The Latest Bloodshed

Jim Stallings

2         The Latest Bloodshed

come…That cruelty behind him, Death, or whatever it was, just came on apace and swallowed him…

And he awoke in a sweat in his great aunt’s old farm house where he now lived alone and he howled. He howled his pain and shook the heartwood old frame that sustained him above the alluvial clay soil of Strickland County, miles only from the Florida line. These semi-tropical fantasies with all its rich farm lands alight with the ghosts of the past. Jelly screamed his pain, his absolute fear, and shook in a malarial sweat ’til he pitched back into his wet sheets and stared once again at the speckled ceiling of his family’s old homestead. You boy, somebody whispered, you got the curse of remembering. The ghosts of the ancestors walked the soil all around him and he knew in his gut he couldn’t escape their curses.

“I’m not carrying this guilt anymore,” he said to no one in particular and rose to drench his head in a sink of cold well water. In the kitchen window’s reflection he saw a tall young muscled man with wild blonde hair, slumped forward, his face freckled by years in the sun…his wide set gray eyes sunken in dark shadows of fatigue.

Overhead a lonely pilot ferried a tiny plane through the dark moonless night. The drone of the engine gave him some sense of his own time but the past in all its thickness came round him like a suffocation, an asthma of gasping breath that caused him to see stars in the black hallway of the old frame farmhouse. Sleep, sleep, he whispered, and made his way back to his bed and slumped back into the damp cotton.

God help me, he prayed, and felt himself sinking into the great miasma of dreams and fears again. Soon, too soon, his own present life would be awakening with the morning sun. He had to outrun that reality, he had to make his way through the darkness to that light where he had a chance to vanquish the weight of the past.

Coyotes yipped in the woods to the east. A hoot owl called out of the ramshackle old tobacco curing barn, put together with pegs and dowels, now leaning over at a crazy angle, all the past shading its weariness into his present life. Was this fair? It didn’t matter. It was the truth. He gasped for breath and in his exhaustion, in his battle with ignorance and death, and every other unknown, fell backwards into blessed dreamless sleep.

The
Latest
Bloodshed

Copyright © 2004 Jim Stallings. All rights reserved.
Maintained by R M Stelting.
Updated: 04 February, 2008