Ruarc came into the world in the bathed-in-the-light-of-the-cathode-ray early nineteen-fifties, the summer of 1953 to be exact, in a family that never would be able to afford a television. The period is marked by the Cold War, the ensuing Red Scare/McCarthyism, and most of all, the Post-WWII Baby Boom — and as such, by 1968, the Shepherds family would come to be made up of Malachi Shepherds (father), Loretta-Anne Shepherds (mother), ‘Roslyn’ Rose-Ellen Williams (maternal grandmother), Albin-Gregory ‘Rory’ Shepherds (paternal uncle), Ruarc-David ‘Davey’ Shepherds (oldest son, fifteen), and later Ellie-Anne, who preferred Elaine, Shepherds (only sister, twelve), and Silas-Fredrick, who everyone just called Stop-Running-In-The-House-Freddy. (youngest brother, ten).

The entire family, save Ruarc Shepherds, was six feet under by the winter of 1969, and he could only be grateful to God that the ground hadn’t frozen solid before he could afford to have them buried. It wasn’t the last time in his life that Ruarc and the Pale Horseman would brush shoulders, but it was the first.

See, something plain awful happened that spring — and it started in the Patterson & Company Coal Mine, with Ruarc at fifteen years old and swinging steel 1200 ft. under the surface of God’s green earth, putting a vicious hurting along with a team of twenty-four other men, more so boys, really, to what was known at the time as the Whittaker No. 7 Coal Seam, and later known as Unlucky No. 7. for the exact events about to transpire.

ⓘ The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 banned oppressive child labor, and set the maximum workweek at 44 hrs. Ruarc was still in the mines thirty years later, at the age of fifteen, after falsifying his application documents with the assistance of a foreman to describe him as sixteen yrs instead, the minimum age requirement for children to work in the mines.

Mother Nature, some say Eve in the same breath, didn’t take kindly to having her ribs pillaged for their marrow — starvation or no — and closed her jaws around Ruarc Shepherd and the rest with more of a roar than a snap. The mine collapsed in three sections, braced walls and carved ceilings bowing in like the constricting, sprawling intestine of some eldritch beast they were deep in the belly of, unwilling-parasites-turned-prisoners.

What happened in the Patterson & Company Coal Mine?

Nobody ever heard much of what happened in the Patterson & Company Coal Mine from the only two survivors, Ruarc Shepherds and Warren Pritchard, for what the boys spoke of after, they spoke little — but what need for words does trauma have, when action serves to tell the story in vivid color instead of monotone, rendered in bright splashes of scarlet and bile green? Safe to say, it surprised nobody in Bixby Crick when Warren Pritchard made it to twenty-two and drunk himself into his grave not too long after despite all their prayer beseeching otherwise. Ruarc sometimes wonders if that untimely death, footnoted in narrow-scrawl in the Pritchard family bible, Wren instead of Warren, was God’s own concept of mercy at play. Hard cider never tasted quite the same after.

What Ruarc chose to spoke of after, he spoke in double-speak. Religious metaphor and revivalist rambling. I’ll spare you the inference, just this once.

When the ceiling came down, Ruarc took a nasty bang on the head — which bled something fierce and left a nasty scar near his hairline that his hair never did quite grow over again, part of the reason he keeps it so damn long now. It shook something loose, or maybe something was already loose and just woke up when it sucked in a lungful of all that pain, despair, and fear. It’s hard to say at an age that young, but the result was the same; Ruarc started hearing things, seeing things, being spoken to by things that seemed as real to him as you and me sitting across from eachother on a porch in a summer sunshower.

It was not the same holy experience for Warren Pritchard, being trapped so far under the oppressive weight of the earth with nothing but a madman spouting nonsense about Gabriel leading the way, bleeding profusely from the head, and pointing into the dark ahead with a wild gleam in his eye. To his credit, even at Ruarc’s feverish direction, Warren Pritchard did most of the digging, with Ruarc pitching in for his shift on the second day when Warren collapsed into sobs and hysteria. God has a plan to see us through this, you’ll see, it’s just a test, we just gotta have faith, that’s all, you have faith, don’t you Wren? Ruarc had babbled somewhat soothingly, unflinching when Warren shoved him back, spitting something that underneath all the snot clumping up in his throat sounded an awful lot like blasphemy, but if he took it to heart through his fervor, Ruarc didn’t show it. He was too busy humming something like a hymn under his breath, that at the time sounded more like a dirge and made Warren start crying harder, while Ruarc sunk his bare hands into rock and gravel until his nails bled and tore away from their beds.

Warren swore one time, drunker than he should have been, that human thighmeat tasted like the fatty leftovers of the ham his Daddy used to smoke for Easter weekend that Warren never quite got through having for breakfast the next day before his mother started tearing a comb through his hair, trying to wrangle the unruly teenager into something presentable for Sunday service so she wouldn’t have to hear about it from Roslyn Williams, who always came alone anyways, so what was she playing at?

