"Hullabaloo" (a murder story)

Hullabaloo


(Part of the End) And so Shannon O’Day knew that very first morning of October, 1953 new that Kent Peterson would be were he was always in the wee hours of the morning, on that porch of his waiting for him to walk through the front gate to paint, and Shannon could no longer withstand, the moment had simply come to that point that no longer could both breathe the same air in the same farmyard, in the same county, and same state, on the same day, and what he said pushed him over the forbidden line, the red line. And so lacking his patience, and perseverance, to subdue his pride, to withstand his nagging, his persistence, he fell back on that right to defend it, the way he did in the war, the Great War, the one he earned a medal for killing his enemy, with his rifle, bayoneted, like Kent Peterson was to him now. But the war was of course over.
It began in the fall of 1953, or a year prior. Oh maybe not, perhaps it started in the summer of 1951, or even sooner, but it shaped itself into a hullabaloo between the two, when he was ordered to paint his house and barn, paint for fifteen days. It all stemmed from arrogance, intolerance and pride, and then destruction. It all started when they started to breathe the same Midwestern air day after day after day, because he, Shannon, was not a contentious man, not like Kent, but he was defending his wimple rights, in the only way he knew how. So perhaps Kent made his own fate, destiny when he finally impinged on Shannon’s, if indeed he we can say that is what he did, provoking Shannon. This was all after Shannon’s wife left him, and Shannon had rented out a farm next to Kent Peterson, who was rich enough to have several Negro workers on his 400- acres of land. The problem was Gus, his brother was gone out of town, not around to help him out of this jam, he was down visiting Mabel’s parents in Fayetteville, North Carolina celebrating for a month their anniversary, their 35th anniversary.

(The Beginning) It was Shannon’s one and only horse. Not having much money, and trying to do what his brother did create a self-sufficient farm, an independent one, asking no favours of any man, paying his own way. He—the horse (called: Dan), had strayed off in fall, into the skeleton cornfields next to his farm, and there he was over by Kent Peterson’s place, and Shannon couldn’t feed him so he left him there; and lived the whole winter without him, let Old Man Peterson feed him, knowingly feeding him. So Peterson feed the horse, knowing it was Shannon’s, the rest of fall, and through the winter—a long hard cold winter, and when spring came, then Shannon went to get his barren horse, worthless horse, his twenty-dollar horse, but he was fat and healthy now.

(The Deal) According to Mr. Kent Peterson’s calculations, and the sheriff from Dakota Country, Sheriff Terry Fauna, who had asked a few other farmers what the horse was worth now, and they all agreed it was valued at $140-dollars, not the $20-dollars Shannon had paid, now that it was fed and exercised, and groomed. Thus, this was the price tag for Shannon to acquire his horse back, according to law.
Yes indeed, all this trouble over a twenty-dollar horse, that now would cost him $140-dollars because he wanted to fool Mr. Peterson, in feeding him, for a short fall and long winter, because he couldn’t afford to do it.
“All right!” Shannon had said to Kent Peterson, to this sheriff, “I’ll work the fifteen days to get my horse back, peacefully, if that’s what you all want, and if that is what it takes, I guess I’ll have to do it, I went through the Great War, I can do this standing on my hands, I can withstand you both likewise.”
And he, Shannon felt forlorn and defenceless he wished his brother Gus was back from down south, he could straighten things out, but he wasn’t.
‘If Gus was back,’ he thought, ‘he would have settled this issue with the horse, he knows the sheriff and Mr. Peterson,’ but he was too impatient. And so he agreed to work for Mr. Peterson for fifteen days, to get his horse back, lest he lose both the goat and the rope.

Shannon worked for Kent, on his farm, painted his house a two-story frame building, then his barn, all 440-square feet of it. He had fifteen days to work off (nine days being spent on the house), and as he worked on the shifted from the house to the barn from sunup to sundown, he watched the young men and girls from the city driving by drinking in their cars, and he’d stop painting the barn to watch them, and the couples and old people, children. The barn faced the highway, the cars all moving in two directions. He could even hear their radios on, playing music—loud. He followed each car with his eyes, at night too, a lantern outside the barn lighted as now.

(The Barn) On the tenth day, now working at night on the barn, he heard the freight trains pass, which did almost at anytime throughout the evening, let alone the other passenger trains. So just by spending the evenings in one 440-square foot area, with only a little movement, he would hear maybe three or six trains before twilight.
When his day and evening was finished he’d walk past the old man, Kent on his way home, a two mile walk to his farm, as he sat in his dim rocking chair on his porch in the cool of the dark evening, an electric light on by his screened-in-door behind him to his right side, that led into the kitchen, where’ll the bugs gathered peacefully, with no worries, no need to escape the death hand of fate, and Kent wanted to talk a little while with Shannon, but he never stopped long enough for the old man to get a syllable out, just kept right on walking by, just like those bugs behind him, so he treated the old man, as if he wasn’t there.


(Trains) By the time he got back to his farm, he grabbed a jug of whiskey out from under his kitchen cabinet, walked a mile to the train tracks, sat on the edge of an embankment, waited and watched for the trains to come and go by, those coming from Chicago, to St. Paul, a few stopping in Stillwater Township first, about twelve miles away. The train it self, he liked to hear the four whistle blasts for a crossing, the headlights, the nosy engine, see the shadows of the engineer, and conductor, and fireman, and watch the slowing down of the coaches, the people in the late dining room car. The black waiters going back and forth with food for the rich: then the back lights of the train were gone as fast as they had appeared in a clap of an eye.
Between the long days of working for Peterson, and his hours of drinking after twilight, he became a fleshless, sleepless, foodless near mindless, empty man, a shell of a man, all over that twenty-dollar horse, that now was worth seven time that amount because he wanted to fool Mr. Peterson, in feeding him, for a short fall and long winter, because he couldn’t afford to do it. But Mr. Peterson had fooled him, and fed him knowing quite well if he did, he’d get fifteen days of work out of Shannon.


(Frozen Anger) It was as if Shannon wanted to get mad, or madder each day he worked, and anger grew, but he didn’t want to cause trouble, he knew he owed Mr. Peterson, and was determined to pay him back, even if he had to drain every ounce of blood out of him. And he knew inside of his cup of anger, if it overflowed its rim, Kent’s life was at risk, and thus, it mustn’t reach that stage.



Day Fifteen


When he woke, it was tomorrow morning, day fifteen.

(Rest of the Ending) It was 5:00 a.m., when Shannon got down to Kent Peterson’s farm a two mile hike from his, he was disturbed, so old man Peterson did notice, and being indifferent, he didn’t much care, said quietly, eating a biscuit, eating it steadily, standing on his porch, Shannon didn’t even notice him on his porch as he walked by, until he said,
“Looks like you had a hard night drinking,” never thinking he didn’t have time to plough and hoe, and get his ground ready for planting, on his farm, that perhaps that was on his mind as well, nor did he have a dinner, or breakfast, and his usual coffee, as the old man usually had simply slept away his afternoons.

(Shannon had taken from his army gear, the dull and rusty bayonet the one he had used in the army in the Great War, to scrape the old paint off the last wall of the barn and finished this last and fifteenth day of his penance, and bring home his horse; the bayonet almost as long as the forearm.)

“Now what?” asked Shannon?

“You, look like a zombie,” he remarked.
“I’m burnt out old man, shut you mouth and let me work my last day out.”
He then went over to the hedgerows and patches of woods to take a leak— concealed and undetected. But the old man followed him, was right behind him,
“You owe me one more day’s work Shannon, for feeding that house of yours for the last fifteen-days,” still chewing on that biscuit.
Inflexible, was the old man, silent was Shannon, as he did his duty, and he thought: ‘Maybe if he worked today, and tomorrow, tomorrow wouldn’t be the last day either. Maybe there would never be a last day, period!’
He put his hand under his coat, his fingers around the handle of the bayonet, pulled it out slowly, his fingers already tightening and taking up the slack around the handle, ‘I’ll never satisfy him,’ he told himself, whispered out loud a second time, without thinking, and between the scream and the bayonet and its impact of the thrust for him to say to Kent, and for Kent to have reasoned with it: ‘I’m not killing you because of the fifteen days of work, that’s okay, I done reasoned that out, and not because you’re rich and have no limits, and sleep all afternoon in that hammock of yours, but because of that one additional day you added on.”

The case of Shannon O’Day never did reach the courts, it was said, (some years after the incident of Mr. Kent Peterson) someone paid the judge to dismiss it, and a check in the mail came from down south, for $10,000-dollars, delivered personally to the judge. And an eye witness showed up at the district attorney’s office, said, there was another man hiding in the woods, which had it in for old man Peterson, an old worker, and grabbed Shannon’s bayonet, and did him in. When Shannon was asked if he killed Peterson at the inquest, or not, he answered, “I rightly don’t know, I hadn’t had any sleep for days, or food, and when I woke up, I had a nightmare that I did, and the police was hauling me down to jail.”
Then the judge said, “We don’t put people in penitentiaries for nightmares, in this country of ours; inefficient evidence, case dismissed!”



Written 5-25 and 26, of May, 2009
No: 406 xx

Not even one Hooting Owl Left (Poetic Prose)

Not even one Hooting Owl


The inside walls was the remains of an old barn one that was never quiet, he had worked it when he was a kid, he remembered how it sheltered animals, kept the hay dray in the loft, stored the machinery snug against the walls, it had stood with the farm, and family through the good and bad times, through their joys and great efforts, it was their lives, it was part of his life—if the barn could talk and it did talk to Shannon O’Day, so he said, time and again, from one generation to the next— it remembered him, and reminded him, he had worked it as a kid, he’d swear it told him when to feed the pigs, milk the cows, bring the hay down from the loft: day, after day, after day, a tedious job, but no tears did the barn shed, it even told him of the winds mounting up outside upon its walls, to hurry on up, and bring the horses in, and so forth, and the winters it withstood, and the summer’s sun that beat on it, that it endured, now silent, not a friend left, not even the small critters, the pigeons and their cooing had gone, the squirrels left; all its companions left, tomorrow it would be no more, no longer there, even loyal to its owls, it would have to go, go with all its secrets, it has to make room for a highway they told Shannon’s brother, Gus.
“A barn is never quiet until its last day,” Shannon whispered, which was this very day, speaking to the barn, standing in front of whatever it used to be, now dilapidated waiting for the bulldozer; the weathervane on top of the roof, had fallen to the earth, no longer able to indicate the direction of the wind (and there it lay amongst the weeds). “Then the squeaks diminish,” he whispered. He saw that all creatures great and small had long gone, empty as an egg shell, its ground it stood on, now waiting for the new sounds, of cars and tires, the new smells, from their exhaust of carbon dioxide. Not even one hooting owl left.


