Dickey’s Diner

(A Shannon O’Day Story)

For those who have read the ongoing stories of Shannon O’Day (in the author’s previous books), this here sketch, is how he came to become friends at Dickey’s Diner, which was hardly mentioned (somewhat of an interlude between the previous stories)…; also it is an overall sketch of many
parts of his life; conceivably you could call it a synopsis…
in addition the reader will get a new happening
thus far untold of Shannon’s working days
at the foundry (in part two
of these two sketches)

(Part one, is an overview; part two, is a new sketch)



Part One of Two



Narrated by: Clayton Claymore Sycamore
((Observer at Dickey’s Diner, partisan and Journalist for a local periodical) (1968))


Mr. Sycamore is sitting at the diner counter talking to folks to his right and left, and a new cook, an assistant to Old Josh…Clayton is also talking to him, as he is cooking their food, as is a waitress nearby listening as she stands ready to serve them once the young cook puts the food on a plates, as Clayton C. Sycamore tells the life, and times or what he knows about them of Shannon O’Day, who had did a year earlier…



So when we first saw Shannon O’Day walking into the diner giving off that rough, independent, worn solidarity look, impression as if in another minute our flesh itself would burn off through our garments—looking more cleaver than a cobra, or even the devil himself—in some kind of disorderly-haste, he—O’Day—didn’t even pay no mind to us, not one iota, folks staring at him, it seemed to us we were watching fate of which both he and us in the diner were meat to meet, and perchance be future victims. It was our first time we laid eyes on each other. We didn’t need to, and I suppose for some of us, we didn’t want to. We assumed of course he was an unregenerate, he’d simply slip out of the diner after he ate, the same way he appeared to have slipped in—but we were not sure of that either. By some devious charm or method he got to know us all quite well—as if he had laid in ambush, just to get to know us, find a new hangout, because more than just he had won, been excepted, thus our new decade, was set. But not solely with him, on the contrary, we were all closer to each other (or in time would be, because of him).
We didn’t ask how it came about, we simple were all allies—in due time that is, his confidents, you could say. Our whole diner (Dickey’s Diner, here in St. Paul, Minnesota) was accessory to that drunk and cuckold—all though we had no proof he was a husband of an unfaithful wife (gossip perhaps feeds the imagination to no bounds, and in our case it did), he simply was never home much, so we assumed so. He was amicable with us; that is, when he was not under the influence of alcohol (though it was hard for us to decipher, he drank from sunrise to sunset).
We were not against Mrs. O’Day, we didn’t even know her, and it was perhaps we had not yet read, or even seen the whole picture. We were never in favor of infidelity, wrongdoing: we simply liked Shannon O’Day and heard about his wife (although I think he had three in sum total, this was his first wife I’m talking about), you see, they drank a lot in the cornfields together, then one summer morning, before he woke up in those cornfields, she had already up and left him, just like that, for what most of us called ‘ordained fate.’ Luckily, the diner didn’t supply their battleground (but for all intent and purposes, there was no battle, as I said, she just up and left, just like that; one morning there simply was no more of her).
Even Mr. Ingway (who works for the foundry, a friend of Shannon’s and who ate here at the diner), and old Josh, the night cook at the diner now, and even that young lad who sings those Ricky Nelson songs at night here in the diner, who sits in the back in the corner, we all said to the rest of the folks here at the diner—in one way or another back then, ‘This diner isn’t that big. Shannon he’ll come back he just went to Erie to get a breath of fresh air. He doesn’t want to stay there, what for, nothing there worth staying for…!”
Then we learned he was back in town.

Shannon got a job at the foundry a while back, for a while, and somewhere along the line, he made friends with that negro from down south, I think Ozark, Alabama, his brother Gus, never took a liking for him, said once, “That damn nigger burned my cornfields…!” but Shannon whispered to Josh on one occasion, “It Aint so, he’s got it all wrong, but I can’t tell you the truth, so don’t be judging the wrong man for the wrong crime!”
But he never was all that serious about anything after he came back from the war, the Great War —I hear tell—, he was a hero of sorts, that’s when his drinking went from moderate to chronic. Never very serious, not any connections between his loves, life and long friends, only liberty to do as he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it.
I don’t suppose even he knew where his life would end up, where he was headed. He retired before he even began any long term employment. And then he died in those cornfields he so adored—in his late 60s, out by his brother’s farm, after his brother had died a decade earlier. He even talked to us as those cornfields being a most pleasant idea for drinking and conversation.
“Why not?” He’d say to us.
But he’d stay out all night drinking, until he passed out in those cornfields, and we all had regular jobs.



A Third Person Narration


Part Two of Two


At the Diner Counter




Said the partisan to the left side of Clayton Claymore Sycamore, Henry Aldrich, sitting at the diner counter:
“Tell us something nobody knows, I heard about this guy and that’s kind of old news?”
“That’s what…” said Clayton?
“Sir,” he said, “old news.”
“Why not!” said Clayton, looking about the diner to see if any old timers, partisans new Shannon well, were around—not wanting to start trouble, or alleged gossip.
At first he laughed, then he looked at the young cook, he was just finishing up frying his hamburger.
“At the foundry, where Shannon worked a short while, he was the low last man in the hierarchy, and he was drinking a lot in those days, and he was not happy with his second marriage, marriage, sentimentalized by a few as a hero of lost gallantry, now lost and irrevocable tragedy, if not misfortune. This all lead to what he’d do, and no one but a few would find out.”
“Here’s your hamburger sir,” said the young cook, whipping his hands on his apron, ready to mix some pancake blend, said, “I think I heard that story too.”
“He,” Mr. Sycamore said, “he hid the iron, and copper and brass all right, where no one could find it. Not even Ingway could find it. Because it wasn’t where he thought Shannon put it, said he had put it, because after Shannon told Ingway he took it, he shortly after that, was accused of taking it, Ingway had told the foreman, but Shannon had already moved it, denied it; because Shannon was no match for wasting time when it came to certain things, and he wanted drinking money.”
And Ingway said to Shannon, “What did you do with it?”
That was when Ingway let it go…,” because Shannon said he sold it, but he didn’t, not yet anyhow.
“You,” said Ingway to Shannon, “made me look stupid in front of my boss!”
“I hope so,” he remarked.
It was nearing twilight, when he got off for a break, carrying his lunch pail to make it look proper, he sat near the shower room eating, because Ingway saw him. Well, Shannon told me, “Me and that old Indian, called Cochise, for short, not sure what his real name was, we threw it out the back window by the shower, and picked it up after our shift, no one being the wiser. And we went that evening, he and I out to my brother’s cornfields, and drank the weekend away.”
Though by the time it got dark, and there was no light to the side of the shower room, outside, so it was dark enough for somebody, I suppose anybody to walk about and take the items thrown out the window, put into three or four sacks, and sell the next morning at the junkyard, but he even had that figured out, he called Jefferson Thomas, the owner of the junkyard off Mississippi Street, to keep the place open, and they weighed the items, and he had brought near a half ton of iron, brass and copper to him.


No: 482 (September 30, 2009) •• Part one of Two “The Diner”
No: 483 (October, 1, 200) • • Part Two of Two “At the Diner Counter”

The Circular Years

((Shannon O’Day’s Youthful Years in Sketches) (1900-1909))


There have been three books written on Shannon O’Day and some independent sketches, this is one of those sketches, for the curious reader who wishes to know more about Shannon’s earlier years especial how he came about for the liking of his most precious substance—booze!



Sketch One

The World According to Shannon O’ Day



The world, which grownups call civilization, or the city or county or country, is composed of a hazy, perhaps never-ending flow of thoughts, and to an eight-year old boy, I could say any boy, with a vast accumulation of energy, but in this case, that is, in particular, Shannon O’Day’s case, he fits the bill quite well.
They, Shannon’s nuclear family, consisted of his brother, mother and father, and they lived in the upper apartments, near the Capitol, of the inner city of St. Paul, Minnesota, between 1900 and 1909.
They only had one lamp for light, sloping crossways, giving light circular throughout the one big room they had. Although the kitchen was sectioned off, the bathroom was in the hallway, on each of the three floors. The building was old—even in 1900—an old wooden structure, perhaps built in the late 1870s.
Like all boys of his age, at his time and place in history, he wanted to travel, journey in search of adventure, perhaps to a war, yet his eyes could scarcely decipher what life was all about. He saw his father almost from birth—with his drinking daily, preparing to die daily, that is to say, coughing up blood, and hangovers, and bloodshot eyes, and reeking with booze out of his pores. Once out of madness, he nearly hurled him over the banister, from their third floor apartment. He wasn’t corrupt, just kind of disband, melted down you might say, with the winds of booze, which often swept his mind, engendered, stimulated his second self, his death’s second self, the one waiting for him, with his demons.
But Shannon, of Irish stock, had that intuition (or learned it mighty quick), that near second insight I might say, perhaps that the Druids had or Celts had; he also had that mental book, cyclical book of the devil’s, that he could see into—per near read, so Shannon knew when his father was possessed and when he wasn’t. This would suffice for his survival through those trying years.
These were the circular years for him, because he seemed to be going always in circles, especial with his father, things seldom changed, that is to say, he got drunk, they ate very little, except when their mother brought home groceries because she did some sewing for a neighbor, or cleaned a house, and so forth.

No reasonable mind can doubt this truth, whose instantaneous result would show up in the future—hence, thereafter, time without end—the curse of the world would befall him; and the theory holds true I believe, that when a boy is weaned on milk, he will grow strong boned, when he is weaned on milk and booze, he will perhaps grow strong, but also acquire a taste, a liking for the cursed substance called booze. He will—in time, have a body-chemistry change over, or if his genetic structure is likened to his father from day one, this imperfect substance, maliciously will take a voyage throughout his system, and seat itself at the helm of his being—near his soul, and forevermore, make him want more, make him come back for more, and Shannon’s father, was the organic ladder for Shannon’s demise with alcoholism, as well as his own, and the weakening of the heart of Shannon’s older brother Gus, I do believe.
It is enough to compare a drunk with a drunk, the rude unsteady hands of Shannon’s father would bring—or better put—permitted the formulation of Shannon’s future addiction to alcohol, where there would be no satisfactory resolution for him to stop its usage. This formless substance, with its chaotic nature made his father insensitive at times, and thus, would form a faithful, and catalogued character, and friend to and for Shannon.

No: 455 (8-25-2009)


The Circular Years
((Shannon O’Day’s Youthful Years in Sketches) (1900-1909))


Sketch Two

“Implacable Death”


I went to my bed, flopped down on top of my iron framed bed—I had already closed the curtains around the bed, nobody was home, just me. And there I lay on my back. The never changing world circled around me, as did the room. Everything was hazy, it was near twilight, the sun in the sky appeared to be hung onto a rope like a shadow, or perhaps it was like a cloud, it was by and large, an incredible day, a day without end, many omens, and I felt my pitiless death surround me. In spite of having been a child of eight-years old, my grandfather had died of alcoholism, and my father was on his way to such a death, and now me, at eight-years old, I was in the symmetrical gardens of the dying, or so I felt, my father allowed me enter without cost, perhaps more at coheres me to enter, to drink four-shots of 140-proof vodka—was his way of saying: welcome to the family curse.
“Was I to die now?” I asked myself.
I looked in the window behind me, it was likened to a mirror, I saw my reflection, in the midst of it all, I hated looking at myself, nearly in terror—I had a long looking horse-face.
“How does one put an end to these wandering illusions?” I asked myself, but of course, in simpler terms. Then got thinking, my father lived with these on a daily bases—by gosh, what a life.
I knew the fast moving thoughts and visions I was having were doubtless due to the alcohol, four shots in a row—it per near poisoned my system, saturated my blood stream. A bird flew across the window, unthinkingly I turned my head and waited for it to return, it never did. I had even noticed as I tried to talk to myself, my human voice weakened. I had tried to tell dad “No more…!” but he said, “Grow up you little twerp!”
And so I had two more shots, four all together. Back then, back when I was just a youngster, nothing I said reached the ear of my father; a man who is sitting in his own infinitely senseless, silence—somewhere I would expect, wanting, waiting but not getting another drink of booze, cause he’s long gone.

The Lamp and a Timorous Boy


The lamp lit the room, and after I sobered up I got thinking, no more faces remained or shadows. They had all gone a good distance away, without waiting for my head to produce questions and answers, there I laid in bed thinking….

