The Quaint Neighborhood Of Mr. Allan Redfish

The Quaint Neighborhood Of Mr. Allan Redfish

Allan Redfish, who signed himself A. Redfish, stepped out his door and headed toward the store. He needed cigarettes, some orange juice and a lucky ticket to start the day off right. He always got the cigarettes, usually the juice and never the lucky ticket. Well, the ticket, he got. The lucky went home with someone else.

Today was no better, no worse. He won two dollars back on the ticket and pocketed it for his bus ride later that day. If you didn't count the money he spent on the tickets, the money he made back paid for most of his transportation out and about. He pulled his left shoe tighter before he stepped off the curb and went over to the library.

He was working his way through the back issues of military magazines. His guns at home were oiled and kept just so, out of reach but in reach, at once. He was not the marrying kind so rugrats manhandling them was not an issue.

He found page forty-seven where he'd left off yesterday. Numbers, he was good at. Speech, not so much. He'd had a hard time speaking as a child. Still as an adult, the first words of a conversation would get stuck in his throat. It was like someone else had to wind up the situation, get it ticking, and then he was fine.

It was a physical issue, the timing of his breath, his speech and whatever in his brain managed speech but no one thought of it that way. Some people had a need to think he'd snubbed them and he fit the bill for those in the neighborhood who had a need for rage.

The thousand conversations he never started were returned to him by pebbles then rocks thrown at his car. What used to be his car. It was dismantled bit by bit over the years. It stood in his side yard now, a monument to the desperate vices of his neighbors.

While he sat at the library reading his magazines, fingers would point lovingly at dings and dents on its door. I did that. With the pride of fine craftsmanship. Only it wasn't a trade they had learned but more of an addiction.

Of course, evil does not view itself as evil. Hitler didn't stay up nights pondering his failings. He went joyfully through his day, demolishing lives. His neighbors never admitted their actions and if they did, fibbed to themselves about why. The physical acts mirrored the destruction of their souls, but they always turned the mirror outward, hoping to flash the brightness toward someone else's faults.

Sometimes the brightness took the form of harassing phone calls. His vegetable garden being overturned. His good dishes broken and the handles left in the sink with his cigarette butts. They were intent on putrefying his life to the deep level of dredge in their souls. It was quite a task and one they did not accomplish over night.

The third year in the neighborhood, his home was vandalized and a large A painted on his door. No one knew his name was Allan, as no one had asked. They did rifle his mail and saw that his bills came to A. Redfish so to them, that is what he was. A red fish to be speared, fried in cornmeal and eaten. They were not polite enough to wipe the crumbs off their lips afterwards.

This was not something that troubled their mamas as their mamas made excuses for them. Their sons and daughters were mischievous. Or going through a stage. Or under the influence of someone older.

No mama ever looked into her own heart and said This, this is what I created.

As the children, and by children I mean people as old as ninety-two, grew their hate for him grew as well. They had never learned to grow anything else so their impulses for gardening or model plane building were thwarted and warped until they twined their way up his arms and into his life.

Over the years, the vines became a jungle filled with parrots and wild birds without names. He grew used to the shade of his jungle and after awhile didn't know how to function outside of it.

This is the day he stepped into when he left the library. The sun was bright and he lifted his arm to shield himself. His skin was pale and could've used the sun but not his eyes. They were tired and by now he had taken to wearing sunglasses to have respite from the town's stares as he practiced his daily life.

I say practice as nothing he did ever turned out right. It didn't use to be this way. Once, but when, he used to live a normal life. But that was not even in the rear view mirror anymore. He was not even sure how to find that life.

The clerk from the gas station watched him cross the street. She fingered the seventy five dollars in her jean pocket his lucky ticket had awarded her that morning. The girls had decided long ago, the day he took two packets of matches at once, that he owed them something.

And, so they began. So far, Tara's daughter had tap lessons and Mary's son had wooden blocks, the expensive old fashioned kind that cost more than they were worth, but looked nice. Like you cared about your kids. She liked that.

This clerk, Nora, was planning a holiday weekend with her boyfriend. Seventy-five bucks might not buy everything, but it would be gas to the next town over, dinner and maybe some flowers. She hated paying for her own flowers, but if her boyfriend wouldn't pony up for them himself, she would have to.

She watched him turn the corner to his street. She waved at Landry, the nice man on the corner who kept his yard so neat. He waved back then reached down for his trash can and pushed it out to the curb to get ready for tomorrow.

As Allan Redfish stepped up the cement to the sidewalk, Landry wiped his face of sweat and the trash can fell at Allan's feet. Allan did not jump back, but looked Landry in the eyes, stepped over a banana peel and continued his walk. A year ago, he might have jumped. Two years ago, he would have offered to help the old man pick it up. Now, he just walked.

He walked for miles though it was only a few steps until he was back at his own home. The paint which had been nice when he moved in had peeled the tiniest bit each time he left. His wooden steps wore away at the corners with more steps than he had ever taken. Inside, his cake mix would have a tiny pebble in it and his favorite plant would be caught in the window.

He locked his door more out of happenstance than any belief it kept him safe. He kept himself safe, or rather God did. The devil is in the details he thought, as he set down to polish his friend. It glimmered back at him the way a pond does when a pebble breaks the surface and the ripples continue on til they lap the banks and brush up against the toes of a frog.

Later on, the news would say a strange man had come out of nowhere and shot the nicest man on the street. The shooter was a stranger, whom no one knew, but who had lived there for longer than the ones who were interviewed for their opinions by the news.

There were two life insurance policies tied with a greasy string in his left jacket pocket when Mr. A. Redfish took his last afternoon stroll. One benefitted the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the other, Mr. Landry's cat Hubert.

_____________________

Author: Meriwether O' Connor

Joey Redeyes

"Hey. This kid looks different. He's a little pipsqueak - and you know what?"

Joey Redeyes said to his friend, Micky, "He don't look like you or me."

"Yeah," his friend said, punching my baseball cap off my hat. "And look at those eyes - it looks like he's inhaling a bad fart."

"Let's kick his ass!" Joey Redeyes said, and the two goons, kids really, but a good three years older than me, sixteen, hobbled of the bikes and motioned toward me, Joey Redeyes holding me by the collar, the other kid, Micky O'Brien, clobbering me in the face with his fists. "You want to stay alive in this neighborhood?" they told me, "stick with a gang.

Stay on your own territory. Your own people. Because," Joey warned me, "You come by here again, especially alone, next time we ain't going to use our fists--we're going to pummel you with bats!" And he gave me one last good kick in the rear-end, and I went running home.

"What the hell happened to your face, Mark?" Ma said when I returned back home, a concerned look on her face. Then she hunched down to me, looking at Pa. "Robert--" Pa was sitting on the easy-chair, watching the world series. "Robert," she said again.

Finally Pa looked over at me--Pa wasn't a very compassionate person,he had no hair except going out of the nose and ears--and said, some-what irritatedly, "Ah, it looks like our Mark has been in a fight. It's good for him. Mark. Next time those kids beat up on you, you have to stand up for yourself, you have to take charge. Be innovative."

"Oh, Robert," Ma pleaded. "I wish you wouldn't encourage our soon
to violence. There has to be some other way--maybe we could talk
to these kids parents."

Dad got up off the easy chair, and he took the belt off, and to this day,I don't know if he had threatened to use it against my Ma, or me. "You listen here Goddamn it," he sneered. "The boy needs to toughen up--to not take crap from everybody." And then, perhaps sensing he was being a little rough, his voice cooled down. He flopped back down onto the couch and took a drink from the Southern Comfort Bottle.

"Look son," he said. "I say this because I love you--you have to stand up for yourself. Be inventive."

Finally, I mustered up enough courage to talk--usually, when Pa talked, I was afraid to speak, but he had a warm sound to his voice, and so I mustered up the courage.

"But they're bigger than me--" I blurted. "And, and," I said, "They ride bikes."

Dad got up, flexed his belt and whipped it wrathfully into the air, my was screaming, pulling at her hair, "Oh God. Oh God," she
said. "I hate when he gets like this."

Then dad puked--a big geyser of green peas bursting out his
mouth, and he was collapsing to the floor. Ma continued to
cry, pulling at her hair. "Oh God. Oh God. What should I
do?"

Then I saw Pa on the floor, and the vile goo coming out of
his mouth. He had had a point. I couldn't let these Irish
Hoodlums bully me no more and so I went to bed, concocting my plan. But what could I do--how was I to be inventive?"

Next day, I was strolling home from school and it was a beautiful
Goddamn day--birds chirping, the smell of freshly cut lawn in the
air, etc. I thought about back home on the farm, and how better
it had been. There, it was sweet-smelling all the time. The cows,
the horses, the pigs the goats, all of them were my friend. Here,
I had no friends, only enemies. This time, again, Joey Redeyes
and Micky appear out of nowhere, on their bikes. Joey, the
main instigator, had grabbed my baseball cap again. "Hey you
little squirt," he antagonized, "I thought I warned you to stick
with your own people." He looked at Micky, shaking his head
sadly. "Too bad we forgot our baseball bats. Oh well. I guess
these will suffice." Joey thrust his fists out and me, I backed
away, like a pro boxer, grabbed for something I had stashed
away in my right side pants pocket--I had taken Pa's advice,
I was being innovative.

Gently, fastly--I had rehearsed a million times the night before-- I put the large Turquoise ring I'd stolen from Pa's bureau the night before and bounced up in front of Joey and then counted one, two, three.

SOCKO

Right in the big dumb bastards face. Then, again and again.
Finally, Joey, the big dumb brute, the leader of the stupid
Joey/Micky duo went collapsing on the floor. And then
Micky looked at me, scared. He started peddling those
big legs of his on the bike pedals fastly; furiously. I was
up behind him, chasing him, staring at his legs. No longer
did they look so big. Running as fast as I could, I got behind
him and, the over-large ring clasped against my hand hit him
in the back with it. Again and again. "You want to make fun
of me some more?!" I said, raining unmerciful blows onto
him. "Huh, huh?!" Finally, the little sniveling bastard was
crying and I left him alone--but not before stealing his
overs-sized baseball cap that had said "Woolworth's" on
it."

Well, after that I had walked home with a lot of heavy
satisfaction in me. Here I was, Mark Burman. A kid from
The South. They had told me I had needed an army of
kids, or at least my on gang, to walk the streets. I showed
them I didn't need that.

I had stood up for myself--and it had felt damn good.
_______________________

Author bio:
]Alan Terry, a real estate investor who has lived everywhere--The South,New York, Hollywood--is a writer currently residing in Fortworth, Texas. In addition to being a devout Christian he is also a staunch supporter of the Republican Party.

