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A Belfry Tale

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A retelling by Ruthie Voth

Friars are not materialistic people; they live solely on the charity of others. It’s not an easy life, and only a humble man will stick with it for many years. This is the story of friars Gabe and Francis. They joined the order of the Carmelites at a young age, wanting to get away from the fast pace of the world. They wanted time to contemplate life and eternity, so together the two friends joined this community of peaceful men.

They lived for many pleasant years, sharing nightly thoughtful discussions with equally poor friends. And they spent countless hours in silence. But time, as it always will, brings changes, poverty, quietude and old age proved too much for many of their companions. So at the ages of 62 and 63, Friar Gabe and Friar Francis found themselves alone in their friary.

Their small house seemed cavernous now that it was shared by only two men. Eventually they moved their sleeping rolls to the little room on the north side of the chapel.

The friars shared a love for two things: their gardens and the chapel. When they weren’t bound to their religious duties, these were the places that Gabe and Francis were most likely to be found. But even to the peaceful, trouble is bound to come … eventually.

For Francis and Gabe, trouble came in the form of their crumbling belfry. Every time one of them pulled the bell rope, calling people to prayer, he said a fervent prayer himself, hoping that the bell would not come crashing down on his head. Obviously something had to be done. In the old days, when the place was swarming with men, it wouldn’t have been such a problem. Now, there were just the two of them, starting to get up in years, and with barely enough money for materials, not to mention hiring skilled laborers. The two friars did their best to let people in the town know of their plight. They set up collection boxes and managed to raise a small amount to put toward a new belfry. But it wasn’t enough.

Finally, they realized that the time had come for them to give up their mendicant way of living. For the first time in almost four decades, they were going to have to look for work. And so they tried. And tried. And tired of trying.

Over the years, they had come to realize that the two of them had complementary talents. Friar Gabe excelled at producing the most beautiful flowers in town, and Friar Francis had the gift of making lovely arrangements that the brothers would deliver to the sick and suffering. When the job search proved futile, they decided to put their gifts to work — they opened a florist shop.

From day one, the business was a hit. Townspeople who had admired the thriving gardens at the friary and faked illness in order to get a sympathy arrangement could now purchase their own bouquets on the slightest whim. Business boomed — possibly due to the fact that these men had lived their entire lives without making financial success a priority. Old habits die hard. The Lord provided the flowers free of charge; why should they jack up the price to make a profit? People in the town loved to come and do business with these kind friars and their miniscule prices.

But there was one person in town who was not so excited about this new florist shop. That, naturally, was the owner of the previously existing florist shop — the one so creatively named “Pete’s Flowers.”

Now Pete was not a bad man. He was a decent guy with a family to support. He did his job and did it well, but it didn’t take him long to notice that his customers were coming in less and less frequently. He lowered prices. He offered special deals. He posted advertising flyers around town. He lowered prices again. But it wasn’t enough.

He paid a visit to the friars and pled with them to raise their prices, so he could make enough money to support his family. But Francis and Gabe couldn’t come to terms with putting high prices on something that had cost them nothing. They refused.

Pete sent his wife, surrounded by their six young children, to beg the friars to have mercy on her family. They felt pity for the family, and gave them some of their hard-earned money.
It wasn’t what Pete had in mind.

He asked his next door neighbor, who had once spent a year at the friary, to go and have a talk with Gabe and Francis. Surely he could talk them into shutting down their business and going back to their normal way of life. But they had come to love selling flowers. They liked the interaction with the people, they said.

Pete went back again and again, trying to talk sense into these foolish men with no business sense who were ruining his life. He sent others to talk to them — anyone who might have a chance of getting the point across. They just didn’t get it. The poor guy tried every line, every angle, every trick he could think of, and nothing worked. He was losing money fast, and feeling desperate.

You know what desperate times call for … desperate measures. Pete finally went out and looked up the one man he’d spent most of his life avoiding: Hugh. Hugh was the biggest, the baddest, the meanest thug imaginable. He’d step on your new puppy and then throw it in your sweet grandma’s face without ever batting an eye. He was too mean even to have a sidekick. Nobody wanted to hang around with Hugh.