I was a timorous boy, to say the least. I can say it now, but wouldn’t have back then, now that I have entered—and seem to be in the middle of (looking back), entered I say, into carrying out a life of drinking, that alcohol had degraded me by making me become shy. Furthermore, it made me an over unassuming man—, as a boy, I took leave of myself, went looking around for pa’s booze, sneaked it, quiet like, even took a few dollars out of his pocket when he was passed-out, and bought corn whiskey with it. The truth is that, I felt too often, and perhaps most often, too visible and vulnerable. But vainly, I kept my drinking under some kind of control during those youthful years.
At age ten, I had already told myself happiness had ended for my youth, no accident of fate. Somehow I thought in my head, or foresaw, that humanity had two regions that he could dwell in happily, one being a soldier, the other a bandit. On the other hand, a lifetime job seemed to me, whosoever would undertake it that is—it would impose upon him a future as atrocious as trying to find your way through a labyrinth. So I hoped and prayed there would be a big war, and there was, they called it, The Great War, and I told myself that was my cup of tea. For as I grew older, I drank more, and the more I drank the more the eyes of men looked dead to me. Anyhow, so war was my forte for when I’d grow up.


A Blurred Young Soldier’s Vision


Under the trees of our apartment building’s backyard, I meditated on this loss of youth I felt surrounded me one summer afternoon when I was ten-years old, ready to go and move in with our Uncle Hawk, and perhaps try to figure out the plan mankind had for an extended life for a human being, for a labyrinth that produced an everyday job for every solid citizen, in the country. I imagined it was under the control of some secret society, on top of some far-off mountain, and that they could escape if need be by some underground tunnel beneath the mountain that lead into the sea, and came up and out, somewhere else right out of a river, what a thought, and want a maze, growing out of a ten-year old mind. Yes I was lost in these imaginary illusions, for an undetermined period of time, youthful time. By observing my father, I got the impression men might be enemies of other men, depending on the simple differing of opinions they shared. But all men seemed to share the same understanding, and loyalty to the one country they lived in, perhaps that is why I figured being a soldier inspired me—filled my mediating days back then. I could see an avenue of escape, a strange destiny and course. Now looking back, I know the blood and tears that are required for a war, the madness, the shapeless mass of contradictory words that float across oceans and continents and other large land masses.

No: 456 (8-25-2009)

Yesterday

(A Shannon O’Day Story)


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

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

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

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

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


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

Burying Shannon O'Day (a short story)

Burying Shannon O’Day
(A Shannon O’Day and Otis Wilde Mather Story)


Chapter One
The Meeting


“All right,” Otis Wilde Mather says. “Then I will pay for his funeral, and his headstone, since no one else will—”
“Gentlemen and Ladies,” said the lawyer, Miles C. Hoffman, and the young one, Annabelle Henry the first one standing up and sternly saying and near tears, “Can’t you all see, Mr. Shannon O’Day was a part of our lives, we all need to make him a big gravestone, not just leaving it up to Otis, because Otis is rich and handsome and kind, and was a close friend to Shannon.
“I’ve already thought of that too,” said Poggi Ingway, a dear friend who had worked at a foundry with him, and even Maribel Adams, who had married Shannon for a season, and lost him to Annabelle, and now was married to Earnest French, making her new name Maribel French, who had traveled all the way from San Francisco to Minnesota to attend Shannon’s funeral, “I feel,” she said, “he belongs to all of us, let’s build a mausoleum, and make it look like a cornfield, because he liked to drink in those damn fields all the time.” (And she chuckled.)
“He’s a war veteran,” says judge Finley, now in his eighties “no need for this meeting to see who’s going to bury the drunk, let’s just have a funeral and a wake and say our goodbyes, the Army provides a wooden coffin, and a hundred dollars I hear.”
Said the Lawyer, “He fought with the French, not the US Military, we’d have to contact them, see what their rules are concerning this matter of payment.”
“Hum…mmm” said the judge.
“Wait, wait,” said Gus’ wife Mabel, “Youall came to my husband’s funeral and there was no fuss about folks putting in fer his headstone so we should jest take up a collection now fer Shannon see what we all can get.”
Old Josh, Zam-Zam and Jake from ‘Dickey’s Diner,’ were also on hand, along with J.R. Ritt from the bank, the owner, he knew Gus better than Shannon, and had a eye for Mabel, always had an eye for Mabel, went to High School with her, fancied her then, and now. I suppose, and I’m sure she supposed, it was a chance for both to meet again; they were standing by one another.
“But there isn’t’ any crime if Otis wants to put the bulk of the proceeds in since he’s a rich—(and he was going to say nigger, but the Lawyer, held his tongue and said) black gentleman.”
As everyone looked at everyone else, like big bass fish, with bulging eyes, nobody paid any attention to no-how to anybody, until Annabelle said, “Well, damn it, will someone speak up!”
“Then what the hell do you want from each one of us, someone take charge here—please!” said Judge Finley.
The Lawyer Miles sitting there calm and quiet, with his face paper white and stiff; and it had seemed to Annabelle, he hadn’t learned much how to speak up and fight, timid as a hermit mouse.
“I was more Gus’ friend than Shannon’s,” said the judge, in a whisper, waiting for someone to make a rule on the amount of money needed, but it was obvious, nobody knew what they needed and wanted, and Shannon’s body needed to be buried, and that was what they came there for, to settle just that, by a passel of amateurs who knew not how to go about having a board meeting, or confronting issues, in a professional way, aimed at trying to simply bury someone, somehow, more now than then.
Poggi was somewhere in the group, and stood up and looked out at the others, “Gertrude, is Gertrude here?” (one of his five wives), and she was there standing in the archway of the door that lead into the kitchen from a hallway, with her daughter, Cantina.
“Yes, Poggi, I’m here, why?” she asked.
“I suppose we’ll have to have your daughter’s signature on everything, she’s the closest thing Shannon had to anyone being legal over him. And I guess you’ve heard as much as we have here, as any one on recommendations, so perhaps you can give a few?”
“Yes: all right, suppose everyone come back out here to Gus’ farm tomorrow and bring what money they can, and my daughter and I will see how much it cost to make him into ashes, and buy him inside a urn and if you all want him to have cornfields, I’ll have the urn designer, that is, do a quick paint job on it.”
Said Judge Finley, “We’ll hold the meeting out here at Mabel’s farm tomorrow then, Gus would like that, and I hear Sally-Ann and Margaret-Rose will be in town tomorrow, Shannon’s other wives, so perhaps the piggy-bank will have more money in it for his funeral. Or his wake or those cornfields Gertrude was talking about.”
Then they all got up to leave, some laughing and talking and joking, back and forth, Annabelle enjoying Otis’ company; Judge Finley looking at Otis, as if he was the Chief Head Master of the Minnesota KKK: old judge Finley had always treated Otis as if he was a foreigner, not even paying no attention to the others, standing by him, just staring at Annabelle and Otis, who became a millionaire in the meat market business, between Minnesota and Alabama, in the past twenty-years or so with the $500-dollars Shannon had won off a racehorse, in the 1940s. And J.R. Ritt, looking at Mabel as if he wanted to restart those old flames from his high school days.
“Now are you satisfied?” said Gertrude, to Poggi. As if to say, now you can leave me alone. She had stood in the archway of the door not wanting to be recognize, who she was—she did not come burrowing through and up to the meeting, relishing the fact she had to take on the coordinating of her ex-husband’s funeral, she had been in Chicago, all this time, just doing normal business until someone said Shannon’s lights went out, she was setting alone in a small apartment, how does a woman say it, inviting her soul to keep her company. It was really simple a time for her to see her daughter, and since it was a grieving time for her, she wanted to be by her. She, herself, had already done all the grieving she was going to do over that man.


Chapter Two
Gertrude’s Testimony


To be frank, and down right honest, Gertrude, wanted to go back to Chicago that very night, she did not want to attend the meeting tomorrow, and she told Cantina that, in so many words, and it didn’t seem Cantina needed her anyhow.
She was capable, but that wasn’t it, she was frail, as if her bones and flesh became fragile and her eyes seemed sleepless, and her mind seemed as if she could not dream anymore, she told her daughter, and that she was relearning these things since she left her father (and her ex-husband),
“Your father meant well, he always was a laugh, and we drank ourselves sick and silly, and I drank with him knowing I would never be enough woman for him, but he was enough man or drunk to do me harm and damage me more mental than physical, he never laid a hand on me, just enough man to do it mentally though, and, I might add, or maybe I didn’t know him, thank god I got away from him. Ay, thank god for that, I found peace in Chicago, perhaps it’s too late, I still have some ensnared anguish, and I thought I could be brave for you.”
“There, there, mother, it’s all right, I know you were brave then and you are brave now,” said Cantina.
“The morning I left your father, when I got home, the first thing I did was to turn on the lights, and the heater, the big space heater in the living room, it was cold. I propped the door to stand open, and I grabbed the bank book. The second thing I did, was to get the money out of our account, then out of town before your father called the police on me, looking for me, I was merely running and wanted him to leave me alone, I was dying of drinking, and he would never understand that.
“I ran up the stairs got my cloths, and I turned off the space heater before I left, and I suppose maybe your father thought there might have been an intruder, but I tried to be tidy about leaving. So I leaped here and there to turn this and that off, I moved, turned away from my home and husband, I had learned the hard way, he had the right to be where he was, and to change things I had to change me and my environment, had I stayed we would have fought over this and that, to flee to run, succeeded. With your father I would have had to be some lesser and baser other, to be vulnerable to him, to have to be silent to his drinking, and to be his drinking partner.
“To gain what? For what? What did I desire, what was I hoping for—it was all scary at first, but what I really wanted was simple, my own identity. I found privacy to sleep, and read, and not be in a state of despair.”

“I understand mother,” said Cantina, “You left because you were unhappy, simple as that, and its okay.”
“Shannon wouldn’t really mind, because I can’t hurt him now,” said Gertrude, “I can’t harm him, not just me, no matter what anyone did, they couldn’t harm him. That he would really just as soon drink and sleep and die in those cornfields as he did and for what godly reason I don’t know, perhaps just to show he cant be hurt. All right, you don’t’ have to agree, what do you want me to do here now?”
“I would like you to stay with me until he is buried,” said Cantina.
“If you were not drinking with your father, after a while he became a nuisance, all drunks are a nuisance when you are sober and they are drunk. I will not miss him, least his drinking, perhaps some of the laugher in the cornfields, since we both agreed in the beginning, cuckolding each other.”
“Lock the door mother,” she said. “We’ve already had a long day, its getting late, let’s go to bed.”
“I hope Cantina; you didn’t mind what I said about your father?” expressed Gertrude.
“Oh no mother of course not, but I do value him as highly as I value you and your coming here proves you value me. Good night!”


Chapter Three
Cantina’s Dilemma

Gertrude told her daughter Cantina, in a smooth yet sour way, the following morning as they readied for the second meeting, “You are much like your father you know, a dreamer and a poet—usually women are only swayed by poets long, a short while perhaps, they prefer reality, facts, and truth, well, they can make it fit in-between as long as they can iron out the other two, but you, you see your father as a hero, the facts are that which existed some forty-years ago, there is no more reality to that, it is all squeezed out like a wet rag, but you won’t even believe me, he was a drunk, no more, then than now, or just before he passed on—I mean.”
“Don’t say anymore maw, I’ll just end up hating you both, you most of all because you started it.” Then Cantina hesitated, trying to get her composure back, “I don’t believe you,” she said, cried and thought.
“So,” said Gertrude, “there is nothing I can say.”
Gertrude held her cigarette in her hand, motionless, as it burned down towards her fingers, “Bury him and be done with it.”
“Don’t you see mother that is what I’m after?”
“Our marriage my dear was a fact, the rest of it was that poetic romance I was fool enough to be fooled into, that only a fool follows a fool, but at the bitter end, the fool, one fool woke up.”
“Good-bye!” she said harshly, adding, “you’ll have to bury him alone, or not with me anyhow!”
“All right,” Cantina told her mother, “thank you for coming anyway.”

