It started as the slightest of murmurs - a fraying thread on the last edges of my exhale. I didn't think much of it at the time. Allergies, I supposed. But when that charming little rasp raised its voice and threatened to rattle my lungs free of their rib cage with each hacking cough, I began to suspect I might be due for a more professional opinion.
I heard every possible explanation of my condition, from liver failure (I am, to put it lightly, not the most responsible of bar mates) to tropical bacteria picked up during a scouting expedition in the Congo. A doctor in Geneva went so far as to suggest my bouts of painful, seal-like barking were the result of, to quote him in his entirety, “sexually transmitted demonic possession of the most dangerous sort”. I found this explanation particularly amusing, considering my last intimate encounter was several decades prior. I must admit, age has not been kind to the desires of my youth.
Despite my physicians’ tendency to skillfully string together latin names of ailments and inhabit offices plastered in ornate certificates from the world’s most prestigious institutions, I was caught off guard by the collective lack of competency of the medical profession at large. Each doctor seemed to know less than the last and wanted to charge me more. This peculiar trend only got worse when I moved to America, a little less than six years ago.
I went to doctors in New York, Baltimore and Chicago. While the architecture of American cities is certainly a site to behold, especially compared to my little home village in Prussia, nobody had anything helpful to offer in the way of solutions. After my third doctor’s visit in a week, my pocketbook was dreadfully low on any sort of valuable paper. It was there, sitting on a newly painted bench waiting for my train, that I decided maybe it was time to lay aside our differences and see if I could befriend that ever present tickle beneath my chest.
I decided to spend what little cash I had left on a tiny shack on a quarter acre of land just west of the Mississippi River. At night, you could see the lights of Memphis twinkle softly in the distance. While technically the property was listed as belonging to the great state of Tennessee, I will go to my grave arguing that the little family of old growth oaks on the furthest side of my little yard belongs to Arkansas. I have no reason; that's just how it seems to be.
Within a year of my residing on the property, I began to receive letters from old friends that war was on its way. The split between the northern states and the southern ones, of which I couldn’t begin to tell you any meaningful difference, had begun to rally troops and rattle their respective sabers. Fathers and sons, uncles and cousins, all boarded trains and wagons and set off by foot for the front. From the brutal headlines shouted on street corners and a neverending barrage of unseemly photos; blood soaked fields greedily slurping up the county’s youth, it seemed to me both sides cared very much about whatever it was they were fighting about.
I used to make the journey into Memphis, with its red brick buildings and newly painted light posts, every Friday for a visit to my favorite bar. Outside of a few brikabrak loners (to be expected in any establishment with a proper liquor license), I found a majority of the patrons to be a serene, thoughtful bunch. They were well dressed, polite and whiled away the hours discussing many facets of world politics, human history and sundry philosophies. Several of them had the uncanny ability to make me laugh like I hadn’t laughed since university; a fine bunch by any estimation.
While on most nights the first bout of conversation was reliably pleasant and apolitical, it was only a matter of time (and empty glasses stacked on the wooden bar top) until the loudest voice at the bar, like a wide, bellicose rudder, steered the conversation towards current events. With the topic finally on the table, the discussion of the war was guaranteed to be mere minutes away.
Memphis was captivated by the fighting. Rumors spread like venereal disease. Unending tales of glory, tragedy and courage chattered off the cobblestone like shrapnel at all hours of the day. I picked up bits and pieces where I could. Something about the railroad line into the city being cut off. A garrison, somewhere, was being moved to a more strategic location. The war was everywhere; on the lips of every man, woman and child from debutant socialite to chimney sweep. The only people who seemed quite silent on the matter were the occasional house slaves permitted to walk freely about the streets, no doubt, on errand from their plantation masters.
There seemed to me to be a commonly held belief amongst the townsfolk that the Federal government had started the war to take away the slaves on which the economic backbone of Southern society was built. They said the North found their owning of slaves a moral abomination and an affront to God. While that may have been the position of a few of the more liberal politicians, as someone with a history of residence in the big “federally owned” cities, I found this idea to be quite humorous. From my experience, your average Chicagoan or New Yorker was just as racially superior in their worldview as their southern brethren! While their accent might have changed, the mentality was much the same. This similarity, in which both sides seemed blinded to, coupled with the humorously young age of the country as a whole (At the time of my ordeal, it was just on the cusp of it’s 87th birthday) gave the entire conflict an air of contrived frivolity. Just what was it all about?
Personally, I didn’t much care who won the war. I was far from home, albeit on purpose, and only looking for a bit of solace in which to spend what I assumed were the final years of my life. The political machinations of a foreign land, and such a young one at that, in which I was little more than a spectator, seemed at best quaint if not entirely irrelevant. That assumption didn't last long.
It was June. I was half asleep in my little cabin that Friday morning, having not gotten much rest the previous night. I was a bit fitful and spent the starlit hours trying to rub a cramp from my leg and begging the bottle of whiskey on my nightstand to aid me in what had become a rather unsuccessful attempt to chase down slumber. At some point I must have dozed off because when I opened my blurry eyes, the pale ghostly light of predawn was peeking through the curtains on the far end of the room. A few more minutes seemed in order. I shut my eyes.
