Horrible Harvest

The first I know’d of heaven on Earth was the first time I took a smoke of opium. Goddamn that freed my mind pert near the second my lungs was filled with that toasty, sweet smelling smoke. Misery finds you in every corner of a war, and laudanum, it gives you shadows of shelter from it but taking a draw from a mixture of tobacky and opium tar, that burns the misery clear away. No need for shelter from the fright and tedium of war. No need for the tight stranglehold of duty to soldiering nor the binding weight of orders give to you from superiors, most of which was just downright inferior crackers. Smoking opium puts you in a state of mind where you just don’t give a shit about bluebellies nor Rebs nor the Union nor the fucking Confederacy. None of it means a goddamn thing, and I tell you true, there ain’t no better spot to be in than not giving a shit.

Here’s the story of my first draw of utopia. I puffed, shallow at first, sucked the flame into the bowl. When the ember of the mixture glowed, I felt high-on excitement, and drew in the smoke deep. I held it there, in my lungs for what felt like was my last breath on Earth. My eyes rolled upward, and my bones folded at the joints. I fell in a bundle to the ground. Leastwise, that’s what I come to understand what’d happened. I come to after a time, how much time I can’t say – Coulda been ten seconds, coulda been ten years. My lungs felt dry as sand, and my throat was coated in some sort of chalk-like substance. The tops of the trees circled around me in a dizzying dance. My head swiveled about as I propped up on my elbows and stared at the slow-moving waters of the Tennessee River. I was drenched in sweat, a stream of which was pouring out of my ears. As I recollect, I had the thought that even my brain was perspiring.

Without logic nor reason, as I watched the gentle waters run wild, I come to the decision that I liked smoking opium. In an instant, I was gone from it all. I was gone from being Augustus Tennyson and nothing felt better than being cleared from being that miserable sumbitch.

I also know’d I had to find a balance, where I stood in the now, but had no purchase in it in the least. Where I was there without being there. I was a goddamn scientist for the next hour or so, finding just the right measure of tobacky to opium to keep me on alert without giving a care in the world about what I was kept alert to or for.

When I fount the right formula, I cut the opium gum I’d confiscated from Daddy into the right measurements, wrapping each piece into they’s own little strips of canvas and stuffed them all in my haversack. The pipe and tobacky I’d stole from Felix was packed away, too, and from that moment on, I didn’t go nowhere without my haversack filled with what I come to call my pieces of St. Peter because they was my tickets to heaven.