FLASH FICTION

SOULS OF THE HARVEST

(Published in Flash Fiction Online, 2008)

Time period: Contemporary

You can’t harvest a crop without killing something. A combine ain’t particular, it cuts whatever’s in its path. There’s no malice in it, just a part of the season, like rain and heat. Food or nesting draws critters in, but come harvest the combine keeps rolling. Some run and live. Others don’t, and don’t.

After a good day’s labor I like to sit on my back porch and breathe in the autumn air when it’s thick with the smells of the earth. Clouds in the west promise rain, but up above stars speckle the night, old Orion coming around earlier now on his way to winter skies. Crickets chirp under the house and frogs sing in the ditches where water drains from the fields. And though they’re almost done for the year, fireflies drift up out of the flattened crop. They shine their little lights like spaceships or angels come to carry away the souls of the beasts that offered themselves up to the harvest. Got fireflies in front and stars behind, and a land flat and dark as oceans stretching out into the night.

Used to be I could hear the old wood floors inside creaking about this time, and I knew Sal was heading out to join me, maybe have a smoke and a laugh. She’d bring me a beer and a cool wet cloth for my head and we’d chat about whatever news was on the TV that day.

No footsteps rattle the boards now but my own. Sal’s been gone these several years, and my boys got called away to the city like boys do. So it was only me at the clinic this morning when the doctor’s report come in. Somebody’d circled some splotches on an X-ray, looked like yellow crayon, and there was this paper full of big words. Doc tried to explain, but hell, I said, the circles tell me all I need to know.

He said, you gonna be okay with this?

I said, sure, why not, and I went home, climbed into my combine, and farmed till sundown, same as yesterday.

The clouds have swallowed up the stars. I love a good storm, but there’ll be no ruckus from this, just a gentle emptying of God’s pockets. I walk out into the field as the first drops fall. Down by the gully where my boys used to help me make fence, I hold my hands out from my body and lift my face to the sky. The rain is cool in the sticky air, washing over me and cleaning my skin of the day’s work. Nothing can wash away the stains inside, but the fireflies rise up around me, rise up through the rain and into the heavens, and I know, now, that there’s a light for me here somewhere, too, waiting its turn. If the good Lord’s coming for me, let him come. He can take whatever part of me he’s entitled to, just leave the rest, leave me to lie down in this field and take root in the earth. That would be all right with me. It’d be all right.

END 

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THE HAND OF THE DEAD

(Published in Flash Fiction Online, 2008)

Time period: Contemporary

This story is not fiction, but rather what I call speculative nonfiction

The entries are written in Spanish, proud, feminine strokes sandwiched between the Apocrypha and the Gospel of St. Matthew. The Bible itself is a recent acquisition, rare Americana from 1792. Each entry begins with a name. 

Andrea Francisca

Nacio en New York en 25 de Diciembre 1808 

This little daughter of unknown parents, born on Christmas Day in 1808, is the first of eight children listed. The last in this generation is Maria Veidra, November 12, 1831: Twenty-three years of childbirth preserved in a sacred ledger. The entries continue but the hand falters, Spanish gives way to English, the proud strokes become more uncertain, sexless. In 1854 Maria marries a man named Francisco. The ceremony is held in her mother’s house and officiated by the Reverend Mr. Smith of St. George’s Church.

A child of this union, Elizabeth Andrea, ensues on October 8, 1855.

And then there are no more entries. After nearly half a century, the story of a family mysteriously ends, with no hand to record the inevitable.  

Who came before Andrea, or after Elizabeth?

I close the Bible, stack it on top of Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Books are meant to be stored in this manner: not upright but flat, safe from the ravages of gravity.

I collect books for the same reason many people do, to connect with the past, to wonder about those who have held what I hold, seen what I see, thought what I think: as if the spirit of the dead could reach through the ages and touch my sense of awe. I consider this luxury of names I have stumbled upon.

Andrea struggled into the world a scant six weeks before the birth, in Kentucky, of Abraham Lincoln, but had chance dealt some other hand, the two of them could have met. They could, in fact, have married. Perhaps it’s Andrea who gasps in horror at Ford’s Theatre as the assassin’s bullet shatters her husband’s skull and a nation’s triumph. Perhaps it’s their son Robert—Roberto?—who must replay this scene twice more in his lifetime, with Garfield, with McKinley.

