Fiction: Afflatus

The scarecrow looked behind him. As far as he could see there was the desert. Somewhere out there was the train that had taken him as far as the rails of the Bad Road would go. After he had disembarked, he had rented a horse and gone many days further, until he had reached the small shack that now sat before him in the distance.


Now the old beast was refusing to clear the last bit of distance. It was unnerved by something, no doubt; he'd been warned about the possibility. With a sigh, the scarecrow slipped off. He slapped it on the side and the horse was off as soon as he said "Go away back home now."

The scarecrow stood for a moment, contemplating his present loneliness and the sight of the shack. Then he collected himself and went forward, past a humble little garden of squash, maize, and climbing beans. Inside there was a man with hair the color of snow. He sat in a dirty, hand-made rocking chair before an oaken chest that was tall enough to double as a davenport and looked as if it did so. A straw hat covered the man's sole remaining eye, so that all that showed was the piece of blue glass that sat in the other, empty socket. It flashed in the light of the setting sun, which shone through the open door from behind the scarecrow.

He could have been eighty or eight hundred, for all he looked.

After the scarecrow closed the door they were cast into darkness, but the old man's glass seemed to gleam all the same. It was the old man that broke the silence first. "You come on account of a famine," he said. "Food don't concern you, nor drink, though you take of both at times. No, but yours is a drought of the inspiration of God."

Despite the darkness, the scarecrow nodded. "Aye."

Light returned to the shack; the old man had lit a fire. The glass in his socket seemed to sparkle in the firelight. "Then why trouble an old man?"

The scarecrow smiled. If the old man had truly been unwilling to help, he would not have entertained the conversation thus far, as short as it had been. "They call you a mountain man, who is able to talk to God and make intercession. I ask that you do so now, and open wide the windows of Heaven for me." His expression fell. "Without my words I am nothing. Any scarecrow may labor crudely with his hands or watch the fields, but few can fashion the music that makes men live or even craft with their hands well enough to make men lift up their heads because of it."

"What are you willing to give?" asked the old man.

Around the scarecrow's neck was a small, golden medallion, emblazoned with ten horns. This, the scarecrow pulled off his neck and handed to the old man. He held it close to his eye and examined it carefully in the firelight. After what seemed to be a long while he spoke, saying, "It is not I that must receive this, nor I that may accept it. The offering is to God, and acceptance is from the same." He sighed. "Go out beneath the light of the moon, and see there whether your offering is well-received."

This the scarecrow did, and he sat for many hours until, with the rising of the sun, the old man walked out and sat beside him. Two seagulls had taken roost on him, one on either shoulder, and they spoke in a susurrus too low for the scarecrow to make out. "What is it that you hear?" asked the old man.

"Nothing," replied the pensive scarecrow.

"Then keep yourself in silence, and make an offering in that manner, for who can feel a whisper amid the sounding of brass?" The old man then left the scarecrow and, judging by the sound of his footsteps, headed to his garden. He sang something, but the language was unfamiliar to the scarecrow.

The scarecrow waited and listened in patience, and the sun climbed its course in the sky. The grass died beside him, burning in the heat of the day, and still the scarecrow sat, and thought on the mysteries of God. In time, the old man returned from his garden and sat beside the scarecrow again.

"What is it that you hear?" he asked.

The scarecrow almost spoke, but caught himself. He waited, and the old man waited with him.

The wind blew softly, and when it came the scarecrow could not hear the old man's low, wheezing breath, nor the voices of his seagulls. Finally he answered, saying again, "Nothing."

The wind died, and all was quiet again. "Or God's breath," the old man said.

Silence returned, and the scarecrow remained.

"And if you met Him who you seek," asked the old man, "what would you do, not being able to talk, nor able to stand there in silence?"

The scarecrow turned his eyes to the old man. The old man waited in patience. And then the words came at last. "Bow."

The old man smiled. "If, then, you do this in the flesh, meeting in the flesh, do so in the spirit, meeting in the spirit."

And are not all things before Him now, through His spirit? The words flashed across the scarecrow's mind, and he was released from himself, by himself, and in that moment of enlightenment he was corrected with the image in his mind of lightning that struck the grass.

And the fire spread, and lived in his mind, and there was rain again in his soul, and from that time the scarecrow was likened unto a voice speaking from out of the mouth of God, that muttered with the power of seven thunders and sounded a song to shake the pillars of the world. And when he perished in the passing of the ages he went not from one absence to another, nor from an absence to a presence, but from one presence to another, for he had long been bowed before his God, and his afflatus had been the sign of it.

Follow-up: Shakespeare's Beam