Horrible Harvest

Can’t say what was said or done for a good stretch of time after Charles clocked me across the head with lumber. Little specks of knowing get kicked out from deep in my brain every now and then, but I can’t make sense of none of it. I can’t even hardly remember coming to. It’s a weird and frightful thing finding your way out of that kind of darkness. You’re just there, and you got no idea where there is. It’s like the world entire lost form and you along with it. You become nothing in that time, and suddenly, for reasons you can’t put together, your back to being you and the world is fitted back together all around you.

When I found purchase back in the waking world, I had a time figuring who and where I was. My name come to me when I heard it come in a mumble from a blur of folks rambling about in front of me. I couldn’t feel my arms, and I’ll admit to finding that particularly concerning. The side of my head and jaw was in pounding pain. I opened and closed my eyes over and over again, trying to hold focus on the goings-on around me. After a time, I seen a face so near mine, I felt the sumbitch breathing on me.

“Hello, lil’ brother,” Charles said.

“What – ” The word fell out my mouth for no particular reason. I had curiosity about the this and that around me, but I didn’t have the sense about me to ask about it. “What” was just the easiest word to say.

“This is where you pay.”

My eyes started to come around to working normal, and it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to happen at that particular time because the sun hung in the sky right at the spot where it near blinded me. At some point, I realized I was seeing two suns, the one in the sky and the reflection of the sun in a lake. I looked down at my feet, and I seen that I was standing on my toes. A development that didn’t make no sense at all. What confused me most was the fact I felt near weightless. I looked up and it finally all made sense. I was hanging by my hands from a tree limb. It was just tall enough for my toes to touch the ground. I must’ve been hanging for a good while, because my arms’d gone numb.

Some fella told Charles to back away, and quick as the order come, he did as told.

“Augustus Tennyson, you have committed a great act of treason against your country.”

I turnt to my left and seen Mr. Miller sitting on a tree stump. Soot and dirt covered his face.

“You worked with conspirators to sever the head of our great confederacy. I am all, rice farmer. I alone give birth to this great nation, and you would join in your captain’s plan to disband my brigade and end my command. For that, you will rot in these woods. Dangling from the limb of this grand tree. The bugs and beasts will feed on you. That is your punishment for treason.”

I couldn’t do nothing but spit out a laugh. Again, wasn’t no real intent behind it. I just couldn’t think of nothing else to say, nor could I have said it if I did have an idea of what to say.

“Then there is the matter of your vulgarity,” Mr. Miller said. “Your vile sins. Yours and my son’s.”

He was talking to me like I had a grasp of what he was saying, but the shape my brain was in at the time, he could have been speaking a foreign language for all I know. It’s only over time that I’ve pieced together this part of my memory. I had it in me to know I was madder than shit. I knew I hated the sumbitch talking at me, but I couldn’t put together why.

It wasn’t until Charles marched Kenneth in front of me that I started to get hold of some clearing in the fog.

“It pains me to call him my son,” Mr. Miller said.

Kenneth’s face and chest was bruised up all to hell.

“I do not have a son. I have decided. I never did.”

I got hold of a little fight and struggled against the irons around my wrists, only to regret the fire out of it when my head nearly split in two from pain.

Kenneth and me locked eyes and he mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

Mr. Miller pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “He’s confessed to his crimes. I have it here. Your letter did not survive the fire, but your sins did, and I have record of it to prove what happens here today is just.”

I fought the urge to vomit from the pain.

“I am power, boy. I survived the fire.”

I flopped my head back to do my best to look him dead in the eyes, and I said, “Thought you said there weren’t no fire.”

Charles stepped forward and give me a slug in the gut so hard it near knocked all the wind out of me. Struggling to breathe made my head hurt even more.

“You’ve always been an insubordinate little shit,” Mr. Miller said. “No matter. We’ll see how funny you think it is after we wash away your sins.”

He give Charles a nod, and my brother yanked Kenneth by the arm and pulled him to the lake.

“Today, water will purify what you have defiled – The Miller name.”

Kenneth didn’t go easy. He kicked and pulled and fought every inch of the way to the lake and for it, he received a kick to the ass and a punch to the back of the neck. When his feet sunk into the muddy banks of the calm water, he begged his daddy for forgiveness.

I tugged against my restraints with all my might. I growled and grunted and fought like hell to break free. I was high on desperate so I didn’t feel none of the pain I’d felt before. The fog was now lifted in full, and my mind was cleared of all the clutter and questions. A rage I ain’t never felt before give me a shock of strength, and I was certain I’d be able to tear the fat limb from the trunk of the tree. I jerked and strained and jerked some more, but it barely moved.

Charles forced Kenneth to wade further out into the murky lake water until they was submerged chest high. They stopped and waited for Mr. Miller to pass judgement.

Never moving from his stump, he spoke, wiping sweat from his forehead and upper lip with a piece of cloth torn from the tail of a shirt that belonged to one of his men. “Today we cleanse the Earth of an error. One I am told is owed to my loins, but such a thing cannot be true. For I do not make mistakes. This blunder that lay claim to the honor of being my son was not delivered to me from God as an heir to my kingdom. He was delivered to me as a test. Will this creature of deceit fool me into loving him and granting him rule over the empire of good that I have built? No, he will not. I face your test, Lord. Resolute in my beliefs that through me, you wield the holy sword of reprisal. He has defiled the Miller name and discarded his masculinity – The highest rank of humankind in service to you, my heavenly Father. I give praise to you, and I am in gratitude to you for allowing me to strike down the one who dishonors my name and your rule.”

Like a Roman emperor, Mr. Miller raised his fist shoulder high. He stuck out his thumb parallel to the ground and then turnt it downward.

Strong as a bull and quick as a flea, Charles grabbed up Kenneth by his hair and forced his head under the water.

I roared. “No! Stop!”

Kenneth thrashed about wild-like against my brother, the executioner, but he didn’t raise no more than splashes of water.

“Stop – Charles – Stop!”

Charles turnt my way, and I could see he was dead inside.

“Listen to me – Listen – We’s brothers. We’s Tennysons. That means something – We’s brothers, Charles – Stop – Please!”

Kenneth’s thrashing turnt weak.

“Charles, I’m begging you, brother. Stop.”

He eased up just the tiniest bit and stood a little taller. I seen a light in his eyes that weren’t there before, and I felt the smallest of hope that I’d gotten through to him, but it faded quick when Charles grinned and pushed Kenneth’s head deeper into the murk.

I screamed. “I’ma kill you, Charles! I’ma tear you part! I’ma fucking kill you!”

The fight in Kenneth give out, and his legs and feet come up behind him, floating in the still violent waters.

Charles let go of Kenneth’s lifeless body and pushed it away. It looked to me like he got a kick out of watching it glide like an unmoored vessel through the wake caused by the drowning.

I wept. The life I’d lived, it’d turnt me hard, and my spirit’d gone calloused long ago. The only thing that’d ever give me a turn towards tender was now dead and floating in a lake in the middle of the woods, in the middle of a war. So, I cried.