Robbing the Temple, part 2

Once home, they separated to their houses, still wordless. But there, their experiences began to diverge. Dean sat with his family around the dining table, uncharacteristically silent. The memory of himself screaming and crying and begging not to be looked at hung in his mind as if someone had pounded it in with nails.

His parents were having some kind of normal conversation about their jobs, and they had asked him several times about his day, but Dean never managed to reply with more than a monosyllable. After supper he went up to his room to lay on his bed and stare, wild eyed, at the ceiling.

How could he have acted like that? He’d nearly wet his pants. And yet, the fear hadn’t left him. The god wasn’t done with them; how were they supposed to learn how to craft marble? What would the god do to them if they failed? The knowledge that something as terrifying and powerful as that god existed had him trapped. And like any trapped animal, he looked frantically for a way out. He made useless vows to himself that he would forget the whole thing and move on. But he could not change what had happened, or understand it. He lay awake all night, tormented.

Neil, meanwhile, heard shouting and name-calling coming from inside the house before he even put his hand on his front door. His mom and her boyfriend were arguing again; not an unusual state of events. He slunk into the house, unnoticed, and tip-toed up the stairs to his bedroom—which doubled as the storage closet for all the junk his mom didn’t want to throw out.

He was hungry, but they were fighting in the kitchen, so he fished a granola bar out from under his bed. He perched on the ratty office chair beside the boxes of old albums, listened to the screaming below and found himself oddly—at peace. He was still trembling, but the experience on the mountain had left him with a swelling feeling that he was so unfamiliar with he couldn’t even name it. His life was so mean and miserable, but if there were gods, it meant there was something more, something beyond the numbing, daily misery that made up his life. The feeling he couldn’t name was hope.  

Neil woke at five AM the next morning with a thrill of excitement, like he imagined it would feel on the first day of a vacation at the beach. He hopped out of bed, pulled on his clothes and hurried downstairs. He grabbed a poptart, sidled past his mother, who was passed out on the couch, and ran out the door.

He met Dean at the edge of the woods. Dean was hollow-eyed, pale faced. His blond curls, usually so styled, were lolling on his head in a mashed mess. He wore a crumpled t-shirt and sweatpants. Neil considered wishing him a good morning and then second guessed it. It didn’t look like Dean was having a good morning.

“Why are we here?” Dean croaked, rubbing his eyes as they headed into the woods. “What’s going on?”

“We’re going to work for the god,” Neil explained, “He’s called us. Didn’t you hear?”

“He-he can’t do that.” Dean said weakly, feeling his legs speed up as he walked up the trail. “He can’t just…I need to get the proper amount of sleep for my health…”

In a remarkably short amount of time they pushed through the undergrowth and walked out into the temple clearing. “We can’t do this, this is insane!” Dean wailed, looking at the monolithic rock rubble in front of them.

“Well, this is what he told us to do, so we must be able to do it, right?” Neil said. “I’m going to try.” He picked up a rock and hesitated, looking at it.

 Some of Dean’s earlier condescension returned. “What are you going to do, glue it to another rock?”

Neil shrugged and started forward, eventually clambering over enough rocks to reach one of the large cracked slabs. Slowly, he pressed the one he was carrying into the crack—and the crack sealed up. He whipped around with a grin on his face to Dean, who was now freaking out in a way that would have been intensely familiar to anybody who watches Japanese anime.

“That’s impossible! This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!”

“We can do this!” Neil said with a grin. “I knew he wouldn’t give us something we couldn’t do.”

If Dean’s grasp on ancient Greek myths had been better, he might have objected to this with Prometheus as a case study, but as most of the adults in his life believed that doing well in athletics was really the important thing, he had no rebuttal.

Finally, he picked up a rock, carried it to a broken slab, and pressed it into the crack. Like dry clay, it crumbled in his hands. Dean had another meltdown and then he tried again. This one went in, though not as easily as Neil’s. Neil had by now nearly repaired an entire slab.

“That piece goes on the roof,” Dean said snottily, trying to reinflate his own image of himself. “You’ll never be able to put it back where it goes.”

Neil wisely did not reply, and Dean, having got over his freak out, bent to his task. Together, they repaired around three slabs of marble twice their size and many times their weight, occasionally discussing together the best placement of something, or how to angle the stones to give the most seamless repair. Even Dean began to be interested in what they were doing.

