The Beast of New Burnside

by

Dalian Moore

There is only one man alive in Johnson County today who knows where the house in question is located.  All I know is that it is (or was) somewhere between New Burnside and old Parker City.  It was abandoned long before the turn of the 20^th Century, but whether or not anyone has lived there since is up to the reader to decide.

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The Smith boys were all born between 1901 and 1910, and they worked with their Daddy in the fields as soon as they could hold a hoe.  They walked a mile or more to school in all kinds of weather without the best of shoes, and dealt with many hardships growing up.  Every so often the family would go into Parker City and New Burnside to trade, and while their parents and sisters were visiting friends and family, the boys would go off looking for a swimming hole or good place to fish.  One time two of the boys went off walking, and somewhere between the two towns they came upon an old house embraced in forest regrowth with a tree growing up through the parlor floor. 

There was talk of a house somewhere in the area where a horde of gold was hidden, so the boys, thinking this might be their lucky day, began exploring all the nooks and crannies.  It must have been a very fine house in its day with five chimneys for fireplaces in the kitchen and parlor downstairs and in all the upstairs rooms.  They couldn’t get all the way into the root cellar because of the way the house was caving in, but they could see a few old jars caked with dirt on the far wall.  The smallest boy squeezed through only to find one jar filled with bugs and the other two sealed but empty.  No luck there, but there was still a lot of house to search before they had to rejoin their family.

They walked into the old kitchen, which was away from the main part of the house.  It was a big room with an old butcher’s block in the middle, but no old knives or utensils.  There were the remains of an old pump and handle, and they tried the pump to see if any water would still come out.  It was rusty and gave a loud squeal, but nothing came through.  There were no cabinets or shelves left in the kitchen, but there was a floor board that bounced up when they stepped on it.  They thought that would be a perfect place to hide a stash of gold, and pulled up the board enough to reach down to see what was there.  There were insects of all kinds and spider webs, and it was awfully nasty under there.  They wiped their hands off on their overalls before moving into the parlor. 

They found an old organ with two foot pedals and wood carvings still left on one side.  One went down on all fours and began pumping the pedals while the other one tried to pull out the stops and play the keys.  The only sound that came forth was a kind of groan, so they quickly lost interest in the organ.  The only other thing in the room was a big old hearth and the tree growing up through the floor.  The tree was not so big around but went all the way up to the ceiling.  They went up the stairs, but had to climb rather than walk since so many of the steps were missing.  They stood on the landing looking down at the large parlor and imagined that a dance could have been held there years ago – perhaps a fancy dress ball for rich folks during the early settlement days.

There were three bedrooms upstairs, and they went into the first one which was also the largest.  There was an iron bed there with rusty old-fashioned bed springs, what looked like a writing desk, a ruined marble fireplace, and a closet in one corner.  It was the biggest bedroom they had ever seen.  This one room was bigger than most of the houses of their neighbors.  They ran to the desk, but were disappointed to see that all the drawers were missing and there was nothing inside.  They were looking into the fireplace for any hiding places for gold when they heard scratching inside the closet.  “That sounds like a cat or squirrel got trapped in there and is trying to get out,” the one said to his brother.  They walked over to the door of the closet and opened the door.  There was nothing inside, and the scratching stopped as soon as the door knob turned.

This was strange, but they went back to the fireplace to see if there were any loose stones or secret panels.  Once again, they heard scratching and a moaning coming from the closet.  It didn’t sound like a cat or squirrel, but might be a coyote.  It was scratching really hard this time because the door was vibrating with its effort.  “I’m going to open that door and stay behind it in case it is a coyote that’s gone mean,” said the older boy.  He pulled open the closet door, and the moaning, scratching, and movement stopped.  Wide-eyed, the boys looked at each other, and felt the hackles rise on their necks.  Both bolted for the door of the room, and just as they reached the threshold, the door slammed in their faces and locked.

Behind them the closet door looked like a bull or some other huge animal was pushing on the inside trying to get out, and a screech not of this world came from the closet where whatever was in there was scratching with huge talons to get out.  The boys pulled and pulled on the door leading out of the room, and one said, “Help me, Jesus!”  The younger one was crying, and it seemed like the monster in that closet was going to beat down that closet door.  They pulled with all their might, and finally the door budged.  They took off down what was left of the banister, fell into the parlor, tripped over the tree growing up into the room, got up and left through the space where the old kitchen door once hung.

They ran all the way back to town where their family was waiting for them.  They were a mess and looked like they’d been thrown from a horse or fallen out of a tree.  The younger boy just stared into space and shook, while the older one started telling his mother what had happened back in that old house.  A lady passed by who was known as a midwife in the area, and she took one look at the staring boy and sprang into action.  She got into her basket and brought out a bottle, pulled out the stopper, and waived it under his nose.  He started coughing and straightened up a little.  By this time a crowd had gathered wanting to know what was happening.

People on the fringes of the crowd were saying, “Those boys were in the old McGee house…that place should’ve been burned down long before now…nothing good ever came out of that place…the ghost of old man McGee was afoot…there was something of the devil in that old McGee place.”  Many remarks were flying around, and the family was in shock as they were humble people who never liked to draw attention to themselves.  They got the children into the wagon and headed home to Tunnel Hill.

The boys stayed home the rest of the summer, but talk of this incident was still circulating by the time school started in the fall.  A pretty girl with blonde braids came up to the older boy the first day of school, and told him that her grandmother had nursed old man McGee in the days after the Civil War.  Nobody in the county had money then, but this old man had sacks of gold.  He lent it out to people but charged such high interest that everyone in the debtor families had to work to pay it back.  The old man was merciless and threatened to put the law on anyone who didn’t repay on time.  The girl’s grandmother worked for years at the McGee place, and the old man had been an invalid for a decade before she got there.  In fact no one could remember him ever being out of the house.  He was confined to his big upstairs bedroom -- the very one where the two boys had been last summer.

The nurse would get him up in the morning, and he would sit at that desk reading his account book and counting his gold pieces all day long.  He counted coin by coin each and every day, and knew to the penny how much he would collect each week.  He didn’t like any of the “help” to be in his room when he had the gold out counting it, but one day the nurse came in at the wrong time.  Her eyes must have been as big as two full moons, because she had never seen one gold coin, much less piles and stacks of gold pieces.  Some had birds on them and others had Indians in full head dress.  She reckoned there was enough gold there to pay off all the mortgages in Southern Illinois, and was overwhelmed at the sight.

