.”
Elijah looked down at his son. “But I would have to pour boiled sugar cane over your journal to attract his attention, Felix. What did you write, young man? What was it you said?”
Elijah looked up at the sky, in order to remember the offending lines. ‘Where a father should be you find a graceless, cupboard-rattling cheat. Is that what you wrote?”
Felix gulped.
“‘Cupboard-rattling?” Elijah asked.
Felix tried to free himself and his father pressed down harder, slipping with the effort. Felix tried to brace himself and came down hard on his left hand, breaking a finger. He shrieked with pain.
The old man looked down at him as though he might spit. He pulled the journal from his trouser pocket and threw it in with the pigs. Felix stood up, gauged the distance between the boar and the book. He
But the hog knows what he is, doesn’t he?”