An Old Photograph, One Slightly Out of Focus”

An Old Photograph, One Slightly Out of Focus”
By P. Keith Boran

Once, when Ira was quite small, his grandfather presented him with a gift – a photograph of him among the Cherokee Indians he traded with. “What do you think of it,” he had asked, “pictures of these people are so very rare, that I knew I must have one, despite their silly superstitions. That’s why I had your father take a quick snap shot whilst he pretended to clean the darn thing!” And along with the candid admission, his grandfather laughed himself red. He kept slapping Ira’s thigh with his hand while periodically wiping a tear from his bloated brow, not seeming to notice, or care, that the photograph was slightly out of focus.

But young Ira didn’t quite understand the gift. “Why such reckless abandon with another’s beliefs,” he had thought to himself, “for it’s the most arrogant trait of a man in business.” So, Ira decided against the profession, choosing to become a painter instead, one willing to ignore most pressing matters for his beloved art. But Ira found the market unsatisfactory. For one to make money with a canvas and brush, one must be educated in the craft, and thus meet the approval of someone in possession of a token gallery. And since reputations are made upon finding anything first in the world of art, these owners live to boast of their acquisitions, their discoveries, their genius. But unfortunately, Ira had yet to make a lasting impression upon this crowd, leaving him to wallow in his failure, a topic his family frequently dwelled upon.

One day when Ira was lying upon his floor, bemoaning the state of his misunderstood art, he received an urgent telegram.

Apparently, his grandfather had passed suddenly in the night, but “take comfort,” or so the note had so blatantly implied, for he had gone quietly without any lingering pain to speak of. It was a proper death for a distinguished gentleman, Ira admitted, but when compared with his struggle to become a famous artist, the matter felt anticlimactic.

After the funeral, his will was read aloud, the only known family function so well attended in all these years. But business is business, after all, even when your competitors are blood relatives. And when Ira’s father was confirmed as the sole beneficiary of the estate, Ira soon returned to his art, seeking solace with a brush, and a canvas. He embroidered its body with the immense grief he had never felt, having left such a large estate with nothing but his name. That is, until a box arrived bearing his father’s postmark. And within its four walls, Ira found a single object – a framed copy of the famed photograph, the exact one his grandfather had given him as a gift so many years before.

Ira held the old photograph for some time, examining the details he knew by heart, remembering his childlike fascination with his grandfather, the family’s ungenerous benefactor. And that’s when an idea struck Ira, leaving him with a sudden compulsion to paint the image in one long setting. It would be a final salute to his grandfather, and a thank you for the funds Ira had used to attend the expensive, four year, liberal arts university, the very one that promised to provide him the tools needed to succeed in life. So, Ira threw his latest piece to the floor, electing to use a canvas white and pure, one left untouched by another’s brush.
He painted the setting first, mixing his oils to create the wooded tones of green and brown. Soon, trees bloomed upon the canvas, leaving a backdrop no viewer could see white through. Next, the campground was outlined. And with a little yellow, brown, and white, several tents began to take form. Their borders were left slightly undefined and out of focus, for Ira intended to bestow clarity upon his grandfather alone.

And with the photograph’s background recreated on canvas, Ira began the intricate strokes that would define the Cherokees and his grandfather, bringing them to life once more. And despite his speed, Ira’s work took him well into the night, until he was left with one last piece to finish – his grandfather.

And as he worked, all the dormant memories in his mind began to unravel, allowing him the opportunity to relive his spotty childhood. Birthdays, holidays, and vacations all came back to Ira, helping him visualize his grandfather with more definition, more detail. And when he had finished, he saw his grandfather’s face in focus, and chose to remember him fondly.

But after a smidge more detail about the eyes, Ira was convinced his grandfather had never loved him as a grandson, or a friend. He was but one object amongst the many his grandfather had owned. And even if his grandfather had considered him rare, Ira would never be more than a trinket made to carry on the family’s name, its legacy. For Ira came at the telling of a joke, one told to validate his grandfather’s need of him at all. And Ira’s father was, as he had always been, most willing to oblige his father’s every whim.

______________________________

Bio: P. Keith Boran teaches writing at the University of Mississippi, where he's happy to be married to his best friend.

The Cabin on Hodd’s Mountain

The Cabin on Hodd’s Mountain
Tom Sheehan

Life, in a rush of energy, was moving on for Clete Scott.

In a hectic span of 32 days of decent weather, volumes of sweat and discrete planning of assets and materials required, mostly found at hand, of course, he had built his cabin. Monstrous, he thought at finish, a palace, a place to hang my weapon and my why. That expression had come out of some past moment with his grandfather, but he could not bring back the where, only the alliteration on his lips, and the full imagery and suggestion it loosed.

Measuring 25 feet by 25 feet, with a covered one-bench porch for fighting foul weather and a small adjunct room with space to swing tools about, he christened his new home as Granpa’s Place. That’s what the sign said when he hung it in a fork of a tree at the fork in the road a half mile below on the valley road, on the very day the cabin was finished. A thickly-drawn arrow pointed uphill, and a small note at the foot of the sign said, in his bold hand, “FYI, any girl named Ada, of age, is welcome, for the weekend or overnight on Hodd’s Mountain.” In three weeks he had two takers, including drivers’ licenses. Even the sheriff, Chud Budnoy, driving up along the valley road with a captured fugitive, smiled at the advertisement, and spouted about it back in town: “Boy sure brought some sparkle back with him, I’d say if I was to be asked.” The word, about Ada of course, was out and about a good piece of Appalachia, as well as an assessment of the returned native son, including Chud Budnoy’s words, “The boy sparkles some’ut.”

He was always caught up in wonder. What would he really find here? What was he looking for? The riddles moved about him like merry-go-round ponies on their roll. In all the mix, he hoped there would be the woman waiting to be found. He quickly thought, Whoever she is, she’ll deserve her own song. The humming of late had become constant.

A month earlier promise floated about the young arrival on Hodd’s Mountain as the sun slipped in and out of clouds, making shadows, taking them away in quick celebrations. He was tall, a trace over six feet, blond, sunburned, and often spent long minutes in new locations hoping to find sounds that had not yet happened. It was a habit of his, to await discovery and make subsequent translation. That in-born trait played on his senses as usual when he came back to the mountain after a sustained absence. And the mountain, with its wilderness clutch, had grabbed him, with open arms one could say. Familiar parts of both entities made smooth and literal connections. Downhill a bird, a cardinal he decided, perhaps perched on a half-dead limb alongside the valley road, saluted him and the day. The young man also determined the notes were high Cs, which he announced to himself with glee, hearing the near metallic song, what-cheer, cheer, cheer; purty-purty-purty-purty and the final refrain, sweet-sweet-sweet-sweet.

Even as he wondered again why he had come home, wide open to discovery, his heart rose to greet the song, each note of it, and the welcome of it. “Hello, Red,” he said, “thanks for the greeting, and the same back to you.” His own whistle was melodic as well and went away from the top of Hodd’s Mountain in a sharp rise and a slow fall. His hand flew out in his own salute as if he was casting birdseed. Comfort, all around, was afoot on Hodd’s Mountain.

Cletus “Clete” Scott, a 23-year-old rebel of sorts, who had contested every letter and syllable of his name from the first time it was said aloud in school, had parked his loaded ’94 Chevy Silverado at the edge of the nearly bald peak of the mountain. The piece of land, left to him by his grandfather, dead now about 12 years, spread over 137 acres of bare rock and higher-level forest of eastern Tennessee. It lay a mere 30 or so miles from Rogersville, in the heart of Appalachia, music and mining and marble sitting in the region’s front row billboards. Clete’s guitar, an old and treasured Martin in a battered case, with the safety belt cinched around it, sat in the passenger seat. The truck bed carried a month’s supply of food, a Springfield Special with ammo, a trusty Husqvarna chainsaw, an ax and a six-pound maul and two 100-year old steel wedges lashed in an old duffel bag, one oversize sleeping bag begging good fortune, a tent that could hold four sleepers on any surprise, and an assortment of fishing gear.

Another secret, to balance his day the way a split personality exerts selves, was also carried in the bed of the truck, an odd-shaped tool box with a worn red cover, about 18 inches long, and bearing a staunch handle.

If there were onlookers at the moment they might classify Clete in one of various occupations or odd endeavors; prospector, camper, outdoorsman, hunter on the prowl, fisherman slightly off course, odd vacationer, rebel about to live off the land. Inwardly he carried a long-held secret about the make-up of Hodd’s Mountain, delivered first hand from his grandfather. With all things possibly coming up right for him, Clete believed he could now begin to live here forever, and do all the things he wanted to do; write songs, play the guitar, work the stone, and find the dauntless woman who could abide that entrance to worldly peace. It was inevitable that he’d have to give the search for a good woman a shot in the arm.

For starters, now that he was without any close family, most all he had known about were in repose, he had decided to build a cabin near where he stood, more than thirty miles from the Muscain Mountain Quarry where Tennessee marble was heavily quarried. Clete had long been aware of his grandfather’s stand that the rock at Hodd’s Mountain was not limestone, as much of Tennessee’s so-called marble had been classified by geologists, but was real marble, “had once been subject to “sech high pressure and temp’ature the difference was done. I’ll not tell ‘nother body about what I b’lieve happened up there,” he had said to Clete when the boy was just past his eleventh birthday, “but that rock’s been made somethin’ special by the good Lord’s eternal fire. Be sure to take care o’it when the time comes. May be a while for you yet, out ‘n’ beyond Tennessee or whatever pulls on you in early life, but the time’ll come. Be ready f’it.”

A good sized open area, large enough for the contemplated new home, summoned him, crooking its finger, bending his ear. More bird calls rose from far below, a soft wind’s caress played games, and now and then venturing up to him from down in a long and narrow valley came the ineffable sense of silence that musicians and composers need to set a new chord or a sparse note, find a new lyric in the air, or frame new thoughts and images in the mind’s rich ore. A thinker’s silence made its way. Deliberations of all kinds rushed at and through him, and arguments of dimension stretched into his hands, into his fingers, reaching for all his art and talent.

At the site, there was sun out front and wind-screening trees behind, and, even wide open to another’s mind, a happy kind of loneliness abounded, solitude’s place of honor. Standing in the middle of the plot, he put himself into his grandfather’s shoes, and studied the view that fell away from him, to the far hills and a hasty trip down through Rod Jenkins Valley, understandably the source of the rising silence. Rod had been his grandfather’s comrade in Korea and, according to his grandfather, had earned the right to have the valley named after him. “Special deeds get to have special names,” somehow qualified past circumstances without offering up any details, though Clete knew they had to be “damned special.” On the side, his grandfather had told him Rod was a hero, but no angel. “Fact is, he carried the same load of cinder blocks on his truck for close to nine years, where he poked white lightning down into stuffed hay for safe delivery. Rod was special to me,” he’d say and wink the whole inside story wink for Clete, who could practically laugh away a whole afternoon with his grandfather, “or else a whole weekend whilst we’re at’t.”