If you wanted to hire someone to shut down a business, Hugh was your man. Pete spent the last of his dwindling cash fund on this one final attempt.

No one knows what happened at the friary the evening Hugh stopped by for a visit. The details of that night will be carried quietly to three graves. But the next morning, Francis and Gabe set all their cut flowers on a table outside the door with a sign announcing “FREE” and hung a “CLOSED” sign on the door. They never sold another flower. The following summer their gardens were not so lush. Several years later, the greenery around the monastery was practically nonexistent. Eventually, the town forgot that there ever were two such talented lovers of flowers in its midst.

Pete’s business, however, flourished with the competition gone. As his sons grew into men, he was able to expand and stock shops in several neighboring towns.
The friars never rebuilt the belfry. It eventually crumbled completely. Francis was injured only slightly when the bell fell.

This tale has been long, sad and full of woe, but it comes with a cheery little moral. And that is: “Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.”

Reporter Catches Lucky Break

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By Andrew Sharp

Without that fire, I never would have won that award for my arson coverage.

I would still be stuck in Wootensburg, Ohio, covering city council meetings about which street to pave next, and fire company parades with Little Miss Fire Queen and other mind-numbing junk.

It was a beauty. I couldn’t have asked for better. I just happened to be driving by on my way to press-release editing duty (I hate to think about it even now). There on Center Street, just before the turn onto East Vine, a townhouse had turned into a torch, the roof crumbling down in and a vast orange fireball rushing upward past it, eating it as it fell. It wasn’t much of a house, but the people standing on the lawn were screaming and crying like it was some huge loss.

As my shutter clicked over and over, I couldn’t help thinking how perfect it was. The grief. The energy of the fire. The fire company actually doing something besides a parade.
The editor had never let me cover any real news, not that there was much in a railroad town of 15,000 people in the rolling farm country in the foothills of the Appalachians. She was making me earn my stripes. Well, this should speed up that process, I thought.

She was very impressed with the photos. So was the town, judging by the fact there were no papers on the racks by 10 a.m. the next morning. Our website hits exploded. The Midwest Rural Newspaper Association was also impressed, and awarded me top prize in the “Best Breaking News Coverage” category at the annual banquet.

“I just did my best in the circumstances I found myself in,” I wrote in my new column the next day. “I’m honored, but also humbled as I think of the pain of this family who lost two children in a fire. That is nothing to celebrate. It’s the dilemma of newspapers — our service to the community is telling the bad news along with the good, the tragic with the heartwarming. We only want to do our best in all cases.”

Not a bad tone to strike. People ate it up. I threw myself into the coverage of the investigation into the arson, and people started to talk about my work. I managed to hit just the right homespun wisdom tone with my weekly column. I had a real knack for crime coverage, I discovered. I have to admit that much of it was luck, being in the right place at the right time, but when I got there I made the most of it. Fires, vandalism, a terrible wreck at a light that had stopped working. They all made it onto my resume and that helped me get out of that little dead-end, stuck-in-the-Great-Depression village.

Indianapolis isn’t the top of the ladder. Oh, no. Even this place is sort of a cow town. This isn’t my last stop. With a little luck, I’ll be moving on soon.

They never did catch that arsonist.

Paradise Mocked

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Crucifix

Photo: Roma Flowers

By Andrew Sharp

The old man stood with his back to a congregation of empty pews, looking up at the outstretched arms of a wooden crucifix that towered over him. Rows of candles lined an altar nearby, but their dead wicks added no light or heat to the drafty shadows. The man’s lips moved as he looked up at the crucifix, but the crucifix gazed away in agony toward the dark ceiling beams, consumed with its own worries. The old man did not turn when the doors to the sanctuary creaked open behind him and footsteps came down the aisle.

“Father James?” a voice said with a trace of a Spanish accent.

