Read Online American Meteor by Norman Lock - Free Book Online Page B

stand out from the rest. Thus are we ever to one another, and alone. Like Grant in the midst of his army, like Lincoln in his White House, like my father with his bottle, like my brother in an alleyway, surrounded by roughnecks who would break his neck for their profit or pleasure, like Ben Franklin with his pennies and his loaves of bread when he arrived in Philadelphia to start afresh, and like Spotswood, who had emptied hishouse and was waiting in the failing light for whatever would come next.
    I went outside to the barn to give the old man the feed order and found him asleep on a pile of sacks. I kicked him twice.
    “Wake up, you lazy bastard!”
    He opened his revolting old eyes and looked at me with unmistakable contempt, so that I had to kick him again. His eyes reminded me of ropy strands of egg white and bloody yolks. I wanted to scramble them with my fist. I don’t know why I should have felt such ill will, except that I’d overheard him tell the black kid who swept the place how I was a conceited jackass to wear my uniform and medal when I wasn’t a soldier anymore. I didn’t much care for his remark. I hate to think that I had a vindictive streak in those days, but I guess it’s true. If he were here, I’d ask his forgiveness; but he was no doubt shoveled rudely into the colored cemetery long ago.
    I gave him the chicken farmer’s order for dried corn and left him to his hard work and chilly barn. I walked back over my tracks, now nearly obliterated by the falling snow. I flung some coal into the stove and sat on the high stool, going over things in my mind. As the room grew hot, I felt a momentary pang of remorse and almost went back to the barn to invite the old man inside to get warm. But I didn’t. Instead, I worried over the girl, the poor showing I must make in her eyes, my unused potential glimpsed on a wharf in Philadelphia, and my empty days. I had forgotten all about Lowry’s dire threat.
    I closed early because of the snow, which sat on the railings and sills and leaned against the walls. The sky was whitewith it. Indifferent, I’d wintered in worse: in Pennsylvania with the regiment and in Brooklyn as a boy when the wind would drive snow into our room through a broken pane of glass. In winter, a tenement is a cold and inhospitable place. I walked down the middle of Fifth, fairly cleared by streetcars and wagons of the powdery snow. A block shy of Jefferson Street, Lowry bolted from a tobacconist’s doorway, where he’d been lying in ambush, having scouted my route from Bergman’s to the depot. He flung himself on me, accompanied by the shrill, unholy rebel yell, which had caused many a Yankee soldier to dampen his blue pants. I shot him down with the Colt before he could stick me with his bayonet.
    The tobacconist, whose testimony was tainted by his friendship with Lowry, which he naturally denied, told the Springfield police that Lowry had gone out to speak to me about our differences. He’d kept his distance, he hadn’t yelled, and the bayonet had stayed tucked up in his belt. He swore I’d called Lowry names no man could tolerate, and then— “entirely without provocation and in cold blood”—I’d drawn my pistol, aimed, and shot him through the forehead. There might have been a morsel of truth in what he said, but Lowry had had no cause to jump me the way he did.
    I remember the squeak of my boots on dry snow, the slap of my rubber coat, the creak of hinges on the tobacconist’s door, the snap of a tree branch, the rasp of my lungs drawing breath, and, after a curious sigh, the rattle of Lowry’s lungs just before he crumpled and fell.
    Had I been an ordinary young man, doubtless I would have been tried as a cold-blooded killer, convicted, and taken in chains to Leavenworth to break rocks for twenty or thirty years. But I had been presented with the Medalof Honor by Ulysses S. Grant himself for my valor at Five Forks and had been handpicked by the secretary of war to serve