EMMETSBURG: Twenty

John stood in the rutted dirt street in front of the house. He was still in his dirty and blood-stained clothes. He’d washed a bit, but still looked a sight. His hair was wild and askew, and John felt about as tired as he could recall. There wasn’t a bone in his body that didn’t ache, either from the battle at the creek or from utter and complete exhaustion.

The late afternoon sun silhouetted his little wood frame house against a darkening eastern sky so that the place shone like polished ivory. Indeed, the house seemed almost comically small before the big old Willow in the back yard. A fat brown rooster sat on the sun-warmed sidewalk beside the house, keeping a watchful eye over several snow-white hens pecking at the grass nearby.

The front door was open so that it was possible to look directly through to the back door and out into the yard. To the left of the door was the small window of the bedroom where John and Anna had made love the night before. Sheer lace curtains that Anna had sewn by hand hung over the window. To the right was the sitting room window, which was half obscured by a small green bush. John had neglected it a bit and the bush had grown wild. Above the sitting room, the second floor window was covered by more of those same drapes Anna had made.

John stared into the window of that upstairs room for the longest time. A thousand thoughts seemed to flow from that window, finding him alone and terribly conflicted. Amid that forest of thoughts logic and morality tested one another, teased and hunted by John’s latent fears. Everything had transpired so quickly, giving him little opportunity for bearings. He was reacting, moving blindly in a moment that seemed fraught with uncertainty and perhaps danger.

A fresh wave of thick liquid pain tore his attention from the window. John closed his eyes and pursed his lips impotently against the worst of it. He extended the arm in a pale attempt to mitigate that pain. But it was a force, like some new element, like the boiling sea pouring in to fill the halves of a continent suddenly ripped in two. John dropped his head and cradled his arm tightly until the worst had passed.

Anna was up the street, where she helped most days to care for the Widow Conlon, who'd lost her husband a few winters back to the influenza. The Conlon place was at the end of the street, and was far bigger than John and Anna's place, by comparison. The house was long and painted a fading pale yellow, that paint now peeling in places. With a row of windows along one side the place always reminded John of a boat, like vagabond version of Noah’s great ship. Widow Conlon’s roses were in full bloom along the side of the house as splashes of fiery red amid wild tentacles of deep green.

The Widow and the late Mr. Conlon had been blessed with a large family, but they had all moved off to lives and families of their own. Not that they neglected Mrs. Conlon, by any means, but they certainly appreciated Anna's help, paying her decently for her blessing, at least in regards to what they could afford these days.

The pain had subsided a bit by the time he reached the house. John went quietly up the old wooden steps and paused at the warped screen door. He reached up and glided his fingers through his hair, sweeping it to one side. John patted down the back and sides, as though that might make him appear less shocking and pitiful when Anna saw him.

He opened the door to the enclosed front porch. It was cooler inside. Not by much, but enough to notice. It was dark and quiet, the air filled with scent of decay and neglect, of old wood and dust, and of stale air that seemed to have been trapped in that house for many years. Strongest of all was the peppery warm scent of Anna's homemade chicken soup, still warm on the stove. Layered and infused upon those smells were decades of meals prepared in the kitchen, of children and the sweat Mr. Conlon earned each day from more than forty years at the mill.

He could hear Anna's muffled voice upstairs in Mrs. Conlon's room. His footsteps creaked upon the uneven wood floor. He paused at the stairs and listened for a moment. The sound of her voice seemed as powerful as any medicine he might have taken to quell the pain in his hand. She was reading a Bible passage. He might have believed it was being spoken by an angel.

“… came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and… “

He went quietly up the long straight stairs to Mrs. Conlon's room. The room was at the back of the house. The light through yellow flowered curtains at either end of the long hall was shallow and pale. He stopped short of the door and listened as she finished the passage. By the way her words trailed and softened he guessed the widow was asleep. With that Anna blew out the candle beside her bed, placed the Bible on the nightstand and went quietly into the hall. Simply the sight of his bandaged hand sucked the air quickly from her lungs

EMMETSBURG: Nineteen

John stood in the cool and quiet of the dark lobby. He was alone, but for Sister Dougherty at the desk near the door. He studied her there for a moment, lost in a Bible passage. She was the first girl John had ever seen naked. Not like a womanly, arousing naked, but that awkward and confusing naked of pre-pubescence. She’d always been sweet and sensitive, but with a captive wildness behind her fiery Irish green eyes. One might have guess she might have given into that wildness and run off to the big city or some farther and more adventurous horizon but it wasn't long after her father passed in a long and wasting illness that she gave herself to the Lord. Now there she was chaste and pure and a Nun. Funny how the rivers of life flow, he thought. She looked up from the Bible and smiled warmly at John, as if the same thought had come to her.