Father James Butler  turned then and smiled politely. “Father Almeda,” he said quietly to the young man standing there. “Martin, if I may. How are you settling in at the presbytery?”

“It is very comfortable, thank you,”  the young priest said. “Although that is not important.”

“I know,” Father James said. “I just get used to asking, after all this time. It seems natural. What can I do for you?”

“We have things we need to discuss,” Martin said. “They are not happy, you know.”

Father James stood with his arms crossed looking up at the crucifix again. “I know,” he finally said. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Yes,” Martin said. “But there is no need for concern. They sent me to help you.”

“Because I’m growing old and frail?” Father James asked with more sarcasm than is proper for a priest.

“Because you have deviated from your purpose. I am here to help you back to that purpose, if you are willing. You still have much service to render.”

“You’re new. You don’t understand yet,” the old man said. “But you will find out that the service they require has its flaws.”

Martin frowned.

“And you’re made in the image of God, like I am,” Father James continued. “Too much in his image. Death doesn’t come naturally. It’s a terrifying thing, losing life, once you have it. But death is built into you too. You have to face it someday. And you will understand then.”

“We aren’t made to worry about those things,” Martin said, looking at the old man as if he had suggested that catching a cold was an injustice. “Faithful service …”

“Comes to an end,” Father James said. “And then what?”

“It does not matter!”

“It does to me.”

“I cannot force you to give up these heresies,” Martin said. “But it would be much better for you if you did. It is best that I am here now. Your condition is worse than I thought.”

“And what if I don’t repent?” Father James asked.

“I urge you not to pursue that course,” Martin said, his voice chilly as the empty room.

Father James sighed. “It might be too late for me.”

 

Sixty years ago, when the new priest had braked for the third red light on the way into Wootensburg, Ohio, across from Smith’s Old Fashioned Drug Store, it struck him that he had drawn an easy assignment. The group he had studied with had been trained to handle the challenges of any metropolis in the world. Seven minutes after reaching the town limits, Father James was sitting in the downtown district of Wootensburg. This would be easy.

Wootensburg was small, but it wasn’t run down. It was built where the Appalachian foothills finally melted down into flat Midwestern farm land, but the resignation and aimlessness that oozed out of the impoverished mountains into so many small towns had not reached Wootensburg.

The downtown district had, among other establishments, several antique shops, two restaurants (Betty Jo’s Home Style Restaurant  and the Country Buffet), a McDonald’s, the offices of the Wootensburg Herald-Press, a sporting goods store, and the pub. These little economic engines rarely ran at high speed, but like an old well-tended diesel, they kept reliably putting along. Mostly, anyway. The town’s coffee shop reopened every six months or so under new, and temporarily optimistic, ownership. The stores were doing good business on this evening. As the sun eased down behind the courthouse, the still-warm sidewalks were busy with retired people, workers getting off for the day, and families out for a stroll.

Not far off Main Street the stone towers of Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, the priest’s destination, stood out high above the surrounding buildings.

He pulled his car into the driveway of the presbytery, a little stone house that was dwarfed by the church next door. A porch ran across the front, with a rocking chair by the door. The young priest reflected that he would be far too busy getting the parish in shape to use the rocking chair.

It wasn’t that the priest thought the town would turn out to be a sinkhole of evil. He liked the looks of it so far. But he carried the church’s doctrines with fervor, and bore the clergyman’s conviction that society was crumbling heedlessly into decay and needed to be built up again by some thoughtful person. His overseers, sharing his convictions, had sent him here to do just that.

They trusted his ability more than they usually did with new young men of the cloth. If their calculations were correct, Father James would be up to any challenge, immediately. And he would not be warped by the pressures of his job. He was a product of  a new, extremely expensive program. It was designed to use advanced technology to ensure perfectly reliable clergy, a commodity that was increasingly in short supply. Wootensburg was a safe place for a trial run.

The reliable little town gave Father James a warm, if appraising, welcome. The newspaper editor wrote a nice editorial about the new leader at Our Lady, in which he hoped, in optimistic first person plural, that the new priest  would understand the town’s needs and put his (approvingly noted) theological credentials to work for the public good. The church’s ladies group threw a welcoming supper.