Or everything could have been different.

What if, for instance, Andrea doesn’t like plays? Johnson never has to assume the Presidency, nor face impeachment: just another forgotten VP. Maybe Grant and Hayes still follow, maybe not. A very young Garfield may step onto the stage early, avoiding the wound he would have survived anyway had medicine then been as it is now.

Or perhaps Andrea is disinclined toward politics altogether, and she and Abe set up a home in rural Illinois or New York, where he practices law and she tends a garden. The Civil War is managed by a less committed man, and the South wins. There are now two countries where there was once one. Southern blacks remain slaves. England favors the Confederacy for her cotton, which eventually leads to another war.

I rub my temples: So many possibilities . . . No, not possibilities, just what-ifs. The past is fixed. It doesn’t allow for alternatives. Andrea and her line stop with Elizabeth, disappearing into a backwater of history which stagnates with names and events that do not matter and insists the world remain what it’s always been. But what force drives the choices? What force decides that Abraham Lincoln will be born who he is, when he is, so he can be where he’s needed at the precise moment of crisis? What decree keeps two people a half a continent apart, drowning one in perhaps happy obscurity, while bathing the other in tragic glory?

We hold human life sacred, we make speeches and deliver sermons, we teach our young to find meaning in their lives, and we believe that love will outlast time. And yet the vast majority of humankind is weightless flotsam, bobbing on the surface of history for a few years until, desiccated, they drift away to brackish oblivion, failing in any measurable way to have registered their existence. They bear children who bob and drift, their children bear children who bob and drift, and so on down the generations, people who do the best they can and then, through no fault of their own, are simply lost. Lost. It’s as if there’s only so much gravity to go around, and those who are called great get it all.

But what of those faceless names in birth certificates and antiquarian Bibles, employee lists and tax rolls? Who is left to tell their stories, sing their songs, note their passing?

I would do it if I could. I would walk back to New York in 1808 and find Andrea’s mother and I would tell her, “I will remember you.” I would introduce Andrea to Abraham Lincoln, as though it were possible for the weightless and the weighty to strike a balance. Then I would walk to 1855 and witness the birth of Elizabeth. I would watch her grow, and I would follow her where she goes, steering her away from those algaed backwaters, refusing to allow her to become becalmed in time. I would say to her, “Learn to sketch and paint, write novels, scratch your name in the cornerstones of buildings. Cry up to the heavens, I am here! Don’t get lost, Elizabeth.”

And if she smiled at me then, she would not get lost, for I would take her smile with me into the future.

The world has turned since 1855, like numbers on an odometer. Everyone who was alive then is now dead; the great, the forgotten, and the never-knowns. They are gone, and I am not. And that is the difference, for I have been to the past, by way of elegant strokes entered into an old Bible by the hand of the dead, and I will keep my promise to Andrea’s mother.

I will remember.

END 

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MR. KAMINSKI

(Published under the title “In an Old Man’s Lap”

in Flash Fiction Online, 2011)

Time period: 1950s

Colleen Kelley relaxes in the visitors’ lounge of the Barnet Convalescent Home in London. The facility is immaculate, even if the history of the neighbourhood around it is rather sordid. She writes Tuesday, 1 December 1959 in her diary as her granddaughter Jacqueline scurries among the residents, making a nuisance of herself. Old age is a strange thing to the little girl, the spotted hands, the papery, wrinkled skin, the stale breath and shallow breathing, the eyes blued by cataracts. Although they’ve come to see Colleen’s grandfather Patrick, Jacqueline climbs onto the lap of anyone able to bear her weight and tolerate her presence. Most of the old dears seem charmed by her, or maybe they’re just lonely. In all the time she’s been coming here, Colleen has only seen a handful of other patients’ relatives.

Are they are as intrigued by J’s youth as she is by their age? Colleen writes. Do they resent her for it?

