Founded by Blood

I cough when I pass the graveyard. My throat tightens up and I feel cold and wet. Most towns have a grave yard, maybe by the church or tucked out of the way. But our town is a graveyard with people walking around like guilty ghosts. You see our town is founded by blood.

This blood guilt falls most full on Lenny Fookes. I met him as a boy, going to his store to look at his candy. And it was his candy, for he ran his store like some king or duke who had stolen away the kingdom. All in the store was his and when we came, we cowered under the spirit of this man who condescended to us by his mere presence. We respected him and hated him and fell guilty by his mere presence. The only thing that seemed to bring him down to us was his miserable cough.

Lenny’s father had been one of the first men to come to this land. His father was a wild man, but not terribly clever. Lenny’s father owned almost all of the land in these parts and like a bent nail refused to sell off a single piece. He hunted and trapped and scratched by on a meager, but honest living. Lenny’s mother was a pale and proud women; a daughter of some eastern banker. She always called Lenny, by his proper name, Leonard. She expected more from life than anyone could ever give. She wanted Lenny to be educated, but her husband thought this was a waste of time. She hated him for this, but he knew nothing.

One night misty and cold, the old man took Lenny out to check the traps, but never came back.

“Boy – quit lagging behind!”

“I aint’ Pa!”

As they walked, the silence fell over them. The ground was wet and the air was cold.

“Pa, next year you think I could go to school?”

“What do you want to go fool’in with that fo’? School never done nobody good. You just come back think’in you know sumthing, but get lost on the way to the john.”

“But, Mother said that if we sold some land…”

“Shut-up! What do yer mother know? She’s just a stupid spoiled heifer. Don’t go listening to her fool ideas.”

And as they walked, the silence went on.

“Here, make yourself useful. I’m gonna climb down this ravine and check them traps,” Pa said as he handed Lenny the gun. “Don’t let ‘er touch the ground. It’be just like yer stupid mother’s child to drop that gun.”

And according to Lenny, when Pa handed over the gun it went off. And the blast killed the old man. It was all a big accident. Of course none of this came out right away, because the body wasn’t found for a couple of days. Lenny stayed out in the woods wandering around in the belly of his guilt. Everyone says that it rained the whole time. Lenny was out in the cold rain for nearly three days. When he was found, the blood had soaked through with the rain and left his shirt a pale pink. This is when he started to cough.
It wasn’t until the body was found that questions were raised. They took Lenny in, but the details never matched up with his story. And it seemed like the longer they questioned him the more he coughed. Everyone talked about how guilty Lenny seemed; but slowly, one by one, nobody talked about it. If anyone brought it up, only a guilty silence hung over the group. Soon no one brought it up.

Lenny never got over his cough, but at the end of the year he went away to school. Most people sort of forgot about the whole ordeal. It was while Lenny was at school, that the town really grew. Most everything was built during this time except for the saloon which was already here. Everyone seemed to be doing well.

But in four years Lenny came back and opened up his drug store. When people went to say hello he glowered at them from his corner. He acted triumphant as if he had beaten us in battle. He acted better than us.

Once, someone asked him about his father.

“What do you care? Your folks are living on my old man’s land.” he coughed out.

And we were silenced by this. You see in the years following the old man’s death Lenny’s mother had sold off nearly all of the land. And the entire town knew that Lenny was as guilty as hell, but we had bought a piece of his guilt when we bought our land. So now we go to his store and buy our medicines, listening to him cough. We tolerate the condescension and share in the guilt because we know that we are as low down and dirty as everyone else in this God forsaken town.

When Lenny Fookes died they buried him next to his ma and pa. It’s a wonder that anyone came to the funeral because it rained the whole day, but curiosity and death always draw a crowd. Thirteen people got sick afterwards. I suppose that when the grave finally swallowed Lenny he got some peace from all his coughing. But even now when you go down to the graveyard you can feel the dampness. The temperature drops and your hair stands on end. As you walk you can hear what sounds like coughing. And if you linger the mists will wrap around your throat and the guilt will rise to choke you out of the land of the living…

Story by Joseph Kotulski

Upon a Stone

Upon a Stone (right click to save file)

Upon a stone I’ll rest my head
Until I find that death is dead
I’ll rest my head upon a stone

Amanda left a mark in glass
Twenty five years in a moment passed
I’ll rest my head upon a stone

She flees our grip in memory
We groan until we too are free
I’ll rest my head upon a stone

I will never claim a home
Until my love unthreatened grows
I’ll rest my head upon a stone

Lyrics and Music by Ian North
Instruments and Recording by Eric North

Coyote Bone Bicycles

At the edge of town, there is a pile of bicycles.  Some are racers – some are cruisers, all discarded.  Some are black and some are white and some are green.  But one thing they all have in common.  They were made out of the bones of coyotes and oak wood.