“Come in,” said old man McGee, in his deep creaking voice.  “I can tell you like what you see, so come in and get a good look.”    The nurse came in, and the glint of gold seemed to make the whole room glow.  “You know, a body doesn’t have to go through life cleaning up after folks all her life.  You could have all this gold and more if you wanted to,” the old man said.  “Well I’d like to know how to earn more, that is for sure, because with three children we stay pretty hard-pressed,” the nurse said.  As soon as she said it she felt wrong telling this, because the old man had never asked her one thing about herself or the family in all the years she worked for him.

“All you’ve got to do is sign this parchment, and if you don’t know how to write, just make your mark,” and the old man spread open a document in very old-fashioned handwriting.  The nurse could read well, but she couldn’t make out any of the words on the page.  “It is in an old language,” McGee said, “because it is an old business,” and he snorted a nasty sort of laugh.  “Just come on over here and sign it, and all you’ve ever wanted will be laid at your feet.”  She didn’t like Mr. McGee, but worked for him because he was one of the few who could pay wages.  He never had friends or family members that she knew of, and the only folks who came around were his debtors.  Maybe he wanted to make her the heiress to his fortune, but instead of feeling happy about it she felt terribly ill at ease.  He looked impatient, and she said, “I’ll be back tomorrow at the usual time,” and left the room.

That night she asked her husband what he thought about the whole business.  He said no one liked Mr. McGee, that was true, but there was an awful lot of good that could be done with that gold in the hands of the right person.  He told her to go ahead and sign the parchment.  The next day she went in and got the old man up to his desk.  He didn’t even want his breakfast, so anxious was he to get her to sign the document.  She said she would, and came up to the desk.  He brought out a pen made of solid gold.  “We’ll use this today,” and he took her hand.  His touch was cold and clammy, but the pen was hot.  He took the pen and pricked her finger and let her blood gather on the sharp tip.  “Now just make your mark here – quick!”   Everything was spinning.  This was not right.  Why had he stuck her with the pen?  She dropped the pen, and had the impulse to run.  She left the house that morning and never returned.

It wasn’t too long afterward that she heard Mr. McGee had died.  The cook brought up his breakfast, and saw him lying dead with his arms around piles of gold coins all over his desk.  McGee was roundly hated in the community, and the nurse was the only one the cook could think of who ever acted kindly toward him.  She asked her what to do, and they decided to call the undertaker and the sheriff.  The undertaker would take care of the body, and the sheriff would know who should get the gold.  They arrived at the house, and went up the stairs together.  There was nothing in the old man’s room except his bed, writing desk, some coal still smoldering in the fireplace, and a closet.  They opened the door to the closet, but there was nothing in there either.  An investigation was initiated by the sheriff, but after weeks of inquiries no progress was made.  Neither the old man’s corpse nor the gold was ever found.

“Why are you telling me all that now?  It wasn’t a man in that closet.  I can tell you that for sure.  It was the worst kind of beast you ever did hear, and it meant to get out and get us,” the boy told the girl.  She said, “There is a little more to the story.  People say that old man McGee got his money through a deal with Satan, and that he was trying to get Granny to sign away her soul when she was his nurse.  He said it was ‘old business’ and that parchment was written in Latin or some other ancient language, which is why Granny couldn’t read a word of it.  The old man pricked Granny’s finger because she had to sign away her soul in blood – that’s the way the devil always does things.  She was a good Christian woman, so Satan couldn’t get her in the end.”  The boy thought about it, and said, “Well that all sounds like something the devil would do, but what did we hear?”   

The little girl’s lips trembled, and she said, “Either you heard the screams of torment from the old man’s soul who was taken from that room to Hell or the thing that took him there.”

©2007 – Lynn Dalian Moore – All Rights Reserved

I’ve Been Working On The Railroad

by

Dalian Moore

Retirement is fine for some people, but those whose being, personality, social interaction, and true satisfaction come from their jobs often find it hard to adjust when their workdays are over.  This is the story of four men who just couldn’t make the adjustment.

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“All aboard!” I shouted as I always did whenever the train, freight or passenger, would pull out from the Vienna Depot.  My name is Davy Hayes, and I live in a place called Puss Town.  It would be entertaining to hear what Sam Carter had to say about his house, the one where things move around on their own.  Something was always happening in that haunted house, but Sam was too cheap to find or build another one, so he escaped to his job on the railroad.  “You’re not going to believe this, Hayes, but today at breakfast, a flap jack just floated off the stove and over onto my plate.  It scared the tar out of the kids, but my wife said, ‘I told you I cooked the lightest pancakes in the county.’”

It was a blistering hot day, and the air was so thick you’d need an axe to cut it.  “Shoot, man, I’d take this furnace of a day over being stuck there in my house,” Carter said, “there are some places in there where it stays cold all the time.”  There was a lot of talk about ghosts in Puss Town.  It started with a tale about a baby who was thrown down a well there.  Many can hear a baby crying day and night.  And then there are the Indian ghosts… The Cherokee Indians’ Trail of Tears cut right through here, so some claim to see an Indian woman sheltering a baby in her lap frozen solid out on the road crossing the tracks.  If all the things that Carter tells really happen, Puss Town must be one of the most haunted places in the world.

We rode the train up to Tunnel Hill where there was a trestle rising out of the canyon just about 100 foot.  We had to do some work on the rails, and trade off water as the trains passed.  It was hard and hot work, but we were young, strong, and able for anything.  Working on the railroad was about the best job a fellow could get in Johnson County, unless you wanted to be a telegrapher, and who wants to stay inside all day long?   By evening we were so worn out, hot, and sweaty that we went inside the tunnel to get cool. 

Looking out the other end of the tunnel it looked like a dream world with the layers of rock, ferns, and light coming down in fingers through tree branches.  We wanted to get good and cool so we kept on walking until the darkness all around us was so total that we lost sense of ourselves, our bodies, like we were part of the darkness.  It wasn’t just cool there -- it was cold, almost freezing.  Then we heard it.   It was like a swooch of hydraulic equipment, and it was in a rhythm that you could count between swooches.  There was nothing in the tunnel that could have made a sound like that.  Carter looked at me and said, “I believe there’s something here the same as in my house!”  We turned tail and ran back to the original opening of the tunnel, welcoming the scorching heat on our skin.

