Malcolm Murray woke up Saturday morning to the unpleasant view of his grandmother on her tiptoes, straddling his mattress. She was in her stockings and faded floral house dress, reaching into the dark recesses of the rafters. His metal bed frame strained with every one of her not-so-graceful movements.
It wasn’t unusual for Nana to be in Mac’s bedroom. After all, they did share it. But a ten-year-old boy must draw the line somewhere.
“Nana, you’re making me seasick.”
Without looking back to acknowledge him, “Then ’haps it’s time to get out of yur boat,” she shot back.
Mac stood up and a heavy wooden crate dropped into his arms from above. “Now go find Mum.”
With only his red hair and green eyes visible above the crate, Mac struggled to traverse the windy route from his bedroom through the dank living room and onto the front steps where Dorothy, his wiry but strong mother, was sorting an impressive collection of scrap metal.
“Good mornin’, Malcolm,” Dorothy said.
Only when the crate hit the ground did Mac catch his first glimpse at its contents. In it were an odd jumble of metal tubes and round dials and big switches. An old coffee can at the bottom rattled with rusty bolts and screws.
“What’s all this, Mum?” he asked.
“Scrap drive. The factory’s sending a lorry,” she explained.
Mac knew about the scrap drive. His mother had been telling their neighbors in the other row houses on Beatty Street about it for weeks. It was her latest effort to single-handedly end the war. And who could blame her for trying?
Clydebank was six miles up the river from Glasgow, and until 18 months earlier, was best known as the home of the Singer Sewing Machine Factory. Almost overnight, Dorothy—along with the rest of the factory’s 16,000 employees—went from manufacturing bobbins to manufacturing bombs.
At the same time, Mac’s father, Paul, had been scooped up by the Royal Air Force and transplanted hundreds of miles to the south where he loaded those very same munitions onto warplanes on the coast of England. As Dorothy toiled away on her twelve-hour shifts, she liked to imagine her husband might soon be handling one of her bomb casings, and when the opportunity presented itself, she would secretly etch her initials into them with a hairpin, hoping that Paul would see it and smile. Who knows, she thought. It might even be the very bomb that lands on Hitler himself. Wouldn’t that be something? A husband and wife victory, made in little old Clydebank.
“I’m not askin’ about the scrap drive—I’m askin’ about this?” Mac pointed to the dusty crate.
Dorothy looked down at the mess of metal and smiled. Before she could answer, Nana was there with an answer.
“That be your grandpa’s nonsense,” she said.
“His inventions,” Dorothy corrected.
Nana rolled her eyes. “A mad scientist, he was. And more mad than science.”
While Dorothy and Nana carried donations to the street, Mac sat on the porch and pulled out Grandpa’s “nonsense” for a closer inspection.
There was a dial with handwritten numbers on it. And a tiny pulley. And a benign-looking trap that suddenly sprung closed, nearly taking Mac’s thumb with it. And buried at the bottom, five inches long and three inches wide, a metal box, sealed by a small screw in each of its corners. A cord dangled from the bottom. Sitting on top was a red bulb, in inch in diameter, covered in a protective tin cage. Beneath it, a pair of Greek symbols Mac didn’t recognize.
Nana was back for another load. “What’s this do?” Mac asked.
“It ‘do’ what all his other stuff ‘do.’ Nothing.”
Mac turned it over in his hands, looking for more clues, when he sensed Mum’s shadow over his shoulder.
“The God Machine,” she said.
Mac wrinkled his nose. “The what?”
“Papa’s God Machine,” she repeated as she made the sign of the cross on her chest. “Your grandfather believed it could detect the presence of the Almighty Himself.”
Mac’s eyes went wide. “How does it work?”
Nana returned for her last load and scoffed. “Work? Ha. Your grandpa thought if he ran electricity through holy water—holy water he stole from the church mind ya—it would trigger ‘supernatural electrons.’” Nana laughed, remembering.
Mac smiled. “And that would turn on the light?”
His mother stared at it with a hint of sadness. “Yes. At least… that was the theory.”
