Comin' Through the Rye

Four G.I.’s sat in a jeep below the Eiffel Tower. It was August 25th, 1944, and the Americans were in Paris.

“I can’t believe you still carry that stupid typewriter everywhere, you’re gonna’ get killed.”

JD didn’t say anything but lifted the black metal case from his lap to show the sergeant. Several bullet holes marred the surface.

The sergeant shook his head and looked back up at the French tricolor flapping atop the tower for the first time in four years. “You ought to go see that writer,” he suggested over his shoulder, “he’s here you know.”

“Here? Impossible, “JD said.

“Really, he’s been here for a while; son-of-a-gun was leading some resistance-fighters... I heard he liberated the Ritz singlehandedly,” the sergeant joked. He sucked on a black cigar and laughed through his teeth.

“Hey, give me a ride over there, will you?”

A few minutes later, JD hopped out of the jeep and into the madness of the celebrating crowds. He ducked under the outstretched arms of an old woman looking to kiss him and slipped sideways around the children pushing flowers at him. His typewriter came in handy in forcing his way through the doors of the hotel.

He found the lobby packed with people, just as raucous as the mob outside. The lounge was off to his right and he scanned the faces there. His attention was drawn to a soldier that was banging out “Don’t sit under the apple tree” on the piano, an attractive young girl on his lap, teenaged probably but quite drunk. As he stared at the young, pretty coquette, he noticed behind her, at the bar, a tall bearded man with a gun in his belt.

JD hurried over to him.

“Mr. Hemingway? You don’t know me. My name is Salinger...”

This is for whom I write

They'll be hers when I'm done.

A LIttle Kindness Goes a Long Way

When the captain departed and the hatch closed behind him, Cyril Evans leaned back on his stool and plopped his feet onto the counter. A long day was ending. One more message to send out and it was off to the Wild West for him. Before leaving port, Cyril had traded another sailor for a copy of Zane Grey’s new novel, Riders of the Purple Sage. With the boat stopped, for the first time all day he felt relaxed and was looking forward to an hour or so of reading before bed.

“Jane Withersteen, don’t go anywhere,” he said, staring down at the book.

Cyril slid an earpiece over his head, pulled the transmitter onto his lap, and began to tap out an informal message.

“Say, old man,” it read, “we are surrounded by ice and stopped.”

As he typed out the last character, the reply came immediately. He yanked the headphones from his ears and held them at arm’s length, and still he could hear the message clearly:

“SHUT UP, SHUT UP, YOU ARE JAMMING ME!”

Cyril threw the headphones onto the counter and sat forward. “Fine, you dingbat,” he said out loud. “Try and be friendly...”

He grabbed his novel and accidentally tore the cover in half as he violently opened it.

“Dammit! You stupid blockhead, now look what you’ve made me do!”

His opportunity for relaxation had now passed; his heart was pounding with anger at the wireless operator on the nearby ship. He gave up on the idea of reading and instead secured the lights, went out the hatch, down the ladder, and fell into his bunk, still upset.

An hour later, at 12:15 a.m. on April 15, 1912, in the empty communications room of the SS Californian, the “CQD” (SOS) of the Titanic went unheard.

By the Demands of the Anti-Gun Lobby

Bill slapped a hammer into the palm of his hand a few times and looked down the stairs where his foreman was going over a stack of papers with an old woman. It was his first day on the job and he didn’t want to make any trouble, but he couldn’t help himself.

“You want me to do... what?”

The foreman glanced up from his plans and said in an irritated voice, “I want you to hang that closet door.” He shook his head and turned to the old woman, “I’m sorry ma’am. He’s new here.”

Bill turned around and whistled quietly through his teeth. He was standing at the top of a staircase that led precisely to nowhere. The steps rose sharply from the sixth floor of the mansion and ended at the ceiling where an ornate wooden frame had already been mounted. He shrugged his shoulders and set himself to the task, thinking he’d be at the employment agency by the end of the afternoon.

An hour later, Bill was sliding himself from under the newly-installed door on the ceiling when he heard footsteps on the stairs. It was the foreman.

Uh-oh, here it comes, Bill thought to himself.

The foreman looked up at the work and then, wide-eyed, back at Bill.

“Fine job,” he said. “Now I’ve got a chimney for you to install in the basement...”

For thirty-eight years, twenty-two carpenters worked twenty-four hours a day constructing this impossible home in San Jose, California; a home destined to be built until the death of its owner, Sarah Winchester, on September 5th, 1922.

Sarah had been compelled to build continuously by the restless and angry ghosts of those who died at the hands of her husband’s invention, the gun that won the west, the Winchester Repeating Rifle.

