Triumph Over Tragedy: an anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy

by R. T. Kaelin

  Glenn’s right eyebrow arched upward. “Die, ma’am? Not if I could help it. They owe me too much at cards.”

  The left side of Sarah’s mouth creased upward, then her face sank. “There ain’t no cards on the plantation, Glenn. There’s just lives.”

  * *** *

  I let Angie fuss over me for a few moments, but as soon as she looked away I left the kitchen. That was enough to earn me a whipping, but I wasn’t worried about Mister Chipman. He never woud’ve taken us to the river, not all of us at once, and sacrificial lambs just kept echoing in my head. I ran to our hut, my hand over the slight firmness in my belly. Later, I’d think about how I left all of them—even Angie, who’d shown me that small kindness—to whatever fate Mister Chipman was worried about.

  The sun was just setting. Joe and the others in the fields would be back soon; they couldn’t harvest in the dark. I gathered the few things we had and waited for him to return. I figured I’d light that fire in his eyes again, stoke it, get it to burn until we took my child away.

  The gunfire sounded like firecrackers going off at the mansion, sharp cracks echoed through the still-hot air. The heat and night pressed down on my eyelids. Maybe if I slept, just hid here in our hut, I’d wake and my Joe’d be beside me. Another round of firecracker sounds split the air, and that time I heard screams carrying over the breeze.

  I remember the tears tracing lines down my face as the screams and gunfire quieted. The sun dipped below the horizon, but I saw a new orange light on the horizon. No one else had returned to our homes. Not Angie. Not any of the other slaves. Not my Joe. I crept back toward the mansion, keeping an eye out for any of the white folk, or any of the other slaves. Or my Joe.

  The flames licked upward, a great roaring blast of heat in the dry air. I stared at it, drawn like night insects to a candle. I stumbled over one of Mister Chipman’s sons. It’d been one of the older boys—William, I think—who had worked out in the fields. I didn’t know him overwell, but my Joe had. He’d said the boy had even stopped to help him a time or two. Now he lay in front of me, a messy gunshot wound in his chest. When I bent over to close his eyes, the rich copper smell of blood made me retch a little. Then I realized what William being here meant, and I retched again. William’d been in the fields. With my Joe.

  There were other bodies there. I don’t remember much, and I’m thankful of that. Just flashes of pale skin and dark skin and all the blood the same dark color on the ground. I didn’t find my Joe, though. The taste of ash coated my tongue.

  Then I heard Mister Chipman gurgle.

  He was close to the house, strung up on a cross, arms and legs lashed to the beams just high enough that he couldn’t stand. The heat’d burned away his hair and blistered the skin of his scalp. Blood dripped from the broken lines of his jaw. His eyes looked down at me, almost hidden in the battered flesh of his face. “Sarah,” he said, and I saw most of his teeth were gone, too. “Sarah, help me.”

  I swallowed hard and stepped up to untie him. “I’ll untie you, Albert.” I said.

  “No, not that kind of help.” He shifted, and a wound in his side came open, the dark splotches on his shirt growing larger. “Help me stop them.”

  My fingers skittered over the coarse blood-soaked rope. “I don’t know —”

  “They’re scared of Sherman, Sarah.” His head drooped for a second, his voice dropping low, hard to hear over the sound of the burning house. “They’re sacrificing our ideals, compromising all of our morals.” He struggled to lift his head. “Sarah, you have to stop them before they kill them all.”

  “Mister Chipman,” my fingers slipped off another knot, freeing his left hand, “save your strength. I can’t stop them.”

  His fingers reached out, leaving a smear of his blood against my cheek. “Sarah, I know that you all worship differently. Less…civilized.”

  I laughed then, cruel as it was to laugh in the face of a dying man. “Mister Chipman, I tell stories to reassure others. I can’t…” I searched for something silly to say. “I can’t call up some savage monster.”

  Mister Chipman laid his free hand on my shoulder. “You’d better learn, Sarah. They can.”

  * *** *

  She paused, and this time no one stopped the old woman from getting another glass of bourbon. The men in the club glanced at each other, at the hunting trophies—both real and fake—on the wall, staring into the smoky air of the Wanderer’s Club. Her laugh echoed against the wood-paneled walls.