Down Beatty Street came the familiar rumble of rubber on cobblestone. “Lorry’s coming,” Nana barked.
She grabbed the God Machine from Mac’s hand, dropped it back in the crate, and kicked it down the steps toward the other junk.
Piece by piece Mum and Nana and Mac hoisted the scrap onto the back of the truck. Tin cans and aluminum siding and broken bicycles and useless car parts and a rusty weather vane and a watering can and a whole crate of Grandpa’s nonsense.
Everything but the God Machine. Mac swiped it from the heap and stuffed it into the pocket of his pajamas.
It was late afternoon and Monsignor McDevitt was putting everyone to sleep again. That wasn’t conjecture. Mac could see it for himself as he stood at the front of Our Holy Redeemer Church, holding a dripping candle, and counting down the minutes till mass would be over.
“It’s a bit surprising anyone shows up to church at all,” he often thought to himself.
If it were up to Mac, he wouldn’t. But Mum left no wiggle room in this regard, especially with Dad gone. Mac and Dorthy and Nana were there every Sunday. Plus the ten official holy days of obligation. Plus the all too often weekday mass—like today—when Mac’s number was pulled and he was thrown into a long, white cassock against his will. These masses were the most painful of all. From his lofted perch behind the altar, he could not only hear, but actually see his friends on the nearby soccer pitch as they laughed and played in those precious daylight hours between school and dinner.
Oh the freedom that comes with being a heathen, Mac thought.
Alas, Mac believed in God. Largely because he was told to believe in God. But could he point to any firsthand evidence? In all those painful mornings and afternoons in the church on Bank Street, had he ever experienced an undeniable otherworldly nearness? Not that he remembers.
His mother was a different story.
While others in church nodded off, Dorothy prayed. Her eyes clenched. Her fists in a tight ball. Her mouth moving but no words coming out. Mac recently asked her what she was saying, expecting her to recite back a long prayer full of fancy church phrases that don’t get defined to red-haired altar boys… “reconciliation of souls”... “apostolic succession”... “Eucharistic adoration”...
“I’m just asking for help,” she explained.
“Help?” Given the state of the world, Mac wasn’t sure this was God’s strong suit. “And then what do you do?”
“Then I listen.”
This seemed like a strange system. Nevertheless, inspired by his mom’s devotion, Mac tried to tune out Monsignor’s never ending prayer and see if God had anything to tell him. He closed his eyes. He focused intently. He didn’t hear a thing. But after another minute, he did smell something. Smoke. Monsignor McDevitt was on fire.
“Malcolm!” Monsignor yelped.
Malcolm opened his eyes to see what he had done. The flame was rapidly spreading upward from his stole even as Monsignor batted at it with his sleeve. Mac ran to the altar and grabbed the only liquid he could find, dousing the flame with nothing less precious than the blood of Christ.
Monsignor was indeed transfigured. His eyebrows lowered, his lips pursed, and he whispered just loud enough for Mac to hear: “You… are the worst altar boy in all of Scotland.”
Mac sat on his bed that evening and weighed Monsignor’s assessment. He saw no flaw in it. He was a horrible acolyte. At last year’s Palm Sunday service, Mac bent down to tie his shoe before the procession and gored a visiting bishop in the bum with a bronze cross. At the Christmas Vigil, he tripped over his cassock, fell into the manger, and decapitated the baby Jesus. Of course those were both accidents. But did he take some delight in hearing the bishop yelp like a schoolgirl? Yes. Did he enjoy the snickers from the packed pews when the baby Jesus’s head rolled down the marble steps and Monsignor McDevitt chased after it? More than a little.
The summation of which left his ten-year-old soul in quite the precarious position if, in fact, the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Holy One was as near to Mac as his grandfather postulated God could be.
Because the bishop and the monsignor were only judging him for his antics in church. They weren’t witnesses to his colorful sins on the schoolyard or in the classroom. They also didn’t see the things he failed to do, which the nuns reminded him were also sins, along with the sinful things he merely thought, which, truth be known, were often the worst sins of all!
