by Ted Minkinow
10
Just as the Yankee soldier would claim to his grandchildren in later years, so did Joe Saunders feel the eyes of some unknown hosts monitoring the skirmish. The seasoned young fighter, senses keened by circumstance, kept a nervous eye on the trees, bushes, and the darkness beyond. The buzz in his spine signaled what common sense refuted. They would depart the area none too soon for him.
11
Once more, Rufus held out a hand. With persistence and any amount of luck, he knew he could catch the Colonel off guard, perhaps in a moment of contemplation over the deaths of his friends. Now’s the best chance…them others are tending to the wounded Yankees.
12
A sound came to Jackson’s ears…a whispering just beyond the trees surrounding the small clearing. He gazed up for a moment and saw Saunders disappear into the darkness to rejoin the others. The sound hit him again.
Impossible, he thought. A faint but clear noised buzzed between his temples. Threat to my men? He wondered if more Yankees approached. But these voices sounded only partly human. McCarran's outstretched hand returned Jackson to the moment.
He swallowed his revulsion and grasped the moist, beefy paw. Jackson winced in disgust when he noticed the damp, fresh blood on McCarran’s sleeve. From my friends’ throats. A new sound…
A sharp, ripping rose vertically from the moistness surrounding the two men. Jackson fleetingly considered thick, dark draperies tearing in half. Foul odor accompanied the sound as if to announce the rending of more than just ethereal fabric. Stench provided Jackson with visions of the unburied and decaying dead of a thousand battlefields…of dead mush—human, animal, plant—melted into a rot so vile that he considered fleeing both his men and his honor to escape. Then Jackson’s eyes caught a sight which no amount of war or suffering could prepare a man.
An oblong hole seemed to hang in the air a few feet away. For a moment Jackson saw multitudes of eyes—glowing red with white dots for pupils—peering through this hole in the fabric that separated what Jackson knew from…From what?
A gentleman stepped through the rot and the portal snapped shut, leaving a thin black line to hang for a moment before it collapsed like falling twine and splashed into the mud. Now only Rufus McCarran, Copper Gulch, and the man remained for Jackson to see.
“Gentlemen, a glorious—I intend to kill you both—evening for a constitutional,” said this new person. “Would you not concur?”
The incongruous statement registered in Jackson’s mind, but the man’s appearance indicated little reason for concern. He stood tall. Dried up string bean, thought Jackson, If not for the skills of an able tailor...the trappings of a gentleman.
Gentleman, indeed. A tight, tan overcoat framed a European-style shirt and silk tie. White trousers fell to a length in perfect harmony with burnished brown boots. The man doffed a broad hat, allowing rebellious strands of white hair to range free over a long, thin forehead.
“Leland Graves,” he said, and raised the top of an ivory-tipped walking stick to where his brim sat moments before. “Now this night is much too fine to consider killing—allow me instead—one another.”
Jackson focused on the man’s eyes…and mental alarms chimed an uncertain warning to his brain.
13
Rufus remained on his knees in the slush, his mouth agape and leg throbbing. He wondered if he heard the voice or had his brain concocted it?
I’ve drawn his attention, you fool.
There it came again. It sounded just like the old plantation owner standing just beyond arm’s reach.
Do it.
Rufus understood.
14
Blade brushing backbone provided Jackson’s first indication of pain. He looked down. Bayonet. It penetrated his shirt between the second and third buttons. That sight slashed open a veil separating common life from soul’s shrouded mystery, impending death became clear. All pain ceased. He felt weighted and drugged, his eyes slid down to meet McCarran's.
He saw evil, hate...a jagged smile…lips stained black by tobacco...McCarran said something to him...he taunted...Jackson could not understand a word of it. Breathing became difficult, but then he felt no need for air at all. Heavy arms fell to his side as Jackson fought gravity against the weight of his eyelids.
Cold, he thought. Strength oozed from the long muscles of his legs, forcing him to sink to his knees in order to summon sufficient balance to remain upright.