“Best take it easy with that hand,” she said. Her voice echoed slightly in the emptiness of the lobby.

He sort of shrugged and picked at the edges of the bandage, biting a little into his wrist.

“Any news on that fella?” he asked without looking at her. He was lingering. The loss of blood had made him queasy, and John in no particular hurry to be in the harsh sunlight washing the street outside into oblivion.

“You did a real good thing, John, helping that boy out the way you did.”

He raised his bandaged hand and frowned. “Got a souvenir.”

“Your reward will be in heaven.”

John shook his head. “Won't fix my roof.”

“The Lord provides.”

“How is he with a hammer and nails?”

“He was a carpenter,” Sister Dougherty quipped, quickly changing the subject. “Doctor says he took a pretty good wallop, that fella. He'll be shaky a while, but the best place for him is at home in bed.”

“Questions is, how does a fella like that end up wrecked in a creek way out in the middle of godforsaken Iowa.”

Sister Dougherty came around the desk and took John by the arm. She led him slowly across to a bench and together they sat. It had all the hallmarks of scoldings he'd gotten from Sisters back in grade school. It was silly, but John couldn't help from feeling that way. He looked at the floor and out into the street, anywhere but in Maribel Dougherty’s eyes. She still held his arm, gently stroking it with her fingers.

“Lot's of lost folks in the country these days,” she said. “Times like these get folks all mixed up.”

That's when he knew this was something more. John looked up into her eyes at last. “Except you didn't sit me down for a Civics lesson, now did you?”

“John Perkins, we been friends just about our whole life.”

“Reckon we have.”

“Doc Gross wanted me to ask a favor of you.” Sister paused, forming the words properly. John knew in an instant what she was about to ask of him. He was already weighing all of it, though his answer was already assured. He thought of Anna and what he would say to her.

EMMETSBURG: Eighteen

John squinted against a scalding pain as the young nurse cleaned the gash running across his palm. It was about as much emotion as he cared to show. She left the room for a moment and John studied the wound. He could see deep into his hand, past the bulging yellowing fat pads, the sinewy red muscle, bluish veins and glimpses of gleaming white bone. He’d come as near as he cared to losing the hand. He counted himself as lucky, still it was just about as good as John could expect with his luck.

He was more concerned with infection. Bad enough and he’d lose his hand for sure, and then where would he and Anna be? He’d seen enough of that in the war to know it was the danger. He’d seen men die by infections from wounds much less severe. When a bug got in the wound and took hold there was just no stopping it.

It took all of twenty stitches to close the wound. The nurse wrapped up his hand so much that it just look sort of silly, as though she'd accidentally covered a baseball with the hand. Down in the lobby Sister Dougherty gave him a sympathetic smile.

John sighed, realizing that his hand was all but useless, holding it up and turning it before his eyes. That wouldn’t do, of course. It meant that he would have to sit still a while, and that was just something John couldn’t stand. Couple days at most and it would have to come off. Fresh air and a bit of cautious use, he thought would do the trick, at least that what the most stubborn part of him wished to believe. What the mind believes and the heart concedes are as different as night and day.

It didn’t hurt, at least not as much as John feared that it might. Of course it was still a fresh wound. He’d taken a kick from a horse as a boy, busting three ribs. It wasn’t until they started to heal that the pain grew almost unbearable. For now there was just a warm sensation, and the feeling of two self-determined slabs of meat moving against one another. And there was also a sense that the assumption of his body’s inviolable space had been breached, like the betrayed body of a woman.

Tick Tick Tick

That would be the clock. Actually, from here it sounds more like BANG! SLAM! CRASH!

Writing for the first posts is well under way, as of this past Saturday. The first chapter of the first book goes up this coming Saturday, September 12. the title is THE LAST MAN, a social science fiction piece I've been thinking about for some time. I won't give away much here, except to say that it is a very intimately personal story about freedom and the power of hope.

The first chapter of the second book will will be posted on Monday, the 15th, is titled IN THE LAND OF JUDAS, a sort of commentary on modern media and the importance of family. I am so pleased with the way each story is unfolding, and I think you'll be just as pleased to read them.

Figuring it should take right at about three to three and a half months to finish each round. After that, I'll be in therapy. For those voracious readers, please hang in there and remember...it's fresh and free!

Finsh these and I'll immediately start on the last two, and finish up next summer with the final piece. Two days to go before the first post!

Got to keep it quick. the stories are calling...