Mac rolled over and reached his hand under the bed until his wax-covered fingers struck something hard. He brought up the God Machine and held it quietly in his hands. He was no longer curious whether or not it would work. He was terrified that it might.
He unplugged the lamp between his and Nana’s bed. Then… holding his breath… he plugged in the machine.
It didn’t light. Not a dull glow. Not a brief spark. Just a deep indifference from the Great Beyond.
Mac’s terror turned to joy. He was more than relieved. He felt liberated—unshackled from the fear that God filled his days counting sins in order to gleefully punish the worst offenders. On the contrary, it seemed much more likely that there were no repercussions for anything. That all the rules piled on him were not ordained by God but created by nuns and monsignors and mothers to suck all the fun out of a ten-year-old’s existence. And if that were the case…
“I’m going out!” Mac yelled as he darted past Dorothy and Nana in the kitchen.
“Now?” Dorothy called back. When she didn’t get an answer. “Be back for supper!” she added.
But Mac didn’t want supper. He wanted shortbread and something fizzy from the drug store. So that’s what he had instead.
And the next day, when he didn’t feel like going to school, he didn’t. He went fishing along the River Clyde—and caught something too! Then Mac walked back into town and exchanged the wiggly fish for two more hunks of shortbread. I’m a regular tradesman, he thought. After lunch he threw rocks at the seabirds from the bridge then walked to the soccer pitch, took a nap, and was up and ready to play when the rest of his classmates joined him from school.
At five o’clock, when the bells chimed for afternoon mass at Our Holy Redeemer, Mac delighted in the fact he wasn’t there. Surely someone else could light the candles and ring the bells and carry the incense, he thought. Frankly, why didn’t Monsignor McDevitt do it all himself? He was the only one getting the quid people like Mum put in the collection. Only seems right he should do the actual work! But no, let’s make dumb ol’ Malcolm do it for free, he thinks. Well, Monsignor, those days are over!
Mac strutted through the front door a few minutes after six, proud of the mud stains on his trousers and excited that he would be doing it all again tomorrow. Dorothy and Nana sat in silence on the small couch.
“Hiya, ladies,” he bellowed. Mac slipped off his wet socks—trophies of his hedonistic adventures—and hung them over the fire while he waited to see which of the two domineering women in his life would be the first to confront him.
Neither said a thing.
Hmm… he thought. Hadn’t they’d heard from the school? Or noticed his glaring absence at church? Surely someone on Beatty Street must have seen him stuffing his face with shortbread in the shop when he was supposed to be learning his times tables.
Mac searched their faces through the shadows of the firelight and noticed his mother was crying. He’d never seen her cry. Not once.
“Mum?” She looked up at Mac. “What is it?” he asked.
But even as he formed the question, he already knew the answer.
Dad.
A telegram rested in Dorothy’s lap.
“There was an accident,” Nana explained. “At the airfield.”
“How bad is he?” Mac asked.
Nana put out her arms. “I’m sorry, Malcolm.” Mac ran to his room instead.
He screamed and tore the curtains from the window. He ripped the sheets from his bed. He kicked his dresser until he heard the wood splinter. Then he saw the God Machine. He picked it up and threw it with all his strength against the stone wall of his bedroom.
Then Malcolm Murray fell face first on the cold tenement floor and wept.
He woke up in the same spot a few hours later. It was still dark. Through the black, he watched the silhouette of Dorothy cross from the kitchen to her bedroom and then back again. He found her at the kitchen sink, packing a snack.
He couldn’t believe it. “Yur going to work?”
“Aye.”
She moved with a stiff coldness across the kitchen.
“Right now?”
“They’re always short for the night shift.”
“You can’t. Not tonight, Mum. Please.”
“The harder I work, the sooner this will end.”
She walked toward the door, resolute. Mac followed. “But tomorrow maybe you could go to church? You and Nana. I’ll go too if ya want?”
“I don’t know, Malcolm.”
“Sure. We’ll go and you can pray for help and then you can listen and—”
Dorothy turned and faced her son, a fog in her eyes. “I haven’t heard anything for a long time, Malcolm.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe anyone has.”
