Called from Labor, Not Discharged - Timothy Reed;Brenda James-Leong

The Worshipful Master of a small mountain Lodge is dead. He left no successor. And he left four things running that no one else knows how to operate.

Malcolm Crisp kept bees in a cold field in Randolph County, West Virginia. He fed the crows that watched from the treeline. He waxed the bottles on a dead cedar at the field’s edge, a tree older than every deed on record. And for four terms he sat in the East of a dying Lodge, holding an office that carried more than anyone guessed. These were never four separate customs. They were one system, carried across the water from Ulster and up into the mountains, passed from Master to Master for over a century. The bees carry word between the living and the dead. The crows watch from the other side. The bottle tree holds what comes back uninvited. And the Lodge gives the messages their authority.

Now the operator is gone, and the system is still running.

Curtis Webb is fifty-three, a maintenance man and the Lodge’s Junior Deacon. He fixes what breaks and keeps his head down. When Malcolm’s coded notebook surfaces among the Lodge’s effects, Curtis learns what his Master never told him. Two messages still lie in the hive, undelivered. One is a death that was never announced. The other is a birth, four years old and never completed, tied to Malcolm’s grandson Eli, a boy born too early whose health has never come right. The account is open. Someone has to close it.

The crows are gathering at night. The lower bottles on the tree have cracked. And before first light, at the house near the treeline, Malcolm’s daughter hears a sound at the ford that her family has not heard in a generation.

Called From Labor, Not Discharged is a debut Appalachian gothic novel in the tradition of quiet, rooted strangeness: folk belief treated with the seriousness the tradition demands, never explained past what the old people would explain. It is a story about succession and stewardship, about what a small Lodge of aging men actually keeps alive on the second Thursday of every month, and about a plain man learning that the chair in the East was never just a chair.

Written by a Master Mason, the novel draws its ritual life from the real thing and its folklore from the Scots-Irish inheritance that came over the water and never got set down: telling the bees, the watching crows, the bottle tree, and the washer at the ford.

For readers of literary gothic fiction, Appalachian storytelling, and anyone who has ever wondered what the old customs were for.