His grandfather’s sudden death set him out on the road from Tennessee in the first place. And those thoughts might have brought him back home, after one night on a lonely beach far away when he felt the ground shake, the family roots sneak up into his mind, graven images snap into place. For the first time in his life he was accosted by shake, sneak and snap as they came upon him, all with a move towards illumination and clarity.

Clete decided the view of this place had been commanded for him, and unloaded the truck without hesitation. The food he locked in the truck’s front seat, set up his tent, managed to circulate his tools and other goods to best working advantage, hung the Springfield Special bore-down on a loop just inside the tent door flap with ammo looped in a pouch. The portable radio had a list of weather and news stations schedules taped to one side, and he put the small set on top of his special tool box.

“Take good care of your tools, Clete,” his grandfather had said a hundred times, “and they’ll pay you back some day down the line. Keep ‘em dry as you can, and sharp as they’ll let you do ‘em.”

All his assets, he finally agreed, were in place. Work could begin and, along with it, the next phase in his life.

The idea that he was back in Tennessee made him vibrate; home had been a long time coming. This time he was saying, an oath as ever announced, I will never leave here again. At last his road experiences had made good a decision for him; he had learned to trust his own assessment of what was about him, ahead of him. With this latest move came a notion that life as it was, had been changing on the long road, and now took on a dramatic change, a hands-on change. He nodded, looking upon the strange tool box, sitting on the floor of the tent, the radio perched on top.

The special tool box held worn but shiny hand tools; a 1 kilo hammer, a soft-head hammer, an assortment of chisels and files and rifflers and pointers, the tools of a stone worker. In Clete’s case, a marble sculptor. He also had come home to break open his grandfather’s secret that this share of Tennessee marble was not really limestone, that at his feet, in a vein for the ages, true marble waited for his developing talents. Treated as an oddity of sorts back in Oregon, he had had two one-man shows, one with his guitar singing his own songs, breaking the edge of country itself, and the second one in a very small but select gallery, with four distinctly beautiful marble busts, all four of them were men in GI battle dress. The quartet had been dubbed The Sodden Survivors, and one art critic had called him the artist with two pair of hands and war on his mind.

After Oregon, the great adventure, all the way from the Chosen Reservoir, was stepping out again. Clete was haunted by old names and hunted his memory for them, for comrades his grandfather had shared in composed moments, a Rod Jenkins delivery in hand, light from the night fireplace sufficient for recollection and disbursement. Recalled, re-affirmed, standing once more in the ranks, came the cohort in battle fatigues, the unforgettable lot of them… Pete Leone, Frank Mitman, Pete Margolotti, Chuck Greenwald and Chuck Rumfola the mechanical genius, Tommy Durocko lost on another mountain, Frank Butcher at odds with life, John Henry Russell judged by a judge to be fit for the Army or else, Bobby Breda with the penetrating mind, the Mechanical Wrist Stan Kujawski from the Chicago’s Industrial Softball loop, Earl Peterson of W9SH Ham radio, Jack Slack and Londo Leuter lost but never gone too far. All the old memories of his grandfather were shaken loose, on Hodd’s Mountain, in eastern Tennessee, where true marble, if anything, was precious… and girls who went by the name Ada, supposedly for the nonce, or likely so, which he’d soon project for notice.

The night the cabin was finished he went down off the mountain to celebrate, his guitar beside him in the truck, like some totem drawn from another existence. He was humming a new song, one he called My Cabin Song, when he parked at Ma Taylor’s Saloon for Not-so-Evil Men. The change of clothes made him a new man, but most of the patrons recognized him immediately, a prodigal who kept to himself, who worked hard, who had given just about all of them (a good dozen early nippers) something to talk about.

The first speaker, introducing himself as an old friend of his grandfather’s, said, “Nathan Gambaw from backaways, son. Hear good stuff about you, like your grandpa meant somethin’ special come of his procreation for Hodd’s Mountain. Was a most likable man, I do say. And they tell me, without my goin’ up there alookin’, that you did him proud with a new cabin they’s tellin’ stories ‘bout already. You brung a lot of hootin’ an’ hollerin’ circlin’ ‘round Hodd’s Mountain, I can imagine.”

He arched his brows while he rested to catch his breath. “You know I’ll never git up there, less’n someone drives me, so tell me what you done built folks talk so much about. And don’t leave nothin’ out; me an’ your grandpap goes back farrer you can smell.” He tapped the bar for two drinks. “I allus buy the first one, but don’t ever know how I’ll finish.” He slapped Clete on the back. “Welcome back here, son. Welcome back.”

More than a dozen miles away, at Shirley’s Place where she waitressed and occasionally tended bar, Rod Jenkins’s great granddaughter heard about the sign at Hodd’s Mountain. Everybody called her Honey’s Hannah, though her driver’s license said her full name was Ada Hannah Jenkins, telling her with no sly idea she was wide open for Hodd’s Mountain excitement… the imaginative entreaty of advertisement and the unknown promise attached, having made the quick draw for her interest.

Ada Hannah Jenkins, hair dark as the back side of a trout, blue-eyed like some spots on the trout’s underside, could say on her biography that she was 21 years on this earth, knew harmony in her life and her voice, could spell words that many people never heard before, and had her teacher’s certificate. She was actively looking for a position in a mountain school where desire and dedication more than experience were most needed. The music of good words continually rang in her head, whole litanies of them leaping within her in the coupled grace of metaphors. She sang songs nobody else ever sang, and could recite poems only a few people on God’s good earth and in this end of Tennessee had ever heard.

Plus, for any advantage she could call on, or others would grant her for consideration, she was extremely good looking (a head-turner, for sure), extremely well shaped (another head-turner from every conceivable angle), and extremely content with most things about her (most things). She had been on the lookout for the man-to-be in her life for a few years when she heard about the odd-named sign maker over on Hodd’s Mountain, and the Ada invitation hanging in the tree at the foot of the mountain, the invitation tickling her no end. He would be worth a look sometime, him parsed and defined, as the image of Clete Scott opened for her.

She marked her calendar; a Friday, for good openers, she thought, and chased that thought with a rational touch… of course, she’d fix her hair, perhaps Aunt Jessie Holcomb would do it up for her, and drop a few more tips. “I was you, girl,” she might say as tipster, “I’d be out and about, doing all the good stuff when my mind tol' me it was now and proper. There is only so many good chances comin’ down the pike, you got to be wide awake to see them live and movin’. They all be dead soon enough. My three men’s proof o’ that.”

Ingenuity and minor inner explosions had special draws for Ada Hannah Jenkins, and she was convinced, long before she would step out on that narrow road to Hodd’s Mountain, that the sign maker was indeed special, had already made a mark on her… though she would not even tell Aunt Jessie about him, or about the hopes that caught an edge of her small inner explosions. She did this even as she wondered, circumspectly, how many Adas had been licensed in this end of Tennessee, or had climbed Hodd’s Mountain.

Chud Budnoy, aware of Hannah’s legal names, all three of them, saw her staring at him as he sat at the bar in Shirley’s Place, in his spot at the turn of the bar, usually left vacant for him. For a dozen or so years, when time and circumstance allowed, he would cap his end-of-the-day there with a scotch and water, saluting his normal off-the-clock hours as sheriff. It was Friday and some recess of mind lit up with an idea… he had locked together Clete Scott, the kid on the mountain, the charismatic kid with a told variety of talents, and this lovely granddaughter of an old acquaintance, long before either one of them would know of the imposed pairing. He found it all highly tantalizing even as it classified itself as a duty of his office to foster community spirit, for the common weal someone had said back down the line someplace. He was sure of that too.

Odd words for some time since his arrival back home had been floating about Clete and about Hodd’s Mountain’s atmosphere, from other local denizens who had kept themselves at a respectable distance from the new cabin. But that respect no way interfered with quick generation of suspicions, suggestions, conjectures, rumors… how he apparently has a host of talents, how he has “built hisself a log cabin almost a palace in these here parts,” where “music sifts down from Hodd’s Mountain just about every evenin’ when lights get lit and often in salute to mornin’ the way day itself should be brought up to account”, where “strange chunks of shiny marble near big as life itself get hauled or dragged by his truck to the cabin from odd holes in thet old mountain itself.” One lone hunter swore he heard “the tattoo of the oddest sort comin’ from thet nice new cabin thet boy built up there, like he was playin’ notes with a hammer agin the whole damned mountain itself.”

Without any self-proclamation or bombast, the prodigal was becoming a small legend on the mountain, and in the winding valleys below.

As Ada Hannah Jenkins stared at the sheriff, resting her tray full of empties on the edge of the bar, and eliciting some kind of connection he was sure, Chud Budnoy conjured up the sight of Rod Jenkins racing his truck down the valley with the years-old pour of cement blocks in near eternal posture. Memory, and the senses touched, flooded him, all those alerted stimuli showing their teeth, biting at him. In one unforgettable scene, when his father had taken him fishing, Rod’s truck slid to a stop beside the stream and Rod, like a wide receiver with a huge vertical leap, jumped up on the truck and withdrew a wrapped bottle from cover and handed it to his father. The grin was a yard wide on Jenkins’s face and a small sum of money changed hands. The fishing subsequently took on a rosy hue for the whole day, even the trout obliging, and the stream dreamy and filled with music until darkness came home.

Rod, he remembered with stark clarity, had big shoulders, a big smile, and appeared one of the happiest men Chud Budnoy had ever known. Rod’s granddaughter, he knew, carried the best of those happy genes. In another flicker of light, punctuated with an enjoyable grin, the scotch moving on his breath, he precociously named Ada Hannah Jenkins The Mistress of Hodd’s Mountain. In a further salute, he ordered a second Scotch and water.

Along with the scotch and water tickling his throat, he was renewing the essence of good old white lightning that Rod and a few of his comrades scurried home for on weekends from Fort Devens in Massachusetts. That was in the early ‘50s when their throats threatened to go dry for good old Tennessee liquid fire on the vast war playground where they trained for the real stuff. Dry coming home and wet going back to the army, full of building legends and peppery talk coming from their new life in the northeast corner of America, he envisioned them on the long road to soldiering. The road, for many of them, grew longer, spanned water, continents, islands, and all existence in between… the noise, the clamor, the long and fruitless war. Some of them came home legless, some in boxes, some did not come home at all. All the measurements, he understood, had created both a tolerance and a sense of respect for things not obvious to many eyes. It made him an understanding sheriff, and a highly respected one, who could sit alone, sip his scotch and water at the end of day, let his mind wander with goodness and his way of mountain life, though sadness was never far away.