Then Dorothy lifted her sweater off the hook and disappeared into the dark.
Nana and Mac cleaned up the damage he had caused in sad silence. She saw no need to scold her grandson. For all her bluster, she’d endured enough heartache in her sixty-four years to know that sometimes the best gift you can give someone who is hurting is your silent presence.
Or at least she tried to do that. But when she picked up Mac’s blankets and threw them onto his bed, she discovered the God Machine on the ground beneath them and gasped.
“Oh Lordy, it’s a resurrection,” she said.
The machine had an impressive dent in the metal cover, but otherwise, grandpa’s solid engineering had weathered Mac’s meltdown.
“I was just curious. So I kept it. But when I plugged it in, nothing happened.”
As much as Nana wanted to express her lack of surprise, she put a hand on Mac’s shoulder and gave him a loving squeeze instead. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He had been relieved when it didn’t work. But that was before. Now, though he couldn’t articulate it, there was nothing he wanted more than to see that small red light go on. For Mum’s sake. And, if he were honest, for his.
Mac fetched his father’s tool box from the kitchen cupboard.
His dad loved that tool box. Over the years he had curated the exact number of devices needed to repair every one of the house’s various leaks and squeaks. Whether it could make the God Machine finally work was another question.
Mac set up shop next to the dying fire and used a small Phillips head to remove the four screws. Even without them, the cover didn’t budge. Mac rummaged for his dad’s hammer and then the chisel, gently tapping along the seam of the device until the box cracked open like a clam. Inside, a thin line of copper wire stretched from its junction with the cord into a sealed vial. He jiggled it. Sure enough, two thimble’s worth of stolen holy water danced in the clear glass. Suspended in the liquid, the wire coiled into a tight circle then exited the other side where it was welded neatly into the socket of the light bulb.
Mac tightened the loose connections. Wiped out twenty years of dust. Then put it all back together and plugged it in.
Nothing.
“Time for bed, Malcolm,” Nana said.
“Not yet, Nana...”
“Malcolm—”
“I’m goin’ to get this to work!”
Nana relented. If she put him to bed, all he’d do is lie there in his grief feeling worse. Besides, Dorothy would never know if he stayed up a bit late. She settled into her favorite cushion on the couch and watched the fire.
Mac went back over everything. The cord. The wiring. The connections. The socket…
Then he realized. The bulb.
Mac lifted the protective tin cage and unscrewed the red, incandescent bulb. He held it up against the orange firelight and looked through the fragile glass.
“The filament! It’s broken!”
Nana took the bulb from his hand and gave it a shake against her good ear. “Tis,” she said, her eyes growing weary. “We can walk to the hardware store in the morning.”
But Mac had no intention of waiting. At the sound of Nana’s first snore, he was gone.
At a quarter past eight on a Thursday evening, the Clydebank hardware store was long closed. But like most of the town’s shops, if you banged and hollered loud enough, eventually someone would open the door for you.
“A ten-watt…” the white-haired owner said, rolling the bulb around in his palm as he walked in his slippers toward the far end of his shop. With war rations in full effect, it was slim pickings for even the most basic items. And this was no ordinary bulb.
Adjusting his glasses and loose trousers, he picked through his limited supply. “Forty… sixty… sixty… eighty…” No luck. “What color is this, anyway?”
“Red,” Mac answered.
“A ten-watt red?” The specificity jogged his memory. “Hold on.”
Mac brightened. “You got one?”
“No,” the owner said. “But I remember sellin’ one. Last year. Maybe the year before.”
“Who to?”
“I don’t remember.”
Mac slapped the counter with both hands in desperation. “Well please try!”
The owner put his head down and pulled at his lower lip until, “Ah!”
“You got it?”
“Yes!”
“Who?”
The owner smiled wide in satisfaction. “Monsignor McDevitt!”
The rectory of Our Holy Redeemer sat at the rear of the church property. As Mac saw it, the only thing worse than attending Our Holy Redeemer would be living at Our Holy Redeemer. And yet this was the life Monsignor had chosen. Mac concluded there must be perks to the priesthood that Monsignor McDevitt didn’t broadcast to the larger congregation.