Tuesdays are music day at the Home. A sincere but ungifted pianist plunks the keys. He’s chosen songs from the twenties, but even those are too new, as some of these people were old even then. The Gay Nineties would be more appropriate. The residents who aren’t being pestered by Jacqueline either deal cards and argue decades-old politics or tap their toes and sing any lyrics that come to mind, regardless what the pianist is playing.

“Grandmum, look!” Jacqueline says. She’s pried a hearing aid from Mrs. Stephens’s ear. The old lady is oblivious to Jacqueline’s antics. She is oblivious to everything, and has been for years.

“Put it back,” Colleen says. Jacqueline pouts but pops the device into the woman’s ear.

Patrick sits in his wheelchair next to Colleen, wrapped in a blanket. He is no more alert than Mrs. Stephens. How old is he? she writes. Born 1863. So: 96. Victoria was nearer the beginning than the end then, two years on in her grieving widowhood. Oh, Granddad, do you even know we’re here?

It doesn’t matter. She gets something from their visits, whether or not he does. She smiles warmly at him and realizes how little she knows about his youth. He’s senile now, but how would he judge his life if he could judge his life? He stares at the overhead light and mumbles to whatever ghosts of memory remain. All your years, all your experiences, everything you’ve ever done or wanted to do, was or wanted to be, has been reduced to empty stares and mumbles. If you’d known it would come to this, would you have allowed yourself to grow so old?

The pianist is attempting a ragtime version of Noel Coward’s I’ll See You Again, but can’t quite master the syncopation.

Jacqueline has invited herself into the lap of an old man named Kaminski. He bends his lips into a grin and pats her hand. “What’s your name?” he says. Mr. Kaminski has no teeth, and his cheeks sink into the hollow of their absence. A growth the size of a grape protrudes from the left side of his jaw. He’s bald, and scabs pock the top of his head, former pimples, probably, that have been picked at until they bled and then picked at again so often they never heal.

“Jacqueline,” the girl answers as she examines the strange defect on his jaw. “What’s this?”

“The missus clipped me a good one,” Mr. Kaminski says with a laugh. He looks at Colleen and winks. “Aiming for me ear, she was. How’d she miss this big flapper, eh?”

Colleen studies the old man, so like Granddad Patrick. He seems like an innocuous fellow. She imagines scenarios for his life. In some he is good, in others an outlaw. But is a person ever just one thing? We humans are so uncharitable in our opinions of others. If this man has led an honourable life but for one bad act, we will forever remember him for the one bad act. And it doesn’t work the other way—a villain may perform a noble deed but he is not redeemed by it. Can there be redemption for anyone when all we see is the evil? Pity.

Colleen closes her diary. The Barnet Convalescent Home is located in the same borough of London where Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum has stood since the 1850s. According to some theorists, seventy-one years ago the infamous Whitechapel fiend was bound over to the asylum, which is a tidy explanation for why his killings stopped. The murders were horrific, ghastly beyond words. Witnesses who saw the Ripper in 1888 described a man of about twenty-five years. Had he lived, he would be 96 now, same as Granddad Patrick. The experts always speak of the monster in past tense, but what if he isn’t dead? What if he’s been confined to institutions from that year to this, leading a blameless life—a life, perhaps, of reflection, repentance, and regret? Indeed, what if he’s redirected his energy to help his fellow inmates, improving their lot, doing good?

Colleen eyes the male residents. She laughs nervously. What a silly thought. Of course the Ripper is dead ...

Jacqueline has curled up in Mr. Kaminski’s lap, asleep, her head resting against his chest. Humming along with the piano, the old man strokes her hair and smiles.

END

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 INDICATIONS

(Published first in Flash Me Magazine, 2010

and reprinted as a chapter in our historical novel, A Killing Snow, 2016)

Time period: 1880s

Truth is, none of us ever saw a live chicken stripped naked by a cyclone, though of course we all know someone who knows someone who has. But Professor Josiah S. Kunkel of the University of Chicago is fixing to test the matter. We hauled our Civil War cannon out for the Centennial celebration last month, and the professor means to load five ounces of powder and a chicken into it to determine how much wind velocity is required to suck a living bird’s feathers right out of its skin.

I could tell plenty of stories about the funny things twisters do, as I’m the one who telegraphs weather readings from Fort Union, Dakota, to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Washington. Then they issue the indications for the area.

