by Dan Dillard
***
There was a portion of land on the property that Albert Gates didn’t like. It was barren in the center, a circular spot crawling with the blasted fire ants and not much else. The only thing to grow there was a wiry grass which irritated his hands when he tried to remove it. Outside of that circle the trees and bushes grew thick. It was a nuisance place and he always felt sick to his stomach after working the area. Something in that place stunk. A faint odor, but there nonetheless. If asked, he would’ve described it as a combination of sulfur, burning firewood and rotting meat. No one ever asked, and he didn’t want to speak of it. But, as the family had to be fed and the sun had to rise, he had to clear the land. So he suffered through it. A good man. A hard working man.
He dug the wire grass clumps from their sandy soil and wore mule skin gloves to pile them outside the circle where they would later be burned. A full day’s sun passed over him and when it was gone, he was only partially finished clearing the area. It should’ve taken him a matter of hours. Finished by noon, he had told Charlotte, but as he stood at the edge of that circle, he found his thoughts wandering as if he was waking from sleep.
When Albert snapped out of his trance, he was leaning on the handle of the shovel like a young boy watching a bird in the sky and dreaming of flying. Only he wasn’t dreaming of flying, he was dreaming of death. He dreamed of killing his young children, of raping the slave girl, of tearing into the meaty flesh of his wife’s breasts with his teeth. He envisioned those things and they excited him. Albert found he was actually smiling when he woke. He felt pleasantly drunk and as the sun went down, he walked back to the house to wash up for dinner.
The drunken feeling passed, and the terrible dark thoughts disappeared from his memory but something itched at his guts. When he was home, he thought about the circle of barren land. It gave him a cold feeling as if he’d been in the devil’s hoof print—walked a mile in the old man’s shoes, so to speak. Whenever Albert was fishing or selling his fish to others at the market, he found himself daydreaming about that place. The more he dreamed of the circle, the more his thoughts turned dark. Day in and day out, he found he was back there and neglecting the rest of the massive property.
The aching itch in his stomach stopped and was replaced by something else. It was the feeling of opportunity. There was something special in that land. Something that would bring him...what? Riches? Salvation?
At first, he couldn’t enter the place. He paced along its perimeter, walking sometimes for hours until a path had been worn marking its exact location. He wore a perfect circle around that place, a sore on the face of the earth. Slowly, over a matter of days, he ventured inside, drinking in its sickly perfume until it was sweet and not bitter to him anymore. And once he could stand it, he remained in the center of the ring and breathed its power deep into his lungs, filling himself with it. Loving it.
Albert began to pray inside that circle. He found himself kneeling in its center and having his delicious dark visions. Images of power, of war, of death, of wealth, of violent sex with women other than his wife, of sex with the slave women, of sodomizing the slave men, of killing them all and eating their flesh, of drinking blood from their empty skulls. He often passed out in the center of the circle and when he woke, he was naked, soaked with sweat, caked in sand and itching from those damnable biting ants.
On July 18th, 1817, his young daughter’s birthday, Albert Gates, Sr. stood in the middle of his odd bit of land and prayed. Not to God—to whom exactly, he did not know. He only knew he couldn’t help himself, and nothing else mattered anymore.