∙

Cantina didn’t care, know anything about womanhood for the most part, the parts anyhow, Gertrude was talking about, the things like romantic love, she only knew parental love, or mortality (death), she was too young to think of such things, to place them on a table and call them facts of life, she didn’t care about her mother’s reality, let alone the truth or no truth of what was the real truth that went on between them two, it was their lives, not in particularly her’s—perhaps she wouldn’t have put it quite that way—but she knew little about such things, yet she knew she had time to learn them, in time, she only knew what she knew, and felt, that she loved the man that died, her father, and it was unconditional love, it was free for him to take, and her to give, and she gave and he took, and he gave and she took, and it was not necessarily always receiving. If it was, then it was a trade, not unconditional. And that is what she knew, and felt, that was her reality.
And she knew this second meeting, meant just that. And she knew by the time everyone was done talking at the meeting, all the ex wives, and the banker, Ritt, and Poggi, and even Otis, her father’s body, oh yes, the dead can look ugly, and smell bad, no semblance of who they really were. This, the second meeting was the devil’s ambush, to take from her what her mother couldn’t, but tried, that last reflex of devotion and make it like sour milk
“All right,” she said, “just tell me paw how do you want to be buried?” and she fell to her knees, put her hands over her eyes, then when she opened them, in his shoe, she found an envelope, she opened it, and in the envelope was a letter, his will, how he wanted to be buried.
Then that afternoon she set out to follow the instructions. It all was too simple, but simplicity was greeted as a gift, a pusher, a stressor taken off her.

That evening, while everyone waited in the yard, at Gus’ farm, Cantina, showed up, all knowing she had the instructions from Shannon himself now, written out in plain English for her daughter to follow, all watching what she was going to do, she said “Okay paw it’s your idea to go home, it is you who insist on it being this way…” she held in her arms a two gallon antique, moonshine jug, one that Shannon used for drinking moonshine, and wine and his corn whisky in and from, those they had around the 1880s thru about 1910, or so.
Next she started walking down the rows those tall cornstalks rows one after the other, one by one, slowly and contently, inside that jug was his ashes, and she started emptying them out, pouring them out as if she was fertilizing the ground with them, per his instructions, and she whispered along the way: “I hope your pleased paw…I hope your pleased, I really do, I really do, I really, really do.”


No: 412; Written 6-10 & 11, 2009

Day of the Damned Horses (WWI, 1916)

Day of the Damned Horses
((A Day in the battle for Verdun, WWI, 1916) (A Shannon O’Day story))




Chapter One
The War and the Machine Gun Nest

(It is 1964; Shannon O’Day’s daughter Cantina is twelve-years old. She is with him for the weekend. They are out at Como Park, sitting along the banks of Como Lake. He often talks about the Great War with her, the one he was in as a young lad, and she always listens, but it is often a repeat, but nonetheless she listens, and today, Saturday, he is talking to her about it, they have cool-aid and hotdogs, sitting on an Indian type blanket in the grass:)


Says Shannon to his daughter, Cantina, “I came, I saw, I concurred, in the Great War…” then paused to look deep into her eyes, to see if she was really attentive, listening, “I was a man alone, like an island in the middle of the sea, entire of itself, like a continent, or part of one, that is how I felt in the war, especially in this one day of battle I had, and I had two days that were special in that 300-day battle—oh, perhaps more, but two that haunt me, one of victory, one of tragedy, both during the Battle for Verdun, in 1916, let me tell you about the first one, I call it ‘The Day of the ‘Dead Horses.’” (She nods her head yes, up and down slowly, she’s heard it before, each time though she gets something new out of it, something he was fearful before of releasing, so she has learned to not show discontent for him bringing it up for the umpteenth time, she knows when he’d dead, gone, these will be her private stockpile photos, of his trying days in battle, ones he only shared with her, and only her.
Cantina knew ever since he had come back from his war—some forty years ago, as Shannon called it, World War One, there was a since of duty that remained in him. As if he should have died, but survived for some reason.

She knows, but she can’t put it in words, knows: He sees no hope for victory in the long run for mankind, but finds he can live a full life in the hours God has left him. She knows this has told herself this in so many words, just sitting there talking to her father, thinking but not saying, saying only those things that are pleasing to him, she knows, he doesn’t fear death or solitude, never has and he finds love is possible for him in a sense that in that will, his will, he must never hide from death, nor retreat from it, he can live a full life, closely interwoven with it, but remembers the village where he almost lost his life in France, the girl who lost her two boys, and he had to half kill her, she did the other half of the killing. And those horse, those damn dead horses, he remembers them well, and therefore, he feels in life, ever since, he stands alone.
“What are you thinking?” asks Shannon to his daughter.
“The way you might be thinking.” She says back to her father, and it actually makes him smile, what daughter would try to understand a man like him, a good and fine daughter, that is who, he confirms this to his second self. “She doesn’t judge him,” he tells himself. “How funny, everyone else does.”
And so on this day, in 1964, in the park, sitting on the Indian blanket, here is the story he tells Cantina, I shall tell it in my own words, as he tried to tell her in his:


Shannon O’Day was making his stand in a trench. He did not like this trench and when he saw it he thought it had a shape of a woman’s womb. But he had no choice this was the trench, and he selected it as far away from the German artillery shells could reach as possible. But not as far away as the sound of automatic machine guns reached with their bullets banging away night and day, halting and firing, hesitant, uncertain, and then firing again and again, to give him and his platoon of eleven men a nervous case of being shell-shocked.
There still was snow on the ground, frost for the most part, it had ruined the ground, made it muddy, chilled and hardened at night, when the sun sank, and when the horses came pulling wagons of supplies, jerking, and climbing, and staggering their way through the mud, and snow, hauling equipment, men pulling their bridles, the rains coming over their heads and shoulders, holding the horses by the mane, many had to be shot, and many got shot in the line of battle, and there they lay dead, where they feel, for the flies and the worms and the rats.
The horses sometimes were used for barricades, if the battle took place within the timeframe the carcass was still plump, and not gutted by animals, and even Shannon and his men shot over their bodies on occasions, their burnt hides, laying their hot muzzles on their dead flesh and firing at the enemy instead of within the trench, allowing at times for them to advance, knowing all that was behind them were empty trenches, in particular their one empty trench this day of battle, and so they used these dead horses, fifty shot in one day to advance from one point to another, giving Corporal O’Day an idea, one that could take out that nest of machine-gunners.
This day, this one early spring day, one of 300-days in the Battle for Verdun, in France, once the twelve men had reached the perimeter, of the enemy, within pistol distance, there were several more horses laying dead thereabouts, they had succeeded in stealing foot after foot after foot, to get that close to the enemy, and now behind those several horses they waited until night fall, when their first shooting would start, the enemy not knowing how close they really were, and how many had perished in the previous battle, which none had.
Of the twelve men who had reached the outer rim of the boarder where the enemy had their machineguns, two were wounded, Henry Sanchez and Elmer Boswell. Henry was from New Mexico a young lad of eighteen, and Elmer, was a man from Wisconsin, a son of a baker, he also was eighteen.
Henry had a leg wound, shot twice, in two places. And Elmer had an arm wound. All the men were very thirsty, and the wounds of the men were starting to stiffen, yet Corporal Shannon O’Day, was too close to victory to halt the operation, it must go forward, wounds or not. Henry had told Shannon it was very painful. And this brought on a severe annoyance, and he told the soldier, plainly, “You will have to endure the pain, or take death as your way out, or if you have an aspirin, that might help, whatever you chose, make it quick, and if you can’t fight anymore, stay put, and if you can, continue to do as you’ve been doing, but this is not debatable.”
It was no joke, reality, it was the mission first, not the man, and if nausea became deeper and deeper throughout the night for the two soldiers, they were considered no longer usable in battle and therefore, second in priority.
Shannon and his other now capable nine men were spread out likened to the Little Dipper. Using the horses for cover, they simply waited; the horses big like mounds linking the soldiers like baseball bases, from one point to another. Shannon moved on his belly from one horse to the other checking his men to make sure they kept their steel helmets on, a few had bullet holes through them, a few had hammered them out, yet some of the edges were still unsmoothed.
When the shooting started at, 3:00 a.m., and all the helmets had been clapped, you could hear a few of those bullets banging against the helmets, and the heads inside of them swaying, the sounds were death sounds: mouth-draying sounds, spiting sounds, cracking sounds, mechanical sounds, machine-like sounds, desperation sounds, and then a final sound—and throaty voices were no more!
The dryness and fear Shannon had in his mouth, and gut, were on hold, as he looked among the nest for the bodies of the enemy, he had thrown in three grenades, men were laying flat on their faces, arms, torn off, reaching—but reaching unconnected to their bodies, for more machinegun rounds.
Shannon walked among the dead, he wondered said to his second self, “What was their last word inside their head, their last thoughts, or to one another, to the comrade next to him?’
Said Shannon to Henry, as now he had taken the pain, and simply endured it, was still part of the onslaught, standing by his side, “It is better to die on your feet, than on your bellies.”
Another man said in back of them, “Why should they die and not us?”
And of course, in days to come, that voice would die, in a trench, but Shannon had no wisdom, or witty words for the older man, older than he by far, so he said not a word. But Shannon O’Day was thinking: it’s early now, and soon would be first light, and he could take his men back to the General and tell them, if they didn’t already know, the machinegun nest was silenced, and they’d all get a three to seven day pass to Paris or someplace safe, and a good breakfast, and Henry would go home, the war was over for him, and so was it for Elmer. And he’d get two replacements in a week or so.’
He looked around carefully, looked in back of him at the dead horses, in front of him at the machineguns, he looked at the mud where he had crawled, at the bodies he had killed, not one of his men died today, just two wounded, but this was a good day—he felt, he knew there would be worse.


Chapter Two
Rest and Recuperation in Borges


Shannon had went to Paris, for his rest and recuperation, then right onto Burgos, Belgium, for the rest of his seven day leave from the war, it had seemed to him that from now on, after that killing of several men in the machinegun bunker now everyone he passed or talked to, anyone, one and all, he met, or saw, recognized him as the face of the man who killed the seven Germans, that he had a specific face and name, and that each person knew he’d be in Belgium, floating down the cannel in a boat, looking at the old houses, the tower, the square. On second thought—he knew this to be a mental if not physical impossibility, a trick of the mind, a stress from the war, the battle, that war was destroying him, a certain quality in him anyhow, that people like him, had gotten, but even sharper than him, debilitating. He told himself, “When I go home, I’ll have to fix myself, learn how to deal with people again, talk to them,” he meant, not react to them, but act by them.
As he walked along the cannel, and in the square the days he was there, pacing almost unnoticing the people around him as if he was a pigeon in the air, just sailing away, the horses came back to haunt him, the arbitrary shooting, the appearance of the body parts separated from the bodies, he was blank, expressionless, person. Each moment was a new moment a bizarre moment, he was trying to pretend to the people around him he was not involved with the war, that he was someone free of the war, never heard the name, World at War, thinking instead of someone whose destination and goal in life was higher than that, higher than allowing one man one day, start a war between two countries, and pull in the rest of the world, and the rest of the world followed like blind working ants building an anthill, and all these countries miles and miles away, and the spirit of war, having legs, walked and stretched its way down every side street and road in every town and village and city in the world.
He didn’t know these scares would last decade to decade, penetrating his daily life, habits, he didn’t realize then when he got out of the war, he’d be out of the world, out of a life, perhaps his mind betrayed him, the war was fatal to him, he would increase his drinking, it was a healer, and he just couldn’t find anything better.


Chapter Three
The Crossroads Restaurant


Shannon got hungry, and went to a nearby shell of a restaurant, it was in-between two crossroads—shaped like ‘y’ and the restaurant was in-between the ‘y’; inside there was a hearth ablaze, with thick and colorful flames, and the crackling of the dry wood echoed in each ear, it was warm and cozy, he sat close to it.
The guesthouse provided an oilcloth-covered table, with an oil lamp in the middle of it. He ate alone, the guests had vanished, the room looked empty, the plate of food was all eaten, sauerkraut, with a sizzling steak, and corn from a can, and some biscuits, a cup of dark coffee. A few wood embers floated by his table, he spoke casual to the waitress, light conversation, and idly he remained looking out the window.
He spread his legs to warm his inner thighs, the kitchen light went off, he spoke inattentively, “I suppose you’ll be closing for a spell,” he said.
“Just for clean up, we’ll open back up in two hours,” said the waitress.
Shannon asked her to speak a little louder, there was a ringing in his ears, he had become a little deaf from all the gun firing, and artillery; consequently, her having to speak launder, triggered something inside of him, a immobility, a guardedness, he held his breath, looked about as if he was searching for the enemy.
“Are you okay, sir?” asked the waitress.
Shannon’s side was to the fire, something beyond just stillness had overcome him, then he pulled himself back together, his voice had remained the same, “I’ fine, fine,” he reassured her.
“You just sit on where you are mister,” said the waitress, “I’ll cleanup around you, no need to move.”
Shannon nodded his head in thanks, and his mind shifted, as if he was taking a nap with his eyes open, he remembered drinking in the cornfields with his older brother Gus, he’d fall to sleep on the ground, wake up in the mornings, have a feeling the earth itself sucked all the living protean out of his bones, it was as if the ground had arms, and was trying to pull him down into its depths, before his time, but the alcohol would make him pass out and that is where he laid, and that is where he got a full sleep nonetheless—well, not a full sleep, no drunk does, but a dead sleep, not like when he was in the trenches, he could never get a good nights sleep or full sleep, and when he did wakeup from his sporadic sleep in those mud and fly infested trenches, he never knew were he was, thought he was at home, in the cornfields, in his brother’s house, everyplace but where he really was. So that is why he had gotten a hotel room the first day he was in Burgos, and that is why he was thinking about the cornfields, he was thinking about the places he got the best sleep—or at least a full sleep, and now he had learned to appreciate a good full sleep, one of the great gifts of God—is a good night’s sleep, he murmured, and the waitress now sweeping around him, heard him, and knew—right then and there, he was not a tourist, he was a soldier of the Great War.