It wasn’t too much longer until we caught a ride back to Puss Town, and we told the engineer what we heard.  He said we spooked ourselves walking in that tunnel, “It was all your imagination.  Carter here has everybody thinking the whole county is haunted with the tales about his house and Puss Town.”  Sam Carter got a little hot, and said, “Everything I’ve told has been the Gospel truth, and we heard a machine or something in that tunnel where there was none!”  I told him to quiet down and look forward to his dinner.  Sam never appreciated his wife enough, but all the men in Puss Town admired her cooking.  I’d be lucky to get beans and cornbread tonight, but Sam would go home to fried chicken, ears of sweet corn, green beans and new potatoes, biscuits, and freshly churned butter with honey from his brother-in-law’s hives up in New Burnside.  Some men have all the luck!

The rest of the week went pretty good, but then we were told a VIP with his own bogies would be coming through the county on Saturday night.  We were sent up to Tunnel Hill, and it was pretty boring waiting for that special train to pass through.  We looked through the tunnel from the North end, and Carter said, “Do you feel like going back in to the middle tonight?  We can find out if it is still cold in there like the other day and see if we can hear anything.”   I said we couldn’t do anything until the train passed, but I was a little scared to go in if the truth was to be known.  Just about that time we heard the train.  It slowed down, and whoever was in the caboose said a few words to the people who gathered there with lanterns.  I reckon he was a politician of some sort.  We weren’t interested in politics at all, but we did like seeing those special rail cars.  They were the finest we had ever seen, and the people inside were dressed like they had just walked out of the fashion magazines my wife reads.

After a short time the engineer gave us the signal that the journey would continue, and he left pulling those perfect rail cars and beautiful people on South.  Carter said, “Listen, let’s go into the tunnel now, durn it.  I’m not afraid no matter what we hear in there, because strange things go on in my house day and night.”  I figured there’d be nothing in there to scare us because my mind was still full of the sight of those ladies and gentlemen all dressed up riding in rail cars with prettier furniture than any of us in Puss Town had in our homes.  We walked into the tunnel, and dark was all around us.  We could see a streak of moonlight at the other end and the mist that must settle in at this time of night.  I don’t think I had ever been up this late in my entire life.

When we got to the middle of the tunnel we could see the shadow of a man at the other end wearing a railroad hat kindly full at the top.  He was carrying a lantern, we figured, because light was walking in with him.  The next thing we knew, the light gathered into a ball and went up like a balloon you see at the fair to the top of the tunnel.  We were trying to work out where the man went, when the ball of light came down right in front of us, only it wasn’t light when it landed.  It was the man and he stood nose to nose with Carter.

Some say that people are just like animals with instincts built in to save their lives.  I guess this kicked in because without even thinking the two of us started running back out the North end of the tunnel.  It seemed like it was taking forever to get out of the tunnel or like something was holding us in.  All at once we heard the swooch again, only this time we saw what was making it.  There were three men pumping a handcar, and they went by us like lightning.  When we got out of the tunnel we looked back and saw the other “man” signaling them with his lantern, but when they reached the end of the tunnel they all vanished like star dust.

We got back to the road where a wagon was waiting to take us back to Vienna and home to Puss Town.  We jumped in and told the driver to take off.  He said, “What’s the hurry?  You guys are sweating like you were working in the heat all day when I know good and well all you did was wait for that midnight special to come and go.”  We collapsed, and I must have passed out.  The happy sight of the Vienna Depot was the next thing I remember, and we were in such a state that the wagoneer and the telegrapher invited us in to have some coffee with them before we went home to our wives and families.

The coffee was strong because that telegrapher/station master had to stay up all night, and it brought me back to my senses.  Carter was already talking, “I thought I had seen it all before tonight!”  The other two men, well-acquainted with stories of his haunted house and the ghosts around Puss Town, just laughed and rubbed their chins and heads.  “I’m not joshing you boys, durn it!  We saw three old boys pumping a hand car going through the tunnel and some sort of ghost waving them through with a lantern, then the whole bunch of them turned into thin air.”  They were laughing even harder now, and one was slapping his knees and bent over cackling away.

Just about that time the engineer came in to take over on the first scheduled train of the morning going all the way to Chicago.  He wanted to know what the joke was, and they told them as Carter and I looked on with our mouths hanging open.  The engineer always thought Sam Carter made up everything he told and scoffed at us the day we first heard the swooch in the tunnel.  He was different now – stiff and white as a sheet.  “Just a minute there boys.  I never made the connection until now, but it is all clear to me what is going on up there in Tunnel Hill.” 

“When this line was first put in, the company brought in an old lifer from another railroad.  He must have been over 60 by then – maybe even 65, but he knew everything there was to know about maintaining a line, loading/unloading trains, economizing on coal – just think of anything, and he knew it.  There were three young men he was training, and being young they were silly half the time.  They would get on the handcar and go in and out the tunnel and then over and back on the high trestle instead of doing the work they were sent up there to do.  He warned them that they’d never get their pensions like he was about to start drawing if they didn’t get serious.”

“I guess they did enough work, but just the minimum.  They weren’t go-getters if you know what I mean.  One day they were horsing around on that handcar – two on one side and one on the other – and they started to cross the trestle from the North.  Sometimes on those curves before Tunnel Hill, even the sound of a train can seem closer or farther off than it is.  They were going to get the car off at the far side of the tunnel in time for the 4:00 train.  The fellow pumping on his own looking North saw the two jump off, and one went all the way down almost 100 feet to the bottom of the canyon.  That was the last thing he ever saw, because at the same moment the train hit him from behind and ran over the third man.”  The telegrapher said, “My uncle was sending messages in those days, and reported all that happened for the next week.  I remember that incident too.  It was the worst thing to ever happen on this stretch of tracks.” 

“That’s right, but there’s more to the story it seems,” the engineer said.  One of the men said, “Well I’ll be dogged.”  The other one started to say something, but Carter broke in, “Do you mean that we saw three ghosts on the hand car in the tunnel tonight?”   I said, “What else could it be?  But what about the man who turned into a ball of light and came down right in front of us and was a man again?” 

The engineer bowed his head and said he was the last man on Earth to admit something like this was possible, and went on.  “The boys’ families blamed the old railroad man for the deaths, and you know how people are in Southern Illinois.  Gossip and hatred can smother a person until they start to believe what people say about them is true.  The old man felt so bad about what happened to those boys that the day of his retirement he went home and shot himself.  He never received one penny of the pension he’d worked his whole life for, nor did he have a wife to collect it.”