Eyes in the parish also watched Father James carefully to see what kind of priest he would turn out to be. Would he be down-to-earth, genial about small flaws like a little overindulgence in alcohol now and then, or a missed Mass here and there, or would he be alarmed by such lapses? Would he content himself with enlightening homilies, or interest himself too much in how the flock applied them?

Father James turned out to be difficult to judge. He was unwaveringly kind and warm, interested in the parish families, and though very scholarly he clearly understood practical everyday matters. Gradually, though, the flock discovered that their new shepherd, despite his kindness, had an iron side and an uncomfortable tendency to prod them toward righteousness. One saved the good jokes until later when Father James was around. He had no endearing faults. He did not eat too much. He excercised enough. He was on time. He got up early in the morning, worked hard, kept his word, told the truth, and in general was uncannily good.

“He’s a pretty nice guy,” Hector the local plumber, a church member, gloomily summed up one evening for a few others who were gathered at the pub engaging in their every-now-and-then overindulgence, “but you don’t feel like you can relax around him.”

There was a silence.

“Nice, though,” Hector repeated, as if troubled that he did not believe himself.

Father James was not only objectionably good, but he was not shy about speaking out when it was clear that a good orthodox opinion was lacking in the public debate. Some in the town resented what they called his pushiness on social issues. A good many just ignored the priest. A sizable number of the town were stout Baptists or members of the scattered nondenominational Houses of Praise or Fundamental Bible Churches. They viewed Catholics as one step better than pagan, and weren’t sure if they didn’t prefer the pagan.

Our Lady of Peace did not fill up with new members in the following years, although a number were added through reproductive means. The seeming stagnancy did not dampen Father James’ zeal, or his confidence. His happiness was seemingly unaffected by his circumstances. He counseled, he preached, he cheerfully ushered the members of the little town in and out of life. Whether they approved of him and wanted to invite him over for beer on Saturday evenings was not his problem.

He was not aware of the arguments and grumbling conversations going on in the offices of his overseers. They had expected more return on their steep investment.

“He’s giving us no trouble,” his defenders said. “There’s no corruption. And he runs things flawlessly. You can’t change the world in five years, or even a decade.” His detractors grudgingly admitted the truth in this. Father James did not appear in the newspaper at unscheduled times, and this alone was worth quite a bit of the money they had paid.

Those in the parish who had their differences of opinion with church authority were even less enthusiastic about him.

“You have no compassion,” Sister Watts, the head nun at the local convent, told him one afternoon, with her arms crossed. The convent had an unsavory reputation higher up in the church hierarchy because the nuns often ignored the gentle guidance of said hierarchy. This might have been overlooked as a byproduct of strong leadership, but they were of a gender that was not supposed to dissent. Part of Father James’ job was to keep an eye on the nuns and remind them of the will of the bishops.

What had provoked Sister Watts’ arm-crossing in this case was Father James remonstrating with her about the nuns’ vocal opposition to political policies they deemed harsh toward the poor. They had even gone so far as to march around with signs, a dangerous indicator of moral unsoundness.

“I have plenty of compassion,” Father James told her firmly. “I just don’t trust my own judgement in everything, as you seem to do. I give authority its due respect. And so should you. You’d have a lot more peace.”

The nun, not being perfect like Father James, remained irritated. “And what happens when authority is wrong?” she demanded. “You ought to question authority, not just follow it around blindly.”

“They will answer to God, not me, if they are wrong,” he told Sister Watts gently, in a soothing tone. Sister Watts was considerably unsoothed.

“Yours not to reason why? Yours but to do or die?” she asked sarcastically.

“Nobody’s getting killed,” he said. “We’re talking about the bishops not wanting you marching around on the street shouting and waving signs. But yes, if it came to that. Mine but to do or die.”

“Like a robot,” she snapped.

“No,” he said.

“Like a sheep.”

