Free How They Were Found by Matt Bell Page A

comforting his anxiety and giving him strength with her words. She has not gone down the hill since the day she gave birth, and Spear knows that this is the reason his family had to leave, that his congregation had to abandon him. Even the Electricizers leaving him, he recognizes it not as an abandonment but as making room for what is to come next.
    Like Mary and Joseph's flight with the newborn Jesus into Egypt, he and Maud will flee with the New Motor across America, taking it by railroad to town after town after town.
    Like Mary, Maud will not love him, only the Motor she has birthed.
    Like Joseph, he will have to learn to live with this new arrangement, this adjusted set of expectations.
    Spear tears up all the letters he has written so far, then starts new ones, ones infused not with the bitterness he feels but with the hope and inspiration he wishes he felt instead. Soon, the Motor will begin to speak to him, and he must be ready to listen.
     
    It takes a month for the letters to come back, but Spear receives the responses he requires. He runs into the cabin, where Maud awaits him. He says, They're coming to help us, with money and with men. They'll be waiting for us in Randolph, ready to assist me in reassembling the Motor.
    He hesitates, then says, I'll start tonight. I'll disassemble the Motor, and get it ready for travel, and then I'll send word to Randolph for a wagon to transport it. The worst is nearly over, and soon our new day will begin.
    Maud rises from the dining table and takes Spear in her arms, cradling his head against her shoulder. She does not tell him what the angels have told her about what must happen instead, about what has always happened to those who have served God with hearts like his, too full of human weakness, of pride and folly and blinding hubris. She does not tell him about Moses at the border of the promised land, about Jonah in the belly of the whale. She could, but she chooses otherwise, chooses to repay his one-time lack of faith with her own.
     
    Despite his intentions to start immediately, Spear finds that he cannot. Once he has locked himself in the shed with the New Motor, he is too in awe of its ornate existence, of the shining results of all the months of effort and prophecy that went into its construction. He watches the pulsation of the magnets and tries to understand what they might mean, what message might be hidden in their infant energies. He doesn't know, but he believes it will be made clear soon, even without the Electricizers' help.
    Spear sits down on the floor of the shed and crosses his legs beneath him, preparing for the first time in many months to go into a trance, to purposefully pierce the shroud between this world and the next. The trance comes easily to him, in all of its usual ways: a prickling of the skin, a slowing of the breath, a blurring of the vision. He stays that way for many hours, listening, and so he does not hear the knock at the door, or the raised voices that follow. By the time something does snap him out of his trance—the first axe blow that bursts open the shed door, perhaps—it is far too late to save himself.
     
    The men of the village surround him, swear they have come only to help him, to set him free of this thing he's made. Men who were once Spear's friends promise they won't hurt him, if only he'll lie still, but he can't, won't, not in the face of what they've come to do. Held between the arms of the two Russians, he watches disbelieving as one of High Rock's deacons steps to the New Motor, emboldened by the encouragement of the others. The deacon reaches up toward the grand revolver and takes hold of one of the magnetic spheres suspended from its crossbeams, and then he rips it away from the Motor.
    Spear waits for intercession, for Electricizer or angel to step in and stop the destruction, but none appears. He struggles against his attackers, tries to warn them against what they plan to do, against the wrath of God they call