Thunk-Thunk. Thunk-Clunk.   

A woman rides one of these beauties over the freight train tracks.

She is surveying the scene.  Roaming with the spirits unaware.  Back in the empty town.  There is no one here.  There hasn’t been anyone for years.  Returning.  For what?  Where do I go now?  Which streets hold the memory of that boy I was going to marry?  And the children I used to teach? 

Memory sets upon the buildings and streets like dust. 

She pedals faster to stir up the dust with the wind. 

To stir up a cloud over memory for a moment. 

The town bar doors swing open with the wind as she passes, and she sees within a group of stragglers and strangers with horrible faces.  There are little ones with hungry bodies.  Men with cuts.  Women with bruises.  There is no speech.  Their sense of motion is weirdly minimal.  It is unclear if they are alive or dead.  Do they simply have nothing to do and are like this all the time?  Or has something just happened out of the ordinary to make them so sober and lifeless?  Or has the memory of one sudden tragedy left them in an ongoing state of paralyzed remembrance?

She stops past the bar, and, dismounting the bike, turns to go in.  The bartender is tough with age and loss, and stares with an expression of love or anger at her as she approaches.  Something in her stomach spins rapidly as he looks into her.  She scans the room quickly to find families, a wide assortment of people, sitting and staring some at each other, some at her, some out the window, and some down at their bourbon – children on the floor playing with things.  The slow pace of time suddenly rushes into dread as she recognizes these people.  They are all hers.  All of them were hers.  The children to whom she would have given birth if the accident had not happened.  The children in her classroom every day before the accident.  The babies of the children.  Her mother and father there.  And her younger sisters.  The accident.

The bartender gestures with his hand for her to take a seat.  Instead of sitting, she takes his hand, climbs up on the counter, pulls him up, and begins to dance lazily to the rhythm of the door swinging back and forth and the melody whittled by the wind.  Eyelids slowly lift with eyebrows.  The flesh and hair and eyeballs and clothes of the people begin to flicker in her vision.  Patches of color dissolve and disappear.  The familiar fades. 

As she pedals again, the mirror on her handlebars catches her eye, and she looks at herself with the main street shapes in the background.  She surveys herself.  Her face is the same as the people she just left behind.  Alive or dead?  She grabs at the mirror and pounds it once with a fist.  She loses some balance and then regains it.  The mirror has swiveled around but does not budge.

She keeps riding till she comes to the opposite edge of town, and merges onto a wider road.  The billboards beguile her with smiling offers.  Walmart.  Insurance.  Casino.  The trees wave easily in the sun, proud and green.  For miles, there are no other vehicles on the road.  The sky is dyed blue.

As the blue darkens, her pedaling slows.  Suddenly, she presses the brakes, gets off her bicycle, and walks through the grass on the roadside.  On impulse, she lies down in the damp grass.  As she falls asleep, she hears a voice begin to sing.  The sound of the voice is filled with grief and understanding and hope, and she stirs gently, dreams filled with restless love.

Story by Jonathan Kotulski

My Poor Wives

My Poor Wives (right click to save file)

Martha bore me six children
Susan had three more
Martha died in the kitchen
Sue left through the door

Oh my oh my poor wives
They all leave or die
My poor wives

Leticia was a fighter
Samantha was a whore
Leticia went down swinging
Sam left through the door

Oh my oh my poor wives
They all leave or die
My poor wives

Sandra’s father was a lawyer
Margie’s was dirt poor
Sandra sued and broke me
Margie snuck out the door

Oh my oh my poor wives
They all leave or die
My poor wives

Six lifetimes I promised
And six I did abhor
Two of them in heaven
Four left through the door

Oh my oh my poor wives
They all leave or die
My poor wives

To one love was I faithful
I had but one love more
To the bottle I was faithful
Then left alone once more

Oh my oh my poor wives
They all leave or die
My poor wives

Lyrics by Ian North
Music by Jonathan Kotulski

A Greater Love

Anthony could put them back faster than any of us, and most days he did.