  “Y’all expect to see spirits?” The sudden dark warmth of the accent flooded her voice. She waited until she had the gaze of every man in the room. “Y’all want me to pull out some chicken bones, maybe cast a hex on you?” She laughed again, dark and deep, and the men shivered. The edges of the room darkened. But was that just because they were concentrating on her? “Maybe I done already cast an evil eye on you.”

  Jonathan blushed. “Grandmother, please.”

  The shorter woman reached up and kissed Jonathan on the cheek. “Yes, dear.” The darkness had again disappeared from her voice.

  Sarah looked back out at her audience. “If you world-weary travelers haven’t learned yet, there’s as many kinds of voodoo as there are folks that follow it. Me, I’ve never seen any loas, never called no spirits. Just the lady telling you everything is going to be all right because you did the right things. Or I’d tell them that the bad things weren’t their fault, that it was some evil ghost. It made them feel better, let them fix the real problems in their lives.”

  Sarah stared right at Dr. Montegro. The doctor’s hands held his stethoscope, fingers twisting the tubes while she talked. “The alienists—psychologists, you call them now—do the same thing. Take the bad things and turn them into other words: neurosis, psychosis, disorder. But those days, those men…they believed. Not just in their God, but in their devils and demons. Evil was real, and it was out there. And it was powerful.”

  Sarah sat back down on her stool. “And to men like that, power means not having to be scared.”

  * *** *

  I was scared then. I used to enjoy the smell of a bright cooking fire, but as the mansion burned I knew that wouldn’t happen again. Mister Chipman’s hand lay heavy on my shoulder. All the strength had gone out of his arm. I imagined I felt my baby kick, even though I knew it was far too early. My master’s head slumped onto his chest.

  “I can’t, Mister Chipman,” I whispered. “I have other things to worry about.”

  I don’t know how he heard my whisper over the fire. Maybe he just felt me start to pull back. His eyes opened, and he spat blood onto the ground.

  “They have Joe. Joe and Angie and all the others. They’re going to call a demon, then feed them all to it as a bribe. Their souls will burn, trapped inside it forever.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, starting to pull back again.

  His hand gripped my shoulder tight, stopping me. “They’re calling it up to defeat Sherman. You won’t be free either.”

  “I still don’t believe you. There are no monsters. No demons.”

  His eyes flashed a deep noxious yellow. It wasn’t a reflection, not of the fire, not of me. “Are you willing to bet the life of your child?”

  I’d only told Joe about the baby.

  Albert told me a little more before his eyes closed for the last time. Not enough. But more. Where they had gone. What they were trying to call up…and how it was supposed to behave.

  I went carefulquick through the stand of trees on the edge of Mister Chipman’s land, a few early autumn leaves crunching underfoot. The branches scraped over my skin. Albert’s voice echoed in my head again. “It’ll be hungry,” he’d told me, “but it’ll be mad even more, like a wild animal. A circle, probably salt, will keep it from attacking its captors. The ones inside the circle are a bribe, a bribe to ease its hunger enough that they can command it.”

  I wanted Mister Chipman’s voice out of my head. I wanted to hear my Joe whispering that he loved me in
to my ear. Instead, the wind carried the whinny of nervous horses, a sharp crack of a whip, and the rough smoke of a bonfire when it’s first caught, a faint whiff of lamp oil underneath the clean scent of burning pine. For a moment, I wondered if the whole patch of trees would go up in flames. I doused that thought with thoughts of Joe, imagining holding him and the baby.

  I was too late.

  I hid at the edge of the woodline. They were only a dozen yards away, close enough to see but too far to do anything. Mister Holden held up a saber. The metal reflected Angie’s face, his white robes flickered the color of the fire. Two of the other slave-owners held Angie’s arms as she threw herself from side to side. Holden’s arm came down, and the handguard smashed into Angie’s face. Blood spattered from the crushed bones in her cheek, dripping dark circles on Mister Holden’s robes.