No: 2613 5-25-2009

The Third Wife ((1951-1953)(a Shannon O'Day Story))

Prelude (and outline):

For those who do not know the ongoing story, or saga of Shannon O’Day, the first book “Cornfield Laughter,” shows Shannon O’Day as an old man, he dies in 1967, at the age of 67-years old; the book opens in the year 1966. His fourth wife is Gertrude (who he had his second daughter with, and who survives him), who leaves him stranded in the cornfields of Minnesota one morning, and is never seen of again; and his fifth and last wife is Maribel, who he marries, after meeting her at the diner in St. Paul, and they divorce after the winter of that year, and he goes onto dating Annabelle, who is less than half his age, but never marries her. His first wife is Sally-Ann Como, who he meets in the Gem Bar, in the second book called: “To Save a Lopsided Sparrow,” and whom she leaves because of his drinking. Also in the same book his second wife, Margaret-Rose, has a child with him, but dies after an accident, and she returns to live with her father in Chicago. And now here is his third wife, Sandra Rossellini, the one thus far unmentioned, and for a good reason…


The Story


Chapter One
The Apartment


When Shannon O’Day, saw her nearing the door to her apartment, her apartment being next to his—she had moved in a few weeks earlier—both noticing each other through their windows, both taking a liking for each other, this day, this Friday, they stopped and looked up at each other instead of looking down for her keys, and him digging in his pocket for his.
“Would you like to come in for a beer?” he asked her kindly. He pulled out his apartment door key from his pocket, put it into the door’s keyhole, and then held the door open for her, and she walked in.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Shannon O’Day,” he answered, “And yours is?” he remarked, “Sandra Rossellini,” she said in a soft spoken voice, and Shannon thought right then and there, what a pretty fresh looking face she has.
“Beer?” she said to Shannon, “don’t you have something stronger?”
“Whisky and rum, and vodka, and wine, take your pick.”
He drew a beer for himself, and took a second one out of the ice box and pushed it across his little bar counter to her, she sat on a stool, and he was standing upright, behind the counter.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer him. She just looked over his head and at something behind him, and after a long moment of staring, said, “Who’s that?” it was a picture in a frame of a young woman.
“Gwyneth Davis, someone I’ve been dating,” he remarked.
“Rye whisky,” the woman said, “I’ll take a glass of your rye whisky and use the beer for a chaser, I suppose.” (She really didn’t care for beer she was being polite.)
Shannon put out a bottle of beer by her, and a glass and a bottle of rye whisky by her, and a glass of water in case she wanted to mix the whisky with water. Then he pulled out of the ice box, some pickled pig’s feet, put them on a dish between the two, put two forks alongside each other near the pig’s feet, so he or she could pick them up with ease.
“No,” she said, “I don’t care for pig’s feet, you can put one of them back, I’m not eating it,” and she poured water and whisky into the glass.
“So you don’t like pig’s feet?” said Shannon.
“The damn thing stinks,” she remarked, and gagged at the sight of them. Shannon put one back into the ice box.
“Listen,” said Shannon, “if you want we can go for a walk after the drinks.”
“Who said I wanted to go out with you,” she said “it wasn’t’ my idea, all I wanted was to meet you, I saw you about, you have an interesting face.”
“We’ll just go for a short walk; we’ll be back in a hurry.” He told her.
“No you won’t,” she said, “You have other ideas.”
They both drank down their drinks, and Shannon said, “Come on! Do I need to tell you how wrong you are?”
Sandra turned to the window in back of her, it was getting dark. “I don’t know,” she said. “If I go with you tonight are you going to dump that little mistress of yours?” She asked Shannon, and Shannon shook his head yes. She was a very lovely woman, about thirty-two years old; she looked like Audrey Hepburn, he thought. Gwyneth Davis was young and plain looking but loved to drink in the cornfields with Shannon, and that mattered, but he was hoping Sandra would also.
“Who’s that man that brings you home now and then?” He asked her.
“Truman Weaver, you could say I guess, I’m his part time mistress—just like that one is for you (pointing back at the picture in its frame behind Shannon), he pays for everything, and I don’t love him, although he loves me. And I suppose we should get going its getting dark.”



Chapter Two
Murder on the Highway


(Sunday Morning) Shannon O’Day was woken up and picked up by the St. Paul Police, while sleeping in his brother’s cornfields and brought down to the St. Paul Police Station for the murder of Gwyneth Davis, twenty-four years old. He looked about saw a half dozen whores waiting for their lawyers to get them out before they got put into a jail cell, they were about to be processed. There were a few blacks, Indians and Mexicans, talking to a few police men, taking down statements. Two white women complaining about their husbands battering. It was crowded and hot, and stale smoke circled the area, it was the main entrance room where everyone was waiting, processing and complaining. And he was brought through this crowd and put into a backroom, where Sergeant Toby Patron, was waiting for him, for questioning.
As Shannon entered the room the Sergeant didn’t say a word, he shut the door behind him, and noticed the window was up to let in the fresh air. Shannon had spread out trousers and high boots on, a plaid shirt, no cap, and his face pale, eyes bloodshot red, he had been on a drinking binge.
“Thank you for coming down with the officers peacefully,” said the Sergeant.
“I’m an old soldier, I never interfere with the law,” he said, Shannon was fifty-one years old.
“No,” the sergeant said, “I hope not.”
Shannon noticed the Sergeant held his lips tight together, and then another officer came in through the door, stood by it like a guard, as if he might try to escape.
“You like sugar in your coffee,” asked the Sergeant, “I can have Officer Jones, go get you some?”
“No,” said Shannon O’Day, “no coffee for me.”
The sergeant leaned over the wooden table that was between him and O’Day, “Look,” he said—near side by side, “you are a piece of disgusting flesh, why did you murder her?”
Shannon O’Day started laughing, “Murder who?” and he just kept laughing and shaking.
“Oh my god,” said the Sergeant, “he’s pretending he doesn’t know!” (Looking at Officer Jones.)
Officer Jones stood by the door like a dignified pillar.
Shannon was getting ready to say something, and the Sergeant stood up, pounded on the table, “Well!” he said.
“I swear I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Here look at these two pictures,” said the sergeant, they were of Gwyneth Davis, her face beaten and her throat cut and thrown to the side of the road by a café not far from the cornfields Shannon was found sleeping in by the police.
“How old was she?” the sergeant asked.
“Twenty-four; I had just broken up with her, told her I was dating this Sandra Rossellini girl I met, and she was upset and took off and started walking home,” said Shannon.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” said the sergeant, “and you let her walk home in the dark alone?”
“Is that a crime?”
“No, but it isn’t very decent,” said the Sergeant.
“So I’m not decent, is that a crime?” he asked in a sarcastic but friendly manner.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked the Sergeant, and Jones came over to the side of Shannon as if to hit him, and Shannon stood up, then the sergeant said, “That’s all right.” And Jones went back to the door.



Subchapter
Mr. Dudley Arrives


“I would prefer us all here to be friends, Mr. O’Day?” said the Sergeant.
“No,” said O’Day, “not with you.”
“Don’t want to be friends?” said the Sergeant.
“She was just a spitfire, she up and left after I told her about Sandra, not a thing I could do about it.” Shannon told the Sergeant.
The one officer by the door looked at the other and shook his head.
“Damn liars, I hate them,” he said.
Shannon commenced to laugh again and to shake allover, it was kind of an automatic impulse, even the laughing, a form of dealing with unwanted, confrontational stress.
“There’s nothing funny here Mr. O’Day,” the Sergeant said. “Your laugh gives you away. Can’t you stop laughing, and you and I speak decently? If not I’m going to have to jail you.”
“For what?” asked Shannon, “laughing?”
A third officer came through the door with a Mr. Dudley, from the Law Firm, ‘Dudley and Smith’ along with Gus O’Day, Shannon’s brother.
“Oh, shut up,” said Gus to Shannon, Mr. Dudley is here to over see this interview, or interrogation.
“We were just finishing up, Mr. Dudley, matter-of-fact, make sure your client doesn’t leave the state, he’s under suspicion.”
Everyone was very respectful to the attorney, he said, “Mr. Shannon O’Day, this is of course, as you should know, just a high stagy way of trying to get you to say something you’ll regret later,” but Shannon was starting to shake, hands, shoulders, legs from the stress, strain and booze.
“I wouldn’t have hurt him,” councilman, said the Sergeant.
“That’s a fine way to look at it,” said Dudley, “it is all a trick once you are brought into this room Shannon, get up and let’s go unless the good sergeant here, has some more relevant questions to ask, or if he is officially charging you.”
The Sergeant turned and smiled at Dudley, he had been looking out the window somewhat at the little school across the street, at the little French School next to the church called, St. Louis, “My boys go to that school, got to take them for lunch today, go on with Mr. Dudley, Shannon O’Day, we’ll see you later I’m sure.”
The sergeant was a huge figure of a man, broad shoulders, robust built, in his late forties, lumberjack type.
“I hope to god you’re telling the truth. So white and clean and beautiful and smooth skin was that girl, she could have been my daughter.” The sergeant said. And Dudley, Gus and Shannon all walked out of the room as if he was talking to himself, and as they went outside onto the platform, by the doors of the police station, the Indians that were arguing inside the station, when Shannon had first come, were now arguing outside, a little cockeyed.