And he could not let go of the images that came with Clete Scott’s dutiful labors up on Hodd’s Mountain and all that might eventually belong to him. Coming in a stream from a variety of sources were whispers and asides, about Clete and all his enterprises, accompanied on the other end of rumor by the generally hyperbolic noises, like “that y’ung un totes chunks a Tennessee marble aroun’ like he’s a Vol’nteer runnin’ back, I swear to God.” Old George Blummit on Foster’s Hill said one evening at the bar that “on good clear nights the music comin’ down to me’s like or not comin’ clear from Nashville, good bumpin’ stuff makes you think he’s talkin’ his stuff to that Ada whomsoever.” He slapped the bar top with joy. “Ain’t that the picture of dreams allus hangin’ on us old folk! Be damned if it ain’t.” He slapped the bar again, and completed a picture, “'Specially on Sat’day nights.”

The sheriff had visions of Clete at hammer and guitar pick, chipping away for whatever target he had in mind, and Ada Hannah Jenkins looking on, nodding, smiling, found new words filling her head and momentary visions too pleasant to ignore.

And so it was, the return home accomplished by the prodigal, his cabin built, his announcement and advertisement in place, the sheriff and all the locals aware of a demographic and sociological change in their midst, all the characters at beckon and call, that Ada Hannah Jenkins, on a Friday with the subsequent weekend off from work, started up the rude road to Hodd’s Mountain.

With ease, and with no adverse thoughts grabbing her attention, she passed the sign still hanging in the fork of the tree, The Ada Invite as now called, its momentum slowly seeping out of Appalachia. And timing, her timing, suddenly became most important. It all made her smile, a full and bright smile, thinking again that Clete Scott, right from day one, presented himself as imaginative, energetic, intriguing, sexy, and highly entrepreneurial. This last dictate had become her great convincer, that Clete Scott would undertake all risks for the sake of final profit; she would, in the end, be worth his every risk. She stared in the rear view mirror and assumed she looked her very best, with Aunt Jessie’s hair-do in place, her face scrubbed clean, her eyes filled with expectant surprise. This would, she vowed, be a day for pleasant surprise on top of sound expectance. Aloud, to the earth in general and to the loving tipster, she said, with a wide smile, “Aunt Jessie, I do contend you made the fundament help look its best.”

Relatives loomed for her with that look in the rear view mirror, at Aunt Jessie’s work and the road through the valley named for her great grandfather. She struggled to find bare snippet memories of him, a few words that distance was trimming, and his smiling face whose grin time had twisted. At length she expected to find warmth that the mountain, and Clete Scott, might sustain, perhaps embellish.

Her body kept telling her that she fully expected a sexual incident would take place before the weekend was over, which was why she had started out so early… to beat every other Ada, if there were any new ones on the horizon, to the attractive, imaginative, intriguing and sexy young man of the mountain. Furthermore, Hodd’s Mountain had awakened her to a new and greater hope. She could feel the bounce and drive working her over, deep feelings making more demands, touching at last all her wakeful parts, with deep release and full wake-up.

The seat of the VW grew warmer, torpid air caressed her brow, slid about her body, caressed her. Whether it was heat or some unknown energy, she had fluctuating ideas. Odd and inert muscles loosened and then tightened the length of her body, and she swore she could smell smoke and not see any smoke. These impacts were not entirely new. That she was bringing some kind of richness with her, not as bounty but as gift, filled her to overflowing. Lack of confidence had never been a fear for her; she felt the load of confidence, and the explosions that might come of it, to be continual, lasting, daring explosions filled with richness, and good old fashioned desire.

Memories of a few false encounters piqued her for a small portion of the ride along the valley road. They were, she knew, engendered as part of her soulful preparation; bringing memories back… a haymow experience where young Jud Hamlett had placed her hand elsewhere and she had bolted from the loft; a harsh and irreverent incident at a college party that cooled her ardor for a full semester, catching her roommate with three upper classmen on her dorm bed; and a neighbor, a doctor no less, who pretended to be what he wasn’t.

This new encounter, on which she swore an oath, would be on her terms. She would ascend the mountain, view the subject, make up her mind, like Tag, like Ring-a-leevio, like,You’re it, buster. She felt resolute as she shifted into a lower gear.

She was more than halfway up the mountain. The 7-year-old VW crunched and slid on the narrow road, the steep climb occasionally making hard demands on the engine. Full alert was working its way in her mind, when the engine suddenly quit. It flat-out quit on a harsh turn in the road. Urgent tries made no impact on the little motor that could no longer climb, as if frozen in place. She pulled up the rear lid and looked at nothing knowledgeable under the engine cover, nothing at all familiar. She started blowing the horn. In minutes the mountain blond was at her side, coming in through a copse of young trees, an ax over his shoulder.

“You like these little bugs, do you.” He nodded at the little orange car immobile there on the road, like the last drone had made its play outside the hive, now silent. He was not being solicitous, she mused, as the sun played all around him, shirtless, muscled, sweaty, alive as any man she had seen in months and months. His smile was slightly crooked, the way second messages are carried.

“Are you an Ada?” he said. The strange, sinuous energies lit through her again, the wires all touching the way they might never touch again. Comfort zones were knocking at each other. His voice was marvelously in tune with something around them and he was so direct, so handsome, the early sun lighting him up, making him vibrant. For the first time in a long while she was alert to every part awake in her body. It was as if her mind, or his, had leaked out secret directions. She heard herself think up words she had not said before, “Oh, God, I love you.” The exclamation sat weighted at her mouth and she was frightened he could read her lips. What a giveaway that would be. Yet the pot boiled again, the cauldron amid the flames, all her life perking; it was beautiful, it flooded her, made her almost fluid, yet traceable, a form and format exposed… she was the image of desire.

The happening was there, his smile had lit her whole body; unsaid words on his lips, blue eyes that found instant agreement, the whole, fast, blood-lovely aura of youth. The beauty of it, and the promise, assailed her. He could tell her anything, and she’d believe it. “I love you already,” she said again to herself, even as she tried to separate her thoughts and her feelings, all the mash coming upon her at the same time… the numbers of Adas that existed around them, the unknown climbs by unknown numbers up the path to Hodd’s Mountain. The scales of measurement came to play within her mind, noting the sun bouncing off his sweaty but muscular arms, the blond locks sitting on his forehead like some pennant flown for messaging, his eyes too at a near liquid measurement of her own healthy attributes… all of them. She was comfortable in her own being, she could pass any inspection. The sly, sliding eyes, though, were not really that sly, the way they paused and posed. All of it became electric, the wires so familiar, the whole grid work of them, the endless connections. Aunt Jessie’s supposed hasty introduction to life and her own false alarms had rounded her into shape for any encounter the weekend would bring.

She had made herself ready, mostly.

“I am Ada Hannah Jenkins,” she said, and all wariness was gone as if it had fallen down the mountainside.

He had already noticed parts of her and stared into her eyes as if she was the Burning Bush, perhaps all the elements of youth. For a long moment something unsaid but understood hung in the air about them. At length he said, “I will make songs for you. I will show you my stone people. You will find me all at once, I swear.” His eyes locked on hers again, the blue came back from wherever it had gone. She hoped it was a day dream, a quick perfection, a proper introduction. She tasted maple syrup on his breath.

“Come on up,” he said, pointing the way uphill. “We won’t need this little engine up there. Later, on another day,” he added with a raised eyebrow, “we can spin it around and coast it downhill. Take it to a mechanic. I’m not much on engines.” He closed the rear hood on the VW. “If that’s your backpack in the back seat, better bring it along.” He started up the trail and she followed. The sun was shining all round him, showing muscles at work, showing balance and attraction. The word symmetry leaped up at her and was quickly followed by keeping and eurythmy, all of them working in place, allowing that she was in some semblance of control, and reception, as small edges were being known once more.

Small brush broke away as he passed up the hill and curiosity leaped from all her pores. “I hear that you play music up here a lot and work with stone. I hear that you’re a musician and a sculptor.”

Leaning against a tree, he said, “You think it’s odd? You think they don’t go together? We’re all what we were meant to be all the way along the line. It was all laid out for us, by our folk; every word said, every act done. I have the distinct feeling you agree. I’ll not play any music for you this early in the day, I’ll leave that for the birds. But later we’ll have some music.” He held his hand up as he stood on the path. Coming from somewhere downhill, Ada Hannah Jenkins heard his pal Red’s morning salute, as if on cue, and the triple trilling rose to feed her happiness, fill in her wonderment. And the marveling about the Ada attraction continued to swell.

“It must be all in the hands and the heart, and if someone else has shaped it, then most likely you would be able to track it back to inception.” She thought she sounded so foolish. “I mean, awareness is the great attribute.” She almost coughed at that pronouncement. “I mean… ,” she stopped, thinking better of her small talk. She thought, It sounds like I’m trying to kiss his ass. She had another vision and her face colored. The cardinal sounded again, farther off, lower in the valley.

“I knew we’d agree on a few things,” he said. He held his hand out at a small break in the path. She took his hand and all the immediate warmth he offered. She felt lovely again; the cardinal singing, the sun shining, the young and beautiful singer/sculptor starting his day with her. Ada Ada Ada sounded in her head. She could hear him call out her name in the night. Tonight the sheriff would probably guess where she was; at least he’d wonder. Her smile came back as they broke into a clearing and the cabin, neat as a set table, sat a postcard welcome across a small stretch of grass. A full cord of wood stood its trim corrugations between two young trees off to one side. A rope hammock hung between two other small trees. On two shelves on one side of the cabin she spotted the aligned tools of the woodsman; a maul, two absolutely worn-down wedges as old as the world, an extra ax handle, an emery block. On the ground, upon a strange-looking, homemade contraption on three legs, was nestled a grinding wheel, the small wooden seat as shiny as a bicycle seat. The gathering warmth filtered through her body and her memory; such sights leaped again from her past where family members continually harvested firewood from the mountainsides, in whose firelight her mother and grandmother had read poetry to her for hours on end. Words, at a distance, as much a hum as pronounced, arrived for recall.

For a few hours of the late morning he played and sang for her, songs that mixed love and excitement and loss. As ever, the words grabbed her with their sincerity, words of songs he had written, words from poems that seemingly blessed every thought, every idea. She fell deeper in love with him, even as he prepared a late afternoon meal for them. It was all happening so fast, yet the comfort squeezed itself between her toes, made soft touches on her thighs, at her backside. The work done on the cabin was admirable. He had finished off every horizontal joint of the logs, the chinks filled with a gray matter and a smooth touch. He was an artist in all he attempted; the neatness rushed at her. She kept finding order of every kind in his life, and it continually amazed her, his being so contemplative in all he did.