Gone but Not Forgotten

As the ship made its way along the outer banks, John stood atop the foc’sle, anxious. He was the governor of the little city of Raleigh but he had been absent for a long time. It was August 18th, 1590, exactly 1,085 days since he had left his family under the care of the other hundred-plus colonists in the New World. His granddaughter, Virginia, was only ten days old when he kissed her goodbye, the first child born on those distant shores.

“Are you sure this is the right spot?” the mate asked.

Even after his prolonged absence, it still looked vaguely familiar to John, but something wasn’t right. He sidled along the rail, straining his eyes, hoping to glimpse some movement.

“Something’s wrong.”

When the landing party finally walked up the beach, no one greeted them. But they did come upon what looked like a fort in the woods. One of the sailors pointed to a bald cypress tree incorporated into the palisade. The bark was scraped away and onto it was etched the word “CROATOAN.”

“It’s a message, they’re safe,” John said, hesitantly optimistic. “It means they’ve gone to live with the Indians to the south. We agreed they’d carve a Maltese cross into a tree if they were forced away by hostiles.”

Suddenly a flash of movement caught John’s attention. A white deer behind a distant tree raised its head and stared into John’s eyes for a moment before bounding silently away. Suddenly he felt sick.

The settlers had not gone south.

Except for that mysterious inscription, they’d simply disappeared. Without a trace.

John White would die back in England, alone, never having found out the fate of his family or the other citizens of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

Four passing centuries have revealed little else.

Truth to Power

A man opened the flap to a crude tent and stuck his head out. “Rua!”

From behind a tree stepped a boy not yet seven years old, his face burning with a long fresh scar that ran from his temple to his chin. “Yes, uncle?”

“Go to the river and fill this with water!” the man shouted and tossed a copper cauldron that rolled through the grass and stopped right at the boy’s feet. The child stood staring at it.

“Go!” the uncle yelled angrily, “Your father is dead and now you must be a man!”

Rua hurriedly grabbed the bowl by the handles and dragged it backwards through the encampment. He could hear the cries of his mother as he moved off. The sound of her grieving was soon drowned out though by the wailing that issued from many of the tents he passed on his way to the river. For a year and a half, his people had pushed their way through Western Europe and now, in the north of Italy, malaria was devastating them.

As he neared the river, he noticed a group of horsemen slowly approaching from the other bank. He recognized some of them immediately; they were the King’s brothers. But the strangely-dressed ones that rode beside them filled him with wonder. The one in the white conical hat especially affected him. Their eyes met for a moment as they passed each other and Rua thought he recognized a rare look of sympathy.

It was at the end of a long hot summer, around September 16th, 452, and the man in the hat changed the course of western history, or more aptly saved it. Pope Leo, without an army, would turn back Attila the Hun at the river Mincio and secure the city of Rome.

The Day the Laugh Man Came to Town

He lost his job selling dry goods and then he lost his job in the bookstore. His dreams of becoming a doctor and a preacher weren’t working out either, but that was okay, his young fiancé loved him all the more. He went into partnership with his father but his promising start as an insurance salesman was cut short when he developed a mysteriously incurable case of laryngitis. Unable to speak above a whisper, he found work as a photographer’s assistant on Main Street in the little town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. And in doing this, he finally was beginning to feel himself finding a place in life.

All of the strange events that had characterized his childhood seemed to be fading into the past. Edgar was becoming, at last, “normal.” He began dreaming of the simple life, and he and Gertrude discussed their plans for a quiet, happy future together.

It was at this point that a man named Hart came to town. He called himself the Laugh Man, but his specialty was as a hypnotist. While preparing for his show at the Opera House on February 12, 1901, he was told about the young man who had lost his voice. He made sure that Edgar was in the audience that night.

Before a packed house, the Laugh Man placed Edgar into a trance.

“Edgar... do you hear me? I want you to answer me in a clear voice... a confident voice... because, Edgar... your laryngitis is gone.”

“I understand,” Edgar replied strongly, without a trace of the rasp that had plagued him.

By the end of the next month, Edgar Cayce began placing himself under hypnosis. The quiet life he had dreamed of was put away forever when he fathered America’s New Age movement and became the “Sleeping Prophet.”

The Poe Toaster

Upon a clouded and moonless night, at the quiet corner of Fayette and Greene, a man impatiently walked his wife’s miniature poodle. Ladybug had scratched at the front door until she had made her point. She needed to go. But to the chagrin of the unshaven man in robe and slippers, she still hadn’t gone.

Finally she stopped at the old Gothic church and sniffed her way through the grass. She circled twice and squatted.

“Thank God,” the man muttered sleepily.

He stood there holding the leash lazily between two fingers, waiting for the little monster to finish. He closed his eyes and swayed slightly in the silence. A tug on his fingers signaled that the dog had done her business. As he remained there blinking at the plume of steam rising up from the frosty ground, he suddenly felt that he wasn’t alone.