Chapter Three
The Doubt


During the following fifteen-months, of marriage between Sandra Rossellini, and Shannon O’Day, everyone felt terrible. It was sad, the police hounded Shannon O’Day, questioned his wife, and it became embarrassing. Sandra started speaking in a low voice, thinking after talking to the police sergeant several times, maybe her husband did kill young Gwyneth Davis, if not, who did? And she spoke to Gus and Mabel O’Day about it, the fear of it, and Shannon being in war knew how to kill with a knife, and the Sergeant telling her, “Your husband’s a dirty liar,” and Sandra not saying a word back to Shannon. She had never met Gwyneth in her life, but she was feeling sorry for her, felt she knew her. And so she was being flooded with all these emotions, suspicions, doubts, and fears—fears that if he did kill her, there was a possibility she could be next. I mean, if he got away with it once, why not twice.
“How can you say that about your husband?” asked Mabel.
“I say it because it can be true,” said Sandra.
“I know Shannon, and it is not true, and God can strike me dead if it isn’t true,” said Mabel.
“He can strike me too,” said Gus.
And then Shannon, who had been working at a foundry came in during this visit and discussion overhearing parts of it, one Friday afternoon, that lead into late afternoon, “What did she say?” he asked Gus (and he knew somewhat of what she did say, but it was indistinct).
Sandra was crying, so she could hardly speak to express herself any longer.
“You’re a lovely wife,” said Shannon, “you got me to want to work and make something of myself, and now this!” He knew she had been under stress, but not that she might think he killed Gwyneth, then Mabel, said, “She’s been talking to that Sergeant, he’s been feeding her all this rot…I guess I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s all a lie.”
“It’s true,” Gus said. “That’s truly what has been going on.”
“Is that so?” Shannon said proudly to his wife.
“Yes, it’s true, true, true, and true, to Almighty God true.”
“I don’t think Sandra my wife could have said that by herself, it wasn’t the girl I got married to, it wasn’t the way you talked when we first met.”
“It’s true, I fear you might have killed her, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” said Sandra in her soft low voice, “and I guess it doesn’t matter one way or the other, what is, or what isn’t because it is how I feel—especially if your heart and mind believe it, and there is no other proof to the contrary, then it is reality.”
She wasn’t crying anymore, and she was calm. And now Shannon knew it was impossible for them to put the marriage back to how it was, how it was meant to be, should have been; that faith, the belief the trust it was all gone, if indeed, it was ever there in the first place, the reliance was gone, that was suppose to have been there like stone, to march through storms and years of whatever God or the Devil put in front of you.
He said, happily, “I stopped at the police station today to talk to Sergeant Toby Patron, he called me at my work and he said, to come down to the police station, he had something to tell me, and show me, and when I got there, he told me face to face, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, ‘Mr. Shannon O’Day,’ he said to me, ‘you’re a better man than I,’ that is what he said and meant, and I said to him: Did you call me down here to insult me? I asked, ‘No,’ he said, then pointed to a man across the hall, I could see him through the little window of the door, ‘He’s got some bad memories,’ the sergeant said, ‘he just signed a statement he killed Gwyneth’ guess who it was Sandra?”’
She looked at Shannon, “Who?” she asked.
“Truman Weaver, he was jealous over you and me, and thought he’d kill her and pin it on me, and you’d leave me for him. I guess half of that’s true anyhow. Go ahead and call the sergeant up, I never lie, and Gus and Mabel know it.”
It seemed as if she didn’t want to call the sergeant up, but just had to. And had she not, perhaps what took place next, might not have.
And she did call the good Sergeant up, and he did say, whatever he said, and Shannon grabbed a bottle of whiskey out of Gus’ hiding place, behind a cabinet, and said “Good-bye,” to Sandra. And as he walked out, he thought: she certainly had a nice voice, and a few other things nice, but nice is not trusting, and that was what was needed, especially when there was no reason not to trust. That is to say, Shannon O’Day was many things to many folks, but he was not untrustworthy.
Gus and Mabel were getting ready to go shopping, and Sandra asked, “Can you bring me back to my apartment; I need to pack some things?”
Mabel looked at Sandra, and then at Gus, and at Shannon walking into the cornfields with his bottle of whiskey uncorked, in his right hand, then back at Sandra, her face put on a hurt look, and she lost that everlasting smile of hers, she once had, and she lost that look, the prettiest face Mabel had ever saw on a woman, but not today, and her voice was lovely, but not today, and she was always so friendly, but not today, then she said, “We’re going the other way from you.”


Written 5-21 & 22, 2009 (No: 404)

The Bluff ((1946)(a Shannon O'Day sketch))

The Bluff (1946)
(Margaret-Rose Ramsey and Shannon O’Day)

As told by: Mabel O’Day (Widow to Gus O’Day)


And so Otis Wilde Mather took off to Ozark, Alabama, and he’d wait sixteen-years before he’d return to Minnesota, whereupon, he’d meet Margaret-Rose Ramsey, Shannon O’Day’s second wife to be.

(Mabel O’Day :) If I recall right, Otis Wilde Mather, that there nigger he liked, come up from Alabama one summer, the summer of 1946, after the second war, and he and that nigger gulped down some wine in the cornfield together, like they used to, he was now thirty-six years job, and looking for work. Shannon was forty-six at the time, and still working part time here and there, actually he gave $500-dollars more to Gus from that money he won at the horse races a while back in I think 1940 or 1941, when they hit the jackpot for $5000-dollars. A bad year for everyone else, so it seemed, but the two, and so Gus took that as investing money and when times were good, Gus gave him some investment money back, and he hired Shannon to work, when he wasn’t working. But Gus just wouldn’t hire that there nigger friend of his, said his neighbors would hang him if he did. But Shannon didn’t give a hoot; you know how a fellow is that way. I had figured that out by now. But he was a mighty polite nigger; he was so tall I couldn’t even touch his shoulders I do believe. I’m not blaming Gus any, but that’s jes’ the way he was. I was friendlier I suppose with Otis, my mother being from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and father from Minnesota, mom and I kind of knew how to deal with color folk.
Otis and Shannon went to the Minnesota State Fair that year, and Gus and I tagged along, Shannon wanted to see the ‘Fat Man,’ he was 600-pounds of pure butter, and custard, if you know what I mean, ripples of fat like them there rollercoaster’s, they have out there, I like the rollercoaster, and the merry-go-round, but never cared to see the fat man, what for, fat is fat, but I went along with it all. He even winked at me, and I blushed, but I didn’t tell Gus, had I, gosh Almighty, what then? I just thought, the nerve of this guy, and let it be at that. But gee-whiz, gosh Almighty, there I was.
Anyhow, the Minnesota State Fair, lasted ten-days, and Shannon and Otis, went back there after we had went there with him, by themselves, and met Margaret-Rose there, brought her to meet me and Gus at our farm, and he she wasn’t any mutt. What I wouldn’t have given for a stick of chewing gum, I had jes’ eaten some garlic bread, and Gus, he done smoked a twenty-five cent cigar.
Shannon introduced us to her, and we all knew Otis, and she told us her father was a manufacturer of wooden crates for vegetables and fruits, and there company was named ‘Ramsey Crate Manufacturing Co.’
There was something in the way she dressed, in her designer style cloths, and I mean designer in the sense of creative; I bet it was all bought at the Golden Rule Department Store, or perhaps a personal tailor. And she had kind of pretty eyes, and the way she had looked at Gus, I didn’t like. She looked at me kind of strangely, as I was out of place, or so I felt, and guess that was because of my garlic breath, I did give an ore of dislodgment.
Shannon sat down on a chair by the kitchen table, she stood by his shoulder, Otis, was there, and Gus and I; I couldn’t show her up for a boob, I knew that.
I suppose I made a fool of myself, sure I did, I said I came from Connecticut, and my father knew Mark Twain, because he lived there, died in 1910, but it all seemed to fit. Yet I still had my mother’s southern, Fayetteville, North Carolina slight of speech in me, that minor pronunciation, or blur accent, southern twang. Nevertheless, as I kept bragging, Gus and Otis, and Shannon all leaned over their chairs listening not believing what they were hearing, and what I was saying, and I could just imagine what they were thinking. And I don’t think Margaret-Rose was doing much believing in what I was saying. But I kept on a saying what I was saying—and Gus and Shannon were silent about the truth of it all, and Miss Margaret-Rose’s eyes were shinning and so I went whole hog, and said he even helped Mark Twain, by giving him advice concerning some short stories, one on a frog. By gosh, what was I thinking?
As I look back, I guess what happened was: I got a-bragging in a way I never had before, and as she listened, and things dragged on, the story just kept coming out of me, a tall tale that is, and somehow we all got to laughing, and I felt better, of course she didn’t, because she thought I was making fun of her status. Otis was leaning against the stove at this time, and even he was laughing with those big white buck teeth of his, and big nostrils like a dragon. I could have kicked myself in the butt; my legs are not agile enough to do that though. If a person goes to hell for telling a fib, I’m going to go to the hottest spot they got I do fear.
After a while we sat there talking, like we had known each other for years and years, and I bluffed it through the afternoon, even if I sounded like a lame cow.



Subchapter
Bushel of Spoiled Eggs



As told by: Mabel O’Day (Widow to Gus O’Day)

1948-49


There was something else eating at me, during those few years Shannon and Margaret-Rose dated and married, as she did in 1948, and had their first daughter in 1948—

Shannon broke a few, perhaps more than a few, pretty girls hearts in his day, he was a handsome man, in his youth. But he, himself came out of a bushel of spoiled eggs. I loved him as a brother-in-law, and still do, but a rotten egg is a rotten egg, however you look at it, or smell it: on the other hand, I guess I was left alone on that way of thinking, likened on a deserted island, no one else quite thought the way I did. He was no Rudolph Valentino you know, but you’d think he was, always carefree drinking, getting lucky. There I was small boobs as I am, but Gus loved them and me. And when Shannon come over to visit me and Gus and they’d go off into the cornfields, to drink, and leave Margaret-Rose with me cuz she didn’t drink much, she wasn’t saying much, she had changed overnight, so it appeared, and I guess I wasn’t saying much either that day. My guess was I really kind of knew. She wasn’t stuck on me because of the fib, about my father knowing Mark Twain and all that. I’ve learned there is a certain girl you meet and if you click, you best make some hay together cuz there gone forever and forever in some other world and trying to be close friends with them is impossible, you might jes’ as well fall off a house roof and die.
Why she fell for Shannon is beyond my understanding, but he played her music I suppose and after we had supper that day, Margaret-Rose had to leave at nine o’clock to catch a train to Chicago, to see her father, give him the news she was pregnant. Shannon simply went back to his cornfields with Gus and Otis and drank another bottle of watermelon wine, something he picked up in the war he said, over in France. I think that day was a mad, happy and sad day.
“I got to go to the train now Shannon,” said Margaret-Rose thinking he would follow her, but he didn’t. When she left, she was crying but Shannon didn’t see it. She never knew nothing I knew, and when they divorced I couldn’t believe she was all that busted up.

Margaret-Rose stayed in Chicago until after her baby girl was born. She wrote to me, and I wrote back to her, she asked how Shannon was, told me how the child was, that’s all she said. I suppose it was a chance to repair our friendship, a swell chance I got, but I was too busy too. Whatever kind of guy she was looking for, there wasn’t any such creature on God’s good earth. And me, trying to pass myself off as being a big bug, I never really cared to see her because of that; I was a little shameful about the way I acted.
And then after the child was six-months old, the train come in and she got off it, and Shannon met her and shook her hand, and she gave a little bow to me, and the baby cried like a baby does, “Gee,” I said, “what a lovely baby.” You know, like everyone does. “Did you ever see such a lovely baby Shannon?” She asked him.
What he said next I per near fell over, or as if the train itself had run over me, what he said was “It looks like a raw oversized turkey.”
I wanted to go sit down after that, let Margaret-Rose deal with the hurt, and mend fences with Shannon if indeed that was their plan, but I said, “I bet if Shannon hadn’t a drink of booze today, he’d had said how lovely the child was.” But I knew Shannon, and that was another fib, not like the big Mark Twain one though.
He, Shannon said, “Those gosh darn eyes of hers look like they’re smashed into her forehead, what happened?”
“You’re a big fool Shannon—that’s what he is,” I said to Margaret-Rose.
“Did you find work Shannon?” asked Margaret-Rose.
“I don’t care anything for working or saving or shaving, I’m just a half tramp!”
Seven Months Later

Unfortunately I received one last letter, several months after that visit, where Margaret-Rose had written me, her mother, the child’s grandmother had taken the child out for a ride in the winter, while in Chicago, skidded on a road, and they both ended up in the hospital. The mother losing her motor function ability, and the child’s death; I told Shannon of the news, and it simply made him drink more, he never did make it to the funeral.