For the first time in their acquaintanceship, they were on equal footing with each other, both interested enough to simply want to do good work because it seemed worthwhile. Sunbeams shot through the foliage and the air grew steadily warmer. Just about the time that Neil felt his knees wobbling with hunger, Dean said, “Woah, that is a freaky tree. Has it been here the whole time?”

Sprouting out of the ground a little way off was a slender, silver barked tree barley taller than the boys. Its leaves fluttered, revealing, round, peach-colored fruits. Both boys’ stomachs growled in unison. Neil clambered down off the rubble and pulled a fruit off the tree.

“You can’t just eat random stuff you find on trees,” Dean scoffed, but when Neil sunk his teeth into the fruit, let out a happy sigh and sank to the ground to sit and munch the rest, Dean grabbed one himself. They sat there, the golden glow of sunrise warming their cold fingers, eating a fruit that was the size and color of a peach, but soft and sweet beyond the capabilities of even the best peach.

“This is amazing,” Neil said.

“Yeah…” Dean fiddled with the pit of the fruit, something on his mind. “But…doesn’t it bother you that it doesn’t feel much like a punishment? Do you think when we get it finished, he’s just going to smash it, and make us do it again?”

Neither boy noticed that his question revealed how much their relationship had changed over the course of the morning. Dean would never before have revealed a lack of understanding to the lowly Neil. And Neil would never have answered as definitely as he did.

“We kind of did try to rob his temple…and now he’s feeding us. Doesn’t seem like a crazy awful god to me. I wouldn’t mind doing this forever.”

“Well…” Dean pitched the pit into the woods. “I’m probably going to pass out on the field at practice. Coach always tells us to get a lot of protein in for breakfast, not just fruit.”

Neil, who didn’t even know how to cook an egg and who subsisted mostly on pop tarts and granola bars, said nothing to this nutritional advice. Dean gasped, jumping to his feet. “Oh crap! What time is it? We’ve been here for hours! The sun is up! I gotta get home! I can’t be late!”

He sprinted off through the woods. Neil got to his feet also but looked back at the pile of stones. “Um…we’re going to go to school now, if that’s okay….um…” He put his hands in his pockets. “Thanks for breakfast.”

Despite Dean’s head start, both boys reached the culvert at the end of the neighborhood at the same time. The sun seemed not nearly so high in the sky. Dew still covered the grass in a pale sparkle. They hurried off to their respective days.

Dean, to his immense surprise, outperformed even the seniors at football practice. Neil managed to get through the day without being noticed, a success by his standards. After school he gathered up his courage and sidled into the school library to find a book on sculpture in the hopes that it would give him some tips on how to sculpt marble. He’d noticed some of the scrollwork was damaged on the temple and a craving had risen in him to see it restored. He hid the book carefully in his bookbag and went home feeling like he’d done something riskier than robbing a temple.

The next morning, both boys found themselves speed-walking up the side of the mountain again. At the temple, Neil got on his hands and knees to inspect the scrollwork.

“What are you doing?”

“I just thought…I know it’s dumb…” He sat back and picked at a hole in his jean leg, embarrassed.

Dean nodded him on. “Yeah? What?”

“I wanted to restore that. I got a book from the school library…but all it talked about was famous sculptures, not how to actually carve anything…”

Dean got down on his hands and knees as well and ran a finger over the rippling edges, dulled by time and weather. “The school’s not going to have anything useful. I’ll buy us a book.”  He got up quickly and went off to work on the steps, embarrassed by his own good impulses.

Again, the boys worked all morning with marble that sprang to their hands and bent itself to their will. When the sun fully warmed the autumn chill out of the air, they sat down and had another breakfast of fruit, somehow even better than the day before. And then they ran home, skipping down the mountain like a couple of young goats to find the sun still half behind the horizon and the rest of the world asleep in their houses.

This continued for months. Dean bought the book on carving marble to Neil and they both poured over the scrollwork designs. Dean swiped a chisel from his dad’s workbench and Neil set himself to coax delicate flowers and vines out of rock—unusual rock, enchanted rock, perhaps, but rock nonetheless.

Dean assigned himself the task of figuring out how to lever the stone walls upright. He began haunting the physics teacher’s office with questions until the good man offered to recommend that Dean take physics as an elective next semester so that he could get some grading done. Dean’s mother was delighted; Dean’s father warned him not to let schoolwork distract him from football practice.