But there’s no need for them to predict the weather for us today. It’s August, the mercury says ninety-four, and the anemometer’s cups are standing dead still. Barometer’s steady at thirty inches. I can’t send in the official readings till precisely two, so I can only watch Professor Kunkel and his assistant from the bank’s roof, where my instruments are set up. A crowd of curious onlookers has gathered round the men. The cannon’s in the park at the edge of town, but seeing how the edge of town and middle of town are pretty much the same thing in Fort Union, they’re right under me, across the street. I can see and hear everything just fine.

Kunkel talks smoother than snake oil. The widow Bohnet has donated a fine Brahma hen to the cause. The chicken paces in a cage at Kunkel’s feet. Either way you look at it, the bird’s prospects are dim, as it was slated for the ax tonight anyway.

“This is science,” Kunkel proclaims to his audience. “It is my contention that the near vacuum in the center of a cyclone will remove a bird’s feathers slicker than any chicken-plucker mother’s son. Now, it goes without saying that we cannot duplicate conditions at the center of a cyclone, but what we can do, friends, is duplicate the wind velocity. I estimate the cannon will propel this creature at three hundred miles per hour, which is less than the force mathematicians predict in a cyclone. But the pressure inside the barrel will be higher, naturally, since the bore’s so much smaller than a funnel. Thus, the lesser force times the greater pressure should yield a reliable figure.”

The hen looks dubious about the whole affair.

What I want to know is how in blazes a chicken could ever get to the center of a cyclone? Winds would blow it away long before it ever made it inside. Seems to me that all the good professor’s gonna do is show that high winds have an unhealthy effect on wildlife.

“If I am correct,” he says, puffing out his chest and hooking his thumbs into his vest, “then this bird will be naked as any Sunday entrée—pardon my language, ladies—but still quite alive.”

“You’re gonna shoot that chicken outta the cannon?” old Hank Mohler says.

“I surely am,” says the professor. “I expect it to sail over the plains, then glide to earth squawking indignation in all its bare-skinned glory.”

“How’s it gonna glide with no feathers?” Hank says.

“Who’s the scientist here? I tell you, the finest brains in this great land have calculated figures down to the tiniest fraction. There can be no doubt of the result.”

“What’ll this cost us?” Hank says.

“Not a red cent, friend. I intend to publish a groundbreaking study in which you will all be compensated for your contribution to science. My publisher will pay each of you a Morgan silver simply for witnessing the event. My assistant will take your particulars.”

“Well, get to it, then.”

As his assistant moves through the crowd with pencil and paper, Professor Kunkel ramrods a powder pouch down the bore. The chicken raises a furious ruckus about being stuffed tail-first on top of the powder.

A hush comes over the onlookers. “Anyone have a match?” the professor says, though I ‘spect that’s just for dramatic effect, as I seen him light up a cigar earlier.

Hank gives him one. Professor Kunkel says, “Step back now.” He strikes the match against the sole of his boot and touches the flame to the fuse.

After a few agonizing seconds there’s the terrific crack of cannon shot, and that Brahma hen arcs out over the prairie west of town, trailing plumage and smoke like a falling comet.

The crowd applauds with great enthusiasm. The feathers have come out, all right. ’Course, the blast has blown the chicken to smithereens, but in all the confusion, by the time someone thinks to collect the body, the assistant has picked their pockets clean and Professor Kunkel is long gone.

END

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THE DEAD-LINE

(Published in Frontier Tales, 2011)

Time period: 1860s

Tom Beecher was a boy from Tennessee who fought with the Union. In August of ’64 he decided to go home to his sweetheart, but soon as he hopped the Dead-Line fence, a Reb sentry put a musket ball in him. The fence wasn’t even waist high, narrow planks nailed end-to-end on posts that circled the camp inside the stockade wall. Tom staggered, then fell back over it onto the prisoner side.

Our regiment’s sergeant had no doctor schooling, but what he did have was a knack for setting bones and binding up wounds. Me and him rushed to the fence. Tom was breathing in gasps and hiccups. Sarge rolled him on his stomach to have a look. When he saw that the ball had gone in the ribs and out the spine, he just shook his head.