Chapter Four
Anyplace will do


Shannon O’Day was really not much different in battle than out of the battle in that he never did much hiding or luring about, with his behavior, perhaps unseen and unheard as if he was a space invader, and could be an animal as in their natural habitat like a coyote or a wolf, after his prey, and when he attacked he was not concealed any longer, not crouching behind those dead horses, after hours of discomfort—laying against those smelly decomposing, horses, whose shapes were no longer shapes of horses, infinitesimal insects from the horses crawling from the dead to the living, like crossing over on continuant to another. These were the thoughts going through his head as the waitress mopped the floor, and he stared into the flicker flames of the hearth. A little jealous the waitress never had to face such uncertainties that soldiers had to, but happy for her at the same time. She was pretty, he noticed as she walked by the light shinning through the window, near the corner of the room. He had finished his meal, and was now drinking a beer, with his feet propped on a stool, that was left by the hearth for someone to sit on and feed the fire with dray wood.
He didn’t need to be shot at anymore, he could sense, almost feel the whizzing by of bullets, just daydreaming where he was, he could hear them like a bees shooting and buzzing by his ears, it was all invisible to the eye, soaring sounds of invisibility; beyond the woman sat a man counting the morning’s and noon’s receipts—thinking hurriedly, as if the doors would soon be opened again for the early afternoon rush, to dinner rush. He didn’t need to say anything, he just ordered a third beer, and watched and listened and gazed at the legs of the young and pretty waitress. He hadn’t moved from his chair, not once.

The waitress looked at Shannon, trying to figure out his age, figuring him to be twenty or twenty one, not sixteen or seventeen, she was twenty-three, and she had seen many a soldier come through those doors, and sho enough he was a soldier, and she knew had she been through war, she wouldn’t have much left neither, that what she’d want is just what he was wanting, a warm corner someplace, a quiet someplace for a little while. And she left him to himself.


No: 412 (6-9-2009)..

Corn Harvesting and Hogtying (a Shannon O'Day Story)

Corn Harvesting and Hogtying
(A Shannon O’Day Story)




Chapter One
Cantina’s High School


“You are most unhappy when your life is empty,” Shannon O’Day told his daughter Cantina O’Day, picking her up from her High School in March, of 1965 (three months before school would let out for the summer season).
“You got to keep yourself busy,” he pressed this point, “you live from moment to moment, and you should never have any recollection of the previous moment, this way you never have to concentrate or dread tomorrow, it’s all one flash, and one fiesta—!”
But Cantina knew that was the way her dad lived, and for her it just wouldn’t do, nor last. But she smiled at his philosophy it was really meant to smooth her troubled mind about her going with him for the several months, while out on school vacation, and her uncle Gus was visiting down in North Carolina.
She was the kind of like her mother, Gertrude, if she didn’t look out the window to see what or who was coming down the road, or look at what she might have to bear in life, it would become for her unbearable, life postponed, and this in itself would create to a great extent, anxiety.
She knew her father wouldn’t even budge from those cornfields he loved so very much while drinking in the late springs and summers, that an atom bomb wouldn’t chase him away, or even an attack by bees in all directions, yet he was her hero, who fought in the Great War, and fought while in those foxholes they called trenches, and was decorated, while in Europe, by a French General.
She remembered what her mother told her that when Shannon reached home in 1919, there was no triumphant hooting for him, yet he wanted to believe that there were things worth dying for in life, fighting and dying for in life. For at least one thing—even if it wasn’t the real reason—was that Shannon O’Day, himself never thought or believed of naming it anything other than what it was because to him, to Shannon O’Day, it was nameless anyhow, it was that someday he’d have a daughter, and he didn’t want her to have to worry about a dotted world outside the boundaries of America the beautiful—soldiers and sailors and marines pushing their way with hands and weapons onto her sacred soil and coming down the highway standing on the corners waiting to kill Americans like hogs waiting for the slaughter—like rooting hogs, ready to enslave America.
During some of his trying times, he never once went on relief, leaving the bureaucratic Government one less recipient.
So he came to Washington High School, off Rice Street, in ST. Paul Friday afternoon to pick up his daughter, that he Shannon O’Day, knowing that he would have her for the rest of spring, the entire summer and until after harvest time, and then she’d be heading back to school (March through September, to about October 1), about seven months, through the planting season and harvesting time of his brother’s cornfields, outside of the city, where Gus and his wife took care of Cantina, but because Gus’ wife’s mother was ill down in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Gus and she were going down there to take care of her, she was 92-years old.
Shannon would do his farming along with his friend Otis Wilde Mather, although Shannon didn’t tell Gus about Otis being with him during some of the planting and harvesting time (the rest of the time Otis, would be gone attending to his businesses in Ozark, Alabama, and a Meat market, he owned on Jackson Street in St. Paul) Gus never like him, called him a ‘Sneaky and cagey nigger.”

Cantina was thirteen-years old at the time.

That was the situation when he arrived at the school that Friday afternoon, to pick up his daughter. There was apprehension in it too of course, since, for Shannon, to raise a daughter with his drinking condition, and it was Gertrude’s normal concern whenever he took her, even for a day, now for seven months, but she insisted she be with her father on the familiar farm, for Gertrude had to remain close to where she worked, her and Shannon owning a house on Albemarle Street, and working downtown by the Mississippi River at ‘Gillette’, assembly line work.
But now, even if she had changed her mind, it was really too late, the last breathe on the issue had been discharged.



Chapter Two
The Planting


(March) The morning was cold; it was the 10th of March, Shannon had not drank for ten-days, and was already seated at the kitchen table, with Otis, when Cantina came in, down from her second story bedroom, looked out the window, and joined her father, he was leaning back reading the newspaper, as Cantina, clutching her shawl, like her mother often did, said in a waking up manner,
“What are you going to do today when I head off for school?”
“I’m going to start planting,” said Shannon.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early?” she commented.
“Why it’s the tenth of the month, and I’m not waiting for no train.” He said with a chuckle.
“I mean paw, is the ground warm enough?” asked Cantina.
“Warm enough, I don’t know, the worms are still in the ground, they are warm I’d think, when they get cold they’ll show their heads, and that’s good enough for me,” and he laughed again pouring down his coffee, and had a little whisky in it he had hidden, not even told Otis about the pint he kept in the back water where one flushed the toilet.
“All right,” she said, and Shannon remarked, “Get on out of here and go onto school, like you’re suppose to do.” And she did.

It was that the ground was 45F, not the normal required 50 to 55 or 60, for best planting weather, and thus, Otis and Shannon took the direct seeding and planted in the cold soil, and they planted between six to eight inches apart, not the normal eight to twelve for corn stacks to grow among each other, he wanted to get a big harvest, and early planting. And he planted two inches deep, instead of the normal one inch, thinking he’d not let the crows have a feast, and his rows were 20 to 25 inches apart, not the normal 30 to 36 inches, and he had blocks of 8 rows, not four, and it was a wet spring, the soil was drenched, and he needed to drain some of it, but felt no need to, this would save Gus a big water bill, and didn’t. And accordingly, the planting was done, the way his drinking was done, fast and careless.
Then, exactly like Shannon, the other one, Otis, said, “We aint got a thing to do but wait now I reckon, lets git on to doin’ some serious drunkin’?”
Without hesitation, and forgetting his pledge to his wife, he simple said, “Okay, but damn, we’ll be sure not to tell Gertrude, or my daughter, I’ll sleep it off before she comes back from school. Go-on now and bring in that jug of corn whisky, I know you got it hidden someplace.”
Shannon knew Otis had some whisky hidden, and Otis knew Shannon was drinking on the side that he was not as serious to sobriety as he proclaimed to be, but didn’t say anything to Shannon he knew, he just figured it was timing before he’d bring up the subject, and the jug, and therefore, he moved lickety-split like to the loft of the barn where he hid the jug under some hay, and brought that jug in, pulled the cork, and with one hand like a pro, laying it against his cheek, and on his shoulder, he gulped down a big mouthful of that corn whisky like it was Coca-Cola, and Shannon, likewise.



Chapter Three
Watering & Harvesting

As the weeks passed, Cantina would have to remind her pa to water the fields, and he’d do so when she’d go off to school, and during the summer, early summer, she noticed the corn was not growing well. And she watched her papa watering; he did it too shallow, “Paw” she said, “you got to soak the soil thoroughly! And be careful not to damage the plants while cultivating!”

“Cultivating, what is that?” asked Shannon, but Cantina didn’t hear him, she was long gone by the time he got the last syllable out.

As the corn stocks got bigger (knee high), Cantina noticed it was starting to look like a jungle in the cornfields, “Paw,” she said (a little inquisitively), “don’t you remember when you were drinking, there was room for you to put your bottle down, lay back, spread your feet out, while drinking in the cornfields, now if you were drinking today, how would you do it, the cornfields look like the Amazon?”
“Hum…mm, what is your suggestion my dear?” he asked.
“Well, by planting early, you avoided the warm problem somewhat, but now the corn is not growing fast enough you planted it too deep, if you can harvest early, like in August, and not September or October, you will be ahead. You need to use more insecticide.”
“No, I haven’t used any yet, not well for the bones,” said Shannon.
“Oh my gosh,” she murmured, “You should every several days, and when it gets real hot—like it’s starting to get—we’re going to have real big problems.”
It was soon after this that the corn started to silk, and the weather got blazingly hot, and worms were starting to show up, and there was leaf rust (disease on the corn), and there was tumor like growth on the leaves.
During all this, Otis and Shannon were drinking during the early afternoons, sleeping the late afternoons away, as Cantina went to visit her friends and mother. By the time she arrived back, Shannon had a 4:00 p.m., there was usually dinner on the table for her, and Shannon would be looking, or at least acting, all sobered up.

At the dinner table this one evening, she asked, as often she did, “How’s the cornfields?”
“Fine,” he replied.
“Have you done any weeding yet?”
“Weeding,” he repeated, “am I suppose to do weeding too?”
“Oh paw, frequent weeding, that is cultivation, you got to do that before you get a problem, you cultivate just deep enough to cut the weeds off below the surface of the soil. You got to be careful so you don’t damage the plants.”
“Well dear, your old paw knows a lot, but not everything about this farming life.”
“Yaw I know paw, I think Gus knew also, he wrote me, he asked if his field is a disaster yet or not.”
“You’re kidding me, my own brother said that?”
“And I know you’ve been drinking and I won’t tell mom or Gus, because she will take me away from you.”
“I suppose she might, if she knew, but I thought I was being pretty clandestine, like that Charlie Chan fellow, you know, that detective from Hong Kong.”
“Yes, I seen the movie paw, that’s pretty old fashion thought, it’s Perry Mason, nowadays.”
“Yaw, I watch him too, but the best of them all is that private eye called, Sherlock somebody…!”
“Why we are talking like this, when it is a serious matter, you got to take care of the farm Paw, you promised Gus.”
“But I’m doing the best I can, really I am.”
She looked at her paw, and she just couldn’t help but smile, he really felt he was, even if he wasn’t, “I know you are paw, I just wanted to remind you of your promise, sometimes you forget.”

Cantina went out to look at the jungle of corn, it was all of that and worse, worms were starting to mature and eating the corn, and much of it was diseased, and you couldn’t see five feet beyond the first row of corn, and the ground was mushy, and it was late July. The ears were full and milky.
“Pop,” she said as she ran into the kitchen, “I think we can save half, or near half the harvest if we harvest now, sorry about the rest, but it’s bad.”