“I reckon he was trying to scare you boys out of that tunnel so you’d stay alive or warn the ghostly trio that the train was coming a few minutes early.  However you figure it, those boys never learned the lesson that would have saved their lives, and that poor old hard-working railman is still on the job – probably forever.”

©2007 – Lynn Dalian Moore – All Rights Reserved

The Scent of a Woman

By

Dalian Moore

We think nothing of a case of the flu today, because we know it will go away after a few days if treated correctly.  This was not the case in the early part of the 20^th Century.  Without antibiotics and with few properly trained doctors around, influenza claimed many lives of Southern Illinoisans who were underfed, overworked, the very young, and the very old. 

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“I need a drink,” said Daniel Johnson, a high school friend, in a panic stricken voice.  “You?” I said with eyebrows raised. “Why I’ve never seen you take a drink in your life.”  He looked at me shaking, and said, “Just give me whatever you have, Pat Taylor.”  I don’t keep liquor in the house as a rule, but found an old bottle of Wild Turkey, and poured him a shot.  He drank it straight down and wanted another, so I gave him more and a glass of water.  After finishing the glass of water, he was ready to sit down and tell me what was going on.  It would be bad news, I knew, because we live so far out in the country that no one just stops in at 10:00 at night.

“You probably heard the dogs tonight.  We were out hunting coons, and my dogs had one treed just down from the cemetery.  I took aim, but felt someone come up behind me and smelled lavender perfume all around me. It ruined my shot, and the coon jumped limbs and got away.  I turned to look back and saw nothing, but the strangest sight you could imagine flashed in my peripheral vision.  It looked like an old fashioned blouse moving on its own through the cemetery!  It was really white and seemed like it was glowing.  “Now come on, Dan, how many of these did you have before you got here?”

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” he said.  “I was too scared to follow whatever it was, but I couldn’t let my best dogs get away.  I put them down in your pen – hope you don’t mind.  I had a creepy feeling like something cold came over me all of a sudden.”  The next thing we heard was the slam of a truck door in the driveway. This time it was Dennis Row, “Hey there, what is Dan doing over here this time of night?”  I said he was coon hunting but was having a little rest.  “Come on up here, Dennis,” Dan hollered.  He did and saw the bottle and shot glass, and said, “Why didn’t you tell me there was a party going on here?”  Dan said, “There’s no party – far from it, but you might want a drink yourself after I tell you what I saw down the road.”

He recounted the tale, and Dennis said, “Other people have seen strange movements in the cemetery on nights like this.  Why don’t we call one of those ghost hunters and see if they’d like to investigate this?”  They asked me to get on the internet and see if the TV show they had been watching had a website with a phone number.  I told them I didn’t want to get involved in any such nonsense, but went ahead and started checking.  Not only was there a website, but the producers asked people to tell about hauntings.  They wanted a description, exact location, and who to contact.  I put in everything, and Dan agreed to use his phone number as the contact.

I thought that would be the end of the subject as the two men drove away, but a few days later I had a call from Dan saying that the producers contacted him.  They were going to come here with all their gear, a psychic, and a television crew and try to capture the ghost on film or with other measurement tools they used.  I said, “Get out of here!  No way!”  I believed it when I saw a film crew out in the cemetery as I was walking my dog a week or so later.  They asked me did I know anything about hauntings in this area.  I told them this was Southern Illinois, and there was a different ghost every mile and a half.  I continued, “There are so many stories, but in this forest at night people’s imaginations run wild.  There were two ladies who claimed to see a Bigfoot over in Grantsburg, and horsemen who claimed to be abducted by aliens during a campout down by Eddyville some years ago.”

“So you’re not a believer then?” the young good-looking producer asked.  “Let us say I have not seen anything with my own eyes, and until I do I won’t accept any of it as true.  I do believe that the people who say they have seen things really thought they did, though,” I explained.  “We’ll be here for a few days, and if you know anyone willing to talk to us on camera please call us at the Holiday Inn,” and he gave me his business card.

Later the next day, the local newspaper talked to one of the film crew, and wrote an article in the paper after the investigation was finished.  It mentioned Dan, and said that the psychic had communicated with the ghost, but that they did not wish to disclose their findings until the program aired on cable TV. 

The program did air, and I must say it was one of the most fascinating programs of its kind.  The psychic was not strange or witchy-looking at all.  She was a graduate student in psychology who learned that she could communicate with the restless spirits as a child.  Otherwise she was as normal as you and me.  The program interviewed several old people from the community who said they had smelled lavender perfume in the cemetery or seen the outline of a very slim woman in old-fashioned dress with a long skirt and hair piled on top of her head.  The sensitive electronic equipment was not able to pick anything up in the way of sound or video, but the psychic’s explanation was excellent.

“Ghosts do not sense time they way we do.   Even if they were buried 100 years ago, decades may be like a few seconds to them.  They don’t realize that they are dead, but can’t follow the white light that leads spirits away from the physical world.  Perhaps they died suddenly, traumatically, or were in such a confused psychological state at the time of their passing that they never realized their bodies died,” she said.  “This is the case of the ghost in this little county in Southern Illinois.  There were deadly influenza epidemics in the area before 1920, and this lady was one of the victims.”

“Not all spirits can materialize.  This lady only materializes partially when she becomes agitated, but when a person passes her grave she can share the scent of the perfume she wore on her last day alive.   Ghosts will communicate through any of our senses.  You might even get a headache or upset stomach in a haunted place, and that will be the spirits trying to communicate.  Living people are mostly unaware of the unseen, but a few of us are very receptive.  Pay attention to everything going on in your body the next time you pass through a haunted area.”

I thought that was really interesting, and she explained the possibilities so well.  She went on, “This lady had the flu, a terrible case, and she was in bed with it when she went into labor.  The delivery exhausted all her resources which had been taxed to their limits by the illness, and she died.  She doesn’t know she did, though.  She tries to contact everyone who passes her burial site, but cannot often get through.  Then she gets frustrated, and sometimes glows or comes out as a shadow, which is what people have seen.  More have smelled her perfume or heard the rustling of the petticoats in which she was buried.”

The camera returned to the original actor introducing the program, “But why does she want to communicate?   What is it she wants?  Surely if you made contact with her, you know.”  The psychic said, “She’s looking for something.”   The announcer prompted her to tell the rest of the story, and she said, “She is looking for her baby.”  The psychic went on to explain that this mother is desperate to find her child and see that the baby is alright after such a hard delivery.  “So did you get through to her?” the interviewer asked.