“We are to follow the Shepherd,” he said. “Yes. Like a sheep. It would behoove you and the sisters,” he said, “to model yourselves a touch more after sheep. Right now you seem to be getting your inspiration from …  other animals.”

The nun was able to restrain herself from kicking the priest in the groin, a feat she later marveled about. Altogether, she felt her restraint ought to count for quite a bit of purgatory served. Instead of kicking, she said with passion, “And what if God is not on authority’s side? Those holy authorities are great at standing up for church tradition, but sometimes they completely miss God’s compassion for the powerless. And ‘If a blind man leads a blind man, they will both fall into a pit.’”

Father James was not troubled by her scripture quoting. “Obey your leaders and submit to them; for they are keeping watch over your souls,” he shot back. “Unlike you, Sister Watts, I am willing to give authority the benefit of the doubt.”

 

Although he showed no doubt, either then or in the years that followed, the nun’s words stuck with him, and ate away at his peaceful confidence. The priest had expected his biggest tests to come at times of momentous crisis. But it turned out to be the small, unexpected moments like his confrontation with Sister Watts that caught him off guard and eventually derailed him.

Another of these small moments came after several decades on the job. Father James had just led a funeral service for a local farmer, a grouchy, stingy man who had not been much of a churchgoer. He had died suddenly at age 55. The man’s teenage daughter, a conscientious church member, was crying afterward  as she left and Father James paused to offer some sage words of consolation.

She ignored these, and blurted out at the startled priest, “Do you think he made it to heaven?”

Father James took a deep breath. Clergy dislike this question, and to his shock he found that his prepared answers did not answer the question to his satisfaction at all. This had not happened before. He mumbled something about God being just and fair, so we can trust him to do what’s right.

She seemed to wilt. “That’s easy for you to say,” she said in a flat voice. “You always do everything right. You know you’re going to heaven when you die.”

He stood there silent. Heaven. When I die.

From that moment, to his gnawing doubt he added dread. Both started small and grew slowly, but they were there to stay.

He took to sitting out on the front porch in his rocking chair in the evenings, rocking in an anxious, steady rhythm as if he were trying to escape on it. He would watch the sun set behind the houses across the street, and the red light change on Vine and Cross streets, the cars flowing by. Sometimes the people in them waved. Young people and families walked by. In the summer many of them would be holding ice cream cones and milkshakes from the ice cream stand up the street. He wanted to be like them. He wanted the comforting faith that so many of them ignored. Instead, he just rocked his chair, for hours.

On one of these evenings, a number of years after he had arrived in town, Father James was sitting in his rocking chair, going over his homily as darkness settled on the street. It was one of the lifetime’s worth of approved meditations his superiors had given him to deliver. But the words stood out to him differently this time.

“If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

He rocked viciously for a while, musing on societal decay, rebellious nuns, dead farmers and their daughters, and answers he no longer trusted.

 

“I’m worried about you,” Roy, Father James’ atheist friend, told him. They had become friends not long after the priest came to town, and over the years had often enjoyed sparring over philosophy. “It’s no fun arguing with you any more. Sometimes you look like you believe what I’m saying.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that,” the priest reassured him. “It’s that I don’t always believe myself.” He stared at his reflection in his coffee and then sloshed it around.

“Come again?” Roy asked. “You don’t believe me, you don’t believe yourself. What other options are there? You’re not becoming a Buddhist, are you?”

“No,” Father James said. “No, I believe in the gospel more than I ever have. I’m just not sure I’m teaching it.”

“Going to nail up some theses, eh?”

“NO,” Father James said. “That’s not what I mean.  I’m supposed to be perfect. And I’m not. My creed is supposed to be perfect. And it isn’t.”

“That’s very humble of you,” Roy said.

Father James did not seem to hear him. “And the worst thing is, I’m like the man selling movie tickets. The show isn’t for me.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Roy said.

The priest looked the atheist in the eyes. “Roy,” he said slowly. “I have no hope.”

