Morach swooped down the river, cutting spiraling barrel rolls as the wind whipped through his wings.  Acrobatic flying was sometimes the closest to pure joy he found, and he shouted in his pipsqueak-y voice for joy.  Ordinarily he would be back at the shack eating lunch already, but New Orleans had a lot of very rich food.  If he did not watch out, he’d revert back to his original pudgy self.  The old habits were still there, buried under many decades of being thin, but he could feel them wanting to resurface.  Instead, he dove and buzzed a turtle sitting on a sandbar.

Another couple miles, he decided, and flew under another bridge over the mighty Mississippi.  Wagons and a single automobile moved along the bridge, mostly into New Orleans, but some people were leaving to go back to their farms, or to another city.  Rising into the air with fast-beating wings he rose above the bridge, then powerdove toward the great river, and went as fast as he dared before snapping his wings out and shifting into a glide on his feet over the surface of the water.  Screaming for exhilaration, he rocketed--so fast was his flight that it was like he was a rocket, and not just a bird-like man--farther down river.  In the sprite world this stunt was a trick that the boys had done to impress the girls who did not have strong enough wings to accomplish the feat.

Below him, he passed a ‘log’ that was an alligator trying to pretend that it was not on the hunt and you should just take a nice swim nearby.  It was nearly thirty feet long, and had a bit of dirt and a small sapling on its back.  A rowboat with a pair of Black fishermen came next into view, and he buzzed down to them.  The two with their lines in the water looked surprised to see him, but not as surprised as he might have supposed.  Ever since he had arrived in this New Orleans and met the Devil at a crossroads he had been becoming more and more aware that there were a lot of things happening just out of the public eye in this spooky city.

“Want a fish, birdman?” said one of them.

“Thanks, but no.  I just wanted to warn you that a gator was a hundred yards upriver acting like a log.  Big one, too.  Like if you lined up six of these rowboats.”

One of them laughed.

“Old Mossyback is up to his old tricks.  Don’t you worry none, bird man.  I gots this.”  The speaker pulled up a large double barrel shotgun from the bottom of the wooden rowboat.

“You know this gator by name?” Morach asked.

“Oh, my yes.  Some of the creatures hereabouts, like you, are not all natural.  Said that Old Mossyback was here when the Frenchies came.  But he respects a shotgun, even if it don’t kill him none.”

Morach remembered being in his Derek form, and facing off against the Rougarou and the Grunch, which had been evil spirit beasts that he had helped slay.  Afterwards, he had first shifted to his Michael Gabriel form.

“Is he evil?”

“Evil?”  The other man finally spoke.

“Like the Grunch, or--”

The two men looked at each other.

“I’se don’t think so.  I’se don’t rightly know, fer sure,” said the formerly quiet fisherman.  “He’ll eat you if you dive in his waters, but the Cajuns say that unlike some gators, he won’t go into a man’s house.”  This left Morach a bit confused, but that was a feeling he was getting used to in this town.  He warned them again to beware, and they assured him they would.

Flying down another mile, he was about to turn around when he heard several gunshots.  He did a quick wingover and headed into New Orleans toward the sound of the guns.  Passing over swamp and thick trees, he came to a line of houses, all brightly painted, narrow, and while a bit shabby still neat.  He would have enjoyed the street with its overhanging tree branches drooping from huge trees down the center grassway, but for the presence of a crowd of fifty angry Whites, two overturned wagons, and a dozen policemen in blue with pistols aimed up at the second story window of a house.  A boom from the house, and one of the wagons shook, splinters flying from its top edge to nick a policeman’s face.  Drops of blood flew from his face as he fell back in a panic, but his fellow officers assured him he was okay.  Shaking, he put his gun up, and let a doctor bandage him.

Two inches to his right, and the officer would not have been going home that day.  A hail of gunfire from the other police answered this insult, but Morach as he buzzed and almost hung in the air a hundred feet up could see the problem for the police.  They had .38 revolvers, and the house had clear lines of sight all around.  Whoever was in the house could quickly switch to a different window, and had a rifle which they seemed to be quite skilled at using.

