Prologue
“Can’t look back! Can’t quit running!”Black powder smoke, fog, and flying debris caused by ten thousand errant musket balls combined to form a blinding shroud of death. The roar of cannon fire and lead whizzing by was deafening. Yet through it all, John could only hear his own tortured breathing and those two thoughts “Can’t look back! Can’t quit running!”
He ran for his life near some place called Sharpsburg, his ammunition spent and his bayonet shattered. Retreat sounded from a dozen bugles, so he ran. But the bodies were too cluttered and the smoke to thick for John to find his way out of the insanity.
A root reached up and grabbed John’s ankle like a demon trying to pull him down into Hades itself. The teenager yelped as he twisted and crashed to the ground, flat on his back. A mustached Irishman in a blue coat materialized in the haze with his bayonet aimed directly at his throat. As the red haired devil drew his rifle back to deliver the full vengeance of his steel, he froze.
A strange tingling vibrated in the air and the Yankee’s eyes went wide as though he saw Abraham Lincoln himself before him. The Irishman crossed himself and whispered, “Mary, Joseph and Jesus.” He dropped his gun to the ground and fell to one knee next to the seventeen year old lad from Mississippi. “Go home boy.”
All John could say in return was, “Why?”
“Because I just remembered who my master is and it ain’t Grant no more than your daddy is the master of any black man back on whatever plantation you’re from. Now go on home!”
John didn’t bother to wait around to tell the stranger his pappy was lucky to own a few acres on the backside of nothing and never owned a slave in his life. The thought of being branded a coward or a deserter never entered his mind. All that mattered was he was going home.
On a whim he joined up with the Sixth Mississippi and found himself fighting alongside General Lee’s Army of North Virginia. He left Mississippi a wide-eyed boy who couldn’t wait to see far off places and experience something besides cotton, heat and mosquitoes. Now, a thousand miles and three months hadn’t managed to erase the stench of death from John’s nostrils or mind.
The boy died somewhere up north and now a jaded man returned home who had seen all the world he could stomach. Supposedly he left to fight the Yankee devils but he quickly discovered those devils were seventeen year old boys just like him. They bled the same red blood he did; longed for home just like he did; but unlike him many of them never got to go home.
… “Whoa!”
The jostling mule underneath him awoke John from his fitful dream, the same dream he lived through a thousand times over since making his way back home. He had found the mule in a cane break about a mile from his home place near Clarksdale, Mississippi. In fact he soon discovered that mule was about all that was left of the home place.
Two freshly covered graves with primitive wooden markers and an empty whiskey bottle told him all he needed to know. John’s mother and sister were dead and his ever-drunken father was gone to who knows where. There were no more tears left to cry after three years of war so John found a few clothes, looked up the secret place he buried some gold coins before leaving, hopped on his mule and pointed it west.
Not ten miles later John heard shots fired in the distance. He flinched at the echoing sound of gunfire, too vivid memories of recent horror flooding his mind. He shook his head and determined to ride on. Then he heard a weak yet distinct cry for help.
“Not me,” he told himself. “I’ve done all the fighting for lost causes I’m going to do.”
He goaded the old gray mule to move on but it turned and headed straight for the source of the sound. He hopped off the mule and cursed it, hoping to find the appropriate insult to convince it to obey. But the mule would have nothing of it. It just kept ambling resolutely toward the sound. So John followed.
As he and the mule entered a meadow he spied a young black man, face down in the mud of the receding floodwaters of the Mississippi. All that distinguished his skin from the fudge brown muck was crimson streaks of blood flowing from wounds all over his body. Someone had taken the lash to him and then left him to die in this forsaken place.
John started to turn and walk away but a voice within him would not let him leave. He remembered the Irishman’s words about their master and he knew what he must to do. Bending down John picked up the beaten man, placed him on his donkey and made his way the five miles or so to Polly’s house. She was afraid of no man and sure as the sunrise. He knew she was honest and would care for this man.
With his patient’s wounds bound John handed Polly half of his coins and asked her to make sure he was taken care of. He told her the mule and his house now belonged to the man in her care.
“Make sure he gets this mule and the deed to the home place, Polly?”
“Why are you doing this John?”
John thought a moment and replied, “I don’t know. Just tell him I did it because I know the greatest neighbor.”
With that, John Ensgtrom walked his way out of Mississippi forever. He made it to St Louis where he joined a wagon train headed for an untamed world. Many a time, he thought about the old home place with those two fresh graves. He guessed the Engstrom’s were done for good in Clarksdale. From time to time his thoughts turned to the man he saved that day from a certain death in the Delta mud and wondered if it really made any difference at all.
posted by T. E.George @ 5:54 PM
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