Zenith
Zenith is the epic saga of the American north, a cold and brutal country of glacial rock and forest which has given rise to generations of people as fierce as the land itself.
The story of that land is told via intertwining lives and voices stretching across the centuries, from a man in a 1970s rustbelt mining town who has murdered its wealthy heiress and now is crippled by remorse, to the 1870s when a rebellious young woman has journeyed to the frontier outpost of Zenith City to flee her domineering father, only to discover that she is at risk of becoming him, to the seventeenth century when a warrior of the powerful Anishinaabe people must choose between her family and a love which might bring destruction to them all.
Zenith is the tale of the making of the American frontier--a project ambitious, glorious, murderous, and unjust--and also a call to action, as the last remnant of this once-vast wilderness is now threatened by the greed of a few.
Excerpt
4th Sept. 1875
What is this place?
First and foremost, it is a place of men. I am told that fifty years ago there were no men here, just Indians, and only the ruins of the old French trading post across the bay. Ten years ago, after the signing of the treaty with the Indians, there were a dozen white inhabitants. Now there are three thousand men. Each day more men force revision of such census. Too many by far for homes to be built for all, so they dwell in canvas tents within the swamp. The hollow air is filled with the sounds of their destruction and creation, sounds of the raw being cut and chopped, pounded and reshapen into form. Whole ancient trees cast down with crash of thunder, then the snap and crack of every branch and twig, then the whoosh and slow descent of the needle clouds pattering down in a monsoon rain. The slap of nails and the wheeze and whining grate of their crosscut saws. The ursine roar of their shouldering steamers and trampers shouldering, aquiline screams.
The clamor of the trains, my Adam’s trains, rattling and loaded and unloaded by sooty hordes of heavers and the cars’ groans and settling of metallic vertebrae upon their springs, shouldering their immeasurable burdens, pausing beneath grain elevators then doused by deluge of golden chaff-dust which sticks to the skins and passes chokingly within the lungs of all the men. This army in motley made uniform by coat of dust, one train no sooner loaded to its very brims and beyond so that its extra is strewn upon the ground, then it is gone and another come in its stead. Come and then gone too with piercing whistle, with grumbling turn of iron wheel and snort of steam-breath puffed up into empty skies.
On holidays I have seen them to amble about in raucous disarray. Clad in coveralls or in their soiled underclothes, they trade blades and livestock and inebriants and over roaring communal greasefires they spin their spitted shanks of bloody meat. Anights they play at cards and brawl. Upon one evening lightning struck and burnt one of their tents and all those assembled within to ash. Initially those men were mourned by their fellows; however, it was later claimed by the followers of Jedediah Newcombe that they had been onanists all, thus their holocaust the rightful wage of sin.
Is it by such rationalizations that they cope with death and living?
Sundays I see those blackened things made stripped and naked, then descend unto the freezing marsh. Submerged within, they reemerge from those waters cleansed and albinic, restored and rebaptized, if only fleetingly, as human. Goats roam among them with imperious resolve, chew at their drawers and are kicked away savagely, tethered cows shit upon the same ground on which they lay their heads. On the coldening nights, I am told, they nestle up close along the teated underbellies of their hogs.
Everywhere there are only men, and upon seeing me a man pauses his work and beholds me dazedly. Little matter what he had been doing theretofore, no matter upon what he had toiled until then. Axes heaved up over wood stop and fall, shovels slip from grips and saws are dropped upon the ground. Eyes ogle me with a curious hunger which makes my skin crawl. I greet them all with a nod of my head, feeling as a zebra might among a herd of horse, or perhaps as a juicy, fat gazelle might feel walking amongst a pride of starving lions. And in those rarest of times when I greet a woman--even a washerwoman or the consort of some lowly tradesman--I find it is with mutual commiseration, as though we two are the sole survivors of some gynecidal cataclysm which has taken all the rest of our ilk.
Where is my Adam? Have I surprised him or somehow discomfited my husband by my sudden arrival, posthaste from Europe? I await his return, or at the very least his correspondence, on every fruitless day.
Instead of Adam, there are only these anonymous men, these myriad legions of western empire. Only these unknown soldiers of manifest destiny, clad in dirt, and sculpted out of dust.