His first few knocks went unanswered and Mac grew nervous. Monsignor was grumpy enough when he was wide awake. How would he behave half-asleep? Especially toward “the worst altar boy in Scotland.”
Behind Mac, an elderly woman on a cane let out a glorious mid-March sneeze as she left the side entrance of the church and headed toward Bank Street. Mac caught the door before it closed and peeked inside. He saw a handful of sad-looking parishioners on kneelers. Of course, Mac realized. Thursday night confessions.
Now that was a perk of the job, Mac realized. A few times a week people come to you and share all their darkest secrets. Mum always said Monsignor was behind a screen so he didn’t know who was doing the confessing, but in a town as small as Clydebank Mac found that hard to swallow. If Mac were a monsignor, he’d keep a secret ledger of who did what with whom and leverage that information for financial gain or, at the very least, an entertaining bedtime read.
Naturally, Mac had no desire to confess anything. At least not to Monsignor. Then again, would he really be that surprised by any of his revelations? The more he considered it, the more he found it oddly comforting that he could speak the biggest, ugliest truths of his life and it would have no direct effect on Monsignor whatsoever.
He waited his turn outside the ornate wooden confessional. He decided he would just say that Mum sent him to the shop for a special light bulb and the shop owner pointed him toward Monsignor, and if he asked more follow up questions, he’d change the subject and say his dad was dead which would probably get him crying. That would shut Monsignor up, he figured.
Of course it would also involve lying. As Mac tried to calculate how many more days in purgatory he might get for lying inside a confessional, a woman stepped into the booth and shut the door. When she did, a light above the confessional flipped on. And not just any light.
The red light.
Mac brightened. Ha! He didn’t have to lie to Monsignor at all! He just had to steal the light. No no no. Not steal. Borrow. Obviously. He would return it. At some point. Probably.
Mac scaled the side of the confessional. The woman who went in the booth didn’t look like much of a sinner so he did his best to climb quickly. He gripped an angel wing and began his silent ascent. He found a foothold on a fire-spitting gargoyle and pushed himself even higher. The bulb was now within reach. He grabbed it gently but— “Ock!” It burned his fingertips.
Mac pulled the sleeve of his sweater over his hand and made a second attempt. He slowly untwisted it from the socket, grateful he had misjudged the woman inside as more holy than she apparently was.
Finally, the bulb came loose. Mac held it, triumphant, when—
BOOM!
A piercing explosion shook the church, sending Mac falling from the confessional onto the hard marble floor.
Mac was stunned but only for a moment. He knew exactly what had happened. After ten long years, God had finally run out of patience and he had been struck by lightning. And deservedly so. Unless… this wasn’t God’s first blow. Mac’s thoughts turned dark. Perhaps his dad’s accident was no accident at all. Perhaps it was a divine warning shot.
Next time, Malcolm… it’ll be you.
Then came a high-pitched whistle and a second BOOM. Followed quickly by a third. The confessional doors flung open.
“MALCOLM!” Monsignor yelled down to him.
“I’m sorry, Monsignor,” Mac cried. “I’m so sorry!!”
“Get home, child,” Monsignor explained, trying to pull Malcolm to his feet. “It’s the Germans.”
The Germans? The nuns were always chattering about the chance of an attack. Nana too. The Luftwaffe had been blitzing England from the air for over six months. Everyone hoped they would never come to Scotland. But if they ever made it all the way to Clydebank, everyone knew what they’d target first.
“Mum,” Mac realized.
Before Mac pushed himself off the floor, he saw the red bulb under a pew. He grabbed it, held it tight, and ran as fast as his wobbly legs could run to the Singer Sewing Machine Factory.
He could feel the heat on his back from the shipyard, already in flames along the river to the south. He jumped across the railway and looked west to see burning tracks and twisted steel. The explosions were coming at such a pace that each one blended into the next, creating a hellish, unceasing roar on all sides. The closest ones blew Mac to the ground. Over and over. With each fall he held the small bulb high in the air, letting his knees and elbows take the punishment.