“The Bluff” and “Bushel of Spoiled Eggs,” written: 5-12-2009, part two to the three part story, “The Half Tramp” being part one and part three being the “Cornfield Burner”

"Cornfield Burner" ((1950) (Chapter three: to "The Half Tramp"))

Chapter Three


“What proofs have you Mr. Gus O’Day?” ask Judge Finely.
“I told you the nigger got into my cornfield, was drunk waiting for my brother Shannon to show up and he was the only one there!”
Judge Finley hesitated looked at Otis Wilde Mather… “But that isn’t any substantial proof!”
“I told him, warned him not to go in there without Shannon, my brother, I knew he smoked that damn corncob pipe, and drank,” said Gus O’Day.
“Shannon, he tells me, your honor, it be O.K., ef-in I goes in dhere and waits fer him.”
“Who told you that you could talk Mr. Mather, shut up until you’re told it’s your time to talk, you hear me?” said the judge. “Yessum,” said Otis, and then nodded his head.

“And this here is the man you’re talking about, right Mr. O’Day?” and the judge waved his hand for Otis to standup.
“Yes sir, your honor, that sure is,” said Gus O’Day, adding, “He’s a strange one, but my brother likes him for some odd reason, comes from down south and causes trouble up here.”
“But you don’t have any real proof,” said the judge, “you can see that right?”
“Bring that big black nigger up over here, he’ll tell the truth, or else!”
Otis was still standing, big and wiry, in patched trousers, dusty and dirty, and ripped along the ridges, they were too tight for the six-foot six, man, some 220-pounds. With deep dark eyes, unkempt hair, gave him a wild look, yet he was not wild. He noticed all the white males’ grim faces in the courtroom. And here was a short white, gray haired judge, past middle age, with small gold rimmed glasses ordering him to stand and be accountable.
His body appeared to be stiff, from sleeping in a cramped jail cell overnight. This was not a court of judgment, just a fact finding court that being of a preliminary hearing to see if it was a case to be taken to court, or could be settled out of court.
Otis, didn’t seem to look anybody in particular, he just stood there blankly, like the Tower of Pisa.

“What’s your name, boy?” asked the judge.
“Otis Wilde Mather, sir,” said the big Blackman.
“Where is your hometown?”
“Ozark, Alabama, sir.”
“Did you fall to sleep in the cornfields and with a lit pipe, burn Mr. O’Day’s, crops to smithereens?”
“Nope, but I done drank some your honor; I done left my corncob pipe at Mr. Shannon O’Day’s apartment, sir.”
There was no sound in the courtroom, you could have heard a dime drop had one dropped; it was absolutely quiet, everyone waiting for the Judge’s decision on the matter.
“So you’re saying you’re not guilty of this crime, is that so Mr. Mather?”
“Yessum your honor, dhats waht I is sayin’ cuz I dont rightly know how dhat dhere fire got a burnin’”
Gus’ face exploded with anger “Damn nigger!” he yelled.
“Case dismissed,” said the judge, adding “I can’t even find you careless, Mr. Mather, but I suggest you leave this city and go on back home where you belong, down to that Alabama place, and right quick. And if I ever see you in my courtroom again, you’ll be in the workhouse faster than you can say Jack Johnson.”
“I aint a-goin’ to stay,” said Otis, “dont care fer this place anymore…”
“That’s enough,” said the judge, “get on your way now, out of my courtroom, case dismissed!”

Shannon O’Day had appeared somewhere in the crowed walked out of the courtroom with Otis, gave him some chewing tobacco, they both had smiles on their faces, everyone else had a grim face.
Out on the courthouse steps were several women, farm folk that lived around Gus’ place, repeating: “Cornfield burner! Cornfield burner!”
Said Gus to his brother Shannon outside the courthouse, “Brother, you got to learn to stick with your own blood!”
Shannon didn’t say a word, he knew the truth, and the truth didn’t come out in the courtroom, and he knew who had the truth, and if it did come out, Gus would hate him for it.
So Shannon just stood behind other folks and listened, and figured, ‘We’ll see what tomorrow will bring.’


Subchapter
The Secret


Shannon gave Gus $500-dollars every penny he had, it was a gift given to his wife from her father, now separated and Margaret-Rosa, and his daughter were in Chicago. Gus took the money saying to his wife, Mabel, “I hate to take it but I got to plant again, I imagine I’ll remain friends with my brother, even if he likes niggers—he didn’t burn my cornfield up anyhow, I know that! And I’ll owe him heart and soul until I pay him back.”
Then Shannon showed up at the door, hugged his brother, and they were like two happy hogs again.
“Guess I have some work to do with my new man, Albert Fitzgerald, going to replant as soon as possible.”
And he left the house.
“Come with me,” said Mabel to Shannon, and they went outside, to make sure no one was listening.
“Yes,” said Shannon.
“Otis,” she mentioned, and then paused as if it was Shannon’s turn to speak.
“I’m supposing he’ll be fine, he’s going back to Alabama on the 7:30 p.m., train this evening.
“You know I’ll owe you body and soul for as long as I live Shannon!” she said.
They walked up to the burnt cornfields, to its edge, it was a warm day, and as Shannon looked over the field, it was as if he had lost his lover, but he always had his friend’s farm to drink in, right next door to Gus’.
“You saved our marriage,” she told Shannon, as he stood foot solid looking at her, she was a nice looking woman, more plain than pretty, but she kept herself up, she wasn’t fat or too thin. Then he turned about, saw her farmhouse, perhaps this was the first time he took a good look at it, and the rose bushes, the wooden gate that was closed tight in the front of the house, the creek that run in the back of the house, and to its side, Gus and Mabel had put a life time of work into their marriage, and this farm.
It was a land of small farms, and cornfields, it was his world as well as Gus’. It brought him peace and joy. For no reason he could put into words, his mind being too liquefied from booze for deep thinking, yet he knew Mabel and Gus were safe from divorce now. And her dignity untouched and the buzzing wasps from the courthouse were put to rest, no longer capable of stinging his family.
Shannon knew this was the only way to stop sorrow, certainly raving jealous rage, iron like anger, it would have changed Gus forever, had he known the truth…

Shannon remembered his Negro friend was shouting: “Miss Mabel! Miss Mabel! You-is drunk, go-on back to your house befer youall git us in trouble!”
Gus was passed out in his bed, in the house. And Shannon had just taken a bath in the creek. No one seeing him, not even Otis, still waiting for him to show up, and here he was watching it all, per near.
He saw Mabel, in a thin, near see through nightgown, more like a slip, laced around the neck, thrashing, but trying to wipe, booze off her chin, with the palm of her hand.
After it was all over and Mabel no longer on her back, she stood up, shook herself clean, and headed on back to her house.
Shannon, now looking at Otis, “I tole her no, but…” he said to Shannon, cockeyed and loopy, as Shannon just shook his head.
“I heard yaw!” said Shannon, “now will you please just go away,” he told Otis, holding his breath, and Otis did.
Mabel had carried a kerosene lamp (paraffin style house lamp) the kind where the knob protruding to the right adjusts the wick, and hence the flame size, outside with her, and now was carrying it back headed out of the cornfield and to the house, it slipped out of her hands, and she fell a few feet from the fire that had now started, it had started almost instantly when she dropped the lantern—the glass had broken, and the fire escaped, and Shannon could do one of two things, stop the fire by putting it out with his shirt or pants, or put Mabel back into her house before Gus woke up to find out what all the fuss was about, putting her back into her bed with Gus, and hope Otis could find his way back to his apparent in the dark, but he’d have to let the cornfields burn if he did that. And we all know what he did—what he felt was the lesser of the evils. He did not speak again to Otis until the day at court. He had never seen a man, white or black sweat so hard, as Otis did in that courtroom. But then, who wouldn’t have under the circumstances.

5-12-2009 ∙∙



Notes and History of the stories, “The Half Tramp,” “Christmas in 1947,” and “Uncle Harvey’s Beatings,” written on 5-6-2009; “Foolish Years,” written on 5-12-2009; forming the third part of the Shannon O’Day Saga. “Cornfield Burner,” ∙∙ written 5-12-2009, along with “The Bluff” “A Sad Christmas,” and “Uncle Harvey’s Beatings” written 5-6-2009

The Half Tramp (Shannon O'Day story)

The Half Tramp
(The Years 1922-1932)

As told by: Mabel O’Day (Widow to Gus O’Day)

Chapter One:
The Half Tramp


They—his mother and father had tired to instill it into their two boys, we all knew that in the family, I am speaking of fortitude, the heart and the will to endure, Gus and Shannon neither could answer them in logic or reason, or have explained back to them what they were trying to instill, but we all knew what they had instilled, what their mother and father had implanted, we always knew, and they had it, matter-of-fact, they had more than their share. And their mother knew—beyond her battered life—knew, beyond any doubt, and within their small lonely spot, forlorn spot on earth, which God and humanity gave them: she knew she needed to instill this before she was blotted out of this existence.
And it was this will, this fortitude that held him through the war years (the Great War), and it was that he was fleeing those memories because he was not going anyplace soon; he spent the following decade (between 1922 and 1932) as a half tramp, somewhat of a casual tramp, between getting drunk in his brother’s cornfields outside of the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and the bars and streets of the inner city, working part-time jobs as he could, in per near every factory and foundry in the city, and a general laborer during a few summers working in the field of construction of building, buildings and houses. He even worked a spell in the South St. Paul, Stockyards, drifting from one job to another, drinking before and after his work hours, and finally getting fired from there. And back to the Gem Bar he’d go; now Ira Ingway owned it; where Sally-Anne, now his wife was bartender.