Tom had shit himself something awful. Wasn’t his fault. “Can’t feel nothing down there,” he said, his accent Southern even if his heart wasn’t. His nose flared, and he said, “That me?”

The whole camp smelled like that, so what was one more stink?

“Why’d you do it?” Sarge said. “You know what happens we cross that line.”

“In my pocket,” Tom said.

The Rebs stole our money after Chattanooga—Union greenbacks was worth ten times theirs—but they let us keep most our personal things. Sarge reached under Tom and pulled out a watch with a tintype of his gal inside. She might’ve had the blessed soul of an angel, but Lord, that girl was plainer than a wood stump. Tom was no particular friend of mine, which I figure was why he never showed me her picture before. “She’s pretty,” I said. Sarge handed me the watch, then plugged up Tom’s wounds with strips he tore off his own shirt.

“No she ain’t,” Tom said, and his breath bubbled in his chest. “But she’s the light of this world.”

Then he left this world for the next.

Sarge turned Tom on his back and palmed his eyelids shut. The sun was just rising, but already the Georgia air was hot and wet as a swamp. Sarge squinted up at the pigeon roost. “Bastard,” he yelled, though he’d been fighting too long for real anger anymore.

“Mind your tongue, sir,” the sentry shot back. “Want someone to blame, blame him. Anybody else runs, I’ll give him the same. Now, throw him over. Wagon’ll be along directly.”

The boy talked tough, but his voice was shaky. Must be new to the war. He stood at his station and lifted his eyes to the sky.

***

Back in January when we heard we was being transferred from Danville down to Georgia, we was happier than swine in corn. It was so cold in Virginia that the Jim River had froze solid, and anyway, we was plenty sick of eating wharf rat soup. Georgia was farther away from our homes, but being deep South, it wasn’t so prone to villainous winters. The camp was big, they told us, with beautiful forest all round, wooden shacks for us to live in, and three squares a day.

I remember me and Tom riding down in the same car. We sure was pleased to be out of that cramped train and into the fresh warm air. But one look at the camp and Tom said, “Christ almighty, can this be hell?”

The forest was pretty, all right, but for the rest …

The prisoners was covered head to toe in all manner of filth, more skeleton than flesh. They had scurvy and the bloody flux and God only knows what other infirmities, forty-five thousand souls stuffed onto twenty-six acres. Weren’t no shacks, and not enough tents for a tenth of them. Those fevered boys had dug holes in the ground to get out of the sun. Nothing they could do ’bout rain but take it as it came. The stream they used for drinking, bathing, and relieving themselves was a sludgy ribbon of sewage and flies. For food they was given a brick of johnnycake a day and scraps of salted pork twice a week. Only the South was short of salt, so they tried preserving with ashes, leaving more maggot than meat.

The Rebs took a roll call of us Illinois men, then herded us into the stockade. The commandant, Captain Wirz, was surely the meanest scoundrel to ever walk the earth. He warned us right off about the Dead-Line. Since then I personally seen some twenty Yanks shot down making a run for it.

Wirz wouldn’t let us bury our dead, or even hold services. Soon as someone passed, we was to push him across the Dead-Line. A wagon clattered by every morning to collect the bodies. They was taken to a field and thrown in a hole like common beasts. We didn’t have room for the living, never mind the dead, but goddammit, we weren’t beasts. People deserve Christian respect without regard to the color of their coats.

Me and Sarge rolled Tom under the fence. Seeing his face in the sun, all handsome and dead, I thought about the news his sweetheart was gonna get. That poor gal had waited all this time, loving her Tom, hopeful, scared, heartsick with not knowing. Then one day a letter might come. First she’d think it was from him, and when it wasn’t, I could almost see her sink down onto her Daddy’s porch and look out at the hills and the crops and maybe a little barn, all the things she and Tom might’ve had themselves, and now wouldn’t.

Made me want to jump the fence myself, climb the pigeon roost and teach that sentry what killing meant. But there’d be no sense in that. Plenty of Reb gals had sat down on their porches, too. Sarge touched my shoulder and said, “Come on.”