Ruarc would have agreed, on the similar taste of regular-pig and long-pig, if they could have ever afforded a ham between him and his siblings when they all started springing up like weeds at the same time and needed new clothes for school, because somehow none of the hand-me-downs fit a single one of them more than a week, despite the shrewd but canny habit the Shepherds had of always buying a size larger for growing into — prompting something to be said under the breath by their neighbors about the whole Shepherd clan being cornfed, which Ruarc didn’t really get his Daddy being mad about at the time.

When they dug through the third collapse, squeezing themselves through the gap they had made like earthworms burrowing out of the earth towards the sweet smell of petrichor outside, Ruarc fell to his knees in the mud, and Warren Pritchard knocked over the white cross that had been staked into the ground in his hurry to put the mine as far behind him as he could — he didn’t stop running, not for the stitch in his side, not for the gnawing hunger in his belly or the blood still staining his teeth ‘til he got home to his weeping mother all in black.

How did Ruarc’s family react to him coming home after the mine collapsed?

When Ruarc stumbled his way home, crawled his way up the hill their cabin sat on way back in the woods, all he got was as far as the pear tree in the front yard, face to face with a wide open door left swinging in the wind and the smell of rot nearly knocking him back flat on his ass, and his heart sunk so low in his chest he could of sworn he left it back in the mines.

They said it happened on day two of the mine falling in on itself like a coffin lid shutting tight, when after a full day’s attempt at clearing away the rubble, the foremen ordered his crew to come to a stop, unwitting of how they were just a few feet short of breaking through to the other side of the first collapse. Unsalvagable, he had said. Inoperable, had followed. Condolences, had come third.

Malachi Shepherds had gotten the buckshot from the Sawyer brothers down the lane, said something about going hunting, for his wife and the rest of his family, who were all just sick with worry about Ruarc and weren’t eating and were going to need to eat something sooner or later because they couldn’t all just starve themselves in their grief. Practical, he had been, they’d said. A real practical family man.

Malachi Shepherds was supposed to be in the mines that day, but ever since he caught that nasty cough last autumn that hadn’t really ever gone away and come up black out of his lungs like soot fresh off the gates of Hell, well, young Ruarc found his Daddy’s workboots were the one hand-me-down that fit him proper in the whole house.

Maybe whatever was in Ruarc’s head was in Malachi’s too. He’d thought about it, once, one night while he was writing a sermon. Maybe his father was blessed too, and he just didn’t take it well. Was he afraid pulling the trigger, or did he consider that flash at the end of the muzzle a miracle of his own?

Family annihilation, or familicide, is a form of murder where an individual kills multiple close family members, such as a spouse, partner, and/or children in quick succession. It is often a murder-suicide, with the perpetrator taking their own life after killing their family. It was a murder-suicide, with Malachi Shepherd turning the family shotgun on himself after taking the lives of Loretta-Anne Shepherds (mother), ‘Roslyn’ Rose-Ellen Williams (maternal grandmother), Albin-Gregory ‘Rory’ Shepherds (paternal uncle), Ellie-Anne, who preferred Elaine, Shepherds (only sister, twelve), and Silas-Fredrick, who everyone just called Stop-Running-In-The-House-Freddy. (youngest brother, ten).

The only thing Malachi Shepherd ever left behind for Ruarc to inherit was survivor’s guilt. The cabin was built on land leased under the Patterson & Company Coal Conglomerate’s name, who promptly, without ceremony, reclaimed it, and by extension the buried bodies on the property that Ruarc Shepherds dug the day after. They even took the shovel he used, company property, and all that. Company property, and all that, and his Daddy in his grave and gone straight to hell.

How did this affect Ruarc?

Oh, it went about as well as someone asking you to hold a lit stick of dynamite while they tie their shoe. If only he’d lost an arm instead of his mind.

When something terrible happens like that, you get two paths. You get mean, or you get real, real, charming. And Ruarc Shepherds had never had a cruel bone in his body previous to this point, so for good measure, he took a little bit of both paths in hand — one sugar, and the other pure citrus, and he made lemonade.

He met cautious glances with a kind smile so practiced as to be something almost pure, almost believable to himself. Ruarc took extra efforts not to speak too loud, stand too tall, look too much like his father — it was another blessing when his beard came in as thick as it did.

He got religion — or rather religion got him down in the mines, but no one needed to know about the glowing figure that stood at the end of his sleeping bag one night when he prayed, and prayed, and prayed for God to give him strength, and whispered about sainthood and sacrifice and how there was a season for all things in a knowing tone, and called itself Gabriel and promised him he wouldn’t always be cold and empty like this.

No, that was going between him and Gabriel for a long time, until it was between him and Gabriel and the blackening walls of a church he’d built from sawn pine, built with his own hands, several years from now, the stained glass windows fracturing in spiderweb pattern from the force of the heat, and pouring black smoke forth like oil into a still pond, up into the blue, blue sky, a chorus of screams from inside in harmony like choir song.