At twenty-five years old, in 1925, he could hardly bear to take a cold shower, feeling its needle like thrust of shooting out water, on his sensitive skin; taking five aspirins to subdue his headache and unsteady hands. But he could somehow afford to drink as much as he pleased in those trying years, particularly in the evenings, and on the weekends in his friends or brother’s cornfields. He did this of course with the knowledge of everyone knowing, because on Monday mornings, shrill cries of half drunken women followed him to his work which he had a hard time, at times, driving himself back even to the city, several miles away, how he got to work from there, puzzled all of us. We all learned in time, he’d walk into work in some dreamless stupefaction of reeking alcohol from last night’s uproar, that was still pounding in his head—, in the afternoons it would die, and the recuperation process would start in full swing.

Ten-years of an insane desire to drink—Sally-Anne, made it through the first two; she had married him in 1922, and left him in 1924. In 1932, he still had that shrewdness, that luck and fortitude imported from Europe, by way of his mother and father, good Irish stock.

(It was his brother who had fetched him back—when their mother died, prior to his 14th Birthday, with a kind of abashed and thoughtful unshakability and brought him here, to our farm, and home in which he would live thereafter—until he went to France to join the military, to fight Germans. He had started drinking a little prior to this time with his brother, ten-years his senior, in those cornfields, not one in all those years had he failed to stop drinking, to my knowledge, not even during the war years I would guess.)

Of course all this drinking, required and took, and drained the character and strength of Shannon O’Day. At the Gem Bar, Ira Ingway, had bequeathed him credit, and a discount of 20% off all he consumed, if he agreed to patronize his establishment over the other bars—although an occasional stop at the Coney Island Bar, didn’t matter, and Sally-Anne, now married to Ira, didn’t care for that, but Ira had said, business is business, and since he was such a half tramp in drinking, she could keep an eye on him that way better, so no harm would come to him. Such logic, but it worked. On the other hand, one could say, and many of us did say, Ira Ingway helped Shannon’s dig his hole. By and large, Shannon did drink there the majority of the times, and didn’t spend more than ten-minutes talking with his now ex-wife, Sally-Anne, per week, who was now of course much better off economically.
Sally-Anne, on the other hand lived in complete physical and mental ease and peace as she could devise with Ira Ingway and his bar. She would have had to agree, her life no longer required cash, it was all there for the taking, in the form of credit wherever she went: at the bakery, the butcher, the Emporium Department Store, you name it, and she had credit there.
She could have had servants, if she so desired, or wished to, but she never did, an old habit, a do it yourself thing.
So it would seem she had done right by her new marriage, and nobody blamed her for leaving Shannon, not even Shannon.
The question had come among us, “Did Shannon think about Sally-Anne, thereafter?”
Shannon told me once, and he always added a little smartness to his dialogue, so I can’t say one way or the other, where the truth lies, but he said, and he had a sense of humor of course in saying what he said, “Yes I think about Sally-Anne, when I take cold showers, and when I roll out of bed, in the middle of the night to get a drink of corn whisky, or when I drink out of the ordinary.” If this indeed was true, I was the only one he told.
At times he had a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion, during those years. But in 1947, still a drunk, and still a hard worker, but not quite the half tramp he was during the previous decade, as I recall it was a peculiar winter, and a sad Christmas for Shannon or at least it started out that way. Let me explain…


Subchapter:
Foolish Years—1930s


It was hard on Shannon when he got jolted by his wife, first wife, perhaps the bitterest thing he ever had to face, and it all came about of course because of his lifestyle, his drinking, and his thoughtlessness. Even now, years later, when I think about it, I want to cry, if not swear or kick him in the pants. Yes, even now after all this time and he is of course buried six-feet under. I’m old now, and when I look back I know there will be no satisfaction in telling this, but I will.
To tell the truth, I feel a little foolish bring this up, but during the summer of 1930, Shannon brought a nigger named Otis Wilder Mather over to the farm, Otis, he said was working at a ranch, where people rented out horses, Hilltop Stables, they called it. I guess his job was as a helper all-around, whatever that means. Shannon thought it something disgraceful that one of his friends, in this case, new friends should take a job like that. Otis had been working at the stables for a long spell, some three years trying to save enough money to bring back home to his ma and pa, down in Ozark, Alabama; he had told Shannon in front of me half drunk one afternoon after coming in from the cornfields with him—each with a bottle of whisky in hand, “I gots to work dhere cuz dhere aint no other work to be got.” He was a big nigger fellow, young, big as a lumbering jack, you know one of those tree climbers, and cutters, he was only twenty-years old, and Shannon was thirty.
And they just got to hanging around the farm drinking, and Gus didn’t say a word, but it got on my nerves. And I told him so, and he said, “Mabel, I’m not mowing people’s lawns anymore, nor am I going to sell newspapers like I did when I was ten-years old, and I’m not cleaning any cistern out. So what can I do but get drunk!”
Well, Oscar had moved in with Shannon, and here were two lazy sprawling bodies, cockeyed drunk every morning, in his little hotel room on Wabasha Street. And if anybody had the luck of the devil, it was that nigger.
They both kept a peachy time I’ll say that, I don’t mean any of that funny stuff, just drinking, and joking. And they took off one weekend, jumped a boxcar in August, of 1930, and Shannon took all the money he had left, some $500-dollars I’m supposen, and he bet it on a horse Otis had picked out. And I’ll be, he own $5000-dollars, enough for a house, two or three years of wages. Otis was a fine nigger, like Shannon tried to be a fine brother-in-law, neither one ever stole a thing, or would steal anything, just get drunk a whole lot, swear a little, like his brother Gus, my husband. Shannon even told me once, he said, “That young nigger taught me how to rub down a horse, and can you beat that Mabel?”
He’d get so excited about it he’d even explain it to me in detail, “You wrap a bandage on a horse’s leg, you see, and make sure it is smooth.” And I’d say, “Yaw,” waiting for the next whatever he was suppose to do to the horse, and Shannon would say, “That’s it, there isn’t anymore.”
“Gee whiz,” I’d say, waiting for him to say something else.
Anyhow, it left him with a lot of time to hang around and listen to horse stories from Otis as they’d yap in the warm air in the cornfields. He gave that nigger $500-dollars, and the next day he was gone, said he was going back to Alabama, to be with his folk. And Shannon gave Gus $1000-dollars. If he had any sense he would have bought a house. “Gosh almighty,” I said to Gus, “your brother was sure nice to us,” and that paid the farm off.

5-12-1009

"To Save a Lopsided Sparrow" (Novelette, the short revised version)

To Save a Lopsided Sparrow

(Sequel to the book, “Cornfield Laughter”)

(A Short Novel, on the Great War, and Selected Short Stories :)


The Council of the Continental University, Los Andes University, the UNCP University, the Journalist Professional Association and Cultural Center of Peru congratulates and recognizes


Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D.
By Three Time Poet Laureate




“To Save a Lopsided Sparrow,” Copyright©2009 by Dennis L. Siluk Ed.D.

Contents


Part I. — The Lank Figure


Part II. — The Great War

Chapter One: Rain of Shells
Chapter Two: Streets of Paris
Chapter Three: The Village of Douaumont
Chapter Four: Drops of Sleep
Chapter Five: Death Reeks (Leticia’s Story)
Chapter Six: The First Time
Chapter Seven: The Beast Unhealed
and Edge of the Hamlet
Chapter Eight: Eating her Own Death

Subchapter (to Chapter Seven)
Eating her own Death

Death in the Dark (a poem)


Part III. –Home Sweet Home

Chapter One: A Soldier Goes Home
Chapter Two: The Prison
Chapter Three: The Gem Bar
Chapter Four: Jobless Isaiah
Chapter Five: Death to Death

Poem:

Beauty with Dark Vines



End Notes on writing of the book





Yea, the sparrow hath found a house, and … a nest for herself…”

Psalm 84

One Sparrow shall not fall on the ground without your Father knowing.
Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than the sparrow.

Matthew 10:29

Part One:
The Lank Figure


(Shannon O’Day’s dream-vision) He was near a skeleton figure, lank, with only a thread deep of flesh over his frame, a dark figure, age—hard to define, with long black hair, irregular; rather long-drawn-out features. His chin and jawbone hung low, as if he were of some ancient subspecies of humans, perhaps of the Neanderthal civilization. He lurked consistently at a holy man, Shannon couldn’t make out if he was a priest, angel, minister of some organized church, evangelist, or prophet, but the holy man kept distinctly skeptical, gazing eyes at the lank figure, he could not have gazed harder, had he been a statue.
The lank figure and the holy man were both particularly sensitive to each other’s voices. Shannon had learned he had severe injuries, had he not, the lank figure would not have bothered with him, he knew this intuitively. And so he watched the movements, gestures of the two figures in robs, their mouths, tongues, eyes, knees as their movements made their robs ruffle.
“He drinks and he smokes, and he is dying,” said the lank figure, said about Shannon O’ Day, “and he has killed, and killed, without a morsel of remorse, or so it would seem,” there was the faintest suggestion of derision in his voice.
“If death can possible be avoided,” the holy man said.
“Whose loss shall it be?” asked the lank figure,” For I have much to do!”
“I think it is possible to keep your honor and dignity, and vow,” said the holy man, “should you walk away from this lopsided sparrow?”

The holy man and the lank figure sat at a table both resting their arms upon it, and waiting the next development of this unsatisfactory situation.
“Of course,” said the lank figure, as if he had deliberated the issue with himself, “you must have some sort of comfort, I understand that…. (The holy man nodded his head). It is easy enough to say as many do, leave this man or give me that man, or don’t stand over him or her, the truth is, you want them all full of God—and second chances, and you don’t even know if it is a good or bad thing, giving second chances, good for humanity, or bad for humanity, when they are due to die they should die, but you always try to get to them before me; whose to say what is good and what is bad?”
“I can’t for an instant tell you to leave, but I can stay by his side and pray against these uncertainties, for didn’t the Lord say in so many words: ‘…ye are of more value than the sparrow.’ And is not this sparrow irregular?”’
“Here I confess, we are like publishing a book before the final chapter has been completely written; but you must agree—this man is dying and is in a state of hallucination, he will not even notice the crossover, or pain.”
“But truth be told, essential truth that is, is hidden. It always is.”
“I follow you,” the lank figure said, “that is always so! Perhaps there could be some violent link in all this, some contradictory fact, some accident or some subtle change to take place,” and death had a feeling, he paused. Even the holy man was reluctantly interested. It meant something, described something, the holy man admitted, he too had intuition, supernatural intuition.
“I never believe in concealing my own thoughts from an intellectual being, such as you,” he said with a quiet offensiveness, “I left that back in the Dark Ages. I will inform you of my guesses and suppositions. At the base of this all, is a man who is due death, as a matter of fact in time to come he may very well die of over drinking; he consumes more alcohol than air, so it would seem. I’ll make you a deal—contract. I’ll leave here for a day, twenty-four hours, and upon my return, you will leave for ten?”
The holy man nodded, and the deal was sealed.