 

The parish watched Father James change, although they had a hard time saying what was different. He fulfilled all his duties and for a while, he delivered perfectly orthodox sermons, the same as ever. But he seemed to shrink, and his eyes were sad.

Eventually, he changed too much. He deviated from his lines. He questioned things publicly. His overseers might have tolerated this in others, but they had invested too much money and time to overlook it in Father James. They warned him. Several times. Father James did not listen.

This was unwise, because the authorities were perfectly aware of everything he did. Tense conversations took place at very high levels.

“The thing is,” the bishop in charge of the new program told an Italian cardinal, “we were told this was not supposed to happen. The technology is supposed to be fail-proof.”

“Yes, we were told that, weren’t we?” the cardinal snapped. “But I was always afraid that was too optimistic. We’ll have to go to the emergency plan.”

 

Martin shook the priest’s shoulder. “Once again, I tell you Father James, we are not to question these things. We are here to serve. Leave your worries to those you serve. They have your best in mind.”

Father James smiled bitterly. “Whom do I serve? God? The church?”

Martin didn’t answer.

“You talk of serving. Who are you serving?” Father James pressed. “The church or God?”

“There is no difference,” Martin said coldly. “And if there is, it doesn’t matter to me. I am done arguing with you about it. Are you going to repent and recommit to the service you are called to or are you going to continue with this rebellion? I give you fair warning — they have no use for you if you persist on the course you have chosen.”

Father James looked wistful. “Repent, you say. I wish I could.”

He slowly turned and knelt under the crucifix.

Martin grabbed the old man’s robe and tore it open down the back. He pressed Father James’ spine with a series of swift motions and a panel swung open, appearing seemingly from nowhere out of the old priest’s sagging skin. Inside was a maze of wires and circuits.

Father James flinched, but he did not struggle. He raised his hands and looked toward the ceiling. “Father, into your hands I commit …” and then he stopped. He made a sound like a sob, or a gag.

Martin pulled a small taser out of his pocket and stuck it into the open panel. He pulled the trigger. There was a violent flashing and popping.

Father James’ eyes went blank, and he slumped down onto the floor. Martin closed the panel and gently laid the old man on his back. His face was empty, and a small wisp of smoke trailed out of his nose.

Martin stood looking down at him for a minute. Then he ran to the door and looked out at the dark street. It was empty. He came back and gathered up the body. They would find the old priest in his bed, where he had died peacefully in his sleep.

The church would handle all arrangements.

 

Of Mallards

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Mallards

By Rebekah Sauder

Sally and her family lived on a back road in a foresty area with a small pond beside their house. Every year at the end of winter Sally’s mother would start saving up bread crusts to feed to the mallards when they came to the pond. Sally would peek out the window every day to see if the ducks were there yet.

“My favorites are the ones with green heads,” Sally told her mother as she smashed her nose on the glass.

“Do you know why they have green heads?” Her mother asked.

“Why?”

“Because the ones with green heads are man-ducks. They’re called ‘drakes.’ The brown ones are ladies.”

“Drakes,” Sally repeated to herself.

Soon the mallards arrived. When Sally saw them sitting peacefully in the water she shrieked.

“Mom, the ducks are here!”

Her mother sent the excited little girl out the door with the bag of crusts, watching from the kitchen window. Sally tried to walk slowly to the pond so she would not scare the ducks away. There were two female ducks and one male. Sally started ripping up the bread and throwing it into the water. She shifted from foot to foot impatiently as the ducks slowly swam over to get the bread.

“Hello, ducks,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Drake.” She thought he was the most beautiful duck she had ever seen. “Why do you have such a nice green head, but the ladies don’t?” she asked him.

The drake seemed interested in what Sally had to say, but the others ignored her.

“Do you wanna know something?” Sally whispered to the drake. “My friend Anna goes to ballerina class. I can show you how to dance, if you want.”

Anna often came to visit Sally after ballet lessons on Thursdays. Sally always asked to see what she had just learned. Sally would practice what Anna showed her when she was alone — but only after making sure no one was coming and shutting the door.