Gus was getting abut five bushels of corn per acre, using about 9000-gallons of water per acre. And planted 400-acres, thus, getting, 2000 bushels of corn; Shannon got 750-bushels, used about 1000-gallons of water, per acre, and none in August or September, normally high water volume months, but somehow, everyone thought under the circumstances, he did a fair job. And everyone felt, he was drinking, and many of the neighbors said he was for sure they saw him and Otis drunk and laughing in the cornfields as if they were trying to hogtie each other, but since no one got killed in the process, Gertrude and Gus, didn’t say a word concerning the matter, to save Cantina’s respect for her father, they wanted her to see him as she always saw him, her hero, because other than drinking, he had good values, so they had just crossed their fingers, and thanked the Good Lord everything turned out rosy, somewhat.


6-7-2009. . No: 411

"To Save a Lopsided Sparrow" (the complete Novel)

To Save a Lopsided Sparrow

(Sequel to the book, “Cornfield Laughter”)

In English and Spanish







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

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








Contents

1

Death in the Dark (a poem)

In English and Spanish
“To Save a Lopsided Sparrow”
(Book II to the Shannon O’Day stories)
“Salvar a un Gorrión Irregular”

Theme Poem: “The Pillars”

(1916-1919)

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


Part III. –Home Sweet Home

(1919-1923)


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”









Linking Additional sketches and stories of the life and times of Shannon O’Day (In English Only)

2
The Half Tramp
(A Story, with three Chapters)

“The Half Tramp”
((Chapter one) (Shannon O’Day, 1922-1932))

“The Bluff”
((Chapter two from “The Half Tramp) (1946))

“Cornfield Burner!”
((Chapter three from “The Half Tramp”) (1950))

3
The Third Wife
(Independent Sketch, 1951-1953)

4
Not One Hooting Owl Left
(A Story in Five Parts)

The Mare (1954)
The Rich Nigger (1955)
Closed Out (1954)
The Judge’s Visit
Subchapter to ‘Closed Out’ (1957)
Not One Hooting Owl Left (1965)

5

The Farm
(Shannon O’Day, the missing
Chapter to “Cornfield Laughter,” 1957)
An Independent Sketch
6
Feeding a Dead Horse
The Case of Dana Stanley
((Godchild to Shannon O’Day) (1958))
An Independent Sketch
7
The Pawn Shop
Recollections of Shannon O’Day’s father
(1959, as told by Shannon O’Day to Otis Wilde Mather)
An Independent Sketch

8
Inside Job: Stillwater Prison (Part One: 1961-63)
In two Parts and six Chapters
The Day before Yesterday (Part Two: 1916/1966)
To Save a Lopsided Sparrow


Part One:
The Lank Figure 1916-1919


(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 robes, their mouths, tongues, eyes, knees as their movements made their robes ruffle.
“He drinks and he smokes, and he is dying,” said the lank figure about Shannon O’ Day, “and he has killed, and killed, without a morsel of remorse, or so it would appear,” 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, and death 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 days?”
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 all were, 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 where: 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, foot by foot, 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—as if they were chewing, as if they were squashing and chomping and chewing on grass, and he could hear the sounds of crickets, and other unnamed bugs, 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, foot by foot, 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, just passing through, during 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 ramshackle houses, and during its best day it was somewhat rundown anyhow, 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 hamlet in front of him. He un-tightened his belt so he could breathe 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 shiny 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 and grass alongside one of the walls under her, which 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, and 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 punctured 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 and grass, covered him 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.
Then there was a pause, “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.”

In the evening, on the eleventh day of his recuperative period, he was able to walk out of the little lair, and seat 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.”
This of course brought on a whole new 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, 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.


Part Three:
Home Sweet Home 1919-1923



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 listened 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 onions, 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 someday 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 the bar, he looked familiar, “Yeah, I know him, all right,” said Shannon, “it’s been a long 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 have popped 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 inmates prison cell, leaving the door ajar, to allow fresh air to enter. The dungeon was moist and dark, and silent. —it was gloomy and shadowy, 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 small room, away 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 than most bars in general, 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 nobody 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 customers, which 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 hamburgers, 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, da fat man, I is 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 those bags 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 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 understand.


End Notes on writing of the Novelette: “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 terrace 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 terrace 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. (FM/∙∙/∙)




The Half Tramp
(The Years 1922-1932)

As told by: Mabel O’Day ((Widow to Gus O’Day, 1969) (Shannon O’Day had died in the Cornfields in 1967, as indicated in the sequel, “Cornfield Laughter”))


Chapter One:
The Half Tramp


They—his mother and father had tried 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, helped Shannon O’Day, through those 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, that is to say, 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—for example, the hog kill, to the meat packing department, and to the Rose Room, where they burnt up the waste of the animals: 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, fourteen 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 up 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. During these times he had a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion, during those years.


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 git.” 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, Otis had moved in with Shannon, and here were two lazy birds, 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, and Shannon was smart enough to take a chance.
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 heard, and he bet it on a horse Otis had picked out. And I’ll be, he won $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∙

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



Chapter Three


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 not for those 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 Ramsey there, brought her to meet me and Gus at our farm, and 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 their company were 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 I guess that was because of my garlic breath, it 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 her’s looks 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 Four
Cornfield Burner


“What proofs have you Mr. Gus O’Day?” ask Judge Finley.
“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 at 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 whisky 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 from Margaret-Rose. 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 like, trying to wipe booze off her lips and face and 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 into her bed with Gus before Gus woke up to find out what all the fuss was about, and hope Otis could find his way back to his apartment 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 ∙∙




The Third Wife1951- 1953


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, and backtracks some, and then forward. 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-Anne 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?” he said, 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 all over, 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 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, or for that matter the city, for the time being, 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, she could possibility be the his next victim. I mean, if he got away with it once, why not twice. He had a motive, a reason to, a flimsy one, but one nonetheless.
“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 had said, 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 fellow down at the St. Paul Police Station off and on, he’s been feeding her all this rot…I guess I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s all a lie, and it has scared her.”
“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 (never looking back once): she certainly had a nice voice, and a few other nice things, 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, the one 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)



Not One Hooting Owl Left
(A Story in Five Parts)

Part One

The Mare
((Hullabaloo 1954) (Part One of Three Parts))

(Part of the End) And so Shannon O’Day knew that very first morning of October, 1954 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, or 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 (and in-between painting he fed the pigs, milk the cows, brought the hay down from the loft: day, after day, after day. He had fifteen days to work off (nine days being spent on the house), and as he shifted from the house to the barn working 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


Part Two

Otis Wilder Mather’s Revenge

((or, the Rick Nigger of Minnesota) (Part Two of Four Parts))

((A Shannon O’Day Story) (1955))



Otis Wilder Mather, had taken the $500-dollars Shannon O’Day had given him, back in the early 40s, invested it in Ozark. Alabama, livestock, and became rich, obliged to no man. Not that he didn’t owe a much obliged to someone. This was years later of course, Many a hard and wet and snowy and grey winter had come and gone in Minnesota, left between his visits to see Shannon O’Day, his truly one and only friend up in Minnesota. He even drove his brand new 1955 Ford sports car, Thunderbird; and owned his own meat market on Jackson Street and two more in Ozark, and one in Shanty Town, seven miles outside of Ozark.
He no longer wore patched cotton overalls, rather tailored ones. They called him in Minnesota, ‘The rich nigger from Ozark.’
He’d walk the snowy streets in gray misty afternoons, passing over the Wabasha Bridge, looking down onto the Mississippi River, saying out loud to the Lord, “Eyes in a hurry Lord, cuz black folk dont even have a barn to live in nowadays, against the cold weather up yonder here,” and folks saw he had very warm boots with fur on them, and a long coat, with fur on the lapels, and he’d hear them badmouthing him under their breaths, cussing him as he walked by, saying ‘nigger go home’ in the stormy winters, breathing in the cold mist, like them. They said these things, not because he was rich, became James Hill, who owned a railroad and lived on Summit Hill nearby, was rich, but because he was a negro, for his black skin being inside those warm garments, warmer than theirs, and their skin was white, and because Otis Wilder Mather was more devoted to work, and beef and cattle, and cows and calves and butcher shops than to humans, even though he took care of his family well. They couldn’t believe a black man could obtain such wealth, cursing the fact that he did; his vengeance to the white raced his revenge one could say was success.
But he learned something from his one time accuser of wrong, Gus O’Day, that in slow incriminations over a long period of time, converted into wealth, that something’s were somewhat controllable and somewhat predictable, one being the love the white race had for beef. In addition to that, the love human males had for the cow, its milk and beef and the long subsequent years of their gestation of his products. This success was the only justice available to him for the wrongs man had done him in Minnesota, when they tired to convict him in 1950 for the burning of Gus O’Day’s cornfields, when it remained a mystery to the truth.
That was it. Prolongation—never stopping or hoping never giving in, hope no longer was deferred, he saw it in the white man’s eyes, ‘outrage!’ now the blow fell upon those who cursed and cussed him. The one who gave him the five-hundred dollars, he had dreamed when given that money, dreamt the imaginary purchase of a cow, and here he bought twelve-cows, and fed them a winter, then sold them plump, and for twice as much, and bough twenty-four cows and fed them another winter, for near fifteen years he did that, now he owned four meat markets, in Ozark, St. Paul, and Shanty Town, a few miles outside of Ozark, where the poor black folk lived.

Written 5-25-2009
No: 405 xx



Part Three

Closed Out!
((Shannon O’Day, 1956-57) (Part Three of Four Parts))


When Gus O’Day and his wife had come back from Fayetteville, North Carolina, he heard about Shannon’s run in with the law, not to mention his reckless try at farming had ended, but “Thank God for that,” he told his friend Ronald Short, the county attorney.
Why in fact, Mr. Short was initially confused on the Kent Peterson murder he didn’t let out, but the sheriff, Dakota Country, Sheriff Terry Fauna, never pursued the murder, or his inquisitive nature, just let it go, again both Gus and Short were puzzled. It appeared it never needed the law to close out the case; it just did on its own, as if someone pulled the blinds down. Now instead of Shannon hanging out with Gus, because of his browbeating over wanting to know the details of the killing, what wasn’t brought out in court, wanting to know, what he didn’t know, or pretended he didn’t know, but he should have known, if indeed he did kill Kent, and he did of course kill Kent, but hanging out with Gus might bring things to light, and Shannon was alright with the results of the Court, so he started hanging out at Dickey’s Diner, he ate there before, he just didn’t hang out there, and now he was hanging out there, got to know Old Josh the cook quite well, and a few waitresses, and some young guy blind who played Ricky Nelson songs, and some little black lad who came in and tap-danced, called Zam Zam.
It was a Friday night, Shannon, he had left the Diner, leaned half the night against the lamppost looking at the empty lots about, you would a-thought he could a-held his staring indefinitely. Then he stumbled on back to his apartment on Wabasha Street, by the World Theater, where he could do no harm to his-self or anyone else—to include innocent bystanders or perhaps all three.

This is when he changed course in his life, which was simply unavoidable—to be—a hazard if he hadn’t. He drank in Gus’ neighbor’s cornfield now, Mr. Orville Stanley (who had retired from the railroad, and had this hobby farm with his wife) Alice Stanley, their daughter, Nadine, and her daughter, Dana.
He knew them as well as anyone else knew them. So of 1956, he asks them without any troublesome interruption, if they wouldn’t mind him drinking among their corn stocks. And as time passed that summer, he’d drop a pint of moonshine whiskey into the old man’s mailbox and when they met and talked, he’d drop a pint into his hind pockets.
So now no one need bother to question Shannon over the murder and he didn’t get that browbeating from his brother, and the way he figured it: out of sight out of mind, or perhaps, what you don’t know, can’t hurt you, or possible, the concept of blood-kin being thinker than water, would not be tested under fire, as Mark Twain would have put it. And that was that, and that was all right with Shannon O’Day.
But it wasn’t the way Gus and that Country Attorney saw things, Mr. Ronald Short, but Gus was not to be as persistent as Mr. Short.
The next, Saturday, Mr. Short and the Sheriff Fauna, both friends, kind of friends, not bosom-buddies but lightly friends, had eaten at Dickey’s Diner, the sheriff believing, and telling Mr. Short in so many words: simple destiny was taking its expected course, and he shouldn’t get too reckless in taking advantage of destiny and poking his nose into the case anymore than he had already, that Judge Finley, had made his decision, and he’d not take a likening should he take this to another level, other than curiosity.
Mr. Short knew, Finley had a short temper, and didn’t care to be questioned on his judgments, and in particular this matter of Shannon O’Day; and Finley had told his dear friend, Sheriff Fauna, not to let Short, get one whiff or light flash of the real picture.
Ronald Short did start to meddle into what Judge Finley thought was his business. Short feeling he wasn’t doing Finely no harm in the process but he was telling the Sheriff about his new investigation into the murder, and forgot that the Sheriff was a dear friend of Finley’s, more so than his.
“No,” he said to Fauna, “what baffles me is Henry Sears, the witness, the very one who saw some stranger kill Kent Peterson then runs deep into woods. And then after the court hearing, he up and leaves the state. I think Shannon had some money hidden, and paid Sears to lie?”

