Glimmering

He’d been Trip Marlowe then, a golden star in heaven’s crown, for sure the star of the Fisher of Men Children’s Choir. Summer and winter they traveled inland, to Bangor and Caribou and Presque Isle, and up coastal Route One to Calais, which was practically Canada. Twenty-four children and their chaperones crammed into the church’s old blue school bus, where the stench of ethanol vied with that of squashed peanut-butter sandwiches and the Dignam twins, who always had to go to the bathroom. John Drinkwater sat in front behind Mrs. Spruce, who drove, and even after they sang themselves hoarse at church suppers and Christian Coalition fundraisers, country fairs and weddings, funerals and baptisms; even at twelve midnight, when the littlest children were so tired they lay across their mothers’ laps and wailed, John Drinkwater made them sing some more.

Jesus is my friend and always will be
Jesus walks beside me every day…

Exhausted as they were, the children sounded beautiful. Outside might be nothing but ravaged forests left by bankrupt paper companies, or the potato-field wasteland of Aroostook County; but inside the bus it was heaven. Even the poor bleary-eyed mothers would take a break from rummaging in paper sacks full of moldering apples and bottles of Coke, to lean back in their seats and smile and clap in time.

Don’t expect me to cry
For I will never die!
Jesus is the sun who shines for me…

When the hymn was done they kissed the children, smoothing the boys’ buzz-cut hair and adjusting the girls’ dirty pink headbands, and told everyone how wonderful they sounded.

“Like angels, now then, hush, let’s try and get some sleep.”

That was what the mothers said as the bus jounced over the bridge to Verona Island, or as it sat with the engine turned off in Bath, waiting for the foot traffic at the ironworks to clear.

But later, when the children finally passed out in their mothers’ laps, those chaperones who were still awake would turn to each other and nod toward the back of the bus where Trip always sat.

“Isn’t he cunnin’, that one? When he sings! If only his mother could’ve heard him. He could be a star, you know. He really could be a star.”

It was Trip they spoke of, of course. He heard them and tried not to be proud, and it wasn’t so hard, because he didn’t feel proud, not really. It wasn’t like the way he felt at school, when someone told him he’d done a good job with an assignment he’d spent too many hours trying to understand. Because he worked at that, he worked at school, even though he knew it was useless. He was smart, he knew that, he wasn’t like the Dignams. But reading was difficult for him, and there never seemed to be a point to it.

So he just kept on singing. When he outgrew the children’s choir he joined the church’s praise and worship band, part of the youth group for teenagers. He was seventeen when John Drinkwater told him he might be able to go to college on a music scholarship. That was before John Drinkwater realized that there wasn’t anywhere Trip Marlowe couldn’t go. Not with a face like that; not with a voice like that.

Because if you were to take a cruse made of ice and drop it, the sound it would make, the sound of cold and crystal shattering—that would be the sound of the children’s choir. That would be their voices.

But the glitter in the air, the arcs of light and color and the stunned silence thereafter—that would be Trip Marlowe.

He had thought he would never fall. And, falling, he had never for an instant believed that he might crash. That the scattered pieces would be him. That there’d be no one there to catch him, no one there to help him gather what was left. Which was just Trip Marlowe, another little broken idol.

Once, there would have been someone there to hear him. John Drinkwater, at least, or Jerry Disney, or, for a few days, the blond girl. Now there was no one. When an angel falls, John Drinkwater said, it falls alone. Nobody but Satan hears it hit the ground.