I hummed a hymn for Tom. A quarter-hour later the wagon took him away and dropped him in the hole.

END 

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CHANCE

(Published under the title “Is, Not Oughta Been”

In Flash Fiction Online, 2010)

Time period: 1860s

Some folks see the hand of the Lord in happenings that nothing but dumb chance. They say He separate people or bring them together by His own plan. Well, I say God don’t bother Hisself with our daily affairs, so if you see a man in a place you don’t expect, then that just one of them things. Ain’t no beam of light breaking through the clouds or angels singing hallelujah. Just is, is all.

So when some Yankee officer come to the cook tent and say, hey you nigga boys got burial detail, me and the others from the colored regiment pick up our shovels and head out to the battlefield. This time of day the sun be in our eyes and the air stink with gunpowder and dead flesh, but everything’s peaceful now the fighting’s over.

And when I see only Rebs, I don’t think nothing of it. Yanks win a battle, they bury their own and leave the rest for us to throw in a pit, or just let them rot where they fall. Rebs win, they do the same.

The officers say it fine if we take a little something for ourselfs, some boots, a coat, a brick of hardtack. We don’t get to keep no weapons, though. Like we gon turn on them. Hell, they the ones giving us freedom, whether they think so or not.

And when after a hour of hauling carcasses I see the dead white face of my old massa’s son Zachariah, I just shrug and say huh. I knowed he was gon go off to war, and here be as good a place as any to meet the everlasting. Now, Eli, my friend who escaped north with me couple years back, he get hisself all worked up. He say, well sumbitch, looky who we got here, and he kick that poor dead boy in the belly. Can’t say as I blame him. Daddy massa cut off his toes first time he try to run. And he whipped all us whenever the mood was on him, even me, who was never a field hand, ’cause I was the only slave could read his children to sleep.

Borned who he was, maybe Zach woulda growed up mean too, but he never gon get the chance to be one thing or the other. I say Eli, the young massa’s past your righteous fury now, you can’t do nothing to him ain’t already been done. No reason to hate him no more.

And Eli yell, he ain’t nobody’s massa! You like him so good, you can go curl right up in the ground with him. And if you wanna hold his hand till kingdom come, that be you own business. But don’t act like he oughta be forgived just ’cause he got hisself killed. This cotton ball be burning in hell, and I say he getting off easy.

Then Eli, he stomp away to bury other massas’ sons.

The day’s about over and dusk light be turning Zach’s white skin pink and yellow. The flies is getting bothersome. Zach got a hole in his chest the size of my fist, but ain’t no marks on his face. Sweet Jesus, he is only a boy. He don’t look evil, he look like a angel sleeping. His cheeks be smooth as silk pillows. I sit down next to him and touch where his heart used to be, and for a short spell it just him and me and the setting sun.

I say, son, what make you people think like you do? What make you look like regular folk on the outside and stir you up so wrong inside? I got my own share of confessing to do, but I ain’t never owned nobody. What you gon say to the Lord? You best hope He judge a man for what he is and was and not what he mighta been.

Zach know the answers by now, or else there be no answers to know, but he just lay still, his dead fish eyes staring up into nothing.

END 

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MERCY

(Published in Frontier Tales, 2012)

Time period: 1860s

He was a handsome boy, even with his face contorted in a scream as my husband Jim applied the first stroke of the bone saw to his arm. We had long since used the last of our chloroform, and the whiskey had been insufficient for the task. The boy wore no uniform, but I believe he was a Rebel. He had lain among the dead on the field for the better part of the afternoon, until the North’s Negro gravediggers could carry him into our home in their makeshift shell and stretch him out upon the table. He was in a frightful state, feverish and weak from blood loss. A musket ball had shattered his right elbow, and his forearm dangled at an angle God did not intend. When in his delirium he cried out to Jesus and Mama and someone named Susannah, it was in a Southern accent.

We had been at this for hours, yet Jim worked tirelessly, pull after push after pull, the teeth of that saw grinding through the boy’s arm with a terrible rending sound.  Bone dust clogged air that was already a miasma of putrefaction, loosened bowels, and vomit. “Tighten that tourniquet,” he said, his halting speech the only indication of his weariness.  His skin oozed sweat, and he had to pause frequently to wipe his hands so they didn’t lose their grip.