“I explained to her through psychic communication that the reason she could not find her baby was that the child grew up and had a long life, and that it was she who died.  She finds this unbelievable, and can’t make the connection that she is even in the cemetery.  She thinks she is at home, and that all who pass her grave are visitors who might be able to aid in her search.  I told her she can rejoin her child if she will just walk into the light.  She is afraid to do this, but was thinking it over as we left.  I hope she will find her way,” the psychic said sincerely.  About a week later there was a beautiful double rainbow coming own on both sides of the cemetery, and we all hoped this was a sign that the lady had crossed over to the world of spirit or heaven. 

Everything was quiet after that until two years ago, when another friend of mine said she smelled perfume in the cemetery.  I said, “Oh no!”  This meant that the lady did not follow the light.  My friend said, “It was strong and all around me, and was distinctly the scent of roses.”

©2007 – Lynn Dalian Moore – All Rights Reserved 

It was my understanding of English that alerted me to the fact that even though my father was a gentleman with great holdings, there was something different about my mother and me.  I heard an ugly old white woman fanning herself furiously say, “There goes Jacques Fournier’s bastard and doxy -- how sad for Margaret.”    I had to ask one of our neighbors who had been to university in France what those words meant, and he told me a bastard was a child without a father and that a doxy was like a woman of the streets who sold herself for money.   Why would anyone call us by such names?  I had a father who was a great man – they said his name, and my mother was not a street woman but a proper lady who kept a lovely house with a maid and cook of her own on a fashionable avenue.

The only people who ever looked at me that way or said hateful things they didn’t think I could understand were white, most of them with blue eyes like my father.  One day Father said that I was a clever boy, and if I paid careful attention to the tutor he hired that maybe I could attend university in Europe some day.  I asked him why his eyes were blue and mine brown, and why the very white people called us names.  He looked disturbed by this question, but answered, “Mon Dieu! There are two kinds of love in the world, but the best is freely given.  This is the love I have for your mother and the reason you are here in the world.  There is another love that has to do with family love, social rank, property, and obligation.  You and your mother can never be a part of the second kind of love, my son. C’est homage, mais c’est vrai (sad, but true).” 

He looked like he might cry, so I crawled up into his lap.   He went on, “Your mother is only one eighth African, but she is classified as colored.  You are mostly white by blood, but you carry some traits of your dark ancestors, like your beautiful dark eyes and curly hair.  These small differences divide us by race, and your opportunities in life will be limited because of this. I am so sorry to tell you these things.”  I told him not to worry, and that I was very pleased to be getting a tutor.  I was only nine years old, so I didn’t understand everything he said, but I never forgot that day. 

During the next five years I not only learned to speak French and English as a proper gentleman, but I learned Latin, mathematics, science, philosophy, and a little about government.   Those were the very best years of my life.  I was studying; my mother played the piano or did embroidery; and whenever Father visited she would light up from within.  One day I told Mother I had learned enough and wished to go to work.  She said, “But why, my darling?  Surely you have all you need or want, and you still have some years to prepare for university.”  An impatient and frustrated youth, I was disrespectful for the first time in my life, “Mother, you don’t even know what is going on around you.  You don’t bother to learn English, and you know nothing of money or politics.  The Creole way of life is over, and all that matters in the English world is money.  I just can’t stay here in the Quarter all my life living as a gentleman at home and being just a person of color beyond our door!”

“But you are free, mon fils (my son), a free person of color.  You are not a slave or servant.  That makes all the difference for us,” and she began to cry when she noticed that I had a bag packed by the door.  “I’m sorry, Mother, but I must go out to earn my own fortune and see if there is a place where even people of color can be truly free and not looked down upon.  Father has not been here for more than a month.  How can we live when we never know when he will be here again?”  I opened the door and she fell begging at my feet not to leave.  I longed to comfort her, but had made a firm decision to go.  “Adieu Maman!”

It took a long time for me to reach Baton Rouge, and Father’s plantation was only a few miles on.  I walked the rest of the way on foot, and was amazed to see the long carriage way down to the house as magnificent as some hotels in New Orleans.  Flowers were everywhere, and there fountains with amazing statues gazed down at me.   I doubted that the Royal gardens in France could be more beautiful than Fortunata (that was the name of the plantation).  As I approached the house, a black man in a uniform came running out, and said, “Go ‘round to the kitchen, boy, you know you ain’t sposed to be out here.”   I said, “I’ll do nothing of the kind.  I am your master’s son.”  He smiled and said, “They’s a lot could claim to be that, boy, but it’s the kitchen door for you.  Now git!”

I went back to the kitchen, and the maids and cooks sweated over steaming pots while an old black woman butchered chickens so quick it made my mind race.  No one acknowledged my presence, so I said, “I am Jacques Fournier’s son.  Please take me to my father.”  The work stopped, jaws dropped, and all eyes fixed on me.  The fat old lady butchering the chickens stood up, “Son, you can’t be sayin’ things like that in here.  Miss Margaret would be fit to be tied.  I will take you to your Daddy though, just let me get shed of this apron.”  Silence filled the kitchen, and she said, “Get back to work you lazy good-for-nothing gals” as we went out the back door. 

“We be taking a long walk now, Son, and I want you to tell me where you come from,” she said. “From New Orleans, Madame,” I answered, and she laughed.  “You sure got all the manners of the whites, but with that nappy hair you ain’t gonna pass for one.  No Sir!  I hate to take this here walk with you, but we’s almost there now.  They’s a good view of things from under this here tree.”  There was also a mound of Earth under the tree and a beautifully carved stone that said “Jacques Fournier, Planter & Founder of Fortunata, born Paris, France 1772, died Baton Rouge 1855.”  I didn’t weep.  I didn’t move.  I just stared at that stone for the longest time.  “I know this be a terble shock for you, Son, but it ain’t even the worst of it.  You better high tail it back to N’Orleans, because Miss Margaret sent men down there to fetch your mother.”

I returned to our beautiful home in the French Quarter, and saw an overseer instructing men on how to get the piano out the front door.  “What are you doing here?  Where is the Lady of the House?” I demanded.  He looked at me with cold blue eyes and skin so pale you could see the blood running under the skin, “She’s where she ought to be, and that’s all you need to know.  Are you her son?”   I felt the threat of his question, and stepped back and started to run down the path when the men with the piano caught and pinned me to the ground.  “Your Mama’s gone for good, boy, and you’ll be going your own way on up River now.  These men will see that you don’t miss your boat.”