Part Two:
The Great War



Chapter One
Rain of Shells


In ill-fitting khakis and a bent helmet, looking like the most un-heroic figure of WWI, Shannon O’Day was in near staggering agony. He took on the look of death, as it was one of the paths his life was bound to take, although, strangely enough, his will, the fight or die, faction of his will, against all odds, its probability, was opposed to it—said no! Therefore it employed its endurance to survive, in this particular case, and death would have to wait—he would be no martyr for a war today.
(To the poor fools, necessity gives them death.)
But this was no illusion. He saw the battle in motion before he became unconscious, and now conscious, he was among his comrades, the mass dead, died in their tracks evidently, as if at a rabbit shoot, dead as dead can be, no deader, no bloodier, all laying around him, looking barely discernible.
The bodies were in front of him, in the back of him, along side of him, all in the trench with him, all dead, looking as if traumatized, disemboweled, from the massive bombardment of shells; shot full of bullet holes; and after the numbness of seeing death all around you—— undeniable compassion of man for man sunk in.

He looked around him in the long narrow trench it was all too quiet, he knew why it was quiet though—the dead are always quiet, there is no quieter more stillness than in a dead body, even if their blood still be warm. One minute they were all laughing, smoking cigarettes, showing each other pictures, getting ready for battle (this was the last day of the battle, April 19, 1916; the battle had gone on for 300-days, 230,000 dead, 700,000 wounded) now empty of life, they were all, all nine of them starting to stiffen as like manikins. He looked at them, two were missing, out of the eleven; he was the twelfth member of the squad (the battery). He must have been out for a while, flies had gathered around the bodies, and a stench of death filled the air, he had to leave the trench but which way? Who went were: referring to the Germans and the French?
One should not break from his company or platoon, but surely they thought he was dead, he sobbed, got his emotions out, he was only seventeen, in the night of iron darkness, alone. He filled his lungs with air, as he crawled over the edge of his trench; the battle had gone elsewhere he figured, at least for the moment. Or it had ended. He moved his belly in the direction of the village called Douaumont, and as he moved inch by inch he imagined the comforts of a beautiful woman. The sweet smells of her perfumes, the soft touch of her flesh; when he stopped thinking along those lines, he could hear the bugs moving along side of him, the crickets, and other unnamed bugs, as if they were chewing on grass, saw the fireflies overhead.
He didn’t care to be a corporal, he was too young he told the Captain; also he told him he was too young to be in charge of a squad, in charge of men twice his age, but he was in charge, and now injured, his soul sank into oblivion.


Chapter Two
Streets of Paris


(Before the Shelling)



When Shannon O’Day was in Paris, it was a different world to him, before he got sent to defend France, on French soil that was taken over by Germans in February of 1916, called “The Battle of Verdun” and to make his new home in trenches. He was from the Midwest of the United States, a somewhat country boy, from a conservative city, who on weekends visited his older brother—older by ten-years—Gus and they’d drink whiskey in the cornfields, as he’d help his brother plant and harvest. Paris was completely different, here people ate outside, on tables spread out, not indoors. Women sat on the church steps knitting with their babies, begging for food, or loose change. Horses pulled grand buggies by Notre Dame Cathedral, while men and women of prestige would disembark them. The Luxembourg Gardens was nearby, passers-by looked at him as he’d walk through them, in his uniform, and clap their hands in applause as if to say thank you for coming. And if he could have read their lips, he’d had sworn they were saying, ‘Be patient soldier, the war will soon be over.’ The people even smiled heroically as if saying hurry up and win it for us, make it disappear like smoke. Tell America to send troops over, Shannon had joined the French Army, in fear he’d not be able to see action, and now he was hesitant about seeing the action he so much wanted to classify as adventure.
While in Paris he went to the theater, couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, could only understand a few words of it, it was in French. It was Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” All he could remember was Quasimodo, the disfigured hunchback, and his carrying a woman on his shoulders into the Cathedral. It really didn’t much matter to him, it occupied his time.
He noticed other soldiers having leisure time in Paris; the rest of the world in Paris appeared to be either on edge, busy or in a hurry.
A woman said, “We are pretty in red dressed, don’t you think so?”
She was for sale, and that night with Shannon, they drank some strong red wine, walked by the doors of Notre Dame de Paris, the Rue Saint Jacques, naked as two jaybirds, stopping traffic wherever they went, laughing like he used to do with his brother in the cornfields back home with a bottle of wine or rum or whisky (such other details I must leave out, for whoever has a liking for them, must at this point use his or her imagination).

It was not until he woke up, he put two and two together, that he was still alive, and in French dirt, but nearer to Douaumont, crawling inch by inch, that it dawned on him, he was dreaming of the few days he spent in Paris before he got his assignment for this great battle of battles. He was now reluctant to move. He must have crawled quite a distance since last he was conscious, he took as fact.


Chapter Three
The Village of Douaumont



He saw chimneys in the distance, roofs of houses, mostly dilapidated but a few could be seen erect; he had been in the village called Douaumont before, prior to the 300-day battle, it had about a dozen structures or more, not much more. A few two story buildings, many connecting to the next structure by it—wall to wall. Narrow doorways, a dirt road for a main street, wide and with embankments on the side, rubbish laying alongside the ram shackled houses, and during its best day it was somewhat rundown, now after the 300-days of battle it was completely destroyed, yet he saw roofs and chimneys, and smoke coming from one Chimney.
Shannon wanted a moment to rest. He wanted to lay hidden until his company found him, or he regained his nerve, or just plain died, the war was not unfinished, perhaps the ongoing battle was, that is all.
He told God he could use a friend now. And he laid there for hours, preoccupied with formless dreams, a brooding mind; remote and unstoppable reminiscing. He was out of the trench, out of the latrine like trench, now in a field of dirt, by a tree, behind a rock, the town-let in front of him. He un-tightened his belt so he could breath better. He had been through it. He was like the enemy, a savage, and brute no better, why should God help him, if not the enemy. He could not hold anything new called humiliation. He had the worse gaunt and grubby appearance a human could have. He was nothing but a sad, pitiful primitive creature.
There he laid blood stained uniform, with a scornful indifferent look.
“Where’s my men?” he questioned, muttered in his under breath, his mind answered ‘Blown to bloody fragments in the trench!”

He talked to himself—anxiously, in a voice, unsteady and near breaking. He was hungry and the sun was coming up, bright like a shinny orange, near flawless, symmetrically round. His mind told him it was breakfast time, he felt in his coat pocket, a piece of old beef jerky, he had saved it from his rations while in the trenches; he pulled it out, unwrapped it, it was only two inches long, but it was enough, and he ate it, like a famished wolf, chewing it like rawhide, squeezing with his teeth every ounce of flavor from it.



Chapter Four
Drops of Sleep


Corporal O’Day, inside his sleepy mind, he questioned: could all this good action, to cleanse the world of evil, be a bad one? He questioned such things as he lay there, looking at smoke coming out of a chimney, in the supposedly, deserted village that wasn’t evidently, completely deserted, it was suppose to be, but there was smoke, his intuition was correct. There would be a new page in history written about today, or now it was yesterday, history would write about yesterday he muttered as if talking to the rock he was laying against, then in a generation or so, hidden if not erased with a whole new generation, and new wars, perhaps even greater ones than this.



Chapter Five
Death Reeks (Leticia’s Story)


After the first days of the battle the mother of two children (Leticia Dalasi) was found wandering, almost haphazard among the rubble of the destroyed hamlet, called Douaumont, walking aimlessly, day and night looking for her children; this is indeed the history of her days, after the great bombardment, the battle for Verdun.
She ate little and rested little; she ate like the birds, and slept only because she had to. She had fallen down continuously, as if dead a hundred times, during these first weeks and months.
She had made her new abode, under some demolished ruins, a livable space, held by four crumbling walls, lopsided walls, open door, some straw above her head for a roof, held lightly together by broken beams she had slept on two straw covered rafters avoiding the rats, but had a bed of straw alongside one of the walls under her she used when she had no strength to climb the rope ladder to the rafters.
She could nonetheless, feel the rats move above and beneath her, sleeping among the beams or beside the walls; in either case, she watch the heavens through an open space in the roof, a window of sorts.
She’d sleep, and then go look in the rubble for something that would remind her of her children, sleep again for several hours, and do the same thing over and over and over, day after day, week after week. Her life and death had been marked out for her. There was nobody to hear her murmurs, the names of her children. In the night she walked about half-asleep dreaming.
It was the 301st day of her tragedy.
She had noticed the shelling had passed, she saw in the distance a curious figure, it had a youthful face, a slim frame, and “What is it?” she questioned.
“Whence does it come?” She murmured, hesitantly looking at him.
“Where was it going?” She murmured, hesitantly, looking out in the fields.
“Let it go where it will, avoid it, let it die,” her mind told her. It was as if death itself was warning her, as if her mind for a moment—woke up, and gave her a heavy jolt.

Leticia watched this mysterious figure wiggle about in its blood soaked cloths. They were just outside the hamlet. As she stared at this young American, dressed as a French soldier, she shivered without being able to tell what for. She felt human to be able to walk around this new discovery she made. She lost the fright and anxiety she had on her face, the drum beat in her heart ceased. She noticed a short of movement to this soldier.



Chapter Six
The First Time


(In a delirium, and half-sleep)



For Shannon O’Day, the victory of the Germans the day before was complete. His eleven men fought like a thousand, they deserved honor for the day, perhaps the two left, the un-killed two, had escaped or were captured, and he wished he knew their fate, but he did not. He had looked behind him as he had crawled throughout the night; it was strewn with dead and the dying. All the roots of resistance must be pulled out from the ground, and the Germans knew this, as did the French, and the English and the Russians.
He knew in his delirium, in his half-sleep, he had been severely wounded, yet he never did surrender; matter-of-fact, as he was thinking all this he knew, because his second self, his mind, like a hidden bug in his subconscious told him all, it said, “You are blood socked, all the way through your cloths. You have been silenced.”

Then he heard a woman’s voice, like an echo, it said, “What is your name?”
Shannon could not answer just hear, he was dying, the loss of blood was extreme, yet the voice, was near all his movement, “You are a brave boy,” this middle aged voice said, an attractive voice, soft voice “a very brave boy, you should be dead. I’m Leticia,” and then he raised one arm to let her know he was not yet dead. She stepped back, thought he was going to attack her, thus, she gave him a blow at his head with a thick wooden board, swift as a lioness. This was a woman unobserved by any one around her, and she had many sides to her.



