When the Moon was White

Jeff Probst

Description

Many stories have been written about the sixties, the decade of the Moon Race, and this literary novel, serious at its core but whimsical in its prose, takes a unique look at the fate of the moon during that decade.Samuel Thwaite is looking for a place to put his stamp on. He chooses Goodmews, a laid-back American town known for its bright moon, and persuades the residents to let him establish the world's first Moon Centre.NASA funds the Centre, and while Goodmews thrives, Thwaite becomes obsessed with achieving something grander, that will last forever. He enlists a rogue NASA engineer, and together they develop a plan. They will use a moon rocket to spread paint over a giant crater so the moon will no longer look white.By chance, Banno, the Moon Centre guard, discovers the plan. He knows he should tell someone, but he has signed NASA's oath of secrecy, and prides himself on keeping his word.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803133362
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Jeff Probst

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781803133362

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Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty

Acknowledgements


Goodmews, South Dakota


One
Early spring, 1965
Francine had always doubted it could happen. That a person visiting a place for the first time, could be so taken by it they would decide to return. But on her first Goodmews evening, gazing up at the moon as she stood alone on the salmon-pink pavement, bathed in the front gardens’ white-flowered fragrance, she said to herself, Yes, the moon is the moon; Goodmews’s is no brighter than any other. But is there something in the way it hangs above the orangewoods? The way it reflects off the Mars-coloured cliffs?
And I thought my heart belonged to Arizona.

Even though she’d been drawn to Goodmews by the TV programme about its moon, she soon found that the town beguiled her too. After a few disoriented walks past rows of houses along bendy streets, she got used to seeing windows and chimney stacks directly ahead. And she found herself warming to the Goodmews accent, which at first had seemed disconcertingly harsh for such a gentle-feeling place. As she listened more carefully, the discordant twang became less bitter and began to dissolve into something like a dark chocolate, that was coating a softness inside. And she liked the way that people said ‘Goodmews’, with the stress falling lightly on ‘Good’.
She often ended up on Goodmews Way, stopping outside the scaffolded church, which reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of Gaudi’s basilica in Barcelona. It struck her as Goodmews’s own bandaged creature, but beneath its timeworn boards and blackened bricks, she could sense its balanced beauty.


Two
GOODMEWS
1643 YARDS
The train trundled through another endless thicket of trees before emerging again into the open. Sam saw a small brown tourist sign staked in the ground.
WELCOME TO GOODMEWS
Below the words was a sketch of a crescent moon above a white church surrounded by scaffolding. Bullpucky , Sam said to himself. He disembarked and walked along Goodmews Way, checking his watch every couple of minutes, quickly getting past a place called JOHNNY’S with The Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’ coming from inside.
A restaurant, AN-O- DINE , had its slogan on the door.
SAFE FOOD
FOR THE CAREFUL AT HEART (AND STOMACH)
Such malarkey. He recalled snarling at the TV a few nights before, feeling afterwards that the ‘Decade of the Moon’ programme, which usually focused on America’s Space Race, had wasted his time by featuring this place just because its residents felt the moon here was unusually bright.
But in the end he’d decided to recce it. It looked like it was probably small enough, naïve enough, to be the sort of place he could put his stamp on; and South Dakota wasn’t all that far away.
He went up and down a few side streets, passing a furniture shop, One Nightstand. It had a 1 on it and the street name, Good Morning. Next door was LETTERBOX HEAVEN.
MAIL SLOTS
MADE TO ORDER
Sam studied the crescent-shaped letterbox that had pride of place in the window . Is that what people in this ‘moon’ town want? Bent mail?
He paused at the clock tower just outside the station. A poem, framed in orange wood and protected by glass, was affixed to the bricks at reading height.