Judge Finley said to Sheriff Fauna, that following Monday morning, in the Dakota County Court hallway, “What in creation kind of County Attorney do we have here, a detective? Ask him if he has a license to snoop beyond the courthouse!”
So for that moment his trust and assurance in Ronald Short shined unsteadily, you could say. For that trying moment he told the sheriff, “Mr. Short could be the victim of pure circumstance, compounded…jest like any one else; if that darn boy don’t believe the old picture show, that he might slip in some alley, or be subject to some outrageous misfortune and coincidence that befell Mr. Peterson, and then we all can rest in peace. Matter-of-fact, if he says anything more about being a detective, burn his britches, and if that don’t work, well, the alley will do.”
Short still never had one second’s doubt that it had been Shannon who paid someone to lie for him, with the clear and simple color of money. But Shannon never had a nickel to his name at this time.
So all Ronald Short needed to do was find out where the money came from, or where the witness was, or work with Gus on Shannon’s guilt, and consciousness, realization to the killing. Anyone, either one would work. And this is exactly what he was determined to do, to pursue, and if need be, persuade, and he was not discreet, having the sheriff provide spies for him, thinking the sheriff was one of his respectable spies himself, with pride in his profession to catch the real killer, instead of chasing shadows, since any little child who could read the court files would have said, ‘hogwash’ to them, and would have known something was fixed.

In plain sight of half the city of St. Paul, evidently going home from the late picture show, nobody could locate Judge Finley to tell him about it. Anyhow, Ronald Short, had found somebody, someone he felt he could squeeze information out of, who called him, and said they had information he was seeking, and Short met this man, in an alley by the Diner, but there was someone behind hidden doors.
He never had anymore sense then to believe the sheriff was on his side, and he could tangle with the old Judge, and walk away as if nothing happened. Not to mention to try and question the witness, and assure him of no ill feelings, and he’d keep it a secret of his identity, but secrets are not secrets when two people know them, they are agreements.
Inside the Baptist church that Sunday morning, Short’s wife had the funeral, and of course Judge Finley and Sheriff Fauna were present, but not Shannon O’Day, nor his brother. They both even brought roses for his wife to lie at the coffin.

That was a lot of money, $10,000-dollars back in 1956. It could have paid for two small houses on the North End of St. Paul, matter of fact it did buy one, for the judge. And as far as the judge and the sheriff were concerned, the investigation was closed out. Forevermore; off the register.

Written 5-27-2009 xx No: 407

Part Four

The Judge’s Visit
Subchapter to ‘Closed Out’ (1957)


Old Judge Finley told Gus in front of Sheriff Fauna, “Ronald Short could have become rich as a top attorney in Dakota County, provided he just didn’t die beforehand,” sitting in his kitchen chair one Sunday afternoon in 1957. The Sheriff chewing tobacco and the judge chewing a stick of gum, the judge looking about watching his wife bend over doing her chores.
“Life,” he said, “Your brother could have gotten life in prison” (thinking it was Gus who had sent him the $10,000-dollars from down south when he was visiting his wife’s kin, when it really was Otis Wilder Mather).
The judge and the sheriff were hungry for more money.
“How long has it been?” asked the Judge, “1954, wasn’t it?” said the Judge, as Gus was looking out the kitchen window at his cornfields.
Finley figured Gus was the only O’Day with that amount of money, or perhaps he borrowed it from his kin folks down in North Carolina, his wife’s parents, and he had influence to help Shannon. But as much as Shannon had hoped Gus would save the day, he never did.
“From 1954 to now, 1957, it’s been three years and we could open the case up again,” said the judge.
“Why would you do that?” asked Gus.
“What do you want me to do?” Asked Finley.
Gus didn’t know what to say.
“Okay,” Finley said, “what do I get if I don’t?”
Gus sat there a while leaning against the wall near laughing, thinking it was a joke. Then Finley, he told him: “I’ll take the same as before, $10,000-dollars. If that’s too high, I can take $5000-dollars in cash and the other in trade,” and looked at his wife “on an installment plan.”
The Sheriff sat there in a shadow, and just chewed his tobacco.
“Even if I had it, I’d not pay; the best you can do is getting him sentenced, and get twenty years yourself for blackmailing me.”
“Stop smirking around the bargains,” said the judge, “you’re the one who sent me the money right?”
“If I had ten-grand, I could have hired ten killers to kill you, not pay you nine times more than what it is worth,” said Gus.
He didn’t even quite chewing his gum, “Then who?” said the judge.
“Well, well,” said Gus, Shannon really did kill that Mr. Peterson after all.”
“Let’s not haggle,” said the sheriff, “I know who it was!”
This time Finley stopped chewing long enough to listen.
“Who?” asked the judge?
“Who’s got $10,000-dollars to spare and give away to save a worthless drunk?” he remarked.
“Who?” repeated the judge?
“That there nigger friend of his, Otis Wilder…forgot his last name, but the judge in St. Paul kicked him out of town years ago for burning, or not burning, Gus’ cornfields.”

Written 5-27-2009 xx 408


Part Five


Not One Hooting Owl Left
((In Poetic Prose) (Part four of four parts))


(1965) it was in the summer of 1965, Shannon O’Day went out to Mr. Kent Peterson’s farm, out to where he had painted the barn, back in 1954, eleven years had passed, it had been unused since the day he died, and the only way I can express how Shannon felt standing by that barn, the one he paint all 440-square feet of, is in the following manner, in poetic prose:


The inside walls was the remains of an old barn one that was never quiet, he had painted it eleven years ago, 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 too—if the barn could talk and it did talk to Shannon O’Day, so he said, time and again, for a decade— it remembered him, and reminded him, he had worked it, 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 of the past 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 Farm 1957


“Yes, brother,” said Gus O’Day to his younger brother Shannon, “a man sees too much if he lives too long: a lot of fellows in a lot of situations.”
He was chatting in a kindly tone with his brother on the porch steps of his farm, Gus’ wife, Mabel, sitting on a rocker on the open air porch. It was a cool evening, and Shannon had spent a good portion of it out in the cornfields drinking rum and whisky alone.
“All this farm life gets yaw tired I’d think, up the nose with rules and regulations, and if you don’t produce, the government gives yaw money, and if you do, and you want to sell, and the government don’t want you to raise more crops and sell, you can’t sell them anyhow, you end up storing them in some bin, the government steps in, don’t know how you put up with it, but I love your cornfields brother, I love the crows, and the smell of dirt and the yellowish-green in the cornstalks, and listening to the trains go by on those metal tracks, and even when the breaks screech, and one car bumps into another, I love it all.”
“Yup!” said Gus, “we done made a bowl of soup out of ourselves on this here farm alright, now all we are, is recipes for the government, if they want stew with corn we plant corn. If they want stew with carrots, we plant carrots; if they want…oh you know what I mean.”
“Man doesn’t need a backbone anymore, brother. ((Gus asks for a swig of Shannon’s bottle of whisky, and he hands it to him, and Mabel says, ‘Slow with it, remember your heart, you’re no spring chicken, Shannon’s ten-years younger than you, so take it easy.”)(That was in the summer of 1957.))
“She likes to bug me,” said Gus, “but as you were going to say brother?”
“Yup!” said Shannon, “man don’t need a backbone anymore, it’s us old critters that have them, I don’t know how big of a wrench it will take to loosen mine up, no need for it nowadays.”

“I reckon Shannon you’d be right lonesome out here just by yourself,” said Gus.
“I don’t rightly know what you mean by that, why you saying—what you saying?”
“Your older brother Shannon,” said Mabel “Gus, he’s picked out his headstone already, matter-of-fact, the other day he picked it out, says he’s goin’ to need it real soon.”
Mabel lit the lantern, it was becoming dark, moved it over a bit by the two brothers sitting on the steps, shoulder to shoulder.
“Can’t see the steps,” said Gus, “my eyes don’t work much anymore, too many shadows in them, I move too slow, breath too hard, get tired too quick.”
“I need to get up,” said Gus to Shannon. Shannon nodded his head up and down, toward his chest, “Yes” he said, but it wasn’t that he needed to relieve himself; it was he needed to get more air into his lungs, his stomach. And he stood up, and held tight onto the railing.
“Nonsense,” said Mabel, “just sit on back down, the strain is too much fer yaw!”
“Honor, and pride and discipline,” Gus told Shannon, “that’s the recipe for a man, and God.”
“I know all that Gus, and trouble is the best teacher, it always comes back to haunt yaw!”
“You know I got to go, got to leave yaw, couldn’t do it without seeing yaw one more time though…” Gus told Shannon in an almost whisper.
Shannon knew what he meant, it was Gus who had raised Shannon per near, he was always patient, calm, with him and figured if he ever wanted to know about God, his brother must had been a carbon copy of him. He was a good model, and always kind of put himself in the background, he had a servant’s heart, but he could be difficult and at times prejudice. —Gus didn’t need to tell Shannon twice, he saw him holding his chest, leaning on that rail that extended from the first step to the third, the top one. Gus asked Shannon to stand up by him. Mabel had laid her head back, Shannon stood up, Gus leaned toward him. And here was two men kissing each other on the cheeks, each hugging the other showing outright love, without shame. He said his last words to Shannon, “It will be a long time from now to then.”
Mabel lifted up the lantern to see why Shannon O’Day was crying, a tall, lean, old man had stopped breathing.


Note on this Chapter Story: “The Farm”: Here is one of the missing chapters to the Novel “Cornfield Laughter.” Written 5-1-2009 (VH)




Feeding a Dead Horse
The Case of Dana Stanley
((Godchild to Shannon O’Day) (1958))




State of Minnesota, Appellant vs. Edward Morrill, Respondent Filed September 29, 1958; Affirmed Finley, Judge; Dakota County District Courthouse



FACTS

Prosecuting Country Attorney: Steve Ramsey (Speaks to the court):


Dana Stanley, born September 27, 1942, met Edward Morrill born August 28, 1930, while working as a teacher's aide in the Dakota County school system. Dana was a student at the High School. Sometime during the school year of 1958, Edward Morrill engaged in consensual sexual intercourse with Dana Stanley, whom was sixteen-years old at the time, and Edward, some ten-years her senior. He had met her while in one of her classes, and thereafter, slowly the acquaintanceship became a relationship, and sexual. Edward fell in love with Dana, and she wrote several love letters to him, expressing her desire to marry him when she was of age.

Mr. Morrill, came to the realization, the relationship was improper, so he says, and brought it to the attention of the school principal, William Ingway. And according to Ingway, Mr. Morrill, was very sorry, and felt he made a mistake, and wanted to come clean, to remove it from his mind, off his chest, get it over with so he could go on living, and by doing this, he could bring forth exactly what the situation was. As was this following statement given to the state’s investigators thereafter, Sheriff Fauna, was present and had this to say:

“He told us that he had fallen in love with Dana and I believe it, he also said it was his first love that I think is a lot of rot, although it may have been her first love. I do see him as a sexual predator of some kind, although the principle Mr. Ingway, don’t see it that way, but then he has his schools reputation to consider, doesn’t he. I wouldn't think there would be any type of pattern to his predator way of life, it is perhaps what he sees, and what he likes he goes after, but I am no psychologist. Mr. Shannon O’Day, the godfather of the child sees it my way also, said he picked her up from school a few times, and Mr. Morrill had always an evil eye on her, he said. To me it is plain as trying to feed a dead horse, He got involved with a student and this kind of behavior cannot be allowed because he says after the fact ‘I’m sorry,’ the sorry doesn’t’ do a damn bit of good. When he goes to prison, I’ll accept his sorry, and so will his godfather, and so will the mother and father, who seem a little more passive on this issue.”

(Steve Ramsey speaks to Judge Finley and those in the courtroom :)

your honor, this following statement was given to the state’s investigators also, by Shannon O’Day, the godfather:


“In my opinion, I would agree with Sheriff Fauna, I had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Morrill, last summer, actually during his summer job, aiding teachers at summer school, those kids that are too lazy to work during the normal school year have to go to the dumb school to catch up.
I was working on my brother’s farm, he died last year, and his wife needed me to do some handiwork, hired me for a-spell, and I got a hold of him on his off time to work, and I got to know him probably on a little better basis and uh, I do see it as a problem and he should get his penis cut off, the horrid son of a bitch. You should hang him, not put him in prison, it is like feeding a dead horse, he’ll just do it again, and again.”

