Yesterday

(A Shannon O’Day Story)


Gus O’Day had not always been a Minnesota corn farmer. But the time when he had not been, his neighbors, or even his brother Shannon could not remember, it was more than forty-five years ago, and it was such a short period of time in his life that only the old men at the County Old Folks Farm could recall it, and to be quite honest, in 1956 (several months before he’d die of a heart attack), it was hard for them to even recall it, and most of them did not, because in that time he was not yet even twenty-years old.
He was a young man then, working at a pawnshop (His Uncle Hawk Gordon O’Day owned it, down on Wabasha Street by the Lyceum Movie Theatre, across the street from the World Theatre. Hawk Gordon was a man of a small figure, with red hair, always having greasy looking hands and shirt and face, wiping his hands constantly onto the back of his trousers—), he worked there at his mother’s request and done so voluntarily when asked, he even tried to persuade his mother (Ella Teresa Cotton O’Day) to let him do it alone, which she refused because after his father departed (dropped them off there), left them to go to who-knows-where, he knew this part of his life—with his younger brother but ten-years—was a mere formally, and a fragment in the span of a life time.
So Gus did what he felt he had to do. Years after (after the death of his mother, and his marriage to Mabel Foote, and taking in his younger brother, and buying his farm), years after that, he still said it was the only thing he could have done, or do; that is, to put up with the situation, and the drunkenness of his uncle in which he was convinced he was taking advantage of his mother, of which she insisted he remain neutral, because he provided a backroom for them to live in, and food—room and board.
Actually he did not overlook it, several months after his mother had passed on—that following winter, having saved enough money in the past two years for a down payment on a small farm, he bought it, and left that part of St. Paul, and moved twenty-miles outside of the city in what was then a remote section of the outskirts. He left his uncle with a taste of his fists, the night he left, and just like they had appeared one night from nowhere, he left the whiskey soaked uncle, the sole owner—promptly, and dignified, with a bill of sale for the farm in his pants pocket and his name signed to it.

The following morning, Gus woke Shannon and Mabel up, sat in the kitchen, at their square wooden table, and Gus handed them a butcher’s knife, and said, “I killed Uncle Hawk Gordon, five hours ago.”
Mabel half awake, who had been sitting drinking coffee at the square wooden table first, before Gus arrived, perhaps had been sitting there for those hours Gus had been missing from the bedroom, whose to say, looked at the nine-inch knife, looked it over, as Gus had swayed—unnoticeable swayed it to and fro: she looked at that knife in his hands with a flat affect, “Let’s not jump to conclusions it appears no one took you into consideration yet.” And with the morning paper to prove it, she looked high and low, page after page, turned on the radio, station to station, end to end, not a word of the murder, and with that she calmed her husband down, claiming the wrong he did was so far undetected on his part, and perhaps better left alone.
I can remember the odd and surprised look that Shannon had on his face. I grabbed the evidence, and it did not take but ten-minutes to dispose of it into the forty-foot well outside near the creek.
“We’re farmers now,” Mabel said, “not storekeepers anymore.” And it would have seemed to an onlooker she had become unshakable to the incident. Gus’ voice was near silent, almost numb, she added, “There’s not going to be any court-trial over that gray and redheaded whiskey drinking pervert!” She insisted.
Only those words were harsher than the words she’d use in 1956. But even then, she’d confess, he got what he deserved. That the justice system would not consider the torment he caused his fellow man, and Gus’ mother, you’d have to be rich, or famous, or know someone—someone who could understand, and empathize, and someone who could do something about such a person, and there was no one out there like that, not even Judge Finley would have protected Gus.
“We all know in this country,” she said back then, “we all know from birth to death that justice—if you want to call it that, demands the culprit be given his rights over the victim, and it is seldom the everlasting price, mentally if not physically—or ever would be considered by the injustice system presently in place.” And as far as she could see, Uncle Hawk had only his own life to pay for the life he tormented, thus, his death, spares those who would have come before him, had he not died.

“I had felt at the time I had to take Uncle Hawk Gordon’s life from him in order to stop him from using people the way he used us!” said Gus. “I didn’t know back then it would follow me to my grave. And that is what I am talking about—somewhat talking about, not about a dead man per se, that died forty-years ago, or his character per se, nor his morality or the sexual acts he made my mother perform, that I saw from the keyhole, but that she was defenseless and he justified it in forcing the issue with our survival, and basing it on her performance. Of course, he never knew this, he slept sound with his bottle of whiskey in his hands each night, as he did when I killed him. Perhaps he still has that bottle in his grave.”
“Yes,” said Mabel, “I’ve tried to tell you this for years, she had no choice in the matter that she was just trying to do the best she could do, with what she had at the time, under the trying circumstances she found herself in. And your instincts and beliefs made his death inevitable, and caused no one any misery, and perhaps better for humanity’s sake.”

Gus had been sitting at the same kitchen table, in the same room he had sat in forty-years ago, where his brother Shannon had sat as a boy…took in that deep breath of disbelief, and everything was so quiet you could only hear the clock ticking on the wall, that seemed to go throughout the room, as if in a bell tower.
“Well Gus,” said his wife, “at least after forty-some years you’ve stopped talking about it, and now at sixty-six it surfaces.”
“That’s right,” Gus said, then corrected himself, “I thought about it everyday of my life, every time I look at that wall, I even replaced the clock so I’d not have to hear the ticking.”
His eyes no longer bright, his face thin, his hair starting to whiten, his heart weakened, “Come here,” said Mabel. “I want you over here for a moment. Ask your brother to come over, you’re feeling way down, over that perverted uncle of yours. Shannon seems to perk you up!”

They were outside now, standing on the wooden stairs, Gus stepped halfway down, his hand on his wife’s shoulder to keep his balance, his eyes half shut too weak to keep them open any wider.
“Justice was accomplished for once, if you can’t bear looking at it that way, don’t look at it at all,” Mabel said.
“Yes,” said Gus.
“Then what do you want?” or expect?”
“I can’t help it,” Gus said, and he couldn’t. Yet for him it was like it happened yesterday, not forty-years ago. Then he heard a voice, it was Shannon’s, “Stop! Over hear!” And Gus looked to the right hand side of him. He could hardly see Shannon. There he stood, benting over the railing, much older looking than he was, barefoot on his porch steps, with a haunting and fierce look on his face; his skin pale, like buttermilk; his hands shaking, as if having palsy of age.
“Come,” said Shannon “I got some homemade corn whisky, let’s sit in the cornfields and get drunk!”
“Yup!” he agreed “let’s get out of here and get off these porch steps, let’s go!” And they did.
His eyes were now eager, content and more than willing to let the dead bury the dead, at least until tomorrow, which today would be yesterday, after they finished that bottle of corn liquor.


No: 449 8-5-2009.. Independent of any other stories of Shannon O’Day