In the distance, Mac could see the tall Singer clock tower through the smoke, still standing. He pushed on despite the repeated, ominous whistles from above and the stream of workers stampeding in the opposite direction. He was inside the factory gate when the timber warehouse took a direct hit and ignited a forest’s worth of trees in an instant. It stopped Mac’s forward momentum and blew him onto his back. For a minute he was deaf, looking up as the silent fireball cut through the thick Scotland fog.
A woman appeared over him, her face covered in soot and yelled something he couldn’t hear. He shook his head and she tried to drag him away from the flames. He kicked and screamed in the eerie quiet. As his hearing returned, he could finally make out what she was saying. “Your mum’s ran home, Malcolm!” Mac found his strength again and shook her off. Then he sprinted south toward Beatty Street.
The nuns all said the Germans would take aim at Singer’s and the shipyard and the tank farm a bit further up the Clyde. They hadn’t considered the Luftwaffe would target the people of Clydebank. But when Mac jumped the railway and turned toward home, the smoke in front of him grew thicker. And as the drone of the German bombers faded into the night, it was replaced by sounds that were even worse.
Beatty Street—and every street around it—had been reduced to rubble.
He slowed as he approached his front steps, not wanting to see what he already feared. But he didn’t even know where his steps were. Or where they had ever been.
Mac collapsed in the street.
“Mum… Nana…”
He looked at the bulb, still secure in his hand. He wanted to squeeze it until it shattered. Until the shards of glass sliced his skin and the blood dripped down his arm and into the pavement on Beatty Street. An atonement for all the things he had done wrong. He stretched his little fingers as far around the bulb as they could reach and started to press.
“Malcolm!”
It was Mum. With Nana at her side. Before he could stand, they had already pulled him up and wrapped him in their four arms.
“You’re alive!” he said from deep inside their embrace.
“Aye, ’cause we were out looking for you,” Nana answered.
Dorothy pulled away from him to inspect her son. Her body was shaking. “Where’d you run off to?” she asked.
“I had to get a bulb,” he said, showing them his hand.
“A bulb?! What in the heavens did ya need that for?”
Nana reached into her apron pocket and revealed the metal box with the Greek letters on top. “For this.”
Dorothy was baffled. “We gave that away.”
“Aye. Then your son rescued it from the furnace,” Nana explained.
“Then you rescued it from the blitz,” Mac added.
Nana nodded, guilty. “I guess I always dreamed it would work.”
She handed the machine to Mac. He flipped open the tin cage and screwed in the bulb until it was snug. “Thank you, Nana,” he said.
Nana nodded, then walked toward the rubble and sat down. Mac joined her. And then Dorothy. They sat in silence and looked at the place they had called home. What they would do from here or where they would go was a mystery. They had nothing. And Mac, starkly aware of his poverty, started to cry.
But as he did, he sensed something else. Something inside his grief. Something bigger. It called his name. And there, on the pile of rubble, Mac smiled.
“I think… I think I hear him, Mum.”
“Who?”
Mac held up the machine.
Her heart stirred. “What’s he saying?”
Mac shook his head, embarrassed. “It… it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Tell me, Malcolm. Please, “ she begged.
“He just keeps repeatin’ it, Mum.”
“Repeatin’ what, Malcolm?” Nana asked.
Mac smiled. Accepting that what he heard was true. “He’s sayin’ ‘I love you.’”
Dorothy nodded. Nana too. In that moment, they lacked for nothing. Then they held each other close. And against Mac’s chest, unseen by any of them, the God Machine began to glow.
Enjoyed your first foray into historical fiction! The red bulb blinking on cinematically over the confessional was a masterstroke.
I think my favorite part of the story might have been the God Machine's "failure": Malcolm discovers that it can't always detect the presence of God, not because God isn't there, but because *the bulb filament is broken* --- we are the ones who fail to detect Him.
Can't wait to see what you write next!
So good Bob. Love all the historic details and the ending was really touching.