Excerpt from my novel FATE

A Second Chance for Moses

 

As the boy grew, his grandfather instilled in Moses a love of books and storytelling, mixed with just enough religious teaching to get by ... enough for the boy to decide for himself what to do with it. His fate had brought him into the world through two religious fanatics, his parents, only to be raised and taught by an idealist grandfather who saw himself to be a writer trapped in a teaching job that merely helped put food on the table. For some years, the old man taught the basics of all subjects in missionary schools across South America, a calling he once shared with his self-denying wife, a woman who mistook sacrifice for virtue and lived as though joy were a trespass. Her devotion was more to suffering itself than to God Himself, and she carried that burden as if it were her proof of grace. However, she eloped with a younger man from the mission, leaving her husband to care for their sixteen-year-old daughter. In the karma of fate, their elopement took a cruel turn when the schooner they were aboard was torn apart by typhoons off the Peruvian coast, and both were lost to the sea.

       Moses’s grandfather returned from South America with his daughter to educate the less fortunate children of his native village by founding a small free school of his own. He wanted to give them a chance to broaden their minds through books, though he knew most would still find their futures on whaling boats. Ever the idealist, he consoled himself with the belief that a little learning might ripple outward, that it might leave some faint trace of good behind. He tried.  

The missionary teacher poured his heart ... and often questioned his own soul in caring for his daughter, trying to fill the void left by her mother’s absence and death. But the weight of his loss turned him away from God. His daughter, innocent and unaware of the true pain in her father’s heart, grew close to his brother ... close enough for them both to see that marriage might be the easiest way to still the village tongues that wagged like a dog’s tail. Yet she remained innocent, not realizing the danger of binding herself to a man whose faith bordered on fanaticism. The intensity of the brother’s belief ... expressed always with a kind of convincing affection, as though in loving God he might make Him greater than himself, was dismissed by his brother-teacher as a mere passion for a God whom he was running from. In shielding his now eighteen-year-old daughter from the cruelties of the world, the teacher was blind to his own brother’s intentions ... the man who would become Moses’s father for just two days. Oblivious to the changes drawing near, all three were caught in a tightening web of emotion and faith. Redemption was coming for the teacher, though he could not see it ... nor imagine that in the aftermath of betrayal and tragedy, he would be given a second chance to play the role of a father. The only one Moses would ever come to know.

Moses and his grandfather were as compatible as two people could be, bound by the shared pain of loss. Their relationship, a severe ordeal of fate, was forged in the crucible of life itself. Moses bore the loss of his fanatical parents in a suicide pact. His grandfather, the loss of his wife to another man and then to the sea, and the sorrow of his daughter’s death, driven by his brother’s madness and her own dwindling insecurity. Then death caught up with the old man. Neither saw it coming. He died quietly in his sleep ... and it would be kind to think, perhaps, on a sun-shiny morning. When Moses found him, he was holding a new blue-covered notebook and the last letter his daughter had written the night she left with his brother, her husband. In it, she had asked her father to care for her unnamed son as though he were his own, and to forgive her ... the other woman in his life who had brought him pain.

      It was time for a total change in his life when Moses’s grandfather, the good-hearted teacher and his 'only father', as he would later tell Kathleen ... died. Moses was twenty years old then and knew he wanted nothing more from life than to write. That need had been nurtured by his grandfather, who had seen in the boy a love of storytelling and a gift with the written word. Moses moved on, in body and mind, but the memories of his grandfather would remain with him until his own last breath. Burying the old man and erecting a worthy headstone in the village cemetery, after selling off their cottage, became his first act of total independence. He was answerable to no one now in seeking a calmer way of life ... calmer, meaning a place where he was not known. He hoped his writing might evolve into the quiet escape it offered him, allowing him to be more himself. He was now free from family ties that might have restrained him, allowing him to embrace the uncertainties of a life fueled by imagination and the act of writing, even if it was solely for his own sake. In that balance between longing and creation, something in him began to unravel, to open, until his very soul took hold of the act of writing. And so he wrote, in the blue-covered notebook his grandfather had been holding when he died.

       For Moses, the act of writing became more than a habit. It was a kind of meditation, a quiet turning of thought into words ... his words, though sometimes it felt as if they were writing him instead. It was how he made sense of what had happened, of what still lingered within him. The blue-covered book became his place of return, a recovery ... not a diary, nor entirely admission... just a space where the heart could loosen itself from silence without fear of judgment, except the one that comes from within ... which is often the cruelest of all. 

       Writing was how he found himself and how he lost himself. Each story he wrote, each character he formed, was a mirror ... not perfect, but close enough to catch the shape of something right, something that felt real. They carried his fears, his doubts, the dull ache of loss that never left him. Out of those shadows, he built his small worlds, believing, perhaps, that by giving voice to them, he might pacify the noise within. But they never left him. Sometimes he thought there were two kinds of writers ... those who write stories to live in, and those who write stories for others to live in. He wasn’t sure which one he was anymore. Maybe both. Maybe neither. The blue-covered notebook, the silence after each sentence, and the feeling that somewhere in it all, he still existed. Maybe the writing itself was enough.