They pushed me into a carriage, and turned me over to two men on the Riverboat.  They took me into a small drawing room, and told me to sit there and that there was no escape.  They were outside the door and there was no other way in or out.  After a few minutes a finely dressed lady entered the room.  “So we finally meet!  I have heard about you and your mother who took my husband from his home, alienated his affection to his true family, and made me a laughing stock in all of Louisiana.  I met your charming mother earlier today, but she didn’t look quite so pretty by the time her boat left for Jamaica.  I’m sure she will find the work there to her liking,” she said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but deduced that this woman must be Father’s first wife, Miss Margaret.  “For you, I have special plans.  When you get where you’re headed, you’ll be met by your new family, and they’re welcome to you.  God as my witness, I cannot imagine what my dear Jacques saw in either of you.”

She left the room before I could mutter a word, and the two men took me to a space so small it must have been an armoire.  I heard the key lock, and fell limp.  In little over a day I had broken my mother’s heart; learned that my father was dead; and now both of us were at the mercy of this madwoman Margaret.   I had no idea what would happen next,  and my dream of freedom was crushed.  The next day I was on a terrible looking boat headed North to a place called "Kayro."  That’s how it sounded when the sailors said the destination, but after reading a printed schedule, it was Cairo, like the ancient city in Egypt.

The Wallace family was at the dock waiting to take charge of me, and they were rough looking people.  I never saw anything like them.  The women cared nothing for their appearance and didn’t even carry parasols, and the man was wearing what I thought was cow hide for his coat.  There were three children, and I thought perhaps I was to be their tutor.  We walked up from the River to a wagon pulled by oxen with what looked like a sail over it, and they told me they were headed overland to catch a ferry to their new home.  The man went on to say, “We won’t have to tie you down if you promise not to jump off this wagon and run off.”  I said, “Please tell me where I am.  What is happening here?  Am I to teach your children?”

“Tie him down, boys!  We seem to have bought us an uppity nigger,” he shouted, and then looked at me, “It is you who will learn what to do for us, not the other way ‘round.”  I tried to explain that I was a free person of color, not a black slave, and therefore I could not be bought nor sold.  No one would answer my questions, and finally one of the sons tied a gag around my mouth so I could no longer speak.  We crossed the river into Illinois.  We were at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and with geography lessons fresh in my mind I realized just how far North I had come.  Eventually we reached a homestead far out in the wilderness.  I had never been out of the French Quarter except to reach Father’s plantation, and this sort of land was completely beyond my comprehension.

There were snakes of all kinds, mud, thickets, and this family planned to all live in a small house made of fallen trees with mud holding the building together.  They told me to tend to the horses along the way, and I tried to explain that I had never worked with animals.  “What kind of lazy nigger are you anyway?  Don’t you know how to do anything?”  How rude they were, but I said, “I know how to do a great many things.  I can read and write Latin and Greek, speak French as well as English, and am well prepared to teach these children mathematics.”  The man took his riding crop and struck me in the face, “I’m not going to tell you this again.  We don’t go much for learning in this family.  There’s land to clear; animals to tend; crops to put out; blacksmithing; water to carry – there’s a mountain of work here, which is why we bought you.   Now, get this straight, you’ll do as we say, when we say for the rest of your damned life or else it’ll be a short one.”

Neither my mother nor father had ever been strict with me.  They only showered me with affection and laid hands on me in sweet caresses.  No one had ever struck me!  I would not let this happen again, and I would not have a short life.  I had to live.  I had to get strong; escape; and find my mother in Jamaica.  So I said, “Yes, Sir, I’ll do everything I’m told.”  I learned that night how to unbridle horses, that they had to be groomed, fed, and that their stalls had to be cleaned day in and out.  I also learned that the horses were to share my quarters.

The very next day I was awakened at sunrise, and the work started. My hands blistered, the sun beat down on my bare back, and my muscles ached even though I was a young boy in the prime of life.  I fell into the barn unconscious until the next sun and another day of hard labor.  I was given biscuits to eat, and knew that I would never be strong enough to live without meat.  In the first month I learned to kill birds with stones propelled by a sling.  I would make a little fire in the barn after the family was asleep and roast the little things who had been calling to their fellow birds only minutes before.  I saw the boys shoot game of all kinds, and they were poor butchers.  They threw out many edible parts, which I hoarded and ate.  I was determined to live, and to escape.

But I was never alone.  One of them was always around: always watching.   There were no other families in the area, and life was unspeakably boring.  Five years passed, and I was a big, strong, and accomplished blacksmith by this time.  The family started offering my services to other men in the district, but they kept whatever was rendered in exchange.  One day a nice old man gave me some coins, and told me not to give them to the others.  I found a hiding place in the barn where no one would ever find my little bit of money.  The years kept passing, but I could never think of a way out.  Wallace would come out to the barn to tell me about a runaway slave who was worked to death in the salt mines to the East.  If a slave ran away and was caught, he could get sent to the mines; be resold if he could not be returned to his master; or shot like a rabbit or deer and thrown into a nearby canyon where wild dogs and buzzards would feast on his remains.

No one cared that I was a young man with a young man’s needs and desires.  There were no women for me, so I lost myself in dreams each night.  I saw the well-dressed and coiffed beauties of the French Quarter, flowers, iron railings, the stone walks, the Cathedral, but most of all I saw my mother’s beautiful face calling me “Mon Cher” and looking at me always with loving kindness.  Had I ever lived that life?  Why didn’t I appreciate it?  Why had Father not made a provision for Mother?  So many questions!   Somewhere along the way I lost count of the days, weeks, months, and years.

For a few years I overheard talk of a War between the North and South, and that there was no way the South could win.  Most young boys from that part of Southern Illinois joined the Federalist troops, but some traveled South to the places they came from and fought for the Confederacy.  Somehow the Wallace boys stayed home avoiding the hostilities.  A smithing client said that Mr. Wallace had paid someone so they would not have to fight.  One day, the boys told me to drive them to Golconda where they were courting girls from good families. 

I was to stay in the stable until they returned, and see that the horses were fed and refreshed before the trip back to the farm.  There was another man in that stable singing to himself in a strange chant.  I waited for him to finish, and when he looked up, rather than being startled, he rose quietly.  “Are you a slave on a farm in this district?”  I asked him respectfully.  “None of my people are slaves,” he said, “but we do know hardship.”  He was wary of me, probably from being betrayed too many times in his life, but I did learn that he was from Hispanola.  The chanting he did was part of his religion.  I asked if he was happy to see the way the War was going and that there would be an end to slavery.   He was not one to show any emotion, but raised an eyebrow, “Don’t you know that people are not allowed to have slaves in Illinois?  They were not to have them for several years now.”