In the early evening she fell asleep after the meal was topped off with a few glasses of a delicious red wine. The comfort kept at her, as if she had arrived at a safe house of a sort, the welcome wide, the security tight. The big sleeping bag was near luxurious and she went to sleep quickly, soundly, Morpheus taking her by the hand and leading her away. It was well after midnight when she woke. Stars fell in the small skylight he had installed in the roof, appearing to be centered on The Seven Little Sisters, and that sent her thinking to far bounds. The deep pleasures were weighty and full of self. She tried to find a burden in them, but they evaded that attempt, so, suffused, spoken for as it were, she let herself go on. Even the thinking, she thought, has a weight all its own, stretching across the five senses as well as filling the body with appreciation of one kind or another, until it reaches a point where the threat of loss enters the argument, either deep-sixing imagination or balancing the whole action.

Had she lost this man before she even had him, before she had borne his weight or who had borne hers in moments of beautiful madness, this man whom she truly loved so early in the game? For a barely known second, she saw his whole face, the total blond and blue-eyed beauty that seemed to rush through her at that junction. The love she knew, deeper than belief held for a whole lifetime… consecrated, sworn to, by, upon… came again.

Her flung arm touched nothing.

Alarm came on her as she wondered where he was. For the saddest part, he was not in the large sleeping bag with her. She had expected him to slide in beside her sometime during the night. Had looked for it. Now missed it. Silence sat about her as if she was in a bare choir loft. At first, as thin as a far echo, she heard the stone-work sounds from the second room of the cabin. The door between them was closed, with light as a fissure peaking underneath the bottom. Listening, his deep breathing came to her, each breath audible, coded. Then the chip chip came to her, different from the earlier music, but deliberate, tuned, choreographed or composed with calm. A master at work, she thought. Night air, the soft touch of it, the absolute silence between owl break-ups, floated upon her. The comfort was supreme, oozing, again making warm inroads, making friends with all of her being. Love, she thought, seizes all territory, spreads upon itself, asks acceptance, begs acceptance, then demands acceptance for all it’s worth.

In soft cotton pajamas, a trade-off from the beginning, as sexy as a crutch she conceded, she peeked in on the noise maker. Shirtless, under an overhead light in the small area, he stood over a nearly-finished marble bust of a GI in battle dress. The gasp caught in her throat at the remarkable sight. The marble he worked on she easily identified, a bust of her great grandfather, Rod Jenkins, hero to Clete’s grandfather, and comrade in arms. She didn’t know where the positive memory came from, from what day or place of the past, but it was as alive as she was, the helmet thrown back on his head as though he was taking in sunshine, yet the grime of war surfaced with the whole presentation, the coating of battle a visible patina. An unimaginable sense of achievement pounced on her as she shared the artistic victory.

Yet she was rocked at the same time by gain and loss, satisfaction and hunger. “Why didn’t you come into the sleeping bag with me,” she said, unable to hold it back. “I thought that’s why I was here, that you wanted an Ada. “ She shook her head and threw her hand out. “All this asks for more than I can offer. It’s breathtaking. I can feel his pain. I can see the stain of war. I can see his last battle. How did you come by all this?” Her warm hand rested on his shoulder, the way a woman might talk to a man.

His eyes were brilliant with another light as if all secrets were being let out, more secrets than one lifetime could hold. “We’ll talk about that, the rest of the night if you want, and we’ll make love before morning,” he said, “when your grandpap’s all done.”

“I don’t care if you do call me Ada,” she replied, as his arm slid around her waist and the riffler fell noisily from his hand.

______________________

Tom Sheehan

Bio note: Tom Sheehan served with the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. He has been retired for 20 years, has written 13 books, has 15 Pushcart nominations, the Georges Simenon Fiction Award, included in Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology for 2009, nominated for 2010 and 2011. He has 230 cowboy short stories on Rope and Wire Magazine and has appeared in Rosebud Magazine (4), Ocean Magazine (7) and many other publications. Work also appears in the anthologies, Home of the Brave, Stories in Uniform and Milspeak Anthology, Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience. His next book is Korean Echoes, coming fall 2011 from Milspeak Publishers.

Power of Prayer

Power of Prayer
By Len Hazell

So, I’ve got the keys to the warehouse see, ‘cos it’s me that opens up on a morning. Well it’s about ten after midnight and I’ve drunk about a bottle and a half of bathtub bourbon, real gut rot, the sort of stuff you wouldn’t want to know what went in to making it.

And I’m feeling pretty bad, a sour stomach, acid mouth and a head like a stevedores armpit. So, course I don’t want to go home to another ear-aching off of the wife, no way I could deal with that tonight.

I let myself into the warehouse and drunk as I was, I decide to do the only thing left for me to do.

You see I was into Johnny Lightfinger for about half a grand, give or take a hundred, and I had no way of finding that sort of moolah any time soon and Johnny he was coming down on me real heavy to pay up.

Johnny Lightfinger was small time, strictly local, a minor loan shark done good who fancied himself a big time mobster. He was nothing, nothing but a pair of big fists and a bad attitude and sooner or later he was gonna kill someone, that someone probably being me.

I knew where everything was here and I knew there was plenty of rope in the warehouse, so I takes a sheet out of storage and goes up to the second floor.

There, like the good little Eagle Scout I once was, I ties off one end tight against the banister and put my head in a noose at the other.

Now I ain’t no praying man, I never was, but I figures it is gonna be kind of impolite for me to arrive at St. Peter’s station all unexpected like, so I puts my paws together and gets down on my knees for the first time since I was a kid.

“Hey God,” I slurs, ‘cos I was still pretty tanked. “You could get me out of this mess I guess, but you ain’t got no mind to. So, I’m takin’ my own way out and I’ll be up there widya in a few minutes, unless of course, you want’s as to pull off some big miracle for me. Ha!”

I laughed and then I sort of remembered that you’re supposed to sign off when you talks to the big man. So I say, “Armin,” and then nearly craps in my pants ‘cos right at that minute the side window of the office down stairs smashes right in.

Now I’m on the Mezzanine or whatever it’s called, and looking down I see this poor dude with a bag on his head, bein’ dragged across the warehouse floor by a bunch of hoods. Real smart guys, the type you don’t mess with, guys whose middle name is “Thee”.

And I can hear them. Big mouths, voices like they been smoking rocks since they was cradle hoppers. Hard men.

“You messed up bad, people don’t screw with me an’ live.” Says the biggest guy, kicking the schmuck out in front of him. I can hear them big hollow, sickening thuds every time the shoe finds it’s mark.

They rip the bag off of his head and Jees, even in the half light I can see, the little dude is bleeding from everywhere, his face is all swollen and bruised and he bubbles when he talks; I say talks, more like blubs.

“I’m sorry,” he gobs, spitting thick red snot with every word. “I’m Sorry Mr. DeBelasco, please.”
I know that name alright, Mickey DeBelasco, “Mickey The Boot”, on account of his liking for kicking guys in the fork with his size thirteens, very big time hood on the east side. Bad news in spats.

“I know that kid,” says The Boot. “Trouble is you’re sorry you got caught with your hand in my pocket, not that you stole from me, you sticky fingered little Putz!”

Another deep heavy empty thud and the guy on the floor starts coughing out his liver.
Then I hears a revolver hammer being pulled back, man I know that sound; I did my time in the army during the war same as everybody else, so I know my way around a revolver.

The bleeding guy screams he is sorry again but the sap hasn’t got a hope. The whole place rings as he get’s a one way lead ticket to the pearly gates.

“Jees!” I squeak. I couldn’t help it.

Mickey the Boot Swing his gun up right at me. Looks me right in the eye and I know I’m a dead man peeking.

I think, “Well, Billy one chance,” so I jump with the rope still around my neck.

Now Mickey must have been one hell of a marksman, that’s all I can say. One bullet, one shot, on the fly from the shoulder and he cuts the rope in two. I don’t know if he meant to do it or not but I crash in a heap right at his feet.

“What the Hell is this?” says The Boot. “You trying to kill yourself or something?”

My shoulder hurts, so there’s tears in my eyes, but I snarl back, “Yeah, what’s it too ya?”

“You dumb fuck,” He grunts, pulling me back on to my feet. “Don’t you know suicide is a mortal sin? You do that shit and you go straight to Hell!”

Mickey was a good catholic boy, most of the hoods were, except for them that was Jewish.
“So what,” I says like I got nothing left to live for. Mickey slaps me but good for that lip and I go down hard and find myself face to familiar face with the dead corpse and would you believe it, finally I recognise the stiff, it’s Johnny Lightfinger, the guy I owe half a grand to, well not anymore.

“Jesus, Mr. The Boot sir,” I burble. “You killed this son of a bitch. I can’t thank you enough for that.”

This throws the hood and his two goons, they all start laughing like drains.

“Guess nobody liked Johnny then,” snorts Mickey The Boot. “You still wanna kill yourself Potzo?”
I think about it for a minute.

“Don’t need to now do I.” I join them laughing and wipe the blood from my mouth. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you boss. You guys get out of here; leave me your gun and Mr Lightfoot. When the cops come, I’ll say I shot him. Everyone knows I hated him.”
Mickey looks at me in disbelief. The laughing stops.

“Now why the fuck would you do that?” he demands. “They’ll give you the chair.”
I nod.

“Yeah but an executed innocent man is more likely to get in to heaven than a suicide right. I see Johnny dead, you won’t even be suspected and I get a bit of peace at last; everyone’s a winner, yeah?”

Mickey looks at me for a minute then breaks in to that evil smile again.

“You are the craziest son of a bitch’s bastard that ever walked this earth,” he says, slapping me on the back, me, like we was old pals; and then we all hear the sirens and bells coming.

He rubs the gun in his silk nose wiper, for prints, and pushes it straight into the palm of my hand; then he winks at me, all friendly.

“Okay Mr. you got a deal.” He pats my cheek and turns away, “Henry The Moose, Freddy The Fist, let’s get out of here.”

And the dumb bastards all turn their backs on me, Jesus how stupid can you get; I shot them all as they walked away.

Like I said, I know my way round a revolver.

They dropped like stones and I went to work.

Between their pockets and Johnny Lightfinger’s wallet, I got myself a couple of grand that night, a couple of nice watches and a new hat.

Then I locked up, left and went home.

I figured I’d call in sick in the morning, let some one else find the mess and write it of as a turf battle. Cops got better things to do than get killed sticking their beaks in to the business of the likes of Mickey DeBelasco; anyhow they’d be as glad as any of us to see him dead.

Still I kept the gun though just in case Elsie wouldn’t shut the fuck up when I got home.

_________________________

Len Hazell is a writer, actor, performer and composer working in the UK.
He is 46 years old, a slave to his family and dogs and hopes one day to get a life.
E-mail at Bonniefans@hotmail.com

The Way Things Are

The Way Things Are
~ Bamberg, South Carolina, 1914 ~

There isn’t an easy way to tell him.

It doesn’t matter how many times Ambrose takes off his straw hat to scratch his tangled, red hair. He must find a way to tell the boy. He figures it better happen now rather than later. It’s not even his choice to tell him.

