Emmetsburg: Seventy

About ten minutes out of town John passed a line of army trucks and State Police cruisers. He slowed to a crawl, the lines of uniformed and sullen faces like fence posts. John absorbed each one, and could feel time, the moment and the future bending back to meet one another. He would be back here, John knew now. This was his fate, whatever shape that was about to take.

The storm was nearly upon the town, the sky fully reflecting the mood of the men. Upon the road, maybe a quarter mile or so further a fair size crowd had gathered in a farm yard. The men stood up front in ragged and tense ranks. Their hands were filled with clubs and stones. John had seen their expressions upon the faces of men resigned to battle in France. They were cold, stony, empty faces, with dark distant eyes that drew in everything but saw nothing.

There were more soldiers in town. Not a lot. Not enough to make the town seem occupied, but enough gathered near the town hall and at the train station to give John the cold impending sense of approaching doom. Sandbags and a machine gun nest looked out along main Street. Time suddenly seemed compressed, betraying its intimate relationship with fate. He felt pulled and transported from one moment to the next. Life became more and more out of his control, as if he was hardly more than a passenger, an unwilling victim, a leaf whipped by a storm.

The first fat drops of rain were falling as John whipped the truck around the corner and skidded to a stop in front of the house. He threw himself from the truck towards the front door as orange fingers of lightening charged across the sky over head. Thunder shook the world as he tore open the front door and went inside.

John stood in the dining room. There was a Bible, a bottle of brandy and a single glass on the table. The house was silent, the light as murky as a dungeon, What light remained was sluggish and jaundiced, giving the place a forgotten, abandoned sense that made the place seem totally unfamiliar. That light declined steadily with the encroaching storm, the darkness punctuated by glimpses of lightening. In the next room the bed was still made, as if it hadn’t been slept in. a pillow was crumpled on the floor beside the bed. John groaned without realizing, a consequence of his shameful heart.

“Anna!” he shouted, but the storm had come up so that his cry was lost to the fury. The fury paled in comparison to fate screaming in his ear. It spun him around, calling his attention to miniscule details; the curtains pressed flat to the screen, Anna’s hand print in the quilt upon the bed, the Iris’ in the yard dancing wildly in the storm. It was as if fate was attempting to confuse him, to fool him with the delusion of other trails than the one already chosen for him.

John found tears in his eyes. He swept them from his cheeks and looked quizzically at his glistening finger tips, as if they were someone else’s tears. They came from someplace unknown and apart from John. Like a perfect moment of beauty, true innocence, the sudden epiphany that all things are bound intimately together, or the emotive harmony of a symphony, it was the power of fate and the moment that carried him to tears..

In a bright flash of lightening John spotted the revolver on the kitchen counter, where he’d left it a few nights earlier. He considered it a moment. Louis words called to him, even as he lifted the gun in his hands. It was compelling, the gun. The cold steel was alluring, connecting with something as deep and primitive as his sex. John carried it back through the house, then abandoned it on the table, backing away from it as if the gun were the devil incarnate.

Outside the gray-blue storm clouds rolled and tumbled like a muddy puddle agitated by a child’s stick. That first assaulting torrent had abated somewhat. It was replaced now by a stinging rain, driven hard by bludgeoning gusts of wind.

There was a light on at Misses Conlon’s next door. John was soaked to the bone before he reached the house. He burst through the door, fighting to collect himself. A favorite book was open in the Widow’s lap, a yellow and green shawl covering her shoulders. She looked up, squinting through thick eyeglasses, not particularly shocked by John’s sudden appearance.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Have you seen Anna?”

“She was here, John,” he voice was weak and low, trembling a bit. “Poor thing was just worried sick…”

“I know, Misses Conlon,” he cut her off quickly. “Where has she gone to?”

“Why out to find you.”

“Me? How would she know where I was going?”

“She said she had some feeling you got mixed up with those fellers going out to meet the Governor’s men.”

“Obliged,” said John. He told himself to move, but something kept him there, like his feet were welded to the floor. He couldn’t take his eyes from Widow Conlon’s vibrant auburn eyes. He could feel them rooting around in his soul. Widow Conlon pulled the eyeglasses from her nose and pointed them at John.

“You love that girl,” she said sternly. “You love that girl all the days of your life.”

“Trying to,” John felt like a boy being admonished.

“It’s all you got. All any of us got. That girl loves you more than life, enough to overlook your foolish heart and enough to scold your stupid one. Ain’t no amount of riches or fame will ever compare.”

John hung his head and nodded. Widow Conlon’s voice softened, becoming more sympathetic. “Go find her. Those fellas out there mean to start a war. You save her from that.”

“What about tomorrow?” asked John. The Widow slid the glasses back onto her nose and pushed them up with the tip of her frail forefinger. She lifted the book and went back to reading.