  I looked up from Angie, trying to see clearly through my tears. The other slave-owners and their overseers kept their attention on Mister Holden and Angie. The salt circle was there and held the slaves, just as Mister Chipman had said. I’ll never know why they just stood there. I’ll never know exactly what those… civilized men did to my friends and husband to keep them still.

  I remember only some of the details. The stars had just appeared, cold and heartless over the day’s lingering hot air. The white men’s horses whinnied, eyes rolling but hooves planted unmoving in the ground. Mister Holden looked down at Angie, then at the dark spatters of her blood on his pure white robe. He smiled. Oh, gods, I’ll remember that smile until I die. It reached right up to the crinkles in his eyes. He enjoyed this.

  Then I believed Albert. Something about Mister Holden’s smile, and I knew Albert hadn’t exaggerated one whit. I started running for the circle, Mister Holden’s voice booming past me, across the rocks and sand, echoing from the far side of the Chattahoochee. He was calling to something.

  And as I heard the dull thunk of his scimitar taking Angie’s head off her body, it came. I kept running. I ignored the burning heat in my lungs, ignored the blistering on my skin, ignored the twisted shadows the suddenly-huge bonfire cast across the white men. I saw Joe.

  His eyes—all of their eyes—were glazed over with a soft white milky film. They shuffled in small circles. Between them, great spirals of glowing sickly yellow smoke erupted from the ground. I skidded, tripped over a stray stone, and fell to the rocky river sand. My toe barely touched the outside of the salt circle. Fear’d frozen my limbs solid; I was a little mouse hoping the cat wouldn’t notice.

  A few inches away inside the circle, the smoke had solidified into eight fleshy legs that reeked of rotten eggs, joined by a crablike torso three stories up, and a beaked bird head at the end of a long sinewy neck. It glowed sickly red with heat, hot enough to melt the flesh of those too close to it. It shifted its feet, shaking the ground as it tried to bash its thick hide through the cage made by the circle. It shrieked in anger, looked down at the people at its feet, and started to feed. Its head dove down from that high neck, its beak snapping off an entire torso with each bite, snapsnapsnap and three of my friends were gone. A fast swallow, and then it struck again, and again, and again.

  I screamed when it took my Joe’s head. A flick of Joe’s blood arced through the air. It landed on my shoulder, and all of us outside the circle started to move again. Mister Holden shouted, raising his saber to rush at me. The overseers raised their guns and whips. The thing in the circle looked up at me, trapped by the thin line of salt. It had green eyes. They were moist, almost sad.

  I pushed my toe through the circle.

  The thing rushed past me, the heat of its legs pulsing off and smoldering my clothes. Its growl rumbled through the ground, its footsteps the sound of heavy summertime storms. I pushed against the rocks and pebbles, leveraging myself up enough to fall forward again—but inside the circle. I ignored a man’s scream and I pulled my mother’s pouch from my neck. My fingers fumbled with the smooth leather until I felt the hard crystals of salt. I sprinkled them onto the ground, sealing the break in the circle.

  * *** *

  Sarah stopped talking to drain the last of her glass. “Well, that’s a night, gentlemen.” She waved to Glenn for her tab.

  Dr. Montegro spoke up, placing his stethoscope back around his neck. “But what happened after that?”

  Sarah handed the tab to her grandson and turned toward the door. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Obviously it didn’t eat you, madam. So what happened? And what does this have to do with General Sherman?”

  Sarah stopped and looked back at the doctor. “I still don’t rightly know what that thing was. But I knew the look in its eyes. It was trapped, and I sure know what being trapped feels like.” She stepped forward and poked Dr. Montegro in the lapel with a wizened finger, setting the stethoscope to swinging against the man’s chest. “And it may as like be that you don’t know, doctor, but all them slave-owners knew it. They knew that a trapped animal’s just as like to snap at you as to try to get free. That’s why they were too damn scared to even let us swim on a hot summer day.”

  Jonathan retrieved her coat as Dr. Montegro spluttered his way back to speech. “But, madam…General Sherman?”

