A Messiah in the Badlands

By Brady Bergeson
Contributing/Staff Writer?

When he needed a desert setting for his first novel, a modern retelling of the messiah story, Tommy Zurhellen didn’t look to the wide expanses of the American Southwest;, he turned to western North Dakota.

“You can’t find a more beautiful and desolate place than the Badlands,” Zurhellen said of the setting for his novel, Nazareth, North Dakota (Atticus Books), which he will read from on Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. in the Memorial Union Gallery at NDSU.

Zurhellen, who has hiked solo in the Badlands a few times, said it was the perfect place for a young messiah to go and be challenged by the devil, who in this telling tears across the landscape on a motorcycle.

Nazareth, which spans three decades starting in the 1980s, may be a religious allegory but it’s actually closer to a “characters inspired by” kind of story. Even though the book’s characters have Biblical counterparts, Nazareth is by no means a literal retelling of the messiah story. Told through multiple points of view, the novel follows a number of characters struggling and searching to find connections, hope, and freedom in the dusty, hardscrabble small town of Nazareth.

Yes, there’s an inn and a young mother, but it’s a seedy highway motel where a young woman named Roxy, already living on the edge, finds a baby at her motel room door. She doesn’t meet and marry the nice young carpenter until she’s on the run from the law, either.

There’s a corrupt sheriff who likes to play with matches a bit too much, a fire and brimstone preacher, the world’s oldest man, and, of course, the messiah himself, Sam. In all, they are characters with unique and authentic desires that make them more than just role players in a religious allegory.

“The fun of fiction is creating characters you care about, and then seeing where they take you,” Zurhellen saidon his publisher’s web site. “There’s a freedom involved there, and if you don’t feel like you have that freedom to explore, well, you might as well be completing a paint-by-numbers coloring book.”

Zurhellen, who attended Catholic schools growing up, calls the novel more spiritual than religious. In fact, the story reaches beyond Christianity for its inspiration. The book’s cover features a map in the shape of an elephant. In the story, an elephant, a symbol of wisdom and strength in many cultures, escapes from a traveling carnival and wanders through the countryside, becoming a talisman of sorts for several characters.

In one of the more unique twists in the novel, Zurhellen weaves in the history of the Lakota and their messiah story.

The chapter “Song of Simeon” is narrated by the world’s oldest man, Ole Simonson, who has lived in Nazareth his entire life. “Only the rocks and the Lakota belong to this place longer than me,” he said. He recounts his memories of the Lakota people as he sits and waits for his weekly Meals on Wheels delivery, the only regular contact he has with the outside world. This connection between Lakota and Christian messiah stories was not something Zurhellen was aware of until after he decided to set the book in North Dakota.

“I didn’t know that Lakota history would be part of the book before I started writing that chapter, ‘Song of Simeon,’” said Zurhellen, who teaches creative writing at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. “Since it’s written in the voice of the oldest man in the world and he grew up in North Dakota, I needed to find out more about the history. And that led me to the interesting parallels between the story of the Messiah and the story of the Lakota people. Sometimes the story writes you, and this was the case here.”

In Nazareth, Zurhellen places Simonson in the position of translator for Kicking Bear when the U.S. Army arrives to stop the Lakota ghost dances.

“I am a young man when I see the ghost dance,” Simonson said. “Even here on the prairie we hear about the prophet Jack Wilson and his visions of God in the deserts of what is now called New Mexico. Some say he is a messiah. The Indian agents are frightened when they see the Lakota dance the ghost dance in great numbers and they call in the army.”

Zurhellen’s Kicking Bear wants Simonson to tell the army lieutenant of his vision of a child born of a virgin mother in the hills of the Badlands, and that the ghost dance asks for the messiah to come. But Simonson does not believe and does not tell the lieutenant because he fears the army’s reaction. That winter, a hundred miles south, is the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Zurhellen is currently working on a followup novel to Nazareth, titled Apostle Islands, set along Lake Superior. “It’ll be much more of a water book” Zurhellen says on his publisher’s web site, “which I guess is what you’d expect since the apostles are to become ‘fishers of men.’”

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IF YOU GO
What: Nazareth, North Dakota Reading
Where: NDSU Memorial Union Gallery
When: Tuesday, Sept. 27, 7 p.m.
Info: Free