Not a moment later, I was rudely catapulted to an upright position by the most intense noise I’d ever heard. An explosion of epic proportion. I felt the shockwave as a bullying thud in my chest and sinuses. With a litany of the rudest language I could possibly muster and begrudgingly aware of the ego one must possess to be angry at a sound, I threw off the sheets in a huff and scrambled to the door.
Not surprisingly, all that commotion awakened the petulant fellow that had taken up residence in my chest and I doubled over in a violent fit of wet, painful coughing. I became aware of the most curious sensation; as if something had broken loose from its mooring somewhere deep inside me. It became hard to breathe. A concerning pattern of dark splotches appeared on the floor beneath me and I spat out copper and salt. In the dim haze of my cabin, I dismissed it as just a bit of saliva. There were more pressing matters at hand.
I threw open the door and, despite the early hour, was immediately wrapped in a thick blanket of summer humidity. The sky was pale violet, two twinkling stars peering down on me like primal eyes. Through the trees down the hill, I could just make out a glowing reflection of the setting moon, glistening off the Mississippi river.
What alarmed me were the dozen or so pillars of jet black smoke spewing up from the center of the river, just north of the city. There was another explosion and then another. The horizon flashed a snarled orange with each barrage. My heart skipped a beat. Cannon fire. Warships. A battle!
No sooner had I realized the war was somehow both finally and unexpectedly at my doorstep, there was a particularly bright flash of light from the river, followed by another clap of hateful thunder. While I recovered from the thump in my chest, I thought I heard the faintest whistle coming in on the wind. It grew louder and more intrusive and before I could react, the massive oak tree closest to my little shack exploded like a dying star.
There was a terrible racket, a blinding white light. A hot rain of oak bark and iron tore through my skin. I’m sure I gave a horrible scream, but I do not remember it. I couldn’t hear my own thoughts over the racket of cannon and crackling wood. I tripped over my feet in a blind confusion and stumbled to my knees.
There was a brief moment of stillness before a cacophony of crackling timber filled the air. I stared in disbelief. Like some wounded giant, one of the ancients, finally realizing it’s wounds were too great to carry on, the top half of the gargantuan oak swayed for just a moment, as if in the wind, before toppling over. It hit the ground with an enormous crash. The death of such a massive creature struck me as holy. Majestic. Horrifying. Its full, beautiful limbs splintered into jagged shards like a fountain and flew high into the misty air.
I was in a daze. The din of cannonfire on the river faded into a distant rumble as I made my way towards the body of my oaken companion. Although I had lived in my cabin for well over a year at this point, I had never stopped to actually consider the tree’s beauty. It’s size, the craggly, disorganization of it’s infinite interwoven branches or the oddly acidic smell of those round cadmium leaves. Either from the explosion of the cannonball or the fall itself, the tree’s bark had been widely torn off from its body, revealing a deep red heartwood beneath; wound upon bleeding wound.
I caught myself in a moment of mourning for the death of this titan when beneath a cluster of broken branches and smushed up leaves, there was a rustle. Then a panic of fluttering motion. A horrible screech filled the air. Then another. Then another.
After a new fit of violent coughing (I wiped my sticky hand on the back of my trousers, careful not to look at my palm too closely), I rose to my full height and drew apart the leafy curtain to gaze at the source of the commotion below.
A juvenile barn owl stared up at me like a lost child, panic in its eyes. I vaguely recalled having heard his distinctive screech at some point in the night and couldn’t help but realize it was one of his last. The owl’s bright white face shone in the pale morning light like an actor’s mask; angelic glow. His once royal halo of feathers now rimmed with shiny blood. Both his wings had been bent crooked under his body at the most horrible of angles. Tawny feet shuddered in broken, curling spasms.
Immediately, a lump rose in my throat and I could feel my chest tighten. I felt sick. Cooing softly through watery eyes, I bent down and scooped my wrinkled hands gently under his shattered body. He was lighter than I expected, almost weightless. His warm figure yielded to my touch. It seemed all he could move by that point was his tired, fuzzy head, which, with great effort, he turned to face me.
Pale beak clattering at odd intervals, the owl peered desperately into the depths of my being, pleading for salvation through the blackest of orbs. It occurred to me all at once that this bird wasn’t a stranger. He knew me. He knew me well. How many times had he sat in that tree, quietly watching as I tottered around the house, doing chores, whistling, cutting firewood. How often had he been my silent companion, peering down with what I can only imagine was amusement at the strange creature below?
For how long could I have called him my friend?
Watching that bird take those erratic, raspy breaths, I felt a heaviness descend on my shoulders. There was nothing I could do. Not really. I tried in vain to hold all his pieces together but in the end, it made no difference.
The barn owl shuttered, looked at the ground, and to the bellowing thunder of a distant war he could never possibly understand, emitted what I can only describe as the tiniest, most familiar cough I’ve ever heard.
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