Seminary school came with a cot and two hots, which for young Ruarc was more than enough — could have kept himself fed on scripture alone if the words didn’t blur — apparently that was called fasting here, and Ruarc found he was pretty good at being hungry after practicing for so long.

He was good at alot of things, as it turned out; good for more than just swinging a pickaxe and skinning leg muscle from a crushed femur. He was particularly good at talking, which he had never done much of before. His young siblings were the mouthy ones, so his parents had said with a chuckle where he would’ve gotten the strap — they got away with it where he couldn’t as the oldest, he’d come to accept that, so he never really got to use his tongue to his heart’s content ‘til now. And when he got going, to his surprise, he really got going; had moved some older folks in the churchyard to tears with his more inspired recitations.

What were these inspired recitations like?

His hair was shorter then, dark curls falling into his eyes when he bowed his head over the worn leather Bible in his hands. Another hand-me-down, but not from his bloodkin this time, else the company men probably would have taken that too.

“Everyone keeps sayin’ the world’s gonna get better. But I don’t see it. I see cities gettin’ bigger and people gettin’ lonelier. I see folks prayin’ for help while the world laughs at ‘em for still believin’ in God who won’t, who don’t, answer. They tell you faith is a fool’s game, and then they wonder why everything’s fallin’ apart. The world isn’t ending because God abandoned us.”

“The world is ending because we forgot our place in it, as shepherds, sowers, plantin’ the seeds of hope to reap when the hard times come — hope’s a crop. You gotta plant it, tend it, you gotta fight the weeds tryin’ to choke it out. And that’s the part people don’t like.”

“They want comfort without sacrifice. Salvation without obedience. They want God to fix a world they keep breakin’. But the Lord never asked us to sit back and wait. He told us to build, build a life where faith ain’t somethin’ you whisper about on Sundays and forget by Monday. Build a life where you don’t forget about the man standin’ at the end of the road with a sign in hand once you press a five into his hand and drive on to the market, havin’ done your good deed for the day, like he ain’t gonna be just as hungry tomorrow while you’re havin’ seconds off Sunday dinner.”

“When the archangel spoke to me, he didn’t tell me nothin’ like the end was comin’ tomorrow, or in a week, or in a month. He said it had already come and gone, storm rolled right over us and we didn’t even blink. The loneliness. The anger. The way people look at each other like strangers even when they’re standin’ side by side.”

“Storm came and went, and most folks didn’t even notice. Because storms don’t always sound like thunder, ain’t always loud, no, every storm starts brewing quiet. Somethin’ as small as neighbors turnin’ their backs on each other over pettiness — or like men lettin’ evil grow because nobody wants to be the one who stands up and tears it out because that’s hard, and don’t we all want easy?”

“You ever seen a field that’s been left alone too long? Folks got too comfortable off what they harvested lastin’ so long that they just stopped tendin’ to the ground that fed them? Weeds choke it. Thistles spread. Rot creeps in. And after a while… there ain’t nothin’ left worth savin’. And you starve. And I see you starving now.”

“That’s the world we’re livin’ in. And I’m gonna tell you somethin’ most preachers are too scared to say — you can’t save a field just by prayin’ over it. No, sometimes you gotta get your hands in the dirt, and tear the weeds out by root and stem. Sometimes you gotta burn what’s rotten so somethin’ clean can grow in its place. And folks hear that and they start tremblin’.”

“They say that sounds harsh.”

“But God ain’t gentle with corruption. Look at the flood. Look at Sodom. When rot spreads, the Lord cleans house. And if we’re meant to be shepherds — then we got a duty, not just to feed and fatten the flock, but to drive off the wolves. You don’t reason with wolves, you don’t beg them to behave, you stand between them, and the people that they’re huntin’. And that’s what Patterson & Company are. Wolves at our doors. And if the world’s forgotten how to do that, how to stand between what’s right and wrong instead of lettin’ it in with an apology already half on your tongue for takin’ up space you’ve got a right to, well, then maybe that’s why everything’s fallin’ apart.”

He doesn’t try to comfort them. Tell them they’re doing the best they can in a world good at its core but lost, so very lost. Because when did comfort ever get anybody out of a deep hole in the ground they dug themselves?

He doesn’t try to scare them. Preach hellfire and brimstone while the men taking up those pews every Sunday are stained in evidence of hell itself being a very real place you can go if you’re trying to make a dime by sellin’ your body in prostitution by another name, stained with coaldust they can’t ever quite scrub off, too deep in their skin now, souls already burnin’ up, lungs first.

Ruarc preaches strength. Purpose. Direction. Conviction. Solidarity. Righteous fury.

And people drank his dogma down by the gallons, wipe their mouths, and fill their cups again. And if it tasted bitter, they didn’t spit it out, they asked for more.