He must do it, or else he won’t come back.

A sharp grit grinds his gut. Ambrose remembers the feeling – like the time he told his five-year-old daughter why he had to shoot their old, basset hound. The animal was limping away from the farm trying to find a place to die. Ambrose introduced pain and death into her vocabulary.

No true, God fearing man wants to be the hammer chipping away a child’s innocence. He thinks innocence is only a vulnerable, but tough-looking brick that must be smashed to create an adult.
Ambrose takes a stained handkerchief out of his overalls’ pocket. He dabs it on his forehead as he watches the early sunset touch his fields of soybean plants, cotton, wheat and corn. He has employed men – black and white – in his grist mill and on his farm. He pays the most in Bamberg County and uses modern farm equipment.

Yet, for him, the most valuable thing on his soil is the footprints of two little boys. Their little hands dig in the mud, especially if it’s after a recent rain. Several times when the boys play, Ambrose stops his combine in the wheat field. He watches his nephew run through the cornhusks trying to find his friend.

“Let the boys have a little more time,” says Ambrose’s wife, Addy, as she walks onto the porch and caresses his shoulders.
“JD’s got to come in for his bath,” Ambrose replies. “I think I see Pastor Eth driving up in his wagon now.”

Ambrose watches Pastor Eth Benedict pull the reins. His black horse stops, and the pastor pulls the break. He climbs out of the wagon like a little child. The footstep is a long way down for his short legs.

The black man walks to the bottom of Ambrose’s porch steps.
Pastor Eth never comes up the steps. Ambrose doesn’t mind if he chooses to, but he doesn’t invite him, either.

No one says anything.

“Did you have a safe ride over here?” Addy asks.

“Why yes, Mrs. Addy. It is such a beautiful day that I had to slow down to look at God’s country.”

Ambrose recalls the first time he met Eth. One of the workers brought the pastor to meet him. A then graduate of Tuskegee University stood there in his navy blue suit jacket and bow tie. He came back to run his father’s church in the small, black town of Benediction – about fifteen miles south of Bamberg. Ambrose learned a part of Eth’s ministry was dedicated to help black men become better educated and find good jobs.

Over the last ten years, Ambrose did what he could to secure jobs for some of Eth’s men.

Recently, JD and Eth’s son, Smokey, have made business personal. Too personal for JD’s father’s comfort.

“Where are the boys?” Eth asks.

“I imagine they’ll be running back here in a few minutes,”

Ambrose says. “I told JD they had a few more minutes to play. Aurelia Jean went with them.”

The sound of weeping, heavy breathing and running catch Ambrose’s ear. He puts his hat down on the porch railing. Right into his arms, Aurelia Jean wraps her arms around him.

“Daddy, daddy, those boys are so mean.”

He looks into her puffy, brown eyes. She sticks out her lower lip. Her face is red and full of freckles. Two auburn braids hang over her dirt covered overalls.

“Where are the boys?”

“I don’t know Daddy,” Aurelia Jean says looking over her shoulder. “They were chasing and throwing dirt balls at me.”

“Why were they doing that?” Addy asks.

“JD said I couldn’t play with them, ‘cause I’m a girl. Then he told Smokey girls are scared of dirt, and they started grabbing mud and throwing it at me.”

“Come here darling,” says Addy picking up her five-year-daughter. “That’s how boys are.”

Ambrose looks at Addy and their daughter. Deep in his gut, he feels a flame of guilt.

When they married in January 1906, he told Addy with a big smile that they’d have several sons and daughters working side-by-side on the farm. Three times he lowered a small wooden coffin into the ground. The first two were boys and the third was a girl.
Since then, Addy and Ambrose had one healthy child.

Addy carries Aurelia Jean into the Wilkins’ house. She stops to gaze at Ambrose. He nods his head, and his heart still skips a beat just like the first time he’d laid eyes on her.

He needs to tell JD for her sake. He can’t stand the thought of her sick again and then knowing she’ll never see her beloved nephew, because Ambrose couldn’t follow Andrew Bannister’s wishes.

“You thought about what you’re going to say,” Pastor Eth says.
“You know me,” says Ambrose walking down the stairs. “I’m trying to think of a way to explain things in the fewest words possible.”

“I don’t like this at all,” say Pastor Eth.

“I know, but I ain’t changing my mind.”

“These boys have become good friends. When I look at them, I see hope. I see the way the world should be.”

“JD’s father thinks the world should be the way it is now.”

“Why are you letting a rich fool like him tell you what to do?”
Pastor Eth asks.

“I told you last week why.”

“Uncle Amb,” shouts JD running to the porch with Smokey.
“What have you done to your face and hands?” Ambrose asks.
Mud looks as if it is painted on to JD’s skin. His black eyes sparkle while he laughs non-stop with Smokey. They glance at each other and another wave of laughter comes over both the boys. They fall to the ground grabbing their bellies.

“Get up now,” says Pastor Eth pulling his son up by his elbow. “Ethan Smoke Benedict, III, what do you got to say for yourself?”
Smokey covers his mouth and continues to laugh. His dark red curls appear flattened by sweat.

Ambrose remembers Eth’s wife was thirty-four when she gave birth to Smokey.
“I want to be brown like Smokey,” says JD as he jumps off the ground.

“So I said, ‘Let’s dig up some mud and paint your face,’” Smokey says.

“Is that when you boys threw mud at Aurelia Jean?”

“Yes sir,” JD says. “We was busy painting my face, and we didn’t want her around.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Now say goodbye to Smokey,” Ambrose says.

He watches JD and Smokey exchange some secret handshake. Pastor Eth glances at Ambrose. It is the kind of look that would’ve made Ambrose break eye contact and stare at the ground as a little boy.

Pastor Eth wraps one arm around Smokey and helps him onto the wagon. Smokey grabs his father’s hand as he climbs into the driver’s seat. The two set off down a dirt road leaving the Wilkins’ land.

“Come up here, JD. Sit on this swing here for a few minutes with me.”

The little boy runs up the stairs and sits by his uncle. He moves his bottom around a few times before he is still.


“What is it Uncle Amb?”

“You won’t play with Smokey anymore.”

“We didn’t do anything that bad to Aurelia Jean … why, one time I pushed her into –”

“This has nothing to do with Aurelia Jean.”

The smile on JD’s face sinks slowly like a ship anchor. All the fairytale – sparkle dust, or whatever it is that makes children’s faces shine – disappears from JD.

“You can’t play or talk to Smokey on this farm anymore.”

“That ain’t fair. We ain’t done nothing too bad,” says JD as tears glide down his cheeks. “That’s not fair.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong.” Ambrose puts his arm over the top of the swing. He leans in close to JD. “I want you to think hard. When you visit shops in Bamberg, do you see black children with whites? Are there black children at your school?”

“No,” says JD wiping his face with his sleeve. “It still ain’t fair. Smokey’s my friend.”

“I know it’s not fair, but –”

“Then why can’t I play with him?”

Ambrose’s memory relapses to the unpleasant occurrence of the prior week. Andrew Bannister’s driver pulled a shiny Model T in front of his house. Usually, Addy and Ambrose hug JD and send him on his way in the car with a black driver and black nanny. This time, Andrew stepped out of the passenger side cane first. He approached the porch like he was entering his own house.

Inside, Ambrose wanted to punch him, really punch him. He yearned to see him get kicked to ground and beg for help.

“Surprise to see you here,” Ambrose said.

“What’s this I hear about my son playing with a colored boy?”
“My, my, you get straight to the point, every time.”

Bannister looked over his shoulder. Smokey and JD were running to the house. When he saw his father, JD hid behind Smokey’s back. Ambrose thought if Bannister’s head was a volcano – which he read about in a national, science newspaper – it would’ve exploded enough lava to destroy a civilization. He watched Bannister tense and burst past his car to the opening of a cornfield. He snatched JD by the arm.

Ambrose thought Bannister walked past Smokey as if he was a row of corn.

“Fix this, Ambrose,” said Bannister marching up the stairs. He lowers his voice, “Fix it or I’ll see to it JD never visits your sorry family again!”

“Did you hear me?” asks JD as Ambrose returns to the porch, sunset and the subject of two boys who can’t play together.
“Yes, I did.”

Ambrose observes JD cross his arms and poke out his lower lip.
“Because that’s just the way things are,” Ambrose says.

JD’s tears and Ambrose’s handkerchief take the mud off his face. Ambrose observes his eyes still begging for an answer; a logical answer that makes sense to a child. JD leans against his uncle’s chest.

They rock and watch the last sunlight disappear until there isn’t anything but black.

_________________________________

Author: R.T. Dickinson

I currently work as a co-writer and editor for a client’s memoir, freelance lesson plans for the South Carolina Bar Association, and perform other short-term writing jobs. 
 

My professional writing was recently published in the Montcross Area Chamber of Commerce by Bizwell Corporation in North Carolina. I've worked as a staff writer for several newspapers in North Carolina, including: the Kings Mountain Herald, the Belmont Banner, The Selma News, and The Observer News Enterprise. I've freelanced for The Cayce-West Columbia News and The Fort Mill Times in South Carolina. In May 2008, I graduated from the University of South Carolina in Columbia with a bachelors in History and a minor in English.

My first and foremost project is my book, Sons of the Edisto. The Way Things Are is a short story created from my back stories or history of a main character within the manuscript. I also write contemporary fiction and some poetry.

My website is: https://sites.google.com/site/rtdickinsoncom/  

Fat Love Martyr

Fat Love Martyr

Alan Ingleton was disgustingly obese yet somehow had the physical conditioning of an eighteen year-old cross country runner on steroids. He was world famous for this. He hit the gym every day and his cardio was unmatched by most. He ran marathons and half marathons and had even tried his hand in a few triathlons despite how difficult it was for him to ride a bike due to his massive size. He had completed the Boston marathon six times, and once in just under three hours. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his love of food, he would have been a formidable opponent for even the top Kenyan distance runners.

Alan just loved to eat, plain and simple, anything and everything. He would mix caramel and chocolate chips into pancake batter which he preferred uncooked with a poofy whipped topping. He ate peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, and, on average, two bags of potato chips a day, which he often dipped into half-melted rocky road ice cream. Of course, these weren’t the only things he liked to eat. When it came to food, he wasn’t picky in the least. Because of his food addiction, he was fat; as round as monster truck tires and nearly as big. His weight, however, often fluctuated between three hundred fifty and four hundred pounds thanks to his rapid metabolism. Either way, though, he was unquestionably overweight for a thirty one year-old that stood only five nine and a half.