Icy water seeping through pants legs jarred his consciousness back to the moment. Panic threatened to wrest control.
He fought death.
The men needed him. She needed him. He could not leave them unprotected.
Black dots buzzed in his eyes, blocking out patches of the world in front. The dots formed into a tunnel, shifting his view to that of a person peering the wrong way down a spyglass. Sight extinguished altogether as McCarran cracked a heavy, soggy branch into the middle of Jackson’s face. The colonel collapsed on his left side, cold, murky water filled his ear.
She needs me...she needs... His mind still worked. A final attempt to right himself rolled him onto his face.
She needs me...she needs… The water’s bitter cold turned to an ever so brief, but intensely pleasurable reminder of life.
Colonel Jackson Brewton, 90th Alabama Cavalry, faded into stillness.
15
Rufus saw the man, Leland Graves he called himself now didn’t he, spring toward Jackson Brewton with the agility of an angry bobcat. He bent over the body, intent on something for sure…Rufus had no idea what. Then…A circle of light, perfect and white, floated up from Brewton’s back and into the air.
Rufus knew greed as much as any man; and raw greed shone in Leland Graves’s eyes as he pawed at the shining ball with hands incapable of slowing the thing’s ascent. Graves erupted in a screaming fit of oaths so vile that even Rufus’s father never used them. In an instant the light ball sped out of sight toward Vienna. It made no sound in its departure and left no evidence behind. Leland Graves ceased his ranting in mid-epithet.
“I declare,” he said in a voice calm enough to make Rufus want to forget the yelling and stomping, “Have you ever witnessed one act in such a manner?”
Rufus did not reply.
“They normally rise until departed from sight…this one, he traveled elsewhere. Unprecedented!”
Rufus saw greed resume its place on the man’s face as Leland Graves turned a grin to him.
“What say you?”
Rufus tried to speak but a new panic squelched his voice.
“Come now man,” said Leland Graves, “you must surely—no final words?—feel safe. What should you fear with your enemy slain and me for company?”
Another flood of vomit cascaded from Rufus stomach. The last thought Rufus McCarran registered before metal ended all thinking was the speed with which Leland Graves withdrew the blade from his cane and how the arm extended in a most unnatural way as it brought death to bear.
16
No shining entity rose from Rufus’s corpse. Instead, a gelatinous ball of black sludge rose a few inches, expended all energy and spilled back to the damp soil. Leland Graves decided to keep this one—he considered it borrowing. When they showed tar, as the case for this Rufus fellow, then the impact on quota, the measure to the favorable side of judgment’s scales, never covered overhead costs—carrying charges.
But this particular essence shone in its own way; a perfect blackness that drew Leland Graves closer. This one could help him bag larger game. That Brewton family proved a difficult quarry, but oh the prize it promised. Leland Graves smiled. “Waste not, want not.”
He stooped and gathered what of Rufus he could and pressed it into a small, tarry cube. He knew he did not retrieve all; one never could, and prayed to himself he would leave nothing of importance behind.
“The transaction remains open,” he said aloud to the others lest they think his plans ended awry. Never display weakness where none exists. With a final, nearly human glance at th
e land that represented first his original place of being and most recently his temporary confinement, the spot where he occasionally sat in the corner—missed quotas bore humiliations—Leland Graves faded into the fabric of Copper Gulch.
Friday, May 29, 1914, 1:47 am, Aboard the Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence Seaway
1
Martin did not intend on taking so much from the old woman…her food—yes—her life—no. She must have been asleep for hours. Didn’t the old sleep like the dead? Now this one would. He only wanted to feed the children.
Martin spent the earlier years of his life in his birth city of Glasgow, Scotland studying the fine arts: begging, pick-pocketing, and purse-nabbing. Those skills proved a young man’s calling, because at the ripe age of 17, he became careless or slow or both. But the bishop intervened; grabbed Martin’s hand out of sight of the constable standing beside the old gentlemen with the fat wallet. After ten years Martin still wondered if the Anglican bishop concealed a street history of his own. The old man’s hand: So blessed fast.