He had a charm that took us all in, and he told endless stories which were all false and filled with inconsistencies, but nonetheless had us enthralled. Though he came to us later on in life from a town he never spoke of, he was pretty much the only eloquent man in the town, and we sort of adopted him as a spokesperson when something needed to be said.

When our sheriff got drunk and killed a boy of 12, Anthony went in to talk to him. No one knows what he said, but they walked out with their arms over one another’s shoulders, laughing. The next day, the sheriff hanged himself, and that was the end of it.

When the lady in white strolled through the wall of the saloon, with pure white eyes blazing at us, hollow and enraged, we sort of expected Anthony to do the talking. Turns out, she was the first and last thing to leave him speechless. He dropped his drink on the floor when he saw her, and it shattered and the glass flew through her, but nothing broke.

She shook her head sadly, hovered for a minute, and left through the opposite wall. He watched her go, and when she had gone for a long while, he lined them up and put them back until he was on the floor, where he slept for two days before waking up and drinking more.

The second woman was a dark form, and she entered seven months later. Pure rage. She came in the same place, but not in the same sad, spent way. This one was on a warpath. She flashed from one table to another, knocking drinks and cards and chairs and men in every direction. When she made it to Anthony where he sat at the bar, she stood nose to nose with him, yellow smoke shooting from her nostrils.

“You don’t scare me,” he told her, flat and convincingly unimpressed.

“Ain’t no one in here ain’t skeered bu’choo,” she howled, in twelve different voices at once.

“That may be true, my dear,” he said, tilting his hat to the side, “but these men would be scared if you came crawling in as a rat or an ant. These,” he said, gesturing at our trembling presence, “are not bold men. And even if I was as scared as you were when I killed you, I would not apologize.”

The ghost flew into a rage. She whirled around the room, her features momentarily emerging in red from the deep shadow as she drove table legs into men’s throats, cards through their hearts, and coins through their eyes. He threw another one back while she did, placed it on the bar, and sighed.

“It’s a shame,” he said as she impaled one of us on the saloon doors, “that you can’t direct that energy into something useful. You’re nothing but a waste of fury.”

She flashed from view and reappeared at his stool, five time larger, with flashes of red sparking from her edges.

“You got something to say?”

She didn’t. It was clear she couldn’t touch him. Instead, she grew and grew until her darkness filled the room, suffocating the twelve of us who had survived the first rampage. As we gasped and fought to no avail, he raised his glass and told her to go to hell.

“No woman lived ‘nywheres near you that din’t git a free pass to heaven,” she told him.

“Glad to hear I redeemed you,” he joked. We didn’t find it all that funny considering we were almost dead.

She raged and expanded and burned and we felt her fire consuming what was left of our skin, and then she was gone in a burst, and he was left alone with his drink.

Shaking his head, he looked out over our charred corpses, and began to sing the sad song of the love that destroyed every woman and man who ever got near him.

Story by Ian North

Mushroom Tree…

Photograph by Joseph Kotulski

When You Bury A Man

When You Bury a Man (right click to save)

Roll his body over
Fore you put him in the ground
Never bury a man
With his nose pointing down

Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
You gotta bury a man
With his eyes to the sky

Let your eyes cry
When you put that man down
Never bury a man
Without your tears on the ground

Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
When you bury a man
You gotta let your eyes cry

Say a kind word
When he’s down in the ground
Never bury a man
Without a friendly sound

Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
You gotta bury a man
Then wish him the best

Walk from his grave
Feeling death in your bones
Never bury a man
Without thinking of home

Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
Don’t you know nothing
When you bury a man
You’re gonna follow him down

Lyrics by Ian North
Music by Jonathan Kotulski

Looney and the Naked Trees

When he was still a child, Looney was given his name by a nameless seaman who passed through town. The sailor heard his strange cry and after listening carefully, declared the sound Looney, meaning “loon-like,” and then the stranger was off again toward the West coast.

We all felt that the characterization was apt for the child as well as the sound, and the levity of it suited us. Looney was mostly our fault.  When his parents died, none of us took the child in, leaving him to develop as an animal would.

He ran around naked most of the time in the woods out past McGarty’s fields. Something ought to have been done, perhaps, but to punish the boy would be to punish a problem of our own making.  So, ill at ease with our culpability, we let him roam.