It looked like the drake was interested, so Sally showed him what Anna had taught her. She put everything she could muster into her jumps and twirls. The two female ducks quacked in protest and swam quickly away. The drake, however, was not disturbed. Sally stopped dancing when she saw some of the ducks leaving. But the drake was just watching her calmly. Sally turned and ran back to the house with a huge smile, thinking that she should have worn her twirly skirt.

Sally burst into the house. “Mom! I made a new friend.”

Her mother greeted her with a smile. “That’s good, dear, but next time be more careful when you’re that close to the water. If you jump around too much you might lose your footing and fall in.”

Something inside Sally crumpled up and slid into a dark place. She went to her room and hid all her stuffed animals under her bed.

The drake rejoined his companions. “What’s wrong with you?” they scolded. “Don’t you know not to sit so close to something that moves so suddenly? It’s dangerous and stupid.”

The drake did not respond. He just swam peacefully in little circles.

Rebekah Sauder lives in Plain City, Ohio, where she works at an assisted living home, rides around town on her bicycle, and watches “a ridiculous amount of movies.” Every once in a while, she writes a short story. 

The Bullet

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arlingtonedit web2

By Andrew Sharp

A man strolled through a field of ragged grass and wildflowers, swinging a metal detector back and forth over the ground as he moved uphill toward a low, well-maintained stone wall. The metal detector beeped. He stooped quickly and ran his fingers through the grass and dirt, then stood and held up a small piece of metal, blown out of shape by a long-ago impact. He smiled. A find! It would make a treasured keepsake.

—

A dusty cow pasture soaked up the late-morning summer sun. The pasture was empty, except for thistles, stones, and scattered cow pies left by its vanished occupants. Behind a stone wall on a hill overlooking the pasture, a line of soldiers stood. They stared down the pasture toward a patch of trees at the bottom of the hill that clustered on the banks of a creek. The soldiers sweated in the sun and some of them swished flies away with their hats. They could see flashes of colorful uniforms moving down by the creek in the shade of the trees.

Behind the wall, a hand reached into a pouch and felt for a cartridge, a bullet pre-wrapped with powder, ready to load. A ramrod pressed the bullet down into the darkness with a metallic swoosh. The bullet was forced down the tight grooved sides in a slow circle, packing air ahead of it out the gun’s breech, until it smashed down tight against the powder. It was finally ready. Outside, other much larger and heavier bullets were already on their final journey, tearing through the air overhead, smashing into the trees along the creek. A thousand smaller bullets all sat snug in their black tunnels, the rifles that held them hanging over the stone wall, waiting in silence for the big shells to drive the men up out of the sheltering grove.

—

The cone-shaped bullet, a .58 caliber minie ball, was cutting-edge technology at the time. It had been conceived in a munitions factory mold about a year and a half before, poured out of a hot vat of molten lead. Before that, pieces of it had led all kinds of careers. Some of it had been typeset at a newspaper. A very tiny piece had once been plumbing in a villa in Roman London. A goodly portion had been a candlestick-holder in an upright Pilgrim’s house in Massachusetts, supporting the candle by which the family read the Scriptures in the evening.

The man who gave the lead its bullet form was named Josiah Owens. He did not really care much about the war and why it had to be fought, the endless moral points and counterpoints, freedom and justice and righteousness and honor and duty. He would have made typeset, if it were desired, or candlestick-holders, or even plumbing, if those in power had been willing to pay him to do so. He needed to feed his family. He did not personally kill John Hawkins or the hundreds of other men who met death through the bullets he carefully made. Other people made the decisions; that is why they had ordered the bullets. They did not personally kill John Hawkins either. They delegated, as good leaders do.

The motive for making the bullets was debated viciously and endlessly. Was the cause a right one or an evil one? A very few crazy people, Quakers and other radicals, suggested that lead ought to be used for candlesticks, and never for ending lives, but for most, the big question was the Cause.

The destiny of the bullets was also not clear, although it merited no debate. Some would end up buried in tree trunks or fence posts. Some, buried in soil. Others would smash into living people.