I did as he instructed, and a few moments later the arm dropped to the floor. Mercifully, the boy had lost consciousness by then.  I had no squeamishness left in me as I grasped the mangled thing by the wrist and took it outside, stepping over other ailing soldiers. By now there was a trail of blood across my floor and out my door.  I threw the boy’s arm onto the pile of severed limbs by the well, where it dislodged a boot with a leg protruding to mid-shin.

 It was a hot July evening, the sun just setting on what, until today, had been our lovely Pennsylvania countryside. Within the house I had to steel myself against the moans and the sobbing, lest despair rob me of the strength to do what was necessary. At least out here it was quiet, the cannon and the rifles now silent, the awful Rebel yell subdued by exhaustion, sleep, or death.  

Still, I kept my eyes on my feet as I turned back to the door. I dared not look out to the field to see how many more unfortunates might yet need our assistance.

When I returned, two Union officers were lifting the boy from the table. They had removed their own coats to serve as bedding for him. They laid him down tenderly, then brought us the next patient. This one sounded as though he were inhaling liquid, such was the bubbling in his chest. He had a hole in his abdomen.

Jim looked at him and then at the officers. He shook his head. The officers set the man aside to await his appointment with the everlasting.

“Who’s next?” my husband said.

One of the officers placed his hand upon Jim’s shoulder. “You’ve done all you can for now, doc. Rest.”

This fight was not ours. We were simply ordinary folk caught between two armies.  Jim slumped into a chair and gazed at the handsome boy. “You gave him your coats. What if he’s a Reb?”

“The Rebs are out there,” the second officer said, pointing to the door. “In here they’re just men.”

I knew my husband held strong views against the Confederacy, but he just nodded and leaned his head back against the wall.

While he dozed the officers and I tended to the wounded. I mopped their foreheads and brought them fresh water from the well. Despite grievous suffering, the ones who could talk were polite and respectful, calling me ma’am or angel. I was no angel, but with our temporary respite, I could once more open my heart to them. I could hear their cries, and I could hold their hands.

Despite our efforts, though, the Lord chose to take many of our brave invalids. The handsome boy had lost a dreadful amount of blood on the battlefield, and when I came again to him, he was awake but pallid and slipping away. I thought to ask his name, but I would know it soon enough anyway. Men from both sides had taken to sewing their names inside their collars so they would not die anonymously.

“Hello,” I said.

He squinted at the stump that had once been his right arm, now ending in bloody rags six inches below his shoulder. His eyes then moved slowly to my right arm, my weary, aching, but whole arm, and for an instant I thought I saw envy or anger or accusation in his face. But then his expression softened, and he said in failing breath, “Susannah?”

I cradled his head to my bosom and, as he died, said, “Yes, my dear. It’s your Susannah.”

END 

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THE EXECUTION, BY HANGING, OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH

(Published in Flash Fiction Magazine, 2023)

Time period: 1850s

Mr. Thaddeus Sunseri and Mrs. Jonathan House maintained a respectable distance from one another as they conversed where Garden Court Street emptied into Boston’s North Square. They stood close enough to be heard but far enough apart to avoid the appearance of impropriety. It was an early Monday morning, and already a sea breeze carried with it the humidity that would mix with the hot July air and create an oppressive day.

“I am disappointed,” Mrs. House said. “Mr. Corbett usually preaches here on Sunday evenings. He’s been absent for two weeks.”

Sunseri laughed. “Old ‘Glory to God Man’ is a lunatic.”

Mrs. House adjusted her bonnet. “Harsh words, Mr. Sunseri. Idle gossip, nothing more.”

“Not gossip, madam. Corbett is a hatter on Washington Street, or so I’ve heard. Although I cannot fathom why, a high proportion of men in that profession find themselves separated from their reason.”

“Despite his reputation, I rather enjoy his sermons.”

“I have my own minister to consign me to Hell, thank you very much.”

“Language, Mr. Sunseri.”

“It is but the name of a place.”

“A very bad place, sir, wherein neither of us should like to reside.”