McGarty caught Looney in the fields one morning, leaning in to hear the gossip passing between McGarty and a neighbor who happened by.  We assume, although no one is sure, that this is how he learned to speak. 

About sixteen years had passed since the death of his parents when Looney got sociable all of a sudden.  We recognized his father’s duds when he appeared clothed for the first time, wandering across the road without direction, trying to join the swell of people that milled around during that time.

He kept at it for about two minutes, then disappeared down an alleyway.  He was back the next day, milling around, and after two weeks, he stayed among us for the better part of the day before retreating to his primal state.

Then one day, he broke from the throng, climbed to the roof of the saloon, and spoke:

“The naked trees have given me food, and I see through this town.”

Then, seemingly startled by something on a neighboring roof, which none of us could see, he scrambled to the street and fled.

He took to climbing like this, once a day, and speaking odd things to us until some unseen terror threatened him and he fled.  He claimed that our beards connected to strings that played like guitars when we slept.  He said that our wives stitched together five-legged serpents at home when we were in the saloon.  He fiercely denounced the way we painted ourselves white and floated around, although none of us had done any such thing.

Whether he was a prophet or a madman was a subject of much debate.  No one could figure any sort of explanation for the things he said.  Then McGarty mentioned something that gave us all pause.

“That thar yung ‘un been eatin mushrooms off dead trees. He done snatched all a em off one a mine.”

No one had eaten mushrooms from the woods before, so we had no idea what effects they might have on a young mind.  We discussed this at great length, and came to no conclusions.  Did the mushrooms possess some magic? Were they intoxicating?  Were they evil?  Even if we knew that the mushrooms caused the speeches, how would we know what they meant, if they meant anything?

It was finally settled that Ed, who was known for doing just about anything that any of us suggested, would find a tree with some mushrooms and partake. 

We all accompanied him to the tree at McGarty’s place, and found a clump of mushroom at the base that Looney had missed.  It was the size of a marble.  Ed rolled it around in his hand, then, with a final lucid look at his friends, he threw it to the back of his throat and swallowed.

“Nuthin.”

Then suddenly, a kind of terror swept over him. His fingers locked up and his eyes spun around, searching for something.  Without warning, he leapt from us and ran back toward town.

We followed him as well as we could, but he got a lead on us, and by the time we caught up with him, he was standing on a rooftop across from Looney, screaming competing prophecies.

“Your maidens carry the dust of the Western plains upon the soles of their feet!” cried Ed.

“Pigs escape from your daughter’s lungs when they sing,” replied Looney.

They went back and forth like this for some time, then looked simultaneously at the same spot in the air between them.  Looney scrambled from his perch, and Ed fell from his and died.

We heartily agreed that the experiment had been a failure, and held a wake for poor Ed that weekend.  In the house of mourning, Ed’s wife refused to speak with any of us. We understood and kept our distance, chewing on the food that she had prepared.  We weren’t aware that she had collected some mushrooms and mixed them in to our meal so that all of us might share in the affliction that did Ed in.

One of the last things we remembered before the end, after the meal took effect and we started seeing the things which Ed and Looney had warned us about, was that someone had knocked over Ed’s coffin, and the body lay sprawled and stiff among us.  As we slipped into the visions which would claim our lives, we saw Looney suddenly standing by the body, enraged. 

Then, under the spell of God-knows-what, as we all careened toward our own fates, he began to sing like a bird about how to deal with the burial, but it was too late by then. We would all be gone by sunset.

Story by Ian North

Kingdom

Kingdom (right click to save song)

I’ve seen your glory in the gutters
I’ve seen your blood upon the street
I’ve seen hand upon the widow
And your fire upon the meek

And the aliens, though strangers
Hold your kingdom on their tongues
And the children, when we shush them
Hold your cries within their lungs

Oh Redeemer can you help me
To believe that you can
Keep your kingdom here within me
Just as you have with these

My love I’m prone to sell it
To the gods of Babylon
My heart and my frail body
Will be broken and soon gone

And the aliens, though strangers
Hold your kingdom on their tongues
And the children, when we shush them
Hold your cries within their lungs

Oh Redeemer can you help me
To believe that you can
Keep your kingdom here within me
Just as you have with these

And when your crow comes
And life rattles from my bones
And my flesh falls from my spirit
May your kingdom take me home

Oh Redeemer can you help me
To believe that you can
Keep your kingdom here within me
Just as you have with these

Lyrics by Ian North
Music by Jonathan Kotulski

The Preacher on Saturday Night

The preacher came to us from two towns over.  All we heard tell about the place was that it rained all the time, nonstop, in buckets.

