Just One Night

“Just one night. Just one night…” Jack muttered to himself. He was sitting on a bail of hay and staring into the feedbag he was given with ten dollars in crumpled one dollar bills. Ninety dollars more would follow if he could make it just one night in the old barn. Strips of light from the setting sun pierced the voids between the barn’s wooden slats. Dust filled sunbeams gripped the ground and crept up the wall onto Jack’s black overcoat. Looking down, the pattern reminded him of the jail cell he reluctantly called home for seven and a half years. The thought of his captivity turned his stomach. Reminders of his crime and his time plagued Jack at all hours of the day, but especially at sunset. Perhaps it was the impending darkness taking over the light of the day that set him on edge. The jail cell projection on his chest seemed to mock his efforts to hold fast to the newfound light in his life… his love. His Elanor. She carried his heart and stoked his yearning to… as Judge Hanes put it, “turn his life around, b’fore it was too late.”

Yet, here he was, mired in the encroaching blackness of a dirty tobacco barn, sitting in another prison of his own poor choices. But… but… it was easy money - if there was such a thing. Elanor would be disappointed. Furious!

He hated himself.

The brash pity party of his self loathing gave way to breathing… and a quieter and necessary contemplation of his surroundings. He wouldn’t light the lantern for fear of being noticed and if he was going to spend the night, he wanted to stake out a spot to sleep. The atmosphere in the barn was cool, dry, and sooty. A layer of black grime covered everything. He thought perhaps from improperly vented coal fired stoves used to dry the tobacco in the Autumn. Beefy, tall cedar beams held up the frame of the wood clad barn. The waning light falling across a wheat threshing machine cast eerie shadows on the bails of fodder behind him and made a pile of canvas look almost alive. It would serve to pad his frame from the floorboards of the barn.

He never saw the face of the man who on the previous night, wagered one hundred dollars that Jack didn’t have the gumption to spend just one night in old man Garrett’s barn. Jack laughed at the man standing in the shadows between two shops in the square on his walk home. “Not another step” the man said when Jack approached. He laughed at the absurdity of the mysterious man’s shady bet made sweeter by a ten dollar ante tossed at Jack’s feet. It was absurd in its timeliness because Jack was once again down on his luck - if there was such a thing - having just lost his job cleaning up at a butcher’s shop. He needed the money. He needed Elanor to know he was turning his life around. One hundred dollars would give him time to find another job and maybe even money left over for a wedding ring.

The friction between his weakness and his hope twisted his face into a mess of tired, quiet tears salting up his black mustache. Jack was the tattered, threadbare rope in a tug of war between the righteous man he wished he could be and the irresponsible fool he knew he was.

The morning birds ushered Jack into consciousness and lifted his eyelids. He made it through the night! His hazy vision focused to reveal a face back-lit by dawn’s early light… Elanor’s face! Elanor’s smile. Her hair, the same color as the yellow hay surrounding him. She knelt down, took his hand and whispered… “I love you Jack. I love you. Tell mother, I die for my country. Tell mother, I die for my country.”

“What?” he thought?

“Kill me. Kill me” Elanor said. “Kill me.”

The sunshine of Jack’s dream was extinguished, crashing into darkness, torn away by the heavy baritone whisper of a man’s voice, the steely stare of two black eyes, and the terrifying pressure of ten fingers on either side of his head. He tried to resist but found he couldn’t move. The man on top of him had studied many forms of entertainment including the art of hypnosis from Doctor James Braid himself.

The unknown man rose and hobbled away in response to muffled shouting... voices coming from outside the barn. Something about surrendering. The man in the barn shouted in reply… “I’ll need a little more time to consider it!” He returned to Jack and with a flash of compassion across his face, now visible by torchlight coming through the planks of the barn said, “I’m terribly sorry about this” and brought down a heavy wooden wagon wheel on Jack’s ankle. His agonizing scream was muffled by another pair of hands. There were two men in the barn with him! Through his pain, one of the men forced Jack’s arms into a soiled jacket.

The man who had smashed his ankle drew close and for the first time in the broken and crackling torchlight, revealed a familiar visage. It was as if Jack was looking in a mirror. Messy black receding hair. Bushy black mustache. People always told him that he looks so much like the actor… you know the one. John Wilkes Booth. Jack even had a similar tattoo on his hand. JWB. Jack William Browne.

“Pro patria in aeternum.” John said in a strangely calm voice to Jack while he transferred to him two pistols, a carbine rifle, a Bowie knife, a crude crutch, and other items. The other man in the barn surrendered to the mob outside.

“Now... stand.”

Jack’s mind was spinning as he stood instinctively using the crutch to support his weight. John stepped back into the recesses of the barn and with the booming voice of a trained actor yelled, “Well, my brave boys, you can prepare a stretcher for me! I will never surrender!"

“Now… shoulder your rifle and remember what to tell mother.”

Jack’s wary arms and battered mind put up no fight as the master assassin disappeared into the darkness. The last thought of his own that Jack managed to muster before he was shot in the neck, was an image of Elanor and him holding hands walking through a field of flowers.