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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 104: Brown 319
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 33
In his pursuit of the beautiful Creole woman in this dream, or vision, or whatever it was, Derek lost track of her, and of time, and came to find himself in a basement. Three hollow-faced children were there, with a different woman, all clothed in rags, and the children were watching avidly as she carved up a cooked dead rat. They turned to look at him, and although it clearly pained her to do so, she offered him first bite of the rat. Repulsed at the notion of eating a rather skinny rat, and of taking food from clearly starving children, he leapt back against the wall of the basement, and was somewhere else.
Finding himself back on the run, he came upon some Blacks he somehow understood to be slaves trekking with a hand pulled wagon along a shaded path through a leafy wood. They were clearly nervous. Escaped slaves from cruel slavemasters, he figured, and began to step out from behind the oak tree he had arrived behind. But then men in coats came upon them, and laughed, and before he could get unfrozen, they had fixed bayonets and stabbed all the Blacks to death. As much as he tried to, he could not see the color of their uniforms, but their accent sounded too familiar.
Puking, he ran on, wiping his mouth, and came out of a burned orchard with squashed peaches rotting on the ground. Along a road he ran, and he saw the same farmhouse he had seen earlier, but it was burnt now, and the only thing left was a chimney, and a thin trail of smoke in the sky. He saw that a small family of five stood by, and they were all skinny, too skinny. So he came up to them and told them of the rotting peaches. But when he brought them back to them, the peaches were gone.
“It’s all right, stranger. The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” With that Derek ran in all directions, looking for food for them. He ran for days, but all he found were burnt farmhouses, with chimneys still standing, and ruined crops, and slaughtered animals, and tombstones with some of the attached graves violated for they had not been dug deep enough. He would have fought the coyotes who had dug up the body of a mother, but they were skinny just as she had been. In his despair he could not see that saving the body of one dead mother who had lost her battle to survive in a wasteland of death was worth the effort. So he turned aside, and ran again, seeking the Creole Lady.
Smoke rose high in the sky in front of him, and he did not want to run forward, but his legs had a mind of their own. Echoing from the hills he heard a great, almost familiar, voice, feminine, powerful, but not that of the Lady.
“As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again.” He did not know the voice, but he knew he had heard it before.
Continuing down the path, he saw a lady in the distance, and gladly ran to her, his heart aching, wanting to tell her of the strange things he had witnessed, and beg her for help. But when he got closer, he saw she was a redhead with a peach blossom complexion, and was altogether lovely except for the burn scars up and down her forearms and on her cheekbones, and the look of unmitigated horror in her green eyes. He tried to talk to her but she was lost in some private remembrance of agony, and could not be reached. Instead, he left her lying in the dusty road.
He turned around and fled back the way he had come, heading toward cooler lands. As he did, he saw a white-bearded white-haired White man riding beside him on a white horse. The man carried a benign dignity in his very bones and with grave courtesy spoke.
“Brother Christian, more and worse pain is yet to come. Are you sure you want to drink this cup to its dregs?”
“I have to.”
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 #511: Characters Change. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