I told him that I was a free person of color, almost entirely white by blood, and then recounted all that had happened in the last nine years.  He said, “You have been wronged, and you have no power.  Do you have any religion?”  I told him that everyone we knew in New Orleans practiced Catholicism, but that I had not been to a church since I was 16 years old.  He heard the Wallace boys entering the stable before I did, and said, “We will speak longer.  I will find you.”  I got the horses ready for the journey back to the farm, which was more of a prison now than ever before.   These people had kept me living like an animal and making money for them long after whites were allowed to own slaves, and I was born a gentleman, not a slave!  I felt such rage:  it was as if my heart would explode.  I said nothing because I learned years ago that words and reason meant nothing to these people.  The younger children started out sweet, but were corrupted by their elders.  It was a vicious cycle of ignorance.

That night I heard a bird call different from all those I had identified over the years.  I knew from their calls whether a bird was good to eat or not.  I looked behind me out the barn door and saw the man from the stable.  He walked silently toward me, and said “Tonight you will be free, and you will take your revenge.”  I told him that I didn’t want to kill anyone, I just wanted to leave.”  He continued, “Killing them would be too easy – for them!  They must pay for all the injustices whites have done you, and dying once is not enough punishment for your pain.”  This man was too mysterious, but he offered a means of escape.  I needed to try, so I agreed to do whatever he suggested.

He asked me to smoke a pipe with him, and to take the smoke deep into my lungs, hold it, and then slowly exhale.  “Now, you must reach far into yourself.  You must hear the drums of your African ancestors.  You must feel the power of the universe bestowed on you by these ancestors.  Concentrate!  He began chanting in a whisper to my ear, and I went into a different state of consciousness.  I saw painted bodies; felt the beat of a hundred drums; saw women gyrating; heard strange words; so many images; and then he awakened me from these seeming dreams.  He had a chicken taken from the coop, and he slit its throat speaking in a language far removed from those I knew. He caught its blood in a bowl, and touched my forehead with a finger steeped in the gore. Now, you take this blood and throw it on their door.  Say the words of your ancestors – the ones you heard in your trance.  I did as he said, and heard myself say, “Dan a ricki hone shun a shanti!” 

He said, “It is done,” and led me silently through the moonlight to the waiting horses.   We traveled for many days until we reached Chicago.  He bought me a suit of clothes, gave me a sack of coins, and told me to present myself at a great university. “They will not refuse you.  The spell is already cast.  It is the will of your ancestors.”   He also told me never to tell anyone anywhere that I was a person of color.  “The old ancestors are at peace now.  Go forth as a white man.”

That was 30 years ago, and many fine things have happened since those troubled and mystifying days.  I am a doctor of philosophy, and have been teaching reason, compassion, and enlightenment for many years.  Everyone said it was a fool’s errand, but I traveled to Jamaica to try to find my mother.  There were some very good and helpful people there who knew much about the slaves brought there.  In Negril they had heard of a slave woman brought over from New Orleans said to be the most beautiful woman ever seen in the islands.  He told me how to get to the great house where she was sent.  It  turned out to be a brothel, and the half caste Madame remembered the time Mother was brought there.

“I wondered if you would ever come to look for her,” the old woman said as she looked me up and down.  “I was the only one here who could speak French, and she told me of the life that was lost to her forever.  She told me how you parted, and prayed the rosary all night for your safety and success.  They prepared her the next day to meet the wealthy patrons who came to this house in those days. They styled her hair with pearls, adorned her with scent and jewels, and dressed her in a Queen’s ensemble stolen by pirates at sea. She came down the staircase there which was covered in paint made from real gold in those days.  This island had never before and has never since seen such grace and beauty.  The men bid for her – one offering half of his wealth to know her.”

“Your mother loved two men only -- your father, the planter, and you.  She took the hand of the highest bidder, and asked him to stroll with her by the sea before their love began in earnest.  He, being a gentleman, did as she asked.  They came to a promontory overlooking a rocky stretch of shoreline, and she thanked the gentleman for choosing her and for bringing her to this place of beauty.  He kissed her, and she touched his face very gently.  She then flung herself onto the rocks below and was washed out to sea.  The man returned here telling the story, and all wept.  The Madame asked if he would demand the small fortune he paid for your Mother’s favor.  He said, “Merci, Madame, mais non.  Whatever the price, it was not enough to know a woman like that even though for a moment.”

My eyes filled with tears and I could not control the weeping, but I was proud at the same time.  My mother chose to end her life looking like a Queen rather than know any other man than my father.  Her story is famous, and she is known to all on this island as the “Goddess of Virtue.”  She died a beloved woman admired by all after a night of prayer for a good life for her son.  I thanked the woman and offered her £10, for which she was very grateful.  As I turned to leave, she said, “I have something for you as well, Cher,” and handed me an old document sealed with wax .  “Your mother told me the day you left a messenger arrived at your home in New Orleans with news of your father’s death.  He handed your mother this document and a small letter from the planter, and cautioned her to beware.” 

“He told her that he had taken a fever and would soon die, and that she and you, Louis, were in his final thoughts as the only two people who ever loved him completely.  She hid the document in the chignon of her hair, but left the note on the desk.  The planter’s widow entered the house with rough men, and she seized the note.  “How could he?  All my years of being wife and mother to his rightful heirs, and he writes this letter to you! You will pay a high price for ruining our lives, and so will that bastard of yours.  He could not have been Jacques’ son.  It is not possible!”  Your mother said nothing, but was happy in her heart knowing that you were far away seeking your fortune.  It didn’t matter what happened to her as long as you lived.  “Bon chance, Louis!”

I didn’t look at the document until I was headed back to the mainland.  My mother had never broken the seal.  Only beauty and love mattered to Mother, not papers, however important they might be.  It was the deed to Fortunata registered in the name of Louis Bertrand Devereaux.  I visited New Orleans and saw our beautiful house on Esplanade now inhabited by nouveau riche who understood nothing of culture and beauty.  I continued to Baton Rouge only to find that Fortunata had been burned to the ground.  I was wearing my hair straightened with oil, which was the style of those days, and cut a fine figure in a suit of clothes created by the best tailor in Chicago.  The people in the courthouse were extremely helpful after seeing my card with the initials after my name but not by the Chicago address.  I asked where to go to claim property that had been deeded to me some years back.