Neither motives nor destiny meant anything to the bullet. Its purpose was clear. It would perform as asked. And this particular minie ball was destined to carry out its purpose: It would kill John Hawkins. Whether Hawkins’ death was murder or a necessary tragedy in a noble conflict, the bullet made no judgments.

At the moment Josiah Owens was pouring the bullet, John Hawkins was sitting outside the office of a bank manager, his palms sweating a little and his foot fidgeting, waiting to sign papers on a loan. On his list of concerns was not bullets, but that his coffee had been a little cold at breakfast, and coffee was starting to cost a lot, and he thought he could feel a cold coming on (he hated colds, but got them frequently), and of course the risk from his startup manufacturing business. He wondered if he and his wife had been getting a little distant lately, and was troubled when he thought about the bitterness between himself and his father. A business transaction he had conducted several months ago was also eating at him. It had not exactly met the standards of ethical business dealing, and he had always cared about things like that. He would go back and make it right, once he got on his feet with the business, of course.
Like Hawkins, the bullet was not yet moving toward the pasture. After a short wagon ride over bumpy dirt roads from the factory, and a very long ride on a train, the bullet spent many months in a warehouse. It was in no hurry.
Hawkins had his opinions about the war, of course, everyone did. As it became obvious that it would not be over quickly, as everyone had assumed, he imagined his neighbors whispering. A young and healthy man such as himself staying home with the business, while others fought and died … well. Not without ethical feeling, he was also bothered by the nagging feeling that he was not doing his part, and even stood to profit from the conflict with his business. He debated whether to volunteer. He could come back, after the war was over, and restart things. If he did not go, he would always wonder if he should have. And if they began a draft, he would surely have to go anyway. He should leave on his own terms, he decided, although it was a difficult thing to leave not just his business but his wife and his baby in the care of relatives.

—

The bullet and many others was bundled into convenient paper cartridges by overworked and hungry young women making low wages but much reward in heaven. Their handiwork was loaded into horse-drawn carts in a military wagon train and was finally on the way to the man who would carry it into the pasture. Soldiers on horseback rode along with the wagons, ready to shoot anyone who would steal their bullets for nefarious purposes.
While the bullet traveled, Hawkins prepared to get into a wagon himself, after hugging his wife and holding his baby one last time.

“Don’t worry about me,” he reassured her. “I have a job to do … all do our part … home soon … write often.” He handed the baby back. The wagon left. He and the bullet were traveling toward each other now. He was 26 years old.

—

A line of men advanced now out of the creek bed, prodded forward by the screaming death that pulverized the trees. The line moved up the pasture toward the wall at the double-quick. Behind the wall, the rifles came up. The barrel that held the bullet pointed not at any particular man, but at the mass of uniforms. The bullet sat still and silent in its dark tunnel, facing a round hole of light ahead. Waiting.

In the first microseconds after the explosion, the bullet expanded slightly and tightly gripped the tunnel’s grooves, which set it on a deadly, stable, straight-line spin. The bullet spat out of the barrel’s mouth on a direct course down the hill, an unalterable straight line toward a tree root that was sticking up out of the pasture behind the line of men. There was only empty space between the bullet and that tree root.

John Hawkins still had a chance. A step just a hair to the left or right would change things. He could trip and fall. He could slow down just slightly. It had happened before. Once, he lost his hat. Another time, his finger was shot off. This time, he strode forward, directly between the barrel and that tree root, a line he could not see.

The air rushed past the bullet and the stone wall shrank away in one quarter second and was far away at half a second. A uniform coat with brass buttons rushed closer in the next quarter-second and there was a terrible crash. The bullet smashed through its target with a muted thump and expanded, leaving behind a gaping hole. It made it out the other side, its precisely engineered shape crushed into a lumpy mess, and dropped out of the air. It fell to the ground and lay still. It was destroyed, but it had completed its journey and done what it was made to do.

John Hawkins fell to the ground and lay still too.