Morach thought he could probably fly down quickly as no one on either side was expecting an aerial combatant, and dart the rifleman in the house.  He reminded himself that he did not understand what was going on, and so he should go slowly.  Instead, he flew back past the crowd up the street, and making sure no one was looking at him, he transformed to his human form as Derek.  Quickly walking down the street, he joined the crowd of about fifty Whites.  He saw that more were coming, and listening to them he heard their agitated complaints.

“He done shot a policeman.”

“I hope he gets killed.  Murdering savage.”

“Mulatto scum.”

“There’s no justice in this town.”

Despite the angry comments, and the occasional suggestions of a mass rush of the ‘shotgun house’, which they called the pale blue pastel painted house, for reasons of which he was uncertain (the man inside had a rifle, after all).  No one was moving.  Instead they watched, and muttered, like a Greek chorus to a play.  He did note that about half the crowd was armed, many with long weapons which he thought would do a better job than the police revolvers.

Separating himself from the crowd, he walked up to the policemen.  One man spun and held a revolver on him, and Derek put up his hands, and spoke calmly to the wild eyed policeman who calmed enough to roughly order, “Get back, this is police business.”

“I have special abilities that might help.”  He pitched his voice to carry.

“I don’t care--” the officer began, but he was interrupted.

“The Angel,” said a uniformed officer.  Others looked his way, and suddenly the man who had been telling him to get back reached out and dragged him behind the sideways upturned wagon.

“No need to get shot.”  He was much calmer.  No one was firing now, which Derek counted as a victory in his column.  An older policeman with more braid on his dark blue jacket walked over to him, stooping to keep his head down.

“I’m Sergeant Grenadine.  I hear tell you can do special things.  Can you help my men?”  He pointed, and several police got out of the way, for they had been clotted close, leaning down, so that Derek had not seen it already.  Two policemen lay on the ground, both terribly wounded.  This was not what he had expected, but he was more than willing.

“I can try, and if the King of Kings wills, then yes,” Derek said.

“We’ll all pray.”

Derek walked over to the two men who lay on the ground.  One gave him a smile that was more of a wince.  The other was unconscious, and considering he was gutshot that was probably for the best.  But what he felt around him, as all the police half bowed, but kept their eyes open and revolvers ready, was a steady support of group prayer.  He bent down to the first, the one who was awake, and spoke.

“The King wishes all to be whole in body and mind.”  He then took as much of a hug as he could to a man who had been shot high in the right shoulder and was lying on the ground flat.  Light bloomed around him and flowed over the downed officer, and suddenly the policeman gasped, and began to sit up even before the healing was finished.

“Praise Jesus.  I thought I was going to be invalided out, or get gangrene and die,” he said fervently.

There were lots of heartfelt ‘Amens’ at that point, and he could almost feel the intent of the group behind him.  Heal the other guy please, and indeed he was about to, but then he realized something.  They were no longer praying to God, but focused on him.

“It is not me that heals, but God.  Please go back to praying to the--”

“Great Physician,” one policeman said, and Derek nodded.

As he felt the support of group prayer again, he bent over and asked for healing again.  This too was granted, although the man still slept, and he wondered.  But the Sergeant explained in a gruff, quiet tone as he came over and interpreted Derek’s puzzled glance, “I carry a bit of opium.  Sometimes it’s all the mercy a policeman has.  But thank God for today.”

Derek rose to his feet.

“What’s happening, Sergeant?”

“A bad business.”  He pulled out a notebook, and began to explain with help from its notes.  “Two patrolmen saw Montgomery Chauncey, a Mulatto, and his Black companion, on a porch in an expensive White neighborhood, and became suspicious.  So they asked them their business, and upon getting a bad story attempted to roust the suspects with their billy clubs, whereupon Mister Chauncey pulled a gun, and one of the policemen did likewise, and they shot each other.  The other man did not resist, and was released quickly with a warning against improper loitering.  But Mister Chauncey, well, he fled, but he was bleeding from a leg wound, and he came here.  We’re not sure why, as it’s not his house.  No one was home, and he got a rifle somehow, and when we tried to arrest him he shot the man in the shoulder that you helped heal.”

“And the crowd?”  Derek waved at them.

“We had some difficulty tracking him.  The blood trail was not constant.  One place, he bled on the lawn on one side of the intersection, and it was a good seventy five feet on the catercorner otherside where we found a drop on a bush.  So when some offered to help, we couldn’t rightly refuse.  And the volunteers were enough to spread out and find the blood trail.”