They became boys defined by those moments on the mountain. For all the help in manipulating marble that the god gave them, the marble was still marble. Generally, the rules of physics applied. They bashed their fingers sometimes, or shattered the wrong thing, or got irritated at one another over difficulty moving a slab from here to there and had shouting matches.

 But there were constant reminders that the god was present. Sometimes the rock molded itself to their hands. Sometimes a broken piece mended itself. When Neil first shaped a flower out of stone, and Dean was exclaiming over it, the presence was there with them, and the feeling of his approbation was like a sunrise on their backs. The sense of keeping company with the divine, doing something approved of by a god, began to shape their understanding of themselves.

Neil surprised himself one day by raising his hand and answering a question in class. He held himself straighter these days, looked people in the eye. He no longer cringed into a room, ashamed to burden anybody by his existence. He was rangy but no longer waif-thin. The hollows under his eyes had filled out and his arms had the ropy muscle created by long hours wielding a mallet with precision care. No one in his house noticed these changes, because he simply wasn’t there most of the time. When he came home from school, he went to Dean’s house.

Dean’s change was subtler; a kindness had formed inside him as the calluses on his hands formed on the outside. Once Aiden, a new kid who always smelled of onions and would previously have been a prime target for Dean’s sense of humor, dropped all his textbooks in the middle of the hallway. Dean stopped on his way to class and helped him pick them up. When the coach praised him for a good pass, he grinned, said thanks, and went on with his life without needing to repeatedly point out this personal victory to his teammates. Daily doing things that he knew perfectly well he couldn’t have done without divine help made him humbler, less impressed with himself and his achievements.

But the work was coming to completion. Slowly, bit by bit, as the boys created levers and shaped rock, the temple was coming back to its former glory, as it had been long before the boys had first stumbled upon it. In place of the simple decorative ridges along the roofline, Neil had carved a garden of flowers and vines out of marble. Dean had changed the structure, favoring a peaked gothic arch rather than the straight square joints of before.

One morning Dean noticed Neil sitting in front of a blank row of marble with his hammer and chisel poised in the air—not moving. He glanced back over in a moment and Neil was still sitting, frozen in place. Finally, he wandered over. “Everything okay?”

“Remember when we started, and we wondered if as soon as we got done, the god would knock everything down and make us start again?”

Dean nodded.

“Now I’m afraid he won’t—that we’ll just be done and go away and never come back.” Neil ran his fingers over the blank marble in front of him. “This is my last segment. I’ll have the entire thing finished by the time we leave today.”

Dean frowned. “Well…I have a lot to do still…I mean, I still have to give the front steps an extra polish….and I was reading about cupolas the other day. We could add one of those on…” He trailed off. “We really are almost done.”  The silence hung heavy between them.

Then there was a crunch of a footfall, and trembling set into both of their limbs. Neither of them dared to look around. “Hi, um…sir,” Dean stammered. He still fell apart a little bit when the god showed up.

“We were wondering what you wanted us to do next.” Neil said.

“Turn around.” The god said, and with eyes lowered, the boys shuffled around. Dean, his face scrunched up, opened one eye and elbowed Neil. Both boys looked. What was standing in front of them was not the horse god, but an image of two boys, standing side by side. One was weedy, his hair falling into eyes with nothing but blank hopelessness in them. His shoulders stooped, his fingers nervously picked at a frayed edge of his shirt. The other had his head cocked back, a derisive half-smirk on his face. He’d posed himself to look good, a hand on a hip, bicep flexed. “This is who you were,” the god’s voice said. Both boys instinctively looked at each other and then back at the two boys standing before them. The god’s voice rumbled around them with a force that made their ears hurt. “Don’t forget.”

And then he was gone. In silence, the boys finished up their morning. Neil put the final curve on the vines he’d been carving. Dean polished the front step. Then they gathered up their things, took one final look at the temple, and started down the mountain path. Neil rubbed his eyes, surreptitiously, and said in an unnaturally bright voice, “Hey, do you think your mom’s going to make breakfast this morning, since it’s Saturday?”

“Yeah, French toast. You in?”

“Oh, heck yeah!”

Shoulder to shoulder, chatting as they went, they vanished into the underbrush.  Behind them, the marble edges of the temple they’d repaired caught the first rays of the morning sun and gleamed golden.