“It Came Out of the Sky”

“It Came Out of the Sky” is a Creedence Clearwater Revival song lyric used as an epigraph, and its image of a man running into town with news of something falling from the sky sets an opening note of rumor and astonishment. The narrative then turns from that sudden arrival to Haven’s longer history, where a revival preacher’s promises of harvest and sanctuary likewise become part of the town’s enduring story.

The lyric and the opening

The epigraph gives the reader a compressed scene: someone has seen something come out of the sky, and runs to town shouting the news. It is not presented as an event in the plot but as a borrowed musical image, placed immediately before the chapter heading “THE TOWN.” Its urgency anticipates the book’s attention to extraordinary arrivals and the way a community receives, repeats, and reshapes news of them.

A town made through revival language

The historical account that follows describes a fast-talking preacher, Colson, arriving in Ilium in the summer of 1900. He wins much of the town’s Christian population with a lively revival, while the established Methodist and Baptist ministers fail to halt his growing influence. Colson’s sermons make the harvest a sign of divine reward and describe the town as a haven, joining religious promise to a new local identity. During a sermon on a hot August night, Colson declares that the town is sanctified and calls it a haven. He then argues that a place promising God’s harvest and refuge should not bear the name Ilium, which he disparages as the name of a foreigner. Talk of changing the name begins the next day. At the following March town meeting, Article 14 proposes changing the incorporated town’s name from Ilium to Haven; the measure passes, despite the opposition of the Reverend Hartley and the practical costs of replacing official papers and road signs.

The promise and its cost

Colson’s language of harvest carries an ugly double meaning. Before leaving town, he solicits a large “love-offering” from revival attendees and has sex with six young women behind the tent. He departs on the night of September 7, 1900, and by the morning of September 8 both preacher and tent are gone. In the months that follow, nine children are born out of wedlock in the area; all have thick black hair, and six have blue eyes. The town’s harvest imagery thus becomes inseparable from sexual exploitation and its consequences. The episode’s darkest consequence comes two days after the town votes to change its name. Paul Clarendon kills his newborn son with a straight razor, then kills his wife and himself. The account places this family tragedy directly after the vote, making the new name’s promise of sanctuary stand beside an act of intimate violence rather than erase it. The lyric’s news of an arrival from the sky is therefore an apt threshold image for a narrative in which the extraordinary can enter ordinary life, while the town’s own origin legend reveals how easily a promise becomes a story that conceals its price.

Recurrence and irony

The book later returns to the language of bells and religious inspiration through the Reverend Lester Goohringer, who privately devises a new carillon and rewires the church basement to supply the voltage it requires. His plan is accompanied by a sudden, coarse freedom of thought and speech that he has not previously experienced. This later episode does not repeat Colson’s revival, but it echoes the tension between religious forms, private impulses, and the town’s capacity to turn an idea into public spectacle. As an epigraph, “It Came Out of the Sky” works through juxtaposition rather than explanation: its brief report of an astonishing arrival precedes a history of a town whose name and self-image were themselves remade by a preacher’s theatrical promises. The song’s startled cry is an opening signal for a book in which the boundary between the unbelievable and the publicly accepted is repeatedly tested.