He snuck in to our streets one night, and the rains followed him. He locked himself up in the church downtown and wore a prim, dark suit. That’s why we christened him the Preacher, although we never heard him preach from that first night until the water overwhelmed us.

The hiss of electric clouds moved across the fields all the next day.  A slow, grinding drizzle followed after that.

The Preacher hid out most of the time, running to the grocer’s for food without a word to anybody.  He bought mostly green beans and whiskey.

A poker player saw him run past the doors one morning. “There go the preacher,” he said, “how come he thinks he can stay in our church n’ not pay rent?”

A murmur of agreement passed around the room.  If there’s one thing men enjoy in a town with dead air and not much to do, it’s unrest.  The rain had cast an oppressive mood over all of us, and we were itching for a cause to shake it.

Our unrest grew until, two days later, when the Preacher went out for food, we all leapt up and flooded out to meet him.

“Hey preach,” we all said.

“Preach?”

“Yeah.  You been stayin in our church.  You gotta earn your keep if you’re gonna stay in our church.”

“I ain’t no preacher.”

“You are now.  If we come by on Sunday and you ain’t preaching, you gonna get throwed out.”

The Preacher, upon hearing this, turned red as a beet and retreated back to the chapel.

The rain fell harder that night than we had ever seen. Then, on the Wednesday before our new parson was to preach, a woman came to town.  We all took notice of that.

She rode a horse all alone.  She dressed simply, but she was a perfect shape, and we all fell in love before we even got to know her.  She burst into the saloon and every eye turned, except Ed’s left, which never moved because it was made of wood.

“Is John here?”

Four men name John raised their hands.

Apparently, they weren’t the Johns she was looking for. She shook her head and left, and there, on the steps between her horse and the doors, she froze.  The Preacher stood out in the street staring at her.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“I was on my way out.  Stopping in every town.”

He looked at her for a while, both just standing there, and she moved to him. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at her.  She stopped again.

“Get out of town.  Go back to the parson. You’ve brought nothing but rain to me.”

We had all suddenly noticed the rain because of its effect on this woman’s dress, which was now holding her just as close as we wanted to.

“He don’t love me.  Never did.  I left him.  You’re all I got.”

“It’ll get worse,” the preacher said, which was true.  We figured it would get worse either way, so she may as well stay, but we didn’t say a word.

There was a long pause as they looked at one another, searching for finality.

“Well? You gonna git now or in a box?” the preacher asked her, and we all gasped.  She didn’t reply, so he shot her between the eyes.

“What the hell was that?” We demanded. Such beauty rarely found cause to come among us, and we were aghast at the waste of woman.

He spit and looked around.  Then, “she was the wife of a real preacher when I loved her.  Had the power to pray rain from the skies and throw it on my head. And that’s what he did.”

Lightning jumped over us and struck a tree at the edge of town.

“You ought to bury her,” we said.

“I ain’t laying a hand on her.”

He turned and sloshed back to the church, and then the rain really started to get going. Two of us went to the girl and dragged the body to the undertaker’s.

By Saturday, a mass of water of Biblical proportions was moving our way from the mountains.  We didn’t know about it, and we wouldn’t until it killed us, so we sat drinking, speculating in hushed tones about the content of the next morning’s sermon.  After what we had seen, we couldn’t wait.

He showed up at ten that night in the saloon carrying a guitar, took two shots of whiskey, then addressed us.

“You called me a preacher,” he started.  We all nodded.

“But I ain’t a preacher.  I’m a musician, and my music don’t even belong in the Church.  It don’t belong on a Sunday morning. It belongs here, on a Saturday night, with a few drinks in me.”

With that, he moved to a stool and began to play, slow, sad, and red as a beet, with eyes closed in prayer. He was getting ready to say something any one of us lowlifes would have said, given the chance to talk to God.

While he picked at the song, the wall of water moved toward us at full speed. We heard it rip up Ed’s barn, rush over plains and trees. We couldn’t run, couldn’t register where the noise was coming from, so we just sat there, waiting for it to rush over us.

The last words we heard before the end were the Preacher’s plea for a kingdom of his own.

Story by Ian North