  The old woman smiled at Dr. Montegro, and though none of them would swear to it later, it seemed that her eyes flashed a sickly yellow. “Why, that poor thing was still hungry. Holden and the rest were just appetizers. I sure wasn’t going to point it toward the Union army, now was I?”

  Sarah leaned back against the bar. “So I pointed it toward Atlanta.” She smiled into her audience’s gasps. “The landowners were right, knowing that Sherman was on his way did inspire slaves to run away and join the Union army. But by the time Sherman got to Atlanta, it was already in flames, and hundreds of former slaves from the plantations were ready to help him mop up. It made a right mess of that city.”

  Dr. Montegro shook his head. “My God. The devastation…” He looked up at the woman. “You monster!”

  Sarah’s face blazed for a moment, her hand shoving the stethoscope hard against Montegro’s chest. “I weren’t to blame for bringing that creature into our world, Doctor. And I sure weren’t the general who thought that destroying Atlanta were such a good idea that he kept it up all the way to Savannah.” Sarah slumped back, the suddenly-rusted stethoscope softly resting on the doctor’s vest. “Those were the ideas of civilized men.”

  Sarah slid her coat over her stooped torso. “I did what was necessary to save my baby.”

  She nearly closed her eyes for a moment, swaying with a memory. Then she opened them again, and kissed her grandson on the cheek. “We all make sacrifices. We all make compromises.” She walked to the door of the club. She opened the door, and looked back.

  “The thing is, gentlemen, is to make them count.”

  *

  The Caretaker of Mire

  by Gregory A. Wilson

  What has happened down here is the wind have changed.

  Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”

  They say there ain’t been anything like it since the Wizard King Aervis took back most of the Saman Borderlands, and that’s more than a hundred years ago now. I used to sit and look for hours at an old map of how the place was before the war, with Faerlan on one side of the Mire and Saman on the other, not believing it was the same place I live now. The mountains were wrong, for one thing. The Points should have been there, and the East Foothills there, and the Red Ridge there, instead of just one big pile of rocks sitting on the right side of the Mire like some of Kann’s blocks left in the middle of the floor, just the right spot to get tripped over. If I did something like that, I’d get put on dredge duty for certain, but Daddy says Kann’s too young to know better yet, and he don’t mean nothing by it anyway. I guess it’s not like I could remember, but I never meant nothing by anything, and I don’t think I ever got away with what Kann does.

  That map is something, though, and I bugged Daddy to bring it out so many times he finally just gave it to me a
nd said it was up to me to take care of it. It’s been up in Kann’s and my room ever since, hanging right next to the door. Kann knows enough not to mess with it. I look at it every day when I wake up; it always makes me think, somehow, about how much things change when you ain’t expecting it, and that’s kind of scary and fun all at once. So when the Shake hit, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, even though I was. Daddy always says I don’t pay enough attention.

  Right as I’m thinking that, the bottom of the boat shifts under me as my pole hits something and catches, and I have to stop myself from stumbling forward. I shake my head as my grip shifts on the pole, feeling the smooth part of the wood where my hands rest give a little.

  “Keep your eyes forward, Shade, damn you,” I say under my breath. “You ain’t where you need to go yet.” I think about Daddy sitting on the old wooden seat of the boat near the stern, shaking his head with that crooked smile of his as he taught me how to pole. It took me an awful long time to get the hang of moving the boat without moving me off it, and even now I ain’t the fastest in the Mire by a long way. Somehow I can’t keep my mind to it; I start drifting to something else, and next thing you know I’m up against a log or getting smacked in the face by some low branches.

  “You got you plenty of time to think when we get home, Shade,” Daddy would say after it happened a couple of times. “Better you keep your mind here for now.” But he’d always smile when he said it, like he knew I couldn’t shut off my brain if I wanted to, but he had to tell me different just ‘cause it was the right thing to do.

  “Doing it again,” I say as I push myself back out into the middle of the waterway. Truth is I’m pretty tired already; I’ve been on the water almost since daybreak, almost six hours, with only a couple of short breaks, and I ain’t even sure if I’m going the right way. That’s the worst part, the not knowing. Me, I’m playing a guess—actually a couple of them—and Sky knows those ain’t always worked out before.