His Name Was Michael By Layne Mulcahy
Jonesville, Missouri is a tiny town in the midwest of Nowhere, America, that boasts a population under a thousand, most of whom are devout Christians somewhere between working-class and poor. The town has a handful of churches, if they could even be called that. Every Sunday morning, for example, Jonesville’s single nondenominational parish gathers in the living room of the pastor’s little farmhouse out by the highway to hear the service, and every Sunday afternoon the pastor’s wife holds Sunday school in the backyard, a tract of land double the size of the house and decorated only with dry, bone-colored grass. The rest of the churches are similar, only one having its own dedicated building, the others housed in homes, old sheds, and barns. That’s no bother to the people of Jonesville, though. They’ve watched passionate sermons delivered from fireplace pulpits while sitting on folding chairs and old couches for generations. It’s simply the way things are. Trevor Midfield is not from Jonesville, Missouri. He’s not from there, but he spent his entire childhood speeding down the highway seeing the curious little farmhouse churches whiz by his window and wondering how tiny a town must be to not have proper ones. His imagination would wander, conjuring intricate fantasies onto the infinitely rolling cow pastures. Chief among them was the story of a young boy—always roughly his age, whether it be seven or fourteen—who would appear on the pastor’s doorstep, unknown to anyone around, and become a ward of the town. He had a name but no history, no family, and no home. The pastor would offer for him to stay in the farmhouse, and he would oblige. The following Sunday, the townsfolk would gather, as they always did, and be taken aback by the mysterious youngster who now found himself among them. In some versions of the story, he became like an adopted son to the pastor, who had never fathered children of his own. In others, all the people of Jonesville chipped in and raised him together. In others still, the pastor had a beautiful daughter (conveniently his age), and they fell in love. These stories had been the undercurrent of Trevor Midfield’s whole life. Even as he grew older, as he moved away from his modestly rural hometown to the modestly urban Kansas City, these stories captivated him. At every dead-end job, in the waiting room before every interview and audition that would never be “the one,” his mind returned to the boy. It was a quaint story, a relic of a simpler life that he had always dreamed of but never had. It was three weeks ago now that he had decided to make it real. As his ‘98 Toyota braved the blank interior of his home state, Trevor was not pondering the imaginary boy. No, at this exact moment, passing identical cow pastures to the ones that framed his fantasy, he was contemplating the thought that he might be stupid. He had given up on three years of busting his ass for the slightest chance at something in the city, and for what? To chase a dream? Dream-chasing was what had brought him to Kansas City. Now he was chasing something else, taking the interstate at 95 the whole way there, as if something was waiting for him–something that he couldn’t stand to be apart from for a second longer than he had to. But what could be waiting for him in Jonesville? It was barely a speck on the landscape of the Missouri nothingness; he hadn’t even called ahead and reserved a place to stay. Yet, he felt that something was pulling him closer, something that compelled his foot to press the gas a little harder and kept his mind firmly on the prospects of what on earth he was going to do when he got there. “I’ll write a book,” he said. It was barely a mumble tumbling out of him, and for a moment he was hardly aware that he’d said it at all, but Trevor had a magnetic field, and a few seconds after releasing the sentence to the free air, it came right back to him and stuck in the very front of his brain. He said it again. “I’ll write a 74