The intervention cost Martin his livelihood, prevented his incarceration, and set him on a new road: the path leading to the Salvation Army—he remained in the lower ranks—and a posting to Canada. The Blood washed clean his sins, and he molted the old skin of thievery for the wings of sanctification down the narrow path.
Two lines of a telegram from Glasgow and Martin’s world reeled. “Bishop suffered stroke (stop). Near death. (stop).” Martin did not know what to do, how to get home, whether or not to try. The local Brigadier provided the answer. Martin would accompany the Canadian Salvation Army delegation set to depart from Quebec that week on the Empress of Ireland. With luck, he could reach Liverpool and then Glasgow in time.
The children appeared so haggard at the pier; a cloud of filth hovered over them, around them, among them…and Martin knew the look of hunger. A family of nine…well almost a family. Martin saw the drunkard pushing through the crowd, witnessed the mother hurrying her eight children into a dark alcove. The drunk’s alcohol haze hid the woman and her children, and she herded them toward the steerage bridge after the man stumbled past.
Courageous!
Close in trail behind the mother and her eight children, he saw the fat woman.
Her clothes did not speak of wealth as much as they did comfort. Porters carried four steamer trunks…continued past the steerage plank to the first class entry.
Unremarkable.
The packages behind, they grabbed his attention. Several large boxes from Quebec’s finest bakery—a place so special, so perfect that on certain days he would have happily paid for the aroma, if he possessed money. Martin fell in behind the old woman and her sweet entourage. And an idea struck, one so clear he swore it came heaven.
The skills that kept him alive on the street more than a decade ago must still exist somewhere inside his new self. What harm in employing that spiritual gift to liberate temptation from one fat woman and at the same time bring rare happiness to eight children abandoned by their father…young lives headed for poverty and uncertainty in a strange land.
Martin did not mean to hurt the woman. She woke up, and in the darkness he just wanted to knock her out and make a quick getaway. Stolen packages would certainly blind the ship’s crew to the divinely inspired nature of Martin’s mission. More likely they’d call it by its proper name: thievery.
And that’s what the bishop would hear…soon as the Empress docked in Liverpool.
If the man still lived by then…well, he would not anymore. Maybe that’s what made Martin’s blow to the woman’s neck a bit brisker than intended.
I hope I didn’t mean to kill her.
And in his brain he whipped himself in a semblance of his namesake—Martin Luther—who striped his own back over sin so many centuries before. But murder added up to more than a sin of the psyche…more than a philosophical fracas between a big God and one small man.
Murder, flashed in red gaslights across Martin’s mind…and in his panicked brain the word took form…an undead demon gnashing bloody fangs in endless accusations until Martin just wanted to jump over the railing and drown in the freezing waters below.
But there he sat at almost two in the morning, in her room and dressed in full Salvation Army regalia…the fat woman’s head in his lap and him crying the tears of Lazarus’s friends into her half-closed eyes. No hope for an immaculate resurrection here.
Murder.
“Be of good cheer, Lad—a glorious thousand will die with you tonight.”
Martin jumped, but the woman’s dead weight kept him down. He turned to see a gaunt man—Sounds American…Southern—with failing white hair and an odd beige overcoat—the kind old headmaster Crebbs used to wear—standing in front of the closed door.
The man smiled as he spoke, “Did just as I would have.”
Vomit gurgled in Martin’s throat, but he did not have time to let it erupt. The Empress lurched, felt like a giant hand lifted it and moved it right. Grating followed the move and it sounded to Martin as if the devil’s infernal machinery just shed the primary bearings. The scream of steel crushing against steel gave credence to the thought.