No one could understand how this gargantuan blimp of a man could have that kind of physical conditioning with such a horrible diet. Even Alan was clueless. Until one day when he went to see Dr. Glen Christenfeld, one of the leading cardiologists in the southeast region. After a few tests, he concluded that Alan was born with what could only be referred to as the world’s largest and strongest heart. In fact, Dr. Christenfeld was shocked that Alan had never had any cardiac complications before, with such an abnormally enlarged heart, and believed it was somewhat of a miracle he was even alive. His only explanation was that his heart’s superior strength likely overwhelmed any possible complications that would normally occur from having a heart of that size. Alan’s heart was near-perfect; a well-oiled machine that could continue pumping through almost any beating.

But that all changed not long after he met Caroline Carmichael at the market near the frozen pizzas. She had seen him on TV and, aware of his fame and endorsements, became money hungry. The villainous brunette with the slender waist and perky B-cups batted her eyelashes and tossed her hair back, and, after a nice spaghetti dinner and sex at her place, Alan Ingleton was smitten.
The two were inseparable for a while. They would go on runs and dinner dates, and would sleep together every night; sometimes at his place, sometimes hers. Alan even took Caroline on a romantic six day trip to Madrid. She deceived him as only a beautiful woman could. But for the first time in his life, he felt like he had found someone deserving of the love that only the world’s largest heart could produce. He asked Caroline to marry him just three months after they met. She, of course, said yes. But as the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Alan’s heart was no exception.

It wasn’t long after they married that she took half of everything. His friends had warned him, begged him to get a prenup, but he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t want to. And in truth, he didn’t care about the money or the house or the Mercedes. All he ever cared about was the love, but she took half of that too; the only half that had ever mattered.

He stopped running, quit going to the gym, and started eating more than ever. His once powerful heart was beaten and betrayed, and it simply gave up. Five weeks after Caroline filed for divorce, Alan Ingleton died of a heart attack while lying on his couch eating mayonnaise straight from the jar.

They buried him in his hometown of Raleigh beneath the outstretched arms of an old white pine with an eternal flame beside his headstone. Now, people travel to his gravesite from all over the world to be reminded of the dangers of love and to pay their respects to a man who was larger than life, and whose heart was even larger.

________________________________

Author: Greg Kuehn
Greg Kuehn writes literary fiction and Southern literature.  He is the author of short fiction to be published in An Honest Lie, Volume 3: Justifiable Hypocrisy.  He is currently a senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he majors in secondary education with an emphasis on English.  Upon completion of his degree he plans to pursue a career as a high school English teacher, a soccer coach, and a writer.  Mr. Kuehn served eight years in the United States Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq twice before receiving an honorable discharge in April 2011.

Letters From The Barn: Summer Strawberries And Greens

Letters From The Barn:
Summer Strawberries And Greens

I almost opened up my last jar of strawberry preserves this morning but I just couldn't. The previous owner of my land gave me several as a gift recently when I went to go hand over the mortgage. Yes, I was lucky enough to have the previous owners carry the note for me. In this economy, I guess even poor folks can buy land. Sometimes it's good when the banks get the heck out of the way.

The land itself grows wild strawberries, but they're too tiny to make jam from as she did from a spiffy container garden at her new home. Wild strawberries grow about the size of a fairy's pinky, but that's okay. They're so plentiful, you make jam with every step as you walk across the land.

I'm sure the ants and whatnots are quite happy with the tiny speckled strawberry colored trail I must leave everywhere I go. When they come in season, I do collect ten or so each day to sprinkle on top of whatever I'm eating. A little, red summery splotch on various otherwise non-fancy dishes. If it were a savory dish, kind of like you might do with chives. It livens up the dish, makes me feel connected to the land and really, no matter what you eat it does taste better.

Even if you're taste buds are secretly whispering.......maybe it needs ELEVEN wild strawberries for me to quite pick up the taste.

She left behind an asparagus bed that has started sending out runners as well. They will pop up in the strangest places. The other day, a goat came up to say hi and I could distinctly smell asparagus on its breath. I had to laugh. They don't usually graze too strongly in that area, but this day they had. Then, she pawed the ground twice and asked for it be sauteed in butter next time, please. Or, maybe she thought it needed a bit of lemon. My goat is a bit rusty.

The oregano grows freely outside the bounds of the garden, so I use it as a green. In drier areas, herbs concentrate their oils and have stronger tastes. Next to a creek, they grow far more plentifully but with less pungency. Add in a few dandelions greens (the NEW leaves, not the old) and you're in business.

The best dandelion leaf (speaking taste wise here, not medicinally) is the new one that grows before the flower appears. You can just about eat those right off the plant. If you wait til they get bigger (and toothier) they are also more sour. You can eat those, too, but need to boil
'em (and then boil again) maybe with a bit of apple juice in the water to make it edible for anyone but a goat.

Once the leaf is old enough for the white sap to appear, run for the hills. At least as far as taste goes. So, if you choose wisely, you really can relish a fresh green growing right at your feet.

If you're not averse to pork, add a bit into the pot as you cook your greens. If you're a vegetarian and have oil leftover from frying potatoes, you can add a bit of that and it adds a similar full bodied taste. If your greens are still young, you can often just steam them on top of pasta or potatos at the end.

For next year, I need to reign in the asparagus bed, weed it, and treat it properly if I ever expect anything but goat fodder from it. Though if you hear it from the goat's point of view, I might already be doing it exactly the right way.

_________________________________

Meriwether O'Connor is a columnist and short story writer. She works one on one with folks trying to get their writing where they would like it to be. Please contact her through this ungodly contraption called the internet if you'd like your own writing to be quicker and less painful. She'll sit down with you weekly over tea, the telephone or the godforsaken email and surprise you with how much a small chat can help you when you need it most. meriwetheroconnor@hotmail.com.

Matthew Norman Discusses "Domestic Violets"

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Watchin' My Sun Go Down

Watchin' My Sun Go Down

by Rocky George Rutherford


Fridays when I left school I headed straight for Grande’s; he lived in a little shotgun house just south of town. He had chickens, pigs, ducks, dogs, and an old mule named Murph and McClop ( One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare/Stood stupefied, however he came there: / Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud )who just stood and stared. Grande didn’t have a wife so I didn’t have a grandmother; don’t know why, it just fell that way. He was my deddy’s deddy. But they didn’t get along too well. Deddy worked for the bank and I believe he was kind of ashamed of Grande. Mama liked Grande but she looked at him kind of sideways, calling him a character.

Maybe it was the clothes he wore, the stained cowboy hat, the crisp white shirt with the pearl snaps, the starched hard, brass butted jeans, cut slim fit and trim. “Ladies like them butt snug jeans,” he said. Maybe it was the way he talked, his soft Southern brogue rich with thank yous, ah reckons, and you betchas. Or “A man has got to do what a man’s got to do,” or “I should have done what I should have done when I should have done it.” Or “Knock a man to his knees if you have to but kiss him on the way down.”

Or the way he smelled of rollyaown makin’s and freshly polished leather, and sometimes like kerosene and collard greens to cover up his “red eye water back” he took once in a while. Grande said red eye water back makes for nothing but ease of pain for a while; it’s “the viewless wings of Poesy” that counts.

“Come, buckaroo, let us ride off into the sunset on the “viewless wings of Posey,” he’d say.

“You betcha, Lone Ranger,” was my reply.

If being a character meant looking like Grande, quiet, tall, slim, and trim, taking giant steps in his red, white, green and brown, pointy toed, double eagle cowboy boots, then I too would be a character. Yeah, he was easy and laid back as they say but he could be tough.

One Everybody’s Day Celebration, Mama let me go to town with Grande. It was like a big carnival with the streets blocked off and folks dancing and drinking and buying and selling and having a good time ’cause it was everybody’s day. Grande and I were standing in the shade eating our hot dogs when out of nowhere a voice said “You some kind of drug store cowboy?” It was big old moon faced Egolly Atwater, a mean and useless young man who badgered folks for the fun of it. On each side of him stood his just as useless brothers, Dink and Screno. Idiots all.

Grande said two words “Drop it.” And it got quieter than moon glow on a West Texas winter night. His blue eyes smoked and he did not blink as he eyed them over his hotdog. Just like that they moved on. Grande smiled down at me and shifted a little because I had his leg in a death squeeze. Those knotheads don’t know yet how close they came to being kissed on their way down.

My Deddy wasn’t happy with my infatuation of his Deddy but Mama just smiled and said “He’ll outgrow it.”

Grande didn’t have much money but he was rich in so many ways. He could make you feel warm and happy, he knew poetry by heart, and he would never tell the same story twice unless you asked him to. I wouldn’t say he knew more than my teachers, he just had a better way of getting it across.

Once I came on Friday complaining about an English assignment given me.

“They do it on purpose, Grande. Just to mess up the weekend. Now, I got to go to the liberry in the morning. That messes up our whole day, huh?”

“Nah,cowboy. Readin’ and studying’ is good for you.”

“You mean learning the parts of a Pindaric ode can be good?”

“Yep, First a strophe then an antistrophe. Throw in an epode and what you got?”

“Huh?”

“A big old triade. Nuthin’ to it cowboy.”

Sometimes Grande got real quiet, cocked his stetson back, his blue eyes quiet, a rollyaown burt to his lip. He called it stuydin’ on something. Then his words came clear, polished, like from the radio:

“ Day after day, day after day


We stuck, nor breath nor motion;


As idle as a painted ship


Upon a painted ocean.”

Or “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace.” Once when I came into the front room he was standing in front of Grandmother Maudie Raymond McQueen’s picture on the mantle “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach..” He looked at me “Tears, idle tears.” He smiled but I didn’t see any tears.

Grande had his own code which he lived and wrote:

I am Cowboy
Got to go down my own road
Carry my weight, bear my load.
Don’t care what other folks do,
What you do is up to you.
Don’t give advice, I don’t butt in.
I’m here if you ever need a friend.
I work the land, a working hand,
An American who loves his land.

Sometimes Grande would take out his old gutar he called The D28 and play and sing all the old cowboy tunes like Git Along Little Doggies, When the Work’s All Done This Fall, The Dying Cowboy, Billy the Kid. My favorite was El Corrido De Gregorio Cortez. Boy, hidy, could Grand sing and make old D28 ring like a bell. “Never git’s outta tune,” Grande bragged. Sometimes when he thought I had fallen asleep he’d sing “a sad cowboy song, about love that’s gone wrong.” If I woke he’d say “Sounds like a dyin’ calf in a hailstorm, huh?” All I could think to say was I wished I could do it.

His steady blue eyes cast long and far, but they were not cruel, they crinkled but they did not hate, they got your attention but did not hurt. And he laughed so much you couldn’t tell when he was serious.

No doubt he was the greatest man I knew and I wanted to be just like him, a man with real cowboy style. And I believed every word he said; if he said he was All Round Cowboy 1939, I believed him; if he said he was the first bull dogging champion from Carolina, I believed him, if he said he was the best looking cowboy from Amarillo to San Francisco, I believed that too.

