“Whiff always swore to have seen a wormhole in the wind under a neighbor lady’s clothesline as a child, like the legend had described accompanying the appearance of the mysterious stranger who had sent his famous ancestor off to save Stonewall at Chancellorsville. He never let go of the contention that he was the last in his family line to glimpse a strand of a hereditary ghost story…He believed in ‘the blood magic’ as his daddy had called it.”

-Little Greaser Akimbo, interviewed on Fright Night Theatre, October 31, 2019

The nearly bald worn-looking wisp of a man who sat the witness stand with his long tattered briefcase across his narrow knees seemed oppressed by his journey. He had come down from Pittsburg overnight at Whiff’s urgent request and on the promise of Whiff’s donation of his one family heirloom to the man’s Museum of Paranormal Investigation. Whiff felt guilty for wishing the man would get right to it, but knew form their phone conversation that he was a ponderous speaking sort of fellow, and therefore consigned himself to another age had in the purgatory of this held salute, which somehow seemed more oppressive than the hours he had spent standing for his lynching on that union tailgate seventy-two-plus hours ago.

Colonel Imbolden seemed to take pity on the Yankee witness, perhaps, at his advanced age, having seen many an elder person such as this in quiet agony over what crept within to take them from the world. Hs voice was soft, sure, and amazingly full for his years, “Sir, what is your occupation—your field of expertise if you will—that qualifies you to advise this court on the matter before it, in the person of this saluting negro claiming the rights of a Son of the Confederacy. Before you answer let me be clear to our Yankee-taught Special Counsel.”

The Colonel turned humorously toward the SNC and said, “Son up at Harvard I doubt if they even cared which of their boys died in the Pre-Atomic war, or in that little brown Filipino Mess. But down here, each one of us who had an ancestor die, or declared a war hero, in whichever one of the Wars of Northern Aggression applies, has the moral right to speak on military affairs. In this case, our lowly negro barrister whishes to invoke the right to represent this military man you mean to extradite in the manner of a stay of extradition.”

The SNC nodded with understanding, seeming to hold back an objecting notion, and The Colonel turned back to his witness. “Go on Sir.”

Mister Trummel’s voice was wan and parched, “Your Honor, I am Mike Trummel, Professor of Astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also the curator of the Museum of Paranormal Investigation.”

The Colonel cut him off with a manic jerk of his head and a question, “Little gray men—UFO’s!”

Mister Trummel weakly replied with a smile, “Yes Your Honor.”

“Did you find any?”

“No Your Honor.”

“What pray tell is in the museum then?”

“Artifacts of interest discovered in the investigative process, among other things.”

The Colonel must have been quite a mischief maker as a youth for he fairly grinned under his mustache as he nodded at Whiff and spoke comically, “Seeing as how this one is not little, not gray, and would surely sink any flying saucer that tried to carry him, I suspect you must be in possession of an ‘artifact of interest’ which might prove him true—in that very case of your’s perhaps?

“Yes Sir”, said Mister Trummel, as he barely managed to heft the briefcase up to The Colonel, who unsnapped it and spun it around gleefully like a child on Christmas morning. Whiff noticed, out of the corner of his eye, while still holding his rigid salute that the SNC was simmering with impatience over this turn in the proceeding.

The Colonel lifted a laminated certificate from the case and chirped, “This certification of authenticity from the Office of the Sons of the Confederacy and the Curator of the Tomb of President Stonewall Jackson names three artifacts as having been proved authentic.”

The Colonel set the certificate aside then reached into the case and produced a photo album, and began perusing the contents as he mumbled, “Go on Mister Trummel,” not even looking up from this apparent treasure.

The wan voice of Mister Trummel did its best, “The album is a collection of sixty-two forensic photos of the contents of the examined grave of Ben Samson Jackson, exhumed under supervision of the CSA Department of Parks and Monuments, and analyzed by Forensic Anthropologist S.G. Lee of the CSA Eugenics Association. The contents proved conclusively that Ben Samson was of unusual girth to a degree that horsemanship as described in the folk legend kept alive by his descendents was consistent with his physiology, and that the tales of his adventures leading up to the well-known incident in which he saved the General as much through bad horsemanship as good luck are based on true events, if embellished over time.”