The rotund recorder put on his spectacles, and looked at the deed in disbelief.  “Unbelievable!” he finally said.  “The Fournier widow and heirs fought over that place for years after the planter’s death.  Because no will or deed was ever presented there was a probate, which specified that they could continue to live at Fortunata and benefit from income produced there.  Jacques Fournier had given his lawyer an exact copy of this deed that we still have on file here, and his lawyer argued in court that the rightful owner’s name was to be kept secret until the second sealed original could be found.  They tore up that beautiful house and all the gardens looking for this document.  The plantation fell to ruin, and by the time the Yankees started their fire the house was just a shell.  The girls were married off; the boys fought for the Confederacy; and Miss Margaret took two of the women slaves and returned to her people in Natchez.  May I be the first to welcome you as the new master of Fortunata.” 

I told him I would like to visit Jacques Fournier’s grave, and then deed the property to the community to create a botanical garden there.  He said my gift was “overwhelmingly generous,” and I never told him that I was not really a white man or that I was the planter’s son.  The stone was scorched from the fire that destroyed the beautiful tree that shaded the grave, and I left money to have it restored.  I remembered my father, and imagined he and my mother in each other’s arms waltzing among the clouds.  Knowing that he loved us as we had loved him was all that mattered. 

The trip to Memphis was pleasant as was the journey to Cairo.  Nothing could ever hurt me or my mother again.  I got back to the old district where I had been wrongly enslaved, and found that there were towns around there, and the nearest one was called McCormick.  The people there took me for white, too, and treated me very nicely.  I asked what had happened to the Wallace family, and they looked at me as if they had I had cursed them out.  “I’m a good Christian man, and there are some things I just won’t talk about,” the proprietor of the general store said, “but the last of their line is living out there now not far from the site of the original homestead.  People say she’s crazy, but you can take my wagon if you want to go out there.”

I found a ramshackle place barely standing, and a woman holding a baby in her arms and four or five other ones in the yard.  As soon as they saw me getting down from the wagon, those children ran into the forest, and I saw one climb a tree.  The woman said, “I’m only doing washing now, so state your business.”  I said I had no business to transact, but would like to know about the family.  She looked at me warily, and said she didn’t like talking to strangers.  She said her husband and brother were in the penitentiary, and she and the children didn’t have enough to eat.  She had no time to talk to strangers.  I took out ten silver dollars, and she said, “Why don’t we sit a spell over here in the shade?”  The only place to sit was on buckets turned upside down, but she seemed relieved to get off her feet.

“So where would you like me to start, Mister?”  I said that I remembered the family from the time of the Civil War, but lost track of them after that.  She said, “The last year of the war was a bad time.  Lightning struck the house they lived in and all inside were burned alive except for one of the boys.  He was set to marry a girl down in Golconda, but couldn’t find any of his father’s money to post the bond.  He ended up marrying another girl from a family North of here.  They had seven children, but all them came to a bad end.  One was snake bit; another one drowned; one was hit by a train; two died of influenza; and that left my Daddy and his brother. 

My uncle was not exactly right in the head, but Mamaw took good care of him.  He would try to work here and there but no one would keep him on for long because he would argue with everyone and sometimes he even talked  to himself.  One day he came home after being let go from that store over in McCormick.  Mamaw had made a big dinner for him, and she was one of the best cooks in the county.  She fried a squirrel, and had potatoes, carrots, and cabbage with it, and her biscuits would just melt in your mouth. She canned all the fruit the growers threw away, and had delicious jams and jellies, too. He came home and she set the plate in front of him the minute he walked in.  She knew he had to have things just the way he liked them or there would be trouble.  He started eating, and she started telling him what she’d learned about the neighbors that day.  Being an old woman at home all day with no one to talk to, she really wanted to have a little conversation with her son of a night.

He shouted at her, “Shut up!”  She said, “That’s no way for you to talk to your mother.  I was only trying to tell you a little bit of  news.”  He picked up the shotgun from the corner of the room, and shot her dead.  She was laying there in the floor, and he just sat back down and was finishing his dinner.  The neighbor was a deputy, and he came over right away with his gun.  He saw what had happened and asked my uncle if the gun had gone off accidentally.  He said, “No, I told her to shut up, and she didn’t.  And that’s all there was to it.”  He went over to the stove, and loaded up his plate and kept on eating until the deputy put the irons on him and took him to jail.  He was sentenced to life, but one of the other prisoners heard what he did and killed him the first year he was in there.

Oh, there has been a lot of bad luck in the family.  Suicides, jail sentences, bankruptcy, foreclosure – you just name a misfortune that could befall a family, and it has happened to us.  The people around here don’t care if we live or die, and mostly they just stay away, except for some of the men.  People gossip all day long around here.  They say an old slave of theirs put a curse on the family back in the old days, and that we’re cursed to the tenth generation.  Their slave was a real hard worker who always claimed to be a free man, but worked like a dog out there for years.  He fell into some bad company down at the river.  Met up with some escaped slave from Africa or some island who taught him voodoo and how to put curses on.  He ran off one night, but put blood all over their front door and killed a chicken before he left.  It was weird, and we’ve been unlucky ever since.

I rose, and said, “Thank you for telling me about your family, and you don’t know how sorry I am to hear about all that has befallen you.  May better luck come your way soon.”  She said so long, and I returned to the village of McCormick, leaving $100 with the clerk. I instructed him to put it on account for the family I just visited.   On the train home to Chicago I thought about what happened the night I escaped from slavery in Southern Illinois.  I am a man of reason and logic, and train my students not to embrace primitive views of the world or superstitions.  I don’t believe in curses, but where did those words come from that I uttered that night?  Everything was vague and remote in my memory, but I finally decided that I must  have smoked a substance that induced hallucinations.  The bad luck of the Wallace family was a coincidence, and old man Wallace was so mean he set a bad example for his descendants.  That was surely the rational explanation.

I was met at Union Station by my wife.  She looked incredibly beautiful standing there in her lovely corseted dress, gloves, and hat – a lovely lady who lived to love me, our children, and grandchildren.  “Welcome home, Darling,” she said and kissed me gently on the lips.  “What did you learn on your trip?”  I said, in all sincerity, “I learned that I am a very lucky man.”

©2007 – Lynn Dalian Moore – All Rights Reserved