I simply don’t understand those rules. Apparently you can stab a man without wanting to kill him. If that’s the case, then I’d just as rather not stab the man at all. And if I did? Well then I suppose I’d want him dead. It’s no good for him to go off and get healed up and come back to do some stabbing of his own. And when he does come back, what’s keeping him from packing a three bladed treat for me? Is he not going to do that because some conventions held 100 years ago suggested that he shouldn’t? I doubt it. And I certainly aint willing to bet my life on it. He probably thinks Geneva is a brand of shampoo and Hague is a type of sandwich bun. I can only imagine him, or myself, getting in trouble for using a weapon like that—getting in trouble for killing a man, during war, with an unapproved method. Someone will have to explain to me what History makes of that.
The blade I saw in the armory on that day haunted me more than any other artifact before or since. It marked upon me a wound of doubt not easily healed or stitched up. It would be some time before I managed my way out of military duty, but some part of me checked out the day I saw the trench knife. Some part of me was done when I saw the madness in that armory—a decent and regulated mode of annihilation.
Silvio Submission One:
There was a young man who was born into tragedy, and agriculture. For seven generations the Woodlief family had been plagued—not by drought or hail—but by lightning. They were struck in garden tractors and row crop tractors. They were struck when the cab was open and when it was closed. The first generation Woodlief patriarch was fifty-seven years old when his iron spade was struck mid-swing without so much as a cloud in the sky. Twelve years later his son’s push plow was hit, killing him instantly. When they finally found the horse that was pulling the plow, its tail was naught but a singed nub of hair. The young man’s great-great-great-grandfather was smote on his porch while drinking his morning coffee out of a tin mug. The following spring his great-great grandfather was just a young boy climbing a tree when the tree was hit, splitting it nearly in half. He survived that strike, but wasn’t so lucky when, twenty-one years later, he was killed by lightning as he lay irrigation pipe in a light rain storm.
By the time the young man became a young man he was the last of the Woodlief patriarchy. If a cloud in the sky had the slightest shade of gray, he could only be found cowered underneath the dining room table, where his hands covered his ears and he shivered. The fear alone was almost enough to kill him. In his mind’s eye he could see the lurking bolts ricochet from cloud to cloud, discharging and recoiling, just waiting for the opportunity to burn him into the earth. To return him to the dust from whence he came.
When thunderheads got close enough to speak to him, he groveled from below the table like a dog on the fourth of July. And when those flares from the lightning were within sight of the house, it burned onto his retinas the fallen faces of his ancestry. The only Woodlief family tree that mattered consisted of a forked bolt of lightning, and where that bolt met the soil of the earth was the gaunt portrait of our young man.
In his heart he knew that should God really want him dead, there were countless ways for him to do it, but this didn’t keep him from spending years of his adolescence hiding under the table. As he came into his early twenties he decided that his own cowardice was an affront to God’s order and to himself—if lightning would not strike at his ghastly figure from there, it was not because God was merciful toward him. His life was no life to live. His sisters encouraged him to stay under the table until he could reinvigorate the family name, but he refused to take any agency from the divine. If God wanted to end the line, then end the line he would. God was God, and our young man was still only a young man.
And so, the next time a thundercloud cleared its throat and the brilliant spider webs of electricity moved into the acres of the farm, he could be found in the middle of a field—a metal pipe fixed to his back like the sashimono of feudal samurai. He stood there that night, unharmed, until the sky went back to sleep, and then so did he.
To do something once can be the effect of temptation, but by this ritual he no longer envisioned himself tempting fate, but embracing it. The next storm that came through, and the dozen after that, were all met by the young man and his metal rod. His sisters begged him to stop mocking the sky—to stop tempting the tragedy that ran like iron through the blood in their veins. But he didn’t listen. Surely if God didn’t want him to be struck by lightning, then he wouldn’t be struck. Each time he marched onto the field under a shaded sky, he didn’t do so as a heretic, and he didn’t do so with fear or defiance—only with the certainty that the outcome was exactly as it should be.
He and his sashimono survived thirteen storms with that attitude. Thirteen. On the morning after the fourteenth his sisters found his torched, crumpled body. Seared onto his shirt was the exact shape of the bolt as it coursed through his figure, and onto his face the countenance of a perplexed buffoon.
The Parade
The parade sailed by Silvio’s gaze like the old reel film of some incoherent circus. There were horses, and llamas, and dogs, and humans, and they were all dressed in rampant colors of no theme or reason. There were cowboys, and athletes, and boosters, and nobodies, and they marched proudly like as many fascists. Amidst the mobilized army of people and creatures came fire trucks from a number of decades as if a time machine sat at the entrance of Main Street and hailed them through one at a time in order to give the masses a history lesson in the spectacle of old men riding old vehicles. Next came a similar exhibition of tractors for spectators to marvel at their size and guess at their purpose. When the local beauty queen passed by perched atop a red Ford Thunderbird, she waved out at the ogling of the men, the scrutiny of the women, and the empty watch of Silvio. Children swarmed the sidewalks and the streets like a pack of wild dogs and they flaunted their swelling candy bags to peers and parents alike. Silvio stooped to pick up the occasional hard candy that landed near his feet and poked through a handful of it before he selected one and tucked the rest of the noisy wrappers into his short’s pocket. Smiling cowgirls clopped by on top of bannered horses, and the kids with all the candy laughed guiltily when the horse dung splattered thick and green upon the asphalt. There were generic sedans that crept along with nothing more than the decal of a local business plastered to their doors, and there were big trucks that pulled big, slatted trailers that were filled up by the high school’s sports teams. The volleyball players wore spandex bottoms and the football players wore their helmets and they both fit in among the horse dung and the fire trucks just as well as the rest of it. Last was the remnant of the school’s marching band, with the droll blare of their brass horns unable to match, in volume or vigor, the pop hits that blasted from the regional radio station’s trailer two floats ahead. When the last of them had gone, Silvio was finally able to cross the street, dodging the splayed patches of excrement, and walk on to the church several blocks away. He took a spot next to the old man on the front steps, where he apologized for being late.
Silvio said, So what did you think?
About the writing?
Yeah about the writing. Are they going to put it in the bulletin?
There is no They, Silvio. It’s just Mrs. Crawford, and she said she didn’t get it. She thought it was a little too grim for the bulletin.
Silvio flashed a look of confusion. Too grim? I didn’t mean it to be grim.
I know you didn’t. But you have to think about your audience—about the congregation. They don’t care to read your musings on God striking down some poor farm boy.
I never said that God struck him down.
Sil, I just think that you should tone it down a little bit. If I were you, I would just have less death and destruction next time.
No you wouldn’t.
What?
Well if you were me then that isn’t what you would be doing. If you were me then you’d just be me. You would be doing what I’m doing, because that’s what me does.
The old man shook his head. He said, I just mean that if I were in your position, that’s what I would do. I would tone it down.
Okay.