There is a sound that a body makes when it is nearby. An intangible sound that can nevertheless still be sensed. A vibration. A humming, not unlike a television that has its volume turned all the way down. A sound of a “presence.” From the graveyard behind the church, he heard that tell-tale sound. He whirled, fully awake now. Ladybug barked.

At first, in the pitch of the night, he saw nothing. But then slowly, unmistakably, he saw a shadow rise up from a large tombstone. He could make out the shape of a man, wearing a brimmed hat and a cape. As the figure became fully erect, it turned its scarf-covered face towards him and slowly backed away into a stand of trees and then... disappeared.

Every January 19th, since this one in 1949, this mysterious figure has returned to Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore grave to leave behind three roses and a half-bottle of Cognac.

From Where the Sun Now Stands

Tuekakas lay by a dim fire, his eyes half-closed and staring up at the twinkling stars. He was dying and had called for his son. Heinmot Toolyalaket approached and at first said nothing as he sat down beside him. He simply stared quietly at the wrinkled face. He was thirty-one years old, but next to his father he still felt and looked the boy.

Without moving his eyes from the heavens, the old chief began to speak.

“My son... when the white men first came, our people welcomed them as our brothers... Clark and Lewis they were called. And when I became a man, I accepted their banner of stars and stripes and learned their language and religion... I even took their name when they blessed me in the water... But no more! I wished to live in peace but they are thieves with their treaties. I’ve torn their flag and burned their book....”

Heinmot Toolyalaket remembered that day sixteen years ago. He remembered his father giving him long sticks with hawk feathers attached so as to forevermore mark the boundaries of the two peoples.

“My son, soon I will go to the Great Spirit and our people will look to you to guide them... The whites will come back again... This country will hold my body... Never sell the bones of your father! Never forget these dying words!”

The whites did come back, and chased them from Oregon’s Wallowa Valley.

It wasn’t until October 5th, 1877, that the little band of 800 Nez Perce Indians, pursued for 1,700 miles by 2,000 professional soldiers, were finally trapped – just forty miles short of the Canadian border, and their freedom.

Chief Joseph, exhausted from conflict, had to choose between the reservation and death. “I will fight no more forever,” was his decision.

The Wife of the Silversmith

Juan almost dozed off several times. It was easy to do with his eyes closed on that soft warm night in Valladolid and he struggled to keep his senses. Each time he caught himself drifting away, a cold shock would bring him back. The pin he pricked against his leathery thumb helped him too. It took three hours before he was satisfied that his household was finally asleep.

Just before 2 a.m., Juan slid off his feathered bed and crept into the hallway where he silently dressed. From there, it was out the rear door of Number 13 Calle de Platerias and through the garden to a shadowy path that ran inconspicuously several blocks before entering upon the plazuela of Saint Michael. He remained hidden behind a statue for a few moments, making sure there was no one about to see him sneaking around at such an hour. Satisfied that he was alone, he then ran the short distance in the open to the covered porch at the one-time residence of Doña Leonor de Vivero.

After three soft knocks, a slide opened. Juan placed his lips to the wicket and whispered. “Cazalla.” A bolt turned and the door opened just wide enough to allow Juan entrance. The bolt sounded again behind him.

But Juan wasn’t as quiet as he thought when he whispered the password. From below the railing, concealed behind a broad-leafed bush, the wife of the silversmith heard it very clearly.

She waited a moment before gathering up the courage to find out where her oddly-behaving husband was running off to in the middle of the night.

On May 21, 1599, 200,000 people gathered in the Plaza Mayor to witness Juan Garcia and fourteen other Lutheran conspirators burn. After a long lull, the Inquisition began again in earnest.

Never Too Late For a New Vice

“Won’t you have some whiskey?” K. B. asked, pulling a bottle of Bourbon from his satchel.

“I promised my mother when I was a baby that I’d never taste liquor,” James replied with a shaky awkwardness.

Several of his friends were gathered round and they all urged him on.

“I wish you would,“ one of them added, “I think that today merits an exception... after all, even the town across the woods is pointing out the irony of your predicament. It’s named after a tavern for God’s sake...”

James threw his hands into the air, resigning himself to the persuasive force of peer pressure. He looked over at his friend Andrew, with whom he had been through much.

“Tell me, Andrew... how do I look?”

“There’s a little flush to your face,” he said, “Why don’t you take it?”

“All right...”

James stroked his thick beard for a moment and let out a deep sigh. All eyes were on him as he reached forward and took hold of the bottle that K. B. was still holding out for him. He raised it up to the late afternoon sun that was filtering through the Virginia pines and inspected its caramelized color. Before uncorking it, he hesitated and looked over at a few soldiers standing nearby.

“Go do your duty for your country,” he said in a commanding voice. He pointed with the bottle, “Back to the front.”

The soldiers, sheepishly obedient, moved out of his line of sight.