(County Attorney Steven Ramsey) From the documents submitted, specifically the letters from the County Sheriff and Mr. Shannon O’Day, and the statements from the Principle Ingway, which I have aggressively pursued in this relationship between Morrill and Dana Stanley, disclosed relationship because it might never have been, had Mr. Morrill never have brought it to the attention of the school’s principle, and now that he has stopped initiating contact with Dana, and him voluntarily submitted to and paid for a psychological evaluation perhaps his social immaturity and poorly-developed social skills, can be readjusted during some kind of treatment which he says he doesn’t mind attending, if he doesn’t go to prison, which I recommend he does.


The morning trial took a recess; and Mr. Morrill’s counsel delivered an affidavit signed by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, saying in essence to the state, and district court, and it was given to Judge Finley:

“…Morrill and Dana we understand had a consensual sexual relationship that occurred as a result of affection they both held for one another, this we understand, and a long trial would not be in my daughter’s best interest, nor allowing Mr. Morrill to go completely free, even if he pleads guilty to the charge or not, and we understand he has pleaded guilty on the basis of a stay of adjudication, and as I understand that to mean, no prison time. So we feel the best way to resolve the matter is to have the court sentence him on a stay of adjudication. It is what our daughter wants too, although we know his Godfather is against this, but that is his nature. So there is no reason we see that the state should not go along with allowing our request.”

(Narrator) The state did say it would look at, and consider a stay of imposition. The district court told Morrill that it could not promise anything, only indicated a strong willingness. And so Morrill decided to plead guilty to the charge cited in the complaint. During the states questioning of Morrill and opposed to a stay of adjudication, the final decision on sentencing would be "up to the judge."


(Narrator) At the sentencing hearing, the district court determined that there were "special circumstances" (and the judge had considered, behind closed doors before he talked to Shannon O’ Day allowing Morrill to be put in jail for 120-days, and 600-hours of community work, and five years probation, alone with restricting him to have any contact with minors without being supervised, but Shannon O’Day’s friend, Otis Wilder Mather, who still had frozen, if not hidden anger for the state of Minnesota and its off the wall law system, gave, free of charge $5000-dollars to bribe Judge Finley, to execute the worse punishment he could on the offender).


Judge Finley’s Decision:


“The state challenges the district court's conclusion that this case presents special circumstances in which a stay of adjudication is not justified. Generally, the charging function is within the broad discretion of the prosecutor, which should not be subject to interference by the district court. However, a district court may stay adjudication over the prosecutor's objection, if the case exhibits "special circumstances." In the present case, the district court found no existence of prior or identical "special circumstances" to allow this. And I see that the state had reached no plea agreement worthy of the crime. Therefore, over the objects of those concerned for such a ruling, as the case warrants which is a sentence of no less than five years in the state penitentiary, at Stillwater, Minnesota.”

Lawyer for the Offender: “But your honor, Mr. Morrill has no history of aggressiveness, and his part of the relationship with Dana Stanley was consensual and they both appear to want to get married, and the mother’s statement.”
The Judge: “In this case, since you bring it back up, Mr. Morrill in addition is ordered to pay $500-dollars for court fees to the public defender’s fun, and if you question my ruling, I will fine you. And the more you talk, the more you dig a hole for your client, this is a severe breach of moral conduct, happen right in a school system. And for your understanding, he does now have a criminal history. I do not, nor does the public support this characterization. Affirmed.”


Note: this is a fictitious case, as are the names. Written 5-28-2009, ds



The Pawnshop
Recollections of Shannon O’Day’s father
(1959, as told by Shannon O’Day to Otis Wilde Mather)





I wasn’t born yet, so it was Gus my brother who was ten-years my senior who was old enough and big enough to remember for it all to make sense. That is, it was Gus and Sally O’Day, my cousin, my father’s brother, Uncle Marty. They both—Sally and Gus were nine-years old at the time, both born the same year as one another. My mother, Ella Teresa Cotton O’Day, her sister Emma Betty Cotton O’Day, married my father’s brother. But when Gus just called her Sally and dropped the cousin thing—he said it sounded too bonehead like, well, so did I when I got born, and was old enough to reason it out. We all lived in the same city, of St. Paul, at the time. Anyhow, I still hadn’t gotten born yet, so this is what Gus knew and Sally knew until I got born and big enough for them to tell me about it. And so when I say—we, I mean, all three of us, and the city of St. Paul to boot.
One day one fall, my father drove up an alley with Sally and Gus in the back seat, and some merchandise to sell at this here pawnshop. A friend of his owned it, down on Wabasha Street by the Lyceum Movie Theatre, across the street from the World Theatre. Hawk Gordon owned the shop, and drove this big yellow Cadillac of his. He kept the yellow beast for twenty years, I even remember it.
Gus saw through the back window of the pawnshop a man with red hair (Hawk Gordon), grease all over his hands and shirt and face, wiping his hands on an apron—Gus said he thought he was working on an old clock, a short kind of fellow, thin, unfriendly looking chap, with deep embed eyes, in square eye sockets, sunken deep into the pits of his tiny head, with a fat smashed-in nose, like a wino has with big pore holes in them, his hair sticking out everywhichway.
After that meeting, Gus and pa carried all those items he had in the trunk, and front seat, and back seat and on the floors, into the pawnshop, and mom and pa and Gus moved into the backroom, and six months later I was born.
“I give you six months and you’ll be drinking and drunk out on the street again,” Hawk Gordon told my pa.
That was the first fall, of 1899; the first time ma even had met Hawk Gordon. He was shrewd, and pa was working for nickels and dimes from him at the time, but I got born in a warm room, that’s about all I can say, he was a piece of work that’s for sure, if you know what I mean.
But all ready pa was spending his earnings on food and whiskey and gambling, he barely seen us boys, and mom did the required work at the pawnshop.
So pa didn’t know at the time he would go up to Alaska to work, he didn’t even know yet he would ever consider it seriously. But he did tell Gus, talked to Gus about it, said; “I’d like to go someday to Alaska.”
It was a nice thought to keep in mind, and to ponder on deeper, but with pa’s drinking and all, he was going to hell in a hand basket, quick. Mr. Gordon wasn’t all that wrong about pa; no flies on him.
He and Gus got to talking a lot, in those days, I suppose because pa only went to 8th grade in school, spent much of his younger years drinking and travelling, and Gus sounded smart, and told pa he was going to buy a farm, and he did buy a farm in years yet to come. Pa was born in 1874, so at this time he was all of twenty-six years old, but looked twenty-years older.
He, pa, started to sell vacuum cleaners on the side for awhile, he said he sold them before when he travelled, along with doing some swapping and trading, he was good at that.
Pa didn’t like the South, he told Gus many a-times, he said he hung around and played cards with some black folks, down in Huntsville, Alabama. And the white folk got wind of it, and told him to get his ass out of Alabama before they hung him, which would have been by the KKK, the next day, and so when the next day came, pa was gone. It was a poor Blackman’s farm house trifling farmers, and pa seemed to get along with them quite well.
I asked Gus “What made pa go to Alaska?”
“I don’t know,” Gus told me, “whatever it was, Sally’s father Marty went with him,” Marty. “I suppose they thought Alaska would be safer and a man could make lots of money. Or at least more than at Hawk Gordon’s pawnshop, and what they found in Alaska, the first winter was one horrid winter, and knew nothing about its environment, its wildlife.” Gus explained.
Between Gus and his thoughts, his talking to me was vague at best on pa, and Alaska—at first anyhow. Some hidden grief maybe, under his thin hair, and skin and hard skull bone, because when mom passed on and I moved in with Gus and his wife, to live until I went to War, the Great War, he got an official letter from the State of Alaska. And all that information about pa’s death was in that envelope, it took those official fellows, over ten-years to get him that information.
“Oh ay,” I remember saying, “let me in on the secret,” I told Gus as he chewed his fingernails wanted to open that envelope up, but not opening it up, because once he did, he’d know, and knowing he was dead for sure was worse than not knowing and thinking he was alive someplace in Alaska drinking away like he always did, laughing and poking jobs at things that were not funny, and slapping the behinds of pretty young waitresses.

Mother died, worked herself to death when I was thirteen or near thirteen, or perhaps I was fourteen, I rightly can’t remember now, it was that simple, it was that there was not enough of her to go around, just to small for any human female package to hold onto, so much life to deal with, too much of perhaps, doom, too much assortment in life.
I can’t say for sure, no gratitude from Gordon, just for her being his, off and on, mistress after pa was found dead, eaten up by hungry wolves, something Gus knew, but had no proof of until he got that envelope that one day from the State of Alaska. And Gordon being a male and ma in his space and time, and lonely and hurting, and trying to feed two boys, forever in a kind of despair, because she knew, and Gordon knew, there would never be enough of her of any one woman to hold onto grief, and no other men would ever do. That was what he discovered in time; Marty, he died of a heart attack that same year, in Alaska too, and mom of double-pneumonia.

Otis Wilde Mather:

“An’ that dthere yellow Cadillac, what-all happened to it Shannon?”

“Every year or so, someone wanted to buy it. It was a wild yellow, like a canary: when Hawk Gordon died, in around 1940, he put in his will to bury it with him. Well, his children got wind of that, and said ‘no dice,’ and sold it, Judge Finley said it was okay, after, one of the kids went into his back room in the courthouse and offered him 10% of whatever the auction would bring.

Written 2-28-2009 xx No: 409





Inside Job
(Stillwater State Prison) 1961-63

Part one of two

Dana Stanley, born September 27, 1942, met Edward Morrill born August 28, 1930, while working as a teacher's aide in the Dakota County school system…


Forward: Shannon O’Day was the cause Edward Morrill had been sentence to five-years in prison for his affair with a minor, Dana Stanley, during the fall of 1958, and it was now December, 1961. He had served a little over two years, with good behavior, he was to get out in another year 1963, September, and was going up for a board hearing and hopefully be placed on parole, thus, at this point and time he had a parole hearing come September of 1962, one year from this date, and he had told his roommate, he was going to kill the person who put him in this prison when he got out, and the person he told (kidding or not), was Otis Wilde Mather’s third cousin, and when his name came up, Shannon O’Day, Oscar Lewis Charleston, had written Otis, to visit him, saying it was urgent. And he did just that, and gave Otis the information of his roommate, inmate friend, and Otis, gave Oscar enough chewing tobacco to last him the year out. But now something needed to be done to stop this potential hazard in the making.

And Otis’ plan was two fold. Get him a new sentence, another five or ten years, or do him in. Whichever one was favorable, under whatever circumstances prevailed, in accordance to the time period; and the less people that knew, the better off, to include Shannon O’Day himself.



The Story

Chapter One
The Meeting



“Youall do me this here favor cousin Oscar Lewis and I’ll give Youall $200-dollars for you time. Ef-in that be okay with your conscious, and it dont go against your nerve,” said Otis Wilde Mather at the Stillwater State Prison, in Minnesota, during his visit with his third cousin, Oscar Lewis Charleston.
They both looked at one another, and Otis pulled out two-hundred dollars, “Ef-in I takes the money the guard here, I mean, the po-lice man, he a-goin’ to take it away anyhow, I wish I could buy a-whore, but there aint any here, we’all men here and we can do what women cant I reckon…so give da money to some poor sucker,” he said.
“Waht!” said Otis, “Youall sure you wants to do that?”
“How you mean, wants to do that? Jest finds someone who aint got a cent and give them two-hundred dollars worth of those cent’s, all right cousin?”
“We’ll,” said Otis, “ef-in that makes you feel a little better, how about that white girl, Dana Stanley, Morrill got her a baby, and she a-liven on her own in some shack on the levee in that there shanty town down by the Mississippi River, below the cliffs, in St. Paul?”
“Well, I’d like to see a color folk git da money, but poor white is fine I reckon. Waht do he do to her?” Asked Oscar.
“He done treated her like a whore and she waz only fifteen at dhe time, and turned sixteen, then he gits a heart to confess, and gits mad cause Shannon O’Day, he gits the Judge to put him away for five years. Oh I suppose she did her flatiron, but she as poor as a mouse with no cheese. So I’d say if anyone deserves that-there two-hundred dollars, its Dana.”