Chapter Seven
The Beast Unhealed
And Edge of the Hamlet



Beauty with Dark Vines

There is strangeness in beauty
Yea! And my heart knows not why
Perhaps God has taken this memory
(forgotten by man)
Yea! Those are the secrets of time
Yea! Beauty with dark vines…

No: 2609 5-3-2009


A wound does not heal quickly: and so Shannon O’Day seriously wounded, was at the mercy of this female observer. She had discovered after a moment, she had miscalculated in what his intentions were; here was a man that had been shot more than once, she could see that plainly now. She looked into the fields: “He must have crawled a long ways to get here, she concluded at the edge of the Hamlet, he must have seen my smoke from the chimney. She dragged him by his feet down a slope into the lair she had fixed up as her home.

Shannon O’Day was even in a more critical condition than Leticia had believed. There was a wound in his shoulder blade, and one above the breast, his collarbone was cracked, but the bullets that whizzed by him and through him, none hit or penetrated, or punctuated his lungs, he could recover, Leticia thought.
She was a little nurse, a little sorcerer, and after she had dragged Corporal O’Day, to her lair, laid him upon a bed of straw, covered with a blanket, and treated his wounds with her own simples, or remedies, the collarbone knitted tightly back together, the wounds mended a little in the following days, with convalescent rest and leisure.

One evening, on the eleventh day of his recuperative period, he was able to walk out of the little lair, and seated himself on a large stone, he used for a chair alongside the lair.
“Don’t try to speed things up,” said Leticia. He could see in her eyes a flood of fleeting and mixed thoughts, confusion. And he saw those thoughts coming and going. She smiled with a strain. But this was the first evening he was back to near normal strength. The evening was quiet.
The middle aged handsome lady, who had fixed her ratted hair, and put on some clean cloths, washed his and her cloths, watched him with delight, gave him a smile, another strained smile, she said to him: “Your wounds have healed, you can walk again, just take your time in talking.” Then there was a hesitation, “Where am I?” he asked.
“In Douaumont, and who are you?” she asked.
“My squad, we all got shot up. I’m Corporal O’Day, French Army; but I’m an American.”
This of course brought on a whole world of thoughts, some she had tried to tuck under that straw bed. Since he could not talk much, he thought she must think he was still in a state of delirium, and it would last longer, and he’d have to stay with her longer, and she’d keep her ongoing observations of him. But she was thinking, thinking of things she thought she had pushed aside.
It would seem, the healthier Shannon became, the less Leticia became in knowing what to say and do with the young man, like her children she had taken care of them, and now this man, who was going to leave, and as a result, she was to be left alone again; unable to be a caretaker, a natural instinct for a mother, and perhaps for many women in general. It was easy to tell a child what to do, where to go. But a soldier, a young man, all shot up, emptied out of war, “Nothing,” you can say “Nothing,” to a man like that, she conclude. She knew the beast in a man, in a soldier; they killed her children with this 300-day battle. She knew they were among the unfound corpses. She was as most women are, attracted to a young man in uniform, whom was to be idealized for his bravery, no matter whose side he was on, and she knew a man loved with his heart, and perhaps she knew he could not give it willingly, she knew that now, not before, yet her children had given her unconditional love, as she gave it back to them.
She asked herself a host of questions, concerning this unfortunate soldier, but could answer none of them. She had witnessed him naked, a hard young body, handsome looks, and a man who did not willingly brag of the ordeal he had just been through. Yes indeed, for a young man he was odd, peculiar.
But now she saw peacefulness in his beauty, occupied with nature, plants and the birds that chipper about him…

and her passiveness of him was becoming too obvious, as if there was another side to her, but she had harnessed it for the moment. Hence, it was that very night, she created a dread about him—inside her mind, she felt he could not see the other side of her face, although she didn’t see it herself completely. And he knew to a certain extent he was isolated, and her mannerisms had changed. But she didn’t ask many questions, and he gave only a few answers. And it was that night she’d wake up and climb down the rope ladder and lay with him, and she did just that, and who knows what was passing in their minds, they both for that evening clung to one another—like white on rice, but she woke up in the wee hours of the morning, screaming, “My Children! My Children!”
She cried with almost an accent of rage, “MY CHILDREN!”
Shannon dropped his head and shoulders gently back down into the bed, she had a revolver aimed at his temple.
He accounted for this to himself by saying, “Why then did you save me, if only to sacrifice me for the wrongs mankind has done to you and your children?”
It had seemed to Shannon, it was some kind of atonement, for not taking revenge.
And she answered his question, “Because it is man’s war, not mine.”
There she sat, on the edge of the bed, she remained doubtful on what to do for a time, the gun being lowered and brought back up, and lowered again, “If I had known,” she started to say, and went silent, then added, “My good action was really a bad one, in that I spared the life of the wolf, to kill the sheep, and my children are the dead examples, of some of those dead sheep, and those yet you may very well kill.”
And like a strong vulture with overwhelming wings, he pulled up his arms from under the blanket, with unreasoning calmness, yet swift, and in knowing it was just a matter of seconds before she’d had pulled the trigger, he took her arm, and jerked it away from his temple, having confidence in his strength now, he turned the gun on her, and forced her finger to pull the trigger, and she didn’t have time to tell him what she wanted to tell him, so I shall tell you: “What am I without my children. A peasant has nothing but her children, men have war to contain them, brag about after it is all over with.” And so death got its warrant fulfilled—but death had its own agenda.



Chapter Eight

Eating her Own Death



It was funny to Corporal Shannon O’Day to see Leticia shot at close range. There was something strange, almost comic to it—a bullet and all of a sudden an agitated surprise to the mad woman’s face, a surprise to find inside of her, in the center of her lair, to see her drop backwards (than catch her balance), next—to watch her go frantic in dizzying circles at some robotic electric impulse, as if she was racing ahead of death itself, inside of her. But the great puzzle was—for the moment anyway—the great puzzle of all was, the thing Shannon O’Day shook his head back and fourth about, and had to turn away from was—as she laughed (ashamed he was even looking at this mad woman’s humor) —that she madly ripped at her stomach area, tearing at it, until it split open, and pulling out her intestines and then stood there jerking them out and eating them, jerking them out and eating them, taking pleasure in it, relishing it; Shannon just would shake his head, horridly so, as it was unspeakable.

It was an awful sight. Self eating and devouring of the near-dead, herself, as she was dying; it all became stinking, foul. Death had played a dirty joke, so he felt. He looked around for whiskey, anything to drink, any kind of alcohol would suffice, and found a bottle of Watermelon wine of all things, under the straw topped bed, the one he was sitting on, and the very one he had recovered from his wound on, the very one he had slept on for eleven days. It was a half gallon of wine, the label read, “Watermelon Wine, aged one year, 2-3 large watermelons, up to 7-1/2 lbs, finely granulated sugar, 3 tsp acid blend, 2 crushed Camp den tablet, 3 tsp yeast nutrient packet Champagne yeast…(makes three galloons). It was in: English, French, Russian and German; someone was not taking sides, and selling his stock of wine to all the future, and potential, War Veterans, and anybody who could pay in general.
Shannon, sat on the edge of his bed started drinking the wine, drinking it half empty, looking at Leticia, drinking faster than he could swallow his saliva, having to spat on the side. He knew he had to get out of the lair, lest he get sick, and he never got sick from drinking, and he pulled himself together, sat outside, nervously holding onto the bottle, drinking it empty.
This was not anything to laugh about, openly or anytime, but he felt somehow superior to and wondered at this, as he looked at her, over his shoulder, her body still on the floor, than staggered out of town out of the war torn hamlet, called Douaumont, once and for all. He knew, instinctively so, that the battle of Verdun was over, if only now he could find his French Battalion.


Part Three:
Home Sweet Home




Chapter One
A Soldier Goes Home



Shannon O’Day, returned to the United States in the summer of 1919 twenty-years old now. He had spent free time along the Rhine with some French soldiers, and German girls before the corporal caught his ship back home; not beautiful, more plain than pretty. In the few pictures he took, you got just a glimpse of the Rhine. By the time Shannon O’Day returned home, all the celebrations had come and passed. He was too late, hysteria had filled the cities, now peace had set in, and reactions of the people were back to normal—just to be written for posterity’s sake. Shannon needed someone, anybody would do, to talk to, to listened to him, so he could get it all out, unbolted.
As people listen to Shannon it appeared they wanted his stories to be more fictionalized, and he accommodated them, so they’d continue to listen, yet it was drowning him. He didn’t like being vulnerable, a side show, with his lies; unimportant lies to him, merely entertainment for the listeners.

During this time, fall had set into Minnesota, and deeply into the city of St. Paul. He slept long hours, eating at a bar and restaurant, called, “The Coney Island Bar,” on St. Peter’s Street, between 6th and 7th streets, it was a short walk from his apartment on Wabasha Street. In the evenings he’d fiddle on an old brown and black faded guitar, too small for him but he had purchased it at one of the many pawnshops along Wabasha.
When drunk, and drunk he was mostly during these months after his return from Europe, and when his bar friends were drunk, he was a hero to many, and sober, only to his brother Gus was he a hero, who had a little farm a short ways outside the city limits, heading towards Stillwater township.
A little ways away from the Coney Island Bar, that made delicious Coney Island Hot Dogs, made them with raw unions, and lots of hamburger with beans and an Italian sauce, and cheese, he’d head onto the Gem Bar, a more bar type bar, with cool reeking smells and moistness of a bar.
It was this one night after Shannon O’Day had been home, three months, near winter of 1919, when he went into the Gem Bar, she was a waitress, and she smoothed her apron out when she saw him.
“Do you want a beer?” Sally-Anne Como asked, then thought of what she said, “I, mean, what would you like sir?”
“Yeah!” said Shannon, with tired and bloodshot eyes, which scanned her as if he was an android, or robotic.
“I know your brother Gus, he comes in here off and on, talks about you quite a lot, tells us girls here at the bar about your time in Germany, you know, the Great War?” She was completely fascinated with him.
“I’ll bet he does,” Shannon said with a chuckle.
“Yeah, he really does,” remarked Sally-Anne.
“After work some day I’d like to take you over to the Coney Island Bar and buy you a Coney Island, okay?”
“Yeah,” commented Sally-Anne, then added, “Uncle Isaiah says he knows yaw!” Shannon looked at the big Blackman behind he bar, he looked familiar, “Yeah, I know him, all right,” said Shannon, “it’s been a while since I saw him last, he was old when I knew him some years ago, and he looks older now, I guess, I’m surprised to see him still kicking.”
“Well, I suppose I better get back to work,” she said.
Shannon looked at her, he liked her, he liked her very much, and he looked at her for a long time, “Have you got the newspaper?” he asked.
She brought the paper over to him, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. And as he read it, he looked at Old Uncle Isaiah, remembering the first time he saw him, had met him:

(Daydreaming) It was on Nigger Roe, that’s what we all called it; we all knew where it was, on Rondo, I had never walked that street alone, matter-of-fact, I had never walked that street at all, rode by it, down it, rode around it with a few friends, through its neighborhoods. And this one night, a weekend night, late after the bars closed, I met Hank Lowery, and Seven Lundberg, and Charley Lund we all went down to Nigger Town, to this after hours club. That was the night I met the man they called Uncle Isaiah, he had a crowbar lying on an old wooden table, alongside the door entrance to the after-hours joint. I presupposed he was the bouncer.
“Youall ole-enough to drink whitey?” he asked. He had already let my friends through, put an ink stamp on their hands.
“All right, all right,” he said “no reason to be afraid of this big black nigger, you ever been so close to one before?”
And I didn’t say a word, and to this day, I have never seen a man laugh so hard, laughing behind his laughing, until he had to take hold of his stomach, undo a few buttons on his shirt, or they’d pop off. I was all of fourteen-years old then. Gus was to catch up with us, but he hadn’t showed up yet.
“Jes’ call me Uncle Isaiah, this her’ crowbar aint fer you son, it fer those wild ones that is a-comin’, they jes’ is not her yet…! I knowen you aint no trouble maker, cuz you is too scared to be one, so, you go-on in dhere, and be my guest.”