Mister Trummel then fell into a coughing fit, waved off a glass of water offered by Miss Melon, and continued, “The most compelling piece of forensic evidence is the trepanation of the skull above and behind the left orbit, determined to have been caused by a minnie ball round. The shot should have been fatal and was only deflected due to the peculiar slope and thickness of Ben’s skull, who suffered from gigantism—a thyroid condition that eventually seems to have caused his death from heart failure.”

The Colonel reluctantly put the album to the side and pulled out a journal and began paging through the neatly written pages after motioning impatiently for Mister Trummel to continue, which he did in his soft-spoken way, “My field journal kept from nineteen-seventy-eight through eighty-five, charting the family tree and recording the oral folk legendry of Ben Samson Jackson’s descendents, corroborated by NBA Notary Council in 1986 following the death of Ben Samson Gleason Senior, leaving Ben Samson Gleason Junior—the man standing before this court—as the last male descendent of the man who apparently took a bullet in the head in action at Sykesville Station, that was believed by General Jackson and his staff to have been meant for Stonewall himself. This is regarded by most authorities to be the more probable of the two legendary incidents in which Ben was said to have inadvertently ‘Saved the Man Who Saved the South.’ Alternative narratives are entertained widely in the North, most of which would be regarded as insulting to this court. This attribution of heroics, is however, definitely corroborated by the trepanation of Ben’s skull and the third item in the case.”

The Colonel nodded—even as Whiff’s calves cramped abominably and the SNC fidgeted impatiently—and drew Whiff’s ancestral heirloom from the case. It was an item that had been his most treasured possession his entire life—indeed even before it was his, back when it sat on Big Daddy Gleason’s mantel—and had been traded over the phone last night and picked up at his trailer this very morning. Colonel Wade Imbolden held up a pale gray leather-beaked military cap of the kind worn by many a lesser officer and officer’s man-servant in the First War of Northern Aggression. This hat was different than the usual cap in two ways; it was oversized, and it had a double ‘skipping’ hole where the minnie ball had gone through the cloth, flattened against and bounced off Uncle Ben’s famously hard head, and then exited the cloth again, having been said to have then clipped a cufflink off the General’s coat sleeve.

The Colonel was like a boy in ecstasy who had just found the perfect toy in his Christmas stocking. “Well I’ll be goddamned!”

He then looked to Whiff as the SNC shook his head low and slow, and motioned him forward, “Come here boy, put this on!”

Whiff reached the base of the bench, took the cap, and placed it on his fat Gleason head, had from Uncle Ben-Samson over all these generations Big Daddy had said, and it fit. The Colonel then took his pistol and aimed it at Whiff, squinting over the barrel sight as he seemed to be trying to duplicate the shot from so long ago.

“Back up boy, make it instructive at least!”

Oh Good Lord, please don’t make it so!

Whiff backed up to the head of the aisle between the benches and looked as bravely as he might up at the gleaming barrel of that ancestral weapon.

The courtroom was silent.

“I imagine your Big Ben holding Old Stonewall’s reigns as he spies Yankee’s through his glass.”

Whiff went along with the supposition in pantomime, lifting his right hand as if holding a horse’s reigns.

The Colonel then cocked the hammer of the ancient revolver with his thumb and snarled, “I’m a back-shooting Union Dog trying to pull General Meade’s fat out of the fire!”

The click of the hammer and the slight cackle of the lunatic Colonel sounded like a coin dropped on a metal chair in church.

Then The Colonel squeezed the trigger and the hammer fell like doom—on an empty chamber or a dud cartridge.

Whiff breathed deeply and looked up into the eyes of his judge, who seemed to have found him up to Confederate standards, and smiled as he perked up with a voice suddenly young, “A Colored Confederate Carney in my courtroom! I’ve seen it all now boy. Oh well, I’ll manage to explain it to my Daddy when I get to heaven. Mother always said that a single pecan can’t ruin an entire apple pie. As a Son of the Confederacy, Sir, you may represent the subject of this here extradition hearing.”

This is the end of the serialized portion of the Novel Hurt Stoker, which shall be continued in Chapter 22: The Devil’s Hand, and concluded in Chapter 23: Down to the Whipping Post. The entire book will be available in print through Amazon by January 12 2015.

Thank you for reading with us online.

Sincerely,

James LaFond, 1/7/2015