A woman started screaming in the visiting area, some inmate was running around trying to open up his fly, and everyone started looking, and his wife tried to settle him down, and by the time the guards got him, settled him down he had his britches half off wanted to do whatever he could do with his wife, right there and then, and his wife’s hands were over her face embarrassed, just shook her head. And a guard said loud and clear, “We got to cut visiting time short today folks—all right everybody leave please.”
Otis, hushed up, as the guard pulled the man’s britches back up around his butt, and zipped up his front. The guard said to the inmate,
“You’ll be walking a tightrope for along time Henry!”
Otis was done talking anyhow, and when he reached the last steps to leave the prison, hearing the heavy metal doors, steel bar doors, clang, and catch the lock, and click as if death itself, burped, close behind him, he took in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Then he unfolded the money he was about to give Oscar, and put it into a separated department in his billfold. It was that very afternoon Otis visited Dana, and gave her the money on behalf of Oscar. “Do me a favor,” Otis, told her, “Write him a thank-you letter, ef’in that aint too much.”
She brought a beer to her little kitchen table, and opened it for Otis, “All Right,” she remarked, “just give me his full name and how to sent it to the prison, and I’ll do as you ask.”


Chapter Two
The Decision

Oscar had told his roommate, Edward Morrill, who slept on the top bunk bed, “Every inmate has a right to try and escape, the guards expect it. And I got life, or twenty-years in this cell, fifteen more to go if- I keep my behavior well. Then I am free, jest like that, free. But I aint got fifteen years in me left, I’m forty-eight now, I expect I be dead by then. And I reckon every guard has a right to shoot anyone who tries to leave this prison without the proper paperwork. I need your help, cuz my fate is doom, I aint goin’ to run out of her, Im goin’ to walk.”
Morrill didn’t know of course he was being set up, and that he should have known all along he was being set up, because he didn’t need to help anyone, he was not getting a promissory note for anything but trouble, but he said, “What is it you’re asking me to do?” So he even asked before he had to, what Oscar wanted him to do. Oscar had made sure he owed him a favor, a few black friends were going to blackjack him, threatened to slash his head with whatever they had if they couldn’t find a blackjack, and rape him. And Oscar put a scare into those fellows, and Edward was grateful. On the other had, Edward had wished he didn’t even know as much already as he did. In fact, if it was left to him, he would have likened to have been locked up in solitary until Oscar was over his escape theory.
“Don’t brag; just tell me how you expect to do it? I guess I’m under a small bond to you, I want to do what I got to do and wash my hands of you.” Morrill asked, and remarked.
“You don’t need to worry any,” Oscar said.
“What?” he said. “Why would you say that?”
“I said you don’t need to worry, nobody got anything against you and all I want you to do is go into the laundry room, pick up a bag of laundry, from Marcus, my friend in there, and bring it to me in the men’s room, during visiting time Saturday, its got women’s cloths in it, and my sister is going to visit me, and I’ll dress up like her, and she’ll say she lost her ID, and I’ll walk out of the place dressed like a female before her.”
“Yes,” he said, “but you’re going to be one ugly female.” And they both laughed.



Chapter Three
Two Days Later


The Warden called Edward Morrill to his office. “Sit on down,” he told him, “listen up” he said, clearing his throat, and then stated (his voice sotto-voce, and curious): “What in the heck did you do it for? We all thought you were of sound mind. That’s what your records say anyway, and that’s what you told us.”
“That’s right,” Edward said.
“Didn’t you know it wouldn’t work?” the Warden asked.
Edward got up, wanting to leave, and the Warden said, “Wait, didn’t you realize you’d never get away with it?”
“Oscar told me he wanted to escape, but when I brought the bag of cloths into the bathroom, and came out, he was gone, and his sister was gone, and I was standing there by my lonesome.” The Warden looked at him; he looked thin and frail.
“Oscar doesn’t have a sister, he ought not to have fooled you but he hasn’t anything to lose, and when I talked to him, he denied he had anything to do with the women’s clothing in that bag, the guard saw you bring it into the bathroom. You would have got out in just another year, and I warned you to keep your nose clean, not to help three-time losers.”
“He never had to do that to me,” said Edward.
“Well he did it, and you’re going to get another five-years added onto your original sentence, so forget about getting out early, you’ve got until 1968. That’s right Edward Morrill, the champion of champion dummies. And I’ve given you a private cell all to yourself. Some folks just never learn.”
“I thought I only had one enemy, Shannon O’Day, I guess I now got two,” said Edward.



Chapter Four
Sotto-voce

He, Edward Morrill was different now, as if his youth was going to be warn out before he got out of prison, over a statement he had forgot he even made. Immolated youth and hope had set into Dana Stanley likewise. The leather-toughness that he once had was now physical exhaustion; he had robbed the innocence of a young girl, and set a burning fire to his youthful years. Years would pass; those very same years that he was suppose to have been free. Had Edward had a better lawyer, he might have done better, he had forgot, secrets are no longer secrets once told. That was now. And now he belonged to the State of Minnesota, the Government. At first he was embarrassed, at what he did, but held some pride, respect for himself, because he hadn’t gotten caught at it, and had willingly brought his crime to the attention of the authorities, but he had forgiven himself, but now it had become a kind of reflection of someone’s amusement: someone beyond those steel bars, and his guilt, along with that other person’s unforgiving guilt he wanted to plant into him, who was trying to make his guilt into shame, someone beyond Oscar to have tricked him, now he felt foolish, and that old guilt came back and had turned into deep shame, hurt and anger.

And now knowing Edward was in for a number of years, more years, Dana didn’t feel like waiting, and she didn’t want to learn how to wait any longer, waiting and listening, and learning what was going on in the prison, and her child getting older. And so she had gone back to her people, her home with her mother and father, and started dating a gentlemen fellow from Stillwater Township, and she went back to Sunday school. And when Edward would get out in 1968, Shannon O’Day, who was old now, would be dead then, he died in 1967. He, Edward had learned the hard way, justice wasn’t for every man and woman alive, it was for the best and richest, and champions of the world. The best the others could do was hope for a chance at it, but not to expect it. America was no different when it came to money, if a man wanted to blot you out, it was a matter of ‘how much.’ Somehow Edward knew, but didn’t say: he talked too much.

5-29/30-2009
No: 2005..


Upon the suicide death of Mr. Edward Morrill, in 1966, on the prison wall in his cell, next to his bed, he wrote the following poem:


The Mind’s Prison Cell
By Edward Morrill


In my prison cell
An evil knight was born
In a hate sea-roaming
This devil’s noble
Unsheathed his sword,
For my sire of old
Once a star
In the heavens…!

And said I, I to my sire
Of old, trapped on land
Slave to the whims
Of this cell in prison…!
Life slowly suffocating
I’ll give my soul
To become a selkie
To have power of men
Or a merman or sea spirit
Of various forms, thus…

I shall cast off my skins
And come ashore
As a seal, to a selkie
And with time
This valiant-hearted,
Child of longing,
Chosen of an imp
Shall kill the human
That put me forth
Into this lasting prison,
And return with my soul
For his keeping!

5-30-2009; No: 2614



The Day before Yesterday
((A Shannon O’Day Story) (1916/1966))

Part Two of Two


Chapter Five
Skeptical Shooter


(In a Guesthouse, France, 1916) “What?” The waitress said in German.
“I said where the French compound is? It’s getting late.”
It was near twilight, he was looking for his battalion, had left The Village of Douaumont, left it the day before yesterday, the battle of Verdun was over, a three-hundred day battle, and he was left to die, but he didn’t die, and as he had asked, and the waitress had said: there was some kind of ammo dump at the edge of the woods, several miles away, and so he went in that direction she had pointed out, stepped over trenches, and a few dead bodies still in them, dead men’s faces eaten by rats, others with other deformities, he walked by a corn storage shed (reminded him of Minnesota), and then saw a military compound surrounded with barbwire. He headed to the main gate, “Halt,” a French Sergeant commanded. A shooter on the tower looking down with a pointed rifle barrow,
“Let’s see your ID soldier?” he said.
Shannon O’Day pulled it out of his back pocket, and looked strangely at the man.
“Why you staring at me soldier?” asked the sergeant.
“No reason,” he said, but was staring because the sergeant’s nose didn’t have bone in it, and when you looked at him, you could see right up his nostrils, like a pig.
“Your battalion, or company isn’t here, they went onto Paris for leave.” Said the sergeant; then he pulled his revolver out, and ordered him against the guard shack’s wall, “You look like a spy?” he questioned Shannon, in French.
“Do I talk like one?” asked Shannon, “I’m an American in the French Army, and was wounded and lost, and now I’m healed and still lost. I need a drink of water—please.”
“No,” said the sergeant. “Just who and what are you doing here, coming out of nowhere? Maybe you’re a deserter, not lost but simply done hiding since the battle is now over and want to go home like a hero?”
“About three weeks, I’ve been gone three weeks, maybe two, I lost count.”
“Can I be of any help Sergeant?” asked an officer as he walked by.
“No sir,” said the sergeant, “I’ve got it under control.”
“Just so you don’t shoot one of our own,” he uttered.
Then the sergeant shoved Shannon savagely out onto the thin platform, away from the wall, “Three weeks is a long time to be out there on your own soldier?” said the sergeant, “something smells fishy here!”
The shooter was still looking, halfway aiming his rifle incase he had to bring it back up to his shoulder in a hurry.
“I’m no trader, I was wounded, and some woman in that village called Douaumont put me back together!”
“That’s one big cock and bull story,” said the sergeant now in English.

From behind them you could hear the incoming whisper of engines in the air, and so Shannon crouched, looked up, the planes looked like two dark long winged ducks, dropping down quickly, the sky was gray and dim, and they were heading toward the ammo dump behind the guardhouse.
“Listen,” the sergeant said to Shannon, “…grabs the rifle in the guardhouse and shoot at the plane,” the sergeant was too far away, and the plane was now shooting its machine guns madly all around them, and the shooter in the tower could not get a good shot, and he had a roof over his head, and hid behind the tower’s wooden frame.
“The mad Germans are shooting everywhichway,” said the Sergeant.
Shannon now had his rifle in hand, a soldier came running up toward the sergeant, dived to the ground, side by side, “Don’t get in that soldier’s way with the rifle, let him shoot,” said the sergeant, “take the shot soldier,” yelled the sergeant.
The plane dived close overhead, Shannon watched the sky and the lightening tracers of the machine gun, and fired one bullet—a breeze fell on the face of Shannon, with the moon rising overhead, and then you could hear a crash. The second plane emptied its load over the darkness, and missed the main stockpile of shells.

“You know corporal,” said the Sergeant, “I realize you had a lot of pressure going into that shot, but next time, don’t wait so long.”
The stress of the day, and the day before yesterday, was too, too, mush, a certain amount of nausea befell Shannon. He had been anxious to find his battalion, his outfit, and here he found an ammo dump, with a sergeant calling him a spy, and German planes trying to shoot at him.
“Want to know my name, corporal?” asked the Sergeant.
“No, I just want a cot to sleep on.”
“Just call me Wes, I’ll have someone bring you to the ammo battery, and sorry I called you a spy. Looks like you had a concussion?” asked the sergeant.
“I guess I did,” there was a long pause, “can I go now sergeant?”
“Private, go on and take the corporal to the ammo battery, give him a bunk and some grub.”
“Yes,” sergeant, said the private, “This way Corporal” said the private to Shannon.



Chapter Six
The Door


(1966) The Door

There was a knock on the door, Shannon tossed over to one side, heard a voice say, “Youall a-wake in there?” (A voice from the past.)
“I got some news fer you Shannon!”
Slowly Shannon found his feet, and pushed them over and onto the floor, then pulled him-self up to get up and out of bed
“Sounds like you Otis?”
“Yessum, it me all right, let me in.”
Shannon opened the door, “Otis Wilde Mather, what the heck are you doing in town, thought you were down in Ozark?”
“Jes’ thought I’d stop on by have a drink with Youall, and give you the good news, Edward Morrill, committed suicide in prison.”
“I guess I’m not all that sorry about that, and perhaps not all that surprised. How did you find out?”
“My third cousin done called me up and told me. He’s in fer life.”
“Hum…m, sounds a bit suspicious to me, like he was keeping an eye on him for you.”
“I heard you talking in your sleep, getting those damn nightmares again, or what Youall call them things—nowadays?”
“Nightmares is good enough Otis, just plain old nightmares, sit on down, I got us some good old corn whisky, if you got the time?”
“Yessum, jest like old times, that waht I like ‘bout yaw Shannon, you never change.”


Written 5-30-2009, No: 406