It was May 11th, 1864, and Confederate Cavalry General James “Jeb” Stuart had little more than 24 hours to live, mortally wounded by a Yankee sharpshooter at Yellow Tavern.

The aroma of the sour-mash was shrill to his virgin sense, grown accustomed only to the smell of horses and gunpowder.

“Mama, forgive me...”

Gonna Relax for a Bit

"It oozed rather than flowed"

Sparks spewed from the wheels of the train as it crossed the river bridge at Industrial Flats. Vibrations clickety-clacked their way down the steel trestle and into the water. At the surface however, there was no disturbance. Not a ripple.

No birds were to be seen floating on or flying above the water either. No fish broke the surface with their bubbles, for there were none. There were no bugs or plants to feed upon. There weren’t even any slugs or worms inching their way through the slime on the banks. It was lifeless. Anaerobic. The scant riparian vegetation that survived along the shore was poisonous.

The water hugging the base of the bridge supports was a thick goo, mostly black in color, but with sporadic patches of brown and orange and yellow. Oil and sewage and acids. The noon sun brought about a rainbow effect across most of it.

The top six inches of it were the consistency of pudding.

Suspended in the stagnant multi-colored morass was a plethora of flotsam. Timbers and beams poked out at varying angles, propped as much as ten feet high against the trestles. There were enormous globs of fat and grease discarded by the slaughterhouses upriver and the paint factories contributed a share of chemicals.

As the last car of the train cleared the edge of the bridge on June 22, 1969, one last flurry of sparks fell to the river. It ignited. Within minutes, the flames were five stories high. This wasn’t the first time that the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, Ohio. The firemen in the boats took only thirty minutes to smother it. It was a small affair.

But this small affair was witnessed this time by national reporters. Changes in the nation’s environmental stewardship were soon underway.

An Empty Victory

The war-chief Katlian and his Shaman, Stoonookw, walked along the ramparts of the fort they had spent nearly two years constructing. The walls were nearly fourteen feet thick in some places, made of a thousand spruce trees. It was called the “Fort of Young Saplings” and it was built in expectation of the return of the Russians; the Tlingit Clan had slaughtered and expelled them from southeast Alaska with the help of British-made musketry in 1802.

It was now September 28th, 1804, and as the Tlingit warriors peered down across the rocky shoals of Indian River, the Russian naval forces lay still in Sitka Sound. Onboard the lead ship, the Neva, the chief manager of the Russian-American company, Alexandr Baranov, and Lieutenant Commander Yuri Lisyansky conferred upon their strategy.

Baranov held a downy eagle feather above his head and released it. It spiraled straight down to the deck.

“Not a whiff, captain. We can’t sail, let alone maneuver in those shallows,” he said to Lisyansky.

Lisyansky took a quick look down at the foc’sle where scores of Aleut Indians were lounging, waiting for orders.

“I don’t think we’ll need the winds today, sir.”

A few hours later, the Neva, along with her three heavily-armed escorts, was crossing the Sound. In one of the most spectacular scenes in naval history, the four massive vessels were being towed by hundreds of baidarkas; two-man kayaks powered only by the uncommon strength of Aleuts arms.

For four days, the Russians bombarded the “Sapling Fort” with canons. When a reconnaissance contingent was sent ashore to assay the fort’s condition, the scene shocked them. The Tlingits had silently abandoned their position during the cover of night, slitting the throats of their children and animals on the way, a trail of tiny corpses leading into the forests.

Unfortunate Coves

Before the anchor had even touched bottom, a launch was pushed away from the schooner and rowing madly towards the French fishing vessel working the waters of Noddy Bay, where France still retained some rights to the Newfoundland coast after the French and Indian War.

As the little shuttle approached, an English officer seated precariously on the bow raised a copper speaking-trumpet to his mouth and excitedly called out to the crewmen now gathering at the rail.

“Have you a surgeon aboard?!”

It was another hour before the surgeon stepped over the gunnel of the HMS Grenville. A crowd of sailors surrounded him and rushed him below towards the captain’s cabin. “His powder horn exploded,” they repeatedly told him.

As the doctor opened the door, he was greeted with moans of agony. A man lay drenched in sweat, all color gone from his face. He was being held down by the First Mate and his right arm was stretched out over the edge of the bed. It was wrapped in a crimson-stained sheet that was still dripping into a wooden bucket.

The doctor knelt by the arm and slowly peeled away the wrapping until a hand was revealed. A giant gash was ripped open at the base of the forefinger that stretched nearly to the wrist; the thumb dangled by a tendon.

“I think I can save it,” he told the Mate, “but the scarring will be terrific...”

Fifteen years later, on February 20th, 1779, a small boat was launched from an English vessel and rowed into another remote bay; this one in the Sandwich Islands. There it retrieved a small bag, full of body parts.

It was in this way that the dismembered body of the slain Captain James Cook was identified. By the scar on his right hand.