When the moon comes over Brooklyn
On time with the borough clock
’Tis the same that saw Palmyra
And the walls of Antioch.
– Nathalia Crane
Give me a break.
He looked up at the clock. There were letters and dots going round in place of numbers. Instead of a one, there was a G; instead of a two, there was the letter O; and instead of a three, there was a dot. The same pattern of letters and dots went round until it got to where eleven would be, and there was an S, to complete the spelling of GOODMEWS.
What is the point – of any of this? He walked round to the other side and read the notice that someone had stuck up.
FULL MOON GAZERS!
TONIGHT 8 P.M.
14 WEST STREET
GM’S DARKEST AND NOOKIEST MOON-NOOK
ALL WELCOME
The trees blurred as the train picked up speed. At least it had only taken him half a morning. He hadn’t grasped the fact from the ‘Decade of the Moon’ that Goodmews might be one of those phoney-feeling places that seemed to be cropping up these days, places with ‘cool’ clothes, as they put it, and trendy shops, even turning some into so-called community spaces. These towns trumpeted how different they were to ‘the mainstream’, but Sam had found in his scouting about that they were much more like each other than different to anything. He’d take the mainstream any day.

A train whistle roused him, and he woke with an image of Goodmews lodged in his mind. He wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but the closest he could get to a picture of it, was that of an innocent town nestled below a downy fuzz of green, in a virgin valley, offering itself to him.
Could he do what he wanted with it? It clicked into place. It was the decade of the moon.


Three
On the last morning of her visit Francine did her Orangewood Drive amble again . Even though at times she rued the fact that her knowledge of the outdoors got in the way of merely enjoying it, the simple act of walking almost always made her feel good. And as she carried up the gently rising lane, appreciating nature’s gradations of shades, she thought, Is there anything more wonderful than unabashedly walking by yourself, looking at , thinking, what you want.
She passed a manurey-smelling field of sheep, chomping and cropping bright green pasture, enclosed in one of the low stone walls that criss-crossed the hills. She stopped to watch a lamb scratching at its face with its hind leg, seemingly in time to a bird tweeting, then looked back towards Goodmews. Would a Martian think it was home, as it ruminated on the terracotta colour of the cliffs? They looked rose madder, a washed-out red she liked experimenting with.
As she walked on, she could smell what she thought were Shasta daisies, then saw it was cows. Their black and white patches made her think of the moon – its bright rays and peaks, and the darker face of the Man. Then she smelled the pineyness, and soon the grove towered up – giant orange poles fronded with green. She went through the stile and walked in, weaving through trees on barely visible paths that were now floored in leaves as slippery as magnolia petals. It’s the sort of place , she felt, that you wouldn’t see litter, even a banana peel.
Off to her right the gamboge tree jumped out at her. She was surprised at how assuredly she’d found it again, but it was much shorter and thinner than most of the orangewoods and obvious with its lemon-like fruit. She circled it to confirm what she’d known the first time. It was clearly ripe enough to make extracting its colourful sap worthwhile.
She took out the hook she’d brought and screwed it as far as it would go into the tree trunk, then got out her bamboo cup from Happy Goblet Massage, hanging it so it was flush with the tree. With her penknife she made small spiral incisions in the bark, just above the cup.
She watched one milky-yellow drop fall into it. It was tangible proof of what biologists studying the area had determined: orangewoods are also found elsewhere in the world, but only here did they co-exist with gamboges.
A pine needle floated down, like a small bird treading air.
She watched for the next drop. The plodding Stones song ‘I Am Waiting, I Am Waiting’ came into her head. As the local Sioux had apparently once said, ‘yellow pain’ is what gamboges bled.
I’ll come back in five minutes to see what I have.
She walked back to the path she’d come from, and continued deeper into the grove than she’d been before. A piece of paper tacked to a tree stopped her in her tracks.
THE ORANGEWOODS
TOOTHPICK BEHEMOTHS OF SILENT GRANDEUR
It looked like someone had written it with blue pen, though the words were faded; they’d no doubt run in the rain or from the grove’s greenhouse moisture.
She liked what it said. It made sense. And she liked the idea of someone tacking up their take on the w