After going to the after-hours joint several times Uncle Isaiah would say to me, chidingly, and then jokingly, “Youall’s goin’ in dhere to try and see dhe black girl’s behinds, pumping up and down inside those dresses until somebody stops dhem,” then he’d look at me again and say, “Yippee!”



“Sally-Anne,” yelled Shannon, and she come over and stood by him, “Sally-Anne, please don’t muss up the paper next time, no one can read it proper.”
She stood there a moment, watched him unfold the paper again, trying to iron out the wrinkles on the table with the palms of his hands, he liked reading the paper.
“You are an odd one,” she said with a peculiar look on her face, “but I like heroes, I’ll meet you at the Coney Island Bar whenever you want!”
“Good,” said Shannon, “how old are you?”
“I’ll tell you, but you have to keep it hushed up, I’m seventeen-years old.”
“Yeah,” said Shannon, “I thought as much.”
“You bet.”
“Couldn’t you get in trouble for lying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you know. You can be my beau, okay?”
“Sure. I’m your girl now.”
“Sure you’re sure?” asked Shannon putting on a serious face.
“If you’re sure, I’m sure, and if you’re sure you love me, I can even be surer!”
“Uh, hah…maybe!”
“Will you love me forever?”
“Sure, why not!”
“You run along now, I got work to do,” said Sally-Anne, happy as a peacock, flapping its colorful wings.
She put his empty beer bottle on her try and brought it up to the bartender, Uncle Isaiah, and he dropped it back into a box, below him, and he started wiping down the counter, which he did quite often.


Chapter Two
The Prison


It was in 1921, Shannon O’Day was at the Gem Bar reading the paper, reading about two soldiers that had been captured the last day of the battle for Verdun, they had given their story to a magazine, and the newspapers picked up on it, nationally; when he read the names of the two soldiers, it was the very two Shannon had lost account of.

The extract read:


…two sentinels stood guard on duty before the closed door of the small prison…; in the late hours of the night a German soldier would come with a lantern in his hand, transverse the halls, from cell to cell, made himself known to all the sentries, and ordered all the guards to stand at attention for inspection. He then entered each prison’s cell, leaving the door ajar, to allow fresh air to enter. The dungeon was moist and dark, and silent. —it was gloom and shadows, mostly sleeping men; almost peaceful, until he’d show up. We’d had been laying on a bundle of straw, some men slept deeply, no one tried to escape.
The man they called captain, moved close to each one of us, standing tall by the frames of our prison doors, noiselessly standing. He’d press his clinched hands against our throats, his eyes gave a gesture of motionless terror—dots for pupils, he’d tell us to kneel and pray, he’d press his revolver to our lips, the whites of his eyes would open up wide, a dim light in them.
“Ah,” said he, “it is you tonight,” and he’d take one of us out of the cell, out and down the hallway, out through the metal doors of the prison, there beyond, never to return, or be seen, or heard of again. Then one day the doors opened and a French Officer, an American and English officer stood by and one of them said, and I can’t remember which one, said it, “You’re free, what do you understand by that?”
I thought this at the time, but didn’t say it, but I’ll say it now what I thought, because now I fully understand it: each of us, and all owe to each, a whole life, in some kind of peaceful, social order, beyond this, simple law, there is nothing but war. No justice no equity to build for the future, no obligatory service to mankind. I want peace, that last word is what I told him, “We found peace!”


“What are you reading, you’re so intense?” asked Sally-Anne, Como, to Shannon.
“Nothing much, just a fling of manure,” he then throws the paper onto Sally-Anne’s tray, “it belongs in the sewer.”




Chapter Three
Gem Bar, Isaiah Christianson


It was old Isaiah Christianson, Uncle Isaiah to most folks he knew, fifteen-years he worked at the Gem Bar, Sally-Anne liked working there, it was slow during the day, and she had her nights free. The bar was cool but dim, as most bars are, but the Gem was dimmer, and Shannon O’Day liked the bar for that very reason also, a quiet kind of bar.
Dim perhaps because the owner—Jefferson Manning, never washed the windows. Isaiah would tell the customers, the owner liked it that way, and it kept out the young noisy, crowd. Isaiah would say, “Nobody can see in, and no body can see out, therefore, nobody knows anybody’s business, and that way nobody can get into trouble.” And so he just had the old folks come in, mostly old folks, a few like Gus and Shannon O’Day, but very few. And Old Isaiah was getting very old, and slow, and he no longer worked at any after-hours joints, like he used to some years back, he needed his sleep. He’d even play cards and dice with the customer that is how slow it got. And to be frank, Old Isaiah couldn’t see that clear anymore, anyways, a thick yellowish gook surrounded his eyes.
Mr. Jefferson Manning, was a big man, weighted some 400-pounds. Wore small glasses, ate all day long: eggs and pickles, and fried hamburger, and fried chicken and watermelon, and cakes, and pies, and popcorn, then would go up to the Coney Island Bar, and eat a half dozen Coney Island hotdogs in a fat bun, with chili been sauce, and cheese, and raw onions. He’d sit by the big gas stove in the middle of the floor of the bar, and wash it all down with two or three beers, then return to his apartment on top of his Gem Bar, take a two hour nap, and start the routine all over again. But he was going broke; he needed more money, even though his bar was paid for, left to him by his parents. And he was thinking, when he came in after taking that two-hour nape one spring day, in 1922, and he looked at those dirty windows, and he looked, and he looked, and he formed an idea in the process of looking.



Chapter Four
Jobless Isaiah


Old Isaiah Christianson was fired, Mr. Manning, the owner of the Gem Bar, had come down from a nap, looked at his windows, looked at Sally-Anne, never even looked at Isaiah, and said “Sally-Anne, you’re the new bartender, Isaiah’s fired, I hope you know his duties, and if you don’t I’m sure it will not take you all that long to figure them out, get to it.”
Isaiah was in shock, he didn’t say a word, he was just too dumbfounded, he was handed a check for the weeks pay, and $500-dollars in cash, for severance pay, saying “I got new plans Isaiah, and you’re not in them, you just don’t fit, sorry!”
So he himself, took a bucket of hot water, and soap, and several rages, and washed those windows clean, as clean and clear as the ice on the Mississippi River, a few blocks away. And he helped paint it, painted the whole bar, walls and all the woodwork, hired Shannon and Gus and Sally-Anne after hours, and they painted it in two days. Then he bought a big sign that read: “Live Music Nightly, Jazz!”
And the crowd started coming in, almost immediately, and in two months he was making more money, than he had made in the whole previous year.
Well, this didn’t sit well with Isaiah, not one bit; he took a disliking for it all, and rented an apartment across the street, by a new hamburger joint called “White Castle.” And he’d sit outside on a chair, a bottle of whiskey in his hands and these little hamburgers, eating one after the other, and he’d cuss all the customers that went into the bar, and he called Mr. Manning every fat name he could think of and made a few up.
Some days he’d sit on the curb, until Mr. Manning called the police, and got a court order for him to stop his monkey business, stop being a pain in the ass for everybody, to stop his nonsense. The judge warned him that they had places for mentally ill folk, although everyone knew it was anger that got Uncle Isaiah’s goat.
And every week, when one of the waitresses would clean the windows now, Isaiah would throw dirt at the window, he actually had a little supply of it in little white sacks he’d pull one out of his coat pocket, and it was fine sand, and he spat in it, to get it nice and gooey, then throw it at the windows. He even told Shannon O’Day, one day when he was about to enter the bar, “Youall tell um, I goin’ to hit him ef’in I ever sees him alone.”



Chapter Five
Death


After a while old Isaiah only came out of his apartment on occasions, lost one-hundred pounds, of his one-hundred and ninety- -pounds he had at one time. His eyes looked like cracked eggs, in deep sockets, skin and face unkempt, unshaven, warts and pimples all over him. I’m not saying he forgot about what he said concerning revenge on the fat man, he never did forget, he just never got around to doing it, and if he did, when he did, it was too late, because when he got to that point, Mr. Manning had died and left him holding the bag full of sand, which he never threw once he was six feet under, then three months after Jefferson Manning died, he died.
Manning died at fifty-three years old, a heart attack. Uncle Isaiah, at 73, of cancer; It would seem after he got fired he never recovered from the wound, worse than Shannon’s in combat, a deeper scare I’d say.
It wasn’t long after both their deaths, those windows got dirty again anyhow, and one of Manning’s relatives by the last name of Ingway, took over the Gem Bar, that was in 1923, they had closed the bar down for a spell I guess.

۩

End Notes on writing of the book: “To Save a Lopsided Sparrow,” the name of the book had three revisions: “The Sparrow,” one day, then the next, “The Lopsided Sparrow,” and then the third day, “To Save a Lopsided Sparrow.” The first day of writing, 5-2-2009, during the afternoon on my roof in Lima, did two thirds of the outline, up to the end of the war and the death of Leticia Dalasi (the Mad woman); on 5-3-2009, I did half of Part Three, the five end chapters; and on 5-4-2009, I did Part One, and the last two chapters of Part Three, along with a poem. Three days in the making, on my roof; day four, three paragraphs were added to the story, 5-5-2009. Day five, “Eating her Own Death,” was written out, a Chapter Story