Martin did not know that the Norwegian ship Storstad struck the Empress—he felt the roll—and in a second up became down and down up. His tumble assured Martin the movement represented much more than his recent and more personal fall from grace. He fell for ages—less than two seconds—and landed across the ceiling’s light fixture. The fat woman exchanged places with him, and her impact shattered his spine.
Movement above caught his eye. As the St. Lawrence Seaway flowed forward to claim the Empress of Ireland, Martin McLaughlin’s last view framed the mysterious stranger standing on the inverted floor above—twirling a walking cane and humming. Martin felt the metal that emerged from the man’s cane in freezing concert with fingertips of the St. Lawrence as it probed into the Empress for the lives of those aboard. Martin heard the stranger speak, and the voice sounded as if it came from the dark end of a rat-infested Glasgow street.
“Transaction completed.”
2
A grin just would not do, not this time. Take the orb in exchange for…for nothing. Leland Graves erupted in the hearty laugh of Doom incarnate. “Little ones go hungry tonight,” Leland Graves said out loud. He would tarry no longer. More to gather.
Thursday, April 22, 1915, 5:53 pm, Gavenstafel, Belgium, (outside the City of Ypres)
1
The big guns—friendlies—thundered most of the morning and into the afternoon. Orders arrived as usual, but with a twist that left Barti Grunweld shocked and in constant prayer right up to the moment he led his men out of the trench and onto the Belgian Hades above.
Gas—chlorine—gas. Never before in his experience.
Mein Gott, Mein Gott.
He could not believe Albrecht, the white-whiskered, death dealing-fool of a Duke of Wurttemberg could sway the Prince to such levels of dishonor. But these things required authorization—there were procedures after all…even in hell—and the orders surely possessed the Prince’s signature.
Madness!
So a couple of hours ago German guns spit the new horror through the sky overhead to rain down on the French and their African surrogates—and now the Canadians, if one could ever believe intelligence reports—on the other side. Chlorine gas.
Had not the very Catholic Pope blessed the Kaiser’s armies? Barti did not support the Papist notion of God’s Vicar, but like almost all his friends at the Lutheran seminary, he left to join the German ranks…to fight the good fight. Didn’t his belt buckle say “Gott Mit Uns (God With Us)?” When did they stop fighting for God? Today?
Within moments of blowing his whistle, he could make out green fog hovering just above enemy trenches. He reminded himself to worry about that sort of death when he reached the enemy positions, if he got that far. The Oberst made sure to issue the new equipment to Barti’s men…personally promised it would protect them a
gainst the gas. It did not stop bullets.
A scream reached into Barti’s brain and he saw Uwe tumble. Young Uwe the poet. Barti kept moving. Just to his right, Helmut could not announce the Valkyrie’s touch because French steel evaporated his head. The body ran three more paces then dropped into Belgian mud. Barti led his men forward. Now only enemy trenches could provide refuge, but he wondered if German gas spoiled that one chance for him…for his men.
What men? He glanced beside and behind and saw less than twenty still up, still moving.
Mein Gott! 100 down!
Rage shifted his running prayer from contrition to thankfulness. He hoped the green death performed…hoped he would find withering bodies instead of a foe…hoped he lived—not to return to his studies and to Frieda—but to kill those ahead.
Somehow he landed on his feet. That’s why Barti did not think he fell into the trench, the one obscured by his anger—by a hate so pure that he would thrust a bayonet into his own sister if he found her there. He shook his eyes clear.
The four men looked English, but he thought they might be Canadian. They wallowed into the mud like swine, digging in attempts to get under the green floating death that burned their eyes and singed their lungs. One of them looked up at him. He held out a hand to Barti…beseeching mercy like the cripple reaching for a miracle at the pools of Bethesda.
All his seminary training, his entire life spent serving his God, his village, the poor—every pfennig he ever earned shoveling anything a shovel held—snow, coal, even horse manure—stood between Barti’s will and what anger commanded of his hands. A dark angel inside, a part of himself Barti never knew existed, swept an entire young life of faith and service aside with frightening ease.