“I think I can resolve this quickly--without anyone being hurt,” Derek said.  The police sergeant gave him a skeptical look, but Derek just calmly looked back.

“All right, son.  Tell me your plan.”

Five minutes later, and Derek saw the police were down behind the wagons, and not pointing any revolvers toward the ‘shotgun house’.  He learned the name meant that the house’s front and back doors were straight on each other, and you could ‘fire a shotgun in the front door and out the back without hitting anything’.  He had insisted on revolvers in holsters because friendly fire isn’t.

Shifting to his sprite form, he flew up from behind a nearby house.  Approaching the house where the rifleman lay in wait, he felt a sense of deep wrongness.  Rather than just dart the man, Morach reached out to read his mind.  The man believed himself to be in danger of dying at the hands of the police.  He was outraged at his treatment, whether it was unjust or just.  Sudden wild ideas that might get him out of the situation he was in alive were followed by cold depression as his reasoning faculty pointed out the obvious flaws in these flights of fancy.  Morach evaluated the quality of thought.  He was clearly intelligent, although not as smart or strong-minded as himself.

There was another presence in his mind.  Every time calmness and coolness of thought came (except when focused on shooting and killing policemen), the presence twisted those thoughts back on themselves, or shattered them with an emotional microdraft.  For the man, the most peace of mind he got was when he was aiming his rifle.  Then his thoughts of despair, and rage, and guilt were swept away, held back by this presence and by the natural focus required to be a good shooter.

Morach could see it.  The rifleman was not a natural, as it were, but he definitely had some training and talent with the rifle.  In a fight of twelve to one, the numbers were against him, but he had the best weapon, and he was probably the best shot on the battlefield except for Morach with his arrows.  Soon the police numbers would grow, or the crowd of White oppressors would grow, or the police would come up with some clever plan, and he would die--so his thoughts ran.

Yes!

He felt the other presence with a savage glee exult in this foreknowledge.  It looked forward to Mister Chauncey’s inevitable death.  After that, the White crowds would shoot the already dead body more, mutilate it, and then chase down many Blacks.  A small race riot would ensue, and the Mayor would resist the attempt of the Assistant Mayor to put gatling guns in the street to ‘put the White rioters on notice’.  That horrifying institution Thomy Lafon, named for that awful  man, would burn down.  Blacks and Whites would hate and mistrust each other more, rather than the Mayor or the carpetbaggers coming from the North to loot them.  It was all going according to plan.

Chilled, Morach overheard the vile plans of the other presence, and for a split second considered facing it--but he felt just the shadow of its power in the poor dupe’s mind, and he shuddered.  Withdrawing, he went to simpler methods.  He put an arrow into Mister Chauncey’s neck.  The man slumped over quickly, too quickly.  Morach flew in, and saw the man was still bleeding from the leg where a policeman had shot him, and he considered how wound up the man had been.  Perhaps unconsciousness had been a blissful relief.

Shifting back to his human form, he used his telekinesis to pick up the large Mulatto so as to more easily and more importantly more gently bear the wounded man downstairs.  As he did he saw a crow on the window sill.  The crow looked at him, and he felt waves of burning fury come off it.  Derek began to reach for Spritish scriptures to defend himself, but the crow flew off.

Taking the man outside, he gave him to the police.  The crowd surged forward with obvious intent on violence, but the sergeant snapped out an order, and eleven clubs were produced.

“I understand you’re mad.  I am too.  Mister Chauncey shot a policeman who is right now in the hospital.  But he gets a trial.”

“We can save you the money by hanging him right now,” called out a voice from the crowd.

“No,” shouted Derek which brought a cry of ‘Shut up Yankee’ from a couple in the crowd.

“That Yankee Angel saved two of my police officers’ lives, and brought down the criminal.  I won’t say I’ve never been to a lynching, but only for good cause.  You know this man is going to get a fair trial.  You’re just being impatient.  Go home.”  This brought some grumbling, but the crowd dissipated.

After making sure that Mister Chauncey was taken to the hospital because hearing Sergeant Grenadine of the police as much as publicly confess he’d participated in more than one lynching was enough to put Derek in a distrustful mood, he flew home, and exhausted collapsed into the recliner in the front room.

There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #510:  Versers Debate.  Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter.  It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.

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