A hansom cab clattered to a stop across the street and deposited two well-dressed men in the Square. They spoke briefly, then went their separate ways. “Bankers,” Sunseri said. “I have never learned their names. I call them Smith and Jones.”

“Are you not also expected at work? Do not let me delay you.”

“Mrs. House—Elizabeth, if I may—there is no one by whom I would rather be delayed.”

The married woman’s cheeks flushed. “You are a scoundrel, sir.”

“That is my hope.”

“I must get to the market while the vegetables are ripe and the fish are not.”

Sunseri took a step toward her, allowing himself a brief glance toward the maritime inn just south of the Square. “The sun has not been up two hours. The vegetables and fish will keep. As will my employers.”

“What are you suggesting?” She was doing her best to act shocked, but a coy smile betrayed her.

“Must we be so careful every time, Mrs. House?”

“We must. My husband has an abhorrence for forgiveness.”

“As does my wife…”

A man in a black swallowtail coat approached them. Sunseri cleared his throat. “As I was saying, madam, Mr. Corbett is not mocked as the ‘Glory to God Man’ for nothing.”

“He is sincere in his love for the Lord.”

“Can an unbalanced man be sincere?”

Overhearing them, the passerby stopped. “Pardon me, I do not mean to intrude, but do you speak of Thomas Corbett?”

“The man I refer to is called Boston.”

“Thomas and Boston Corbett are one and the same.”

“The fellow who preaches here on Sunday nights?”

“That’s him. Have you not heard? He’s dead.”

Mrs. House gasped.

Sunseri mustered a shrug. “How?”

“I cannot say in the presence of the lady.”

Recovering her sensibility, Mrs. House said, somewhat indignantly, “I am a woman grown, sir. I needn’t be treated as a child.”

“I daresay you would not be so certain of that if you knew the truth.”

“Try me.”

“Very well. He was found on his bed in the boarding house where he rooms. The sheets were soaked in his blood.”

Mrs. House crinkled her nose but remained steadfast.

“It was murder, then?” Sunseri said. “And why not? Despite his delusions of goodness, he arouses resentment when he pronounces a judgement of Hell upon people he doesn’t know.”

The man in the swallowtail coat shook his head.  “This was no murder, sir. He kept a journal. The outrage was committed by his own hand. He did not intend to die, but die he did.”

“Perhaps I do not want to know after all,” Mrs. House sputtered.

“As I warned you.”

The man tipped his hat and started to depart, but Sunseri stopped him. “You cannot leave the story untold,” he said. “Mrs. House, if you would be about your business at the market…”

“Yes, of course.”

She proceeded to cross the Square, heading south. When she was out of their hearing, the man said, “But the market is to the west… Ah.”

Sunseri now felt the color rising in his cheeks. “About Mr. Corbett?”

“The ‘Glory to God Man’ indeed, as I heard you tell the lady. It seems that two Fridays past—July 16, I believe—Mr. Corbett was accosted by two women with, um, er… shall we say, impure motives.”

“We are both men here, sir. Whores?”

“Yes, yes. They solicited him with an indecent offer.”

“One would hardly expect a decent solicitation from whores.”

“But you see, sir, Mr. Corbett had been for some time gripped by the religious fervor he has become known for. He was disturbed by their words.”

A stiff wind came up out of the east, bringing with it the odor of horse droppings and brine.  “As any moral man would have been. An indignant no would have sufficed.”

The man looked furtively around, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “He did refuse, but according to his journal, he was … Oh, dear, how do I say it? Interested?”

Sunseri grinned. “Corbett was tempted by sins of the flesh? Corbett?”

“To his shame, yes. Seeking penance, he…”

“Killed himself?”

“Not on purpose, I told you. He meant only to, to, to … mutilate himself. ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee…’”

Sunseri’s breakfast gurgled unpleasantly in his stomach. “Except it wasn’t his eyes that offended.”

“It was not. He objective was to remove the twin sources of his temptation forever.”

“And in so doing he bled to death?”

The man nodded.

Sunseri shuddered. Elizabeth would be at the “market” by now. Good God, what a relief she’d been spared the details!

Fortunately, his own scruples, and hers, were less demanding than those of Boston Corbett.

Still….

END