There Won't Be War

Sticking up from the first floor stood the enormous lower joint from an impossibly larger clarinet. It looked like some sort of black sarcophagus and it jammed the entire stairwell. The banister below had popped off a couple of its balusters where the clarinet piece exceeded the stairs’ width. Doc glanced instinctively up at the ceiling but found no corresponding hole to explain the presence of the thing. The chrome pads and finger plates reflected him in his utter dismay, each one as big as his head. Who in his employ would have carted the infernal thing along the hall and down the stairs? In the middle of the night no less, and without waking him? Who would do it? An’ what kind of a joke was it supposed to be? He didn’t immediately recognize its musical disposition. All he cared was that, as incommodious as a kidney stone, it blocked his route to pee. The urgency of that need cut through his confusion, and he climbed quickly, apelike, back upstairs to the bedroom. One of the young maids, named Lizzie, had already arrived and was making up the bed. Somehow she’d known he was up—probably heard him clomping across the floor.

Doc hadn’t the time to be shy. He snatched the chamber pot from under the bed, stuck his swollen member into it and glared defiantly at the girl while the echo of his release pinged off the pot. She openly observed his tool as she might have done a passing cockroach, too disinterested to reach over and squash it. With the pressure off, Doc’s tool receded and he furiously tucked it back into his skivvies, blotching the flannel with the last remaining drops.

“Lizzie, what’s that goddam thing on the back stairs?” he demanded. Doc never cursed in the house, so he knew that she knew how mad he was.

“Thing?” she asked. Never heard of it.

“Well, never you mind, girl, you go get me Carpy, right now. Don’t say anything but that I want to see him pronto.”

She nodded dimly and escaped, the bed half-made. Doc put down the brass pot. While he waited for the household retainer, he sat back on the bed. The matter on the back stairs was too perplexing to dwell upon, and his thoughts drifted.

Outside, the field workers were singing a “holler” about not goin’ down to the well no more. Doc smiled vaguely at their singing, which brought back memories of other times on the bed: Sally on their wedding night, drunk and catty; Carpy’s mother, laid back on it, willing to let him fuck her. The halcyon days of youth—it had all been ahead of him then.

4. The Homestead-II

Carpy was six years older than Bubba. Not nearly so dark as his mother, he neither much resembled his squat father. Muscular, yes, but long-muscled and trim. The only obvious trait of Doc’s he’d acquired was the tendency toward baldness. Carpy’s mother died shortly after his birth. His true parentage was kept from him, from the workers, and from Sally (who found out anyway and promptly stopped sleeping with her husband). She mistreated Carpy wickedly, never with any explanation or any apparent cause.

The most Doc dared for his eldest son was to teach him to read so that he could be promoted to the highest household position, that of overseer. It paid a tiny wage, but Doc had secretly hidden funds in a bank account for Carpy. He had rationalized this to himself over the years so as not to have to face the obvious conflict with his duties as a Cyclops. Unlike his old man, Carpy treated those dozens beneath his command with utmost kindness and compassion—a gentle foreman, fond of Lizzie, but secretly, hopelessly, in love with Psalmody. She was built like a goddess. Her breasts alone stuffed his brain full of immoderate thoughts, and thank God for that or he might have zeroed in on the rest of her.

Psalmody liked to run, decades before jogging would come of age. She refused to ride in the family Ford, preferring to race it along the dirt roads, barefoot, in loose-fitting boy’s clothing. The sweat on her upper lip did things to Carpy that he couldn’t explain. Certainly he had seen enough sweat in his life. Even Bubba registered her exudence of sexuality, but his elder half-brother was way ahead of him. Rarely, after all, were women excited by the vision of a loved one picking his nose. Carpy, a man of position and responsibility, never would do such a thing publicly; whereas Bubba’s excavated mucous adorned chair arms, walls and the undersides of tables throughout the house. The thought of his hands on her would have made Psalmody faint. She was looking for someone of intelligence, of original thought, and pretty soon, too, or she would go crazy in this prison-farm. Everything that mattered to her existed somewhere else other than Mound City and its predatory environs. Although she didn’t realize it, Carpy’s gentle nature had already played upon the strings of her heart. History has a way of swinging around for another looksee.

5. Prelude to War