I’d run all the way from school to his house just to be with him, pumping with excitement, just thinking of what he might say or do. But most of all I knew we’d be taking a trip West, just Grande and me. Or maybe Nate Love, a great cowboy Grande liked would ride with us. Maybe we’d ride out to a place in West Texas Grande knew called the Dying Moon Saloon. Whatever, I knew good times were coming.

One nippy October late Saturday afternoon we sat on the back porch watching the sun go down when Grande stood up, stretched his long arms till his fingers touched the ceiling. When he did that I knew something good was coming.

“What, Grande?” I said, my eyes must have been bigger than that old Carolina moon.

He sat back down, flung his long legs up on the rail, fished out his Bull Durham makings, and with one hand, his fingers flickering like a Saturday morning cowboy movie, opened the sack with his teeth, papered, packed,and rolled one as firm and round as a tailor made, lit it from a red headed match struck on a thigh of his tight jeans and blew out a perfect smoke ring doughnut that hung there waiting for me to punch my fist through it. And all in about a minute. As the ring started to dissolve I punched and Grande laughed, reared back, clasped his hands behind his head, and chuckled.

“What, Grand?”

“Cowboy, how’d you like to take a trip out West? “ Magic words, spoken by a man of style with a real cowboy heart. Where would we go this time? Colorado? Texas? Arizona? Sometimes we would even go way up to Coos Bay Or on up to Kamloops. Sometimes we’d ride the rodeo circuit from “Kamloops to the San Francisco Bay.” He might talk of big legged rodeo gals, or ranahans, or the Canadian Rodeo Man. Or the sad story of Junior Varner’s last ride. Maybe we’d ride for the brand or head out in search of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine! How about riding hoof banging, ass busting, leather pounding, hard with Kit Carson as we outran a prairie fire?

“Where, Grande?”

“Your, choice, cowboy. How about Tombstone, or Cheyenne or maybe Fort Worth?

How about Fort Bridger, or El Dorado, or Puking Eagle Gap? You name it. I been there. And I’m lookin’ for a podner to ride the river with. How about a big time rodeo: Pendleton Roundup, Prescott Frontier Days, Calgary Stampede?”

I yanked open the old screen door almost banging it off its hinges and like a wild bronc tore into the back bedroom, knocked his double eagle tailor made boots winding, snatched his 1912 edition of Nancy MacIntyre, A Tale of the Prairies from the pinewood book case next to his bed, set his boots back up while never slowing down, and ripped back through the not yet settled screen door.

“Whoa, cowboy, set tight,” he laughed, his voice slow, gentle, and deep. Nobody had a voice like Grande‘s; it kind of rumbled from deep inside, low, sweet, and came out without his lips moving. He could put me anywhere, make me believe anything, make me do anything, just by talking.

He opened the little red book, with Bill Truly standing on the cover looking into Nancy’s dugout door.

“Hold it, Grande,” I exploded back into the house. Wham! went the screen door.

In nothing flat I was back with our hats, his a fine, well manicured but old Stetson, mine a rodeo throw-away I bought for a buck at Roses Five and Dime. Now we were ready.

“Can’t do no cowboying without the right lid,” Grande said, putting his on and cocking it just right so he looked like Hoot Gibson, a cowboy he knew from way back. I cocked mine the same way; Grande liked that.

“Now that the smoke has settled, let’s git on out West, huh, cowboy?”

“Let ‘er buck, Grande, let ‘er buck,” I shouted as I mounted his solid knee.

I caught my breath as the deep, almost quivering sounds came, magic words forming, painting majestic pictures that opened up our trail west. Me and Grande headin’ out to watch the sun go down:


In the west where twilight glories
Paint with blood each sky-line cloud,
While the virgin rolling prairie
Slowly dons her evening shroud;
While the killdeer plover settles
From its quick and noisy flight;
While the prairie cock is blowing
Warning of the coming night-
There against the fiery background
Where the day and night have met,
Move three disappearing figures,
Outlined sharp in silhouette.
Zeb and Si and Bill, the lover,
Chafing under each delay,
Pass below the red horizon,
Toward the river trail away.

Whiff, Grande’s magic mesmerized me and I rode with Bill Truly as he started on his long journey West in search of his sweetheart, Nancy. I thought he was crazy wasting his time chasing after a girl when he could be off in the hills searching for gold, or droving a herd over the Chisolmn Trail, or tracking down Billy the Kid. Nobody but Grande could make me believe a cowboy could be so in love he didn’t have sense enough to see the sky, the mountains, and the hills or hear the birds calling down the night. But Grande could make all kinds of love come alive, singing prairies, moaning mountains, blistering suns, even God’s love for ungodly creatures.

He didn’t say much about girls he had known, not even my Grandmother Maudie Raymond McQueen, but sometimes he’d mention a name like Big Sal The Rodeo Gal, and he’d smile deeply or emit a little grunt or sigh. But he knew love, where it was, how to find it and how to show it without saying it. He never said he loved me, just called me his number uno podner.

“Greater love hath no man, than he lay down his life for a friend,” he said many times without preaching.

As the Carolina fat-faced moon inches up the Ridge we cross the Solomon River and Grande talks us deep into the opening West where we become specks against a vastness so great we fade into nothing. He speaks quietly of endless days of heat, hunger and thirst which cannot keep real cowboys from their mission even if it was chasing after some gal. By now I have crawled up in his lap. The West is big, scary at times; I want me next to him. His white handlebars switching my cheek as he speaks, his moist breath of raw tobacco and red eye, water back, insure me I am safe. Through the coarse denim I hear and feel the fuzzy meandering of his heart as the West comes alive:


High above the wind is moaning
In a lonely, fretful mood,
Through the lofty spreading branches
Of the elm and cottonwood.
Where the willows hide the fordway
With their fringe of lighter green,
Lies the dam, decayed and broken,
Where the beaver once were seen.
On the sycamore bent o’er it,
With its gleaming trunk of white,
Sit’s the barred owl, idly blinking
At the early morning light,
While, within its spacious hollow,
Where the rotting heart had clung
Till removed by age and fire,
Sleeps the wild cat with her young.

It is dark now, the fat faced moon, mellow yellow; the shadow of the Ridge fades against the leaving day. Grande talks on though the book lays on the porch by the rocker. He knows the story by heart and it pours from him as if he had lived then written it. I am fighting sleep because I want to hear my favorite lines, lines Grande knows I want to hear, and just before I slip off into that silent world, his handlebars twitch, and his lips touch my cheek, with his magic:

Tall of stature, dark of visage,
By the wind well dried and tanned,
Clad in”shaps” and spurs that jingled,
With a bull whip in his hand.

The cowboy, Grande, the cowboy, a real honest to goodness, cowboy! I mumble but he understands and hugs me closer. “’At’s right, buckaoo, just like you,” he whispers. “But what’s a buckaroo without his pony:


Close behind him in the shadows,
Eyes aglow with red and green,
Stood a blazed-face Texas pony,
Ewe-necked, cat-hammed, wild, and mean.”





“And there’s his mustang…just like you and me.” So I drifted off into that great echoing canyon of silence, into the Western night where it’s quieter than moon glow on a West Texas winter night and the fat faced moon shines frozen white. Me and Grande…riding down the canyon to watch the sun go down.

I reckon I did outgrow Grande for a time. Like he wanted, I went to college, got married, and went off to fight for my country. College didn’t make me a better man, marriage didn’t work and war warped me. Grande died sometime during this bitterness and I never said goodbye. Our worlds had separated, he went his way, and I, mine, his passing just another casualty but I never forgot him.

When I finally came to my senses and visited home, my father had torn down the “old eyesore,” shotgun house but I went to the empty lot to see if I could find Grand’s spirit there; I really wanted to say goodbye like I should have done in the first place. I couldn’t make myself go to his grave because I just could not believe he was dead. It’s like he said “Dying is a part of living, cowboy.”

“But, Grande, we never did anything to hurt anyone. Yet the sonsofbitches of this world put all their filth and evil on us. We die for them and they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other.

“Grande, it’s me, McQueen, I’m a man now but I kinda lost my way. Please come and take me West again. You know I always wanted to be a man of style like you. Where ever you are, please come and take me with you. I’m tired and lost.” I knew I could say to him what I really felt and I could cry and empty the pain from my heart. And he would hold me until it all went away and I’d be safe and warm and happy again. Only my Grande, a man of style could do that.

That old fat-faced Carolina moon inched up behind the Ridge, its yellow glow easing around the peaks.
\
“Listen for me, cowboy,” Grande said if I needed him and he’d find me.

So I sat on the ground where I thought the old porch used to be and listened. Please, Grande, come to me, take me in your arms and press me to you so I can feel you and smell you and be safe again. Please, Grande, I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I am blood stained, drained, and tainted. Please, Grande, let’s saddle up Zeb and Si and ride off together, ride down the canyons to watch the sun go down. Show me again how to be a man of style like you.

And he came.

“Hush, little cowboy and listen. To me and to yourself.” I listened and I heard:



A Man of Style


A quiet man from whom few words flowed
Genuine as a sunrise, clean as morning mist,
Never saying what I should or shouldn’t do,
Strong hands helping me find my own road.
Advice came softly with a touch , a smile,
An honorable look into my searching eyes.
That thing between us never needed words.
I worked so hard to mirror his cowboy style.
Listen to your heart, son, speak without hate.
Ride straight to where you’re going but stop
To feel the goodness the Great Spirit makes.
Listen for life, a mating call, a creaking gate.
Listen to your heart as you ride mile by mile,
And, my grandson, you will be a man of style.

For my Grande who lived the way he talked.I made a promise I would follow his advice and I did. When I failed it wasn’t because I didn’t try. And I promised myself, as a gift to the greatest cowboy who ever lived, I would capture his spirit in words so I would never forget him. Though they would never equal his, they would be from my heart and like he said so many times heart is at the heart of everything good. So, Grande, I’ll saddle up Zeb and Old Si while you make yourself comfortable there in your rocker under that Carolina moon. Please don’t whip out a rollyaown until I get there ‘cause I want to see your magic fingers flying, see your white handlbars twitching, and smell your nearness. And, Grande, please don’t laugh when you hear me trying to sound like you. Promise?

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Author Bio:
I am cowboy at heart, soldier by trade.  I still believe a person is as good as his or her word.  A handshake seals a deal, and "daggum" and "dagone" are a lot better than cussing. I'm an English graduate from the University of Alaska, Class of 1974.  I live in the country in Silver Valley, North Carolina with my "farmer wife," Patsy.  We are overrun with dogs, chickens, goats, cats and a whole bunch of God's creatures. I've been a reader, writer, and story teller, all my life...I've always madethings better by pretending and "telling stories."   Some folks down here call me cowboy poet which tickles me.  Rocky.