Dying embers, p.1
Dying Embers, page 1
Title Page
Dying Embers
A Novel By
Glenn Trust
Copyright © 2014
Dying Embers
By Glenn S. Trust
All rights reserved
‘Dying Embers’ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Products and services mentioned in ‘Dying Embers’ were used to give realism and authenticity to the story. Their use in no way implies that the manufacturers or producers of those products or services agree with, or endorse, the author’s opinions on any subject.
This publication, in electronic and/or printed version, is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The publication may not be resold. Additionally, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author/publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. The publication may be shared through authorized lending programs with others according to the terms the author/publisher may have with distributors of electronic and/or print media. Otherwise, if you would like to share this publication with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this publication and did not purchase it, it was not purchased for your use only, or you did not receive it through a lending program authorized by the author/publisher, please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
For permission requests, email the author/publisher, include in the subject line “Attention: Permissions,” at the mail address below:
gtrust@glenntrust.com
Dedication
For my wife, and best friend, Julie, who believes in me even when I do not.
Table of Contents
Dying Embers
Title Page
Copyright © 2014
Dedication
1. “I reckon so.”
2. Job Interview
3. Under the Stars
4. Morning Mist
5. Best Be Quiet About It
6. Big Rodney, Little Tommy
7. Walking in the Mist
8. Dying Embers
9. Not Again
10. Friends
11. The Room Was Still
12. Saturdays, Summer Days
13. Lowell Creek
14. Fireworks
15. How Things Is
16. What Would It Be Like
17. A Decision
18. Special Occasion
19. At Peace
20. Right
21. Questions
22. The Hurtin’
23. Minefield
24. Long Way to Go
25. A Glass of Tea
26. Islands
27. Business
28. Guilt
29. Fault
30. Chrysalis
31. The Right Thing
32. Gasoline and Water
33. Lawyered Up
34. Trouble Comin’
35. Maybe Justice
36. Fading Away
37. A Faraway Place
38. The Case and The Cause
39. The Healing
40. Where We Want To Be
41. The Man-Monster
42. Trust the People
43. A Good Time
44. Objections
45. High Noon
46. What’s That Mean
47. Good As Can Be Expected
48. This Has Got To End
49. We’ll Be Ready
50. God Help Us All
51. This Wasn’t Over
52. Like Rodney Did
53. Focus
54. Friends In The Night
55. Skin The Cat
56. A Smile
57. For Them
58. Saintly
59. He Would Miss The Boy
60. The Night Became Dark
61. The Lesson
62. Why Do They Do It?
63. A Good Marine
64. In Time
About the Author
Contact Glenn Trust
Other Books by Glenn Trust
1. I Reckon So
“Let’s fight.”
It started like that, simple. Deep brown eyes lifted, to regard the speaker calmly. Peering through the dark hair falling over his forehead, the boy sitting on the steps was uninterested in what his challenger had said. He looked back down, his hair hanging limply in the humid air. An old Case jackknife in his hand moved slowly along the edge of pine scrap. The sharp blade threw a splinter into the air. It fell to join the others scattered around his feet on the worn planks of the porch steps.
“Let’s fight.”
Still no reply. Another splinter flipped up, shaved from the wood, and then another. Pushing the knife’s blade hard through a knot in the wood, a chip flew off with enough force to land on the snout of an old yellow dog lying stretched out, head on his paws, in the dusty shade of the porch steps. The dog’s wrinkled brow twitched and flinched, but he never moved, his tired eyes looking up patiently at the boy on the steps.
“C’mon. Let’s fight.” The words were friendly, more curious than threatening.
The whittler raised his head enough to see his challenger clearly. Shorter, stocky, freckle-faced and fair, the tousled hair on his head was bleached white from the summer sun. The old jeans he wore were frayed at the knees. The canvas sneakers were reddish brown from the Georgia clay embedded in the fabric.
“You crazy?” The boy on the steps squinted into the sunshine from the shade of the porch.
“No.” The freckled face opened in a gap-toothed grin. “Hell, maybe.”
“Why you wanna fight?”
“Figured we could be friends.”
“What?” He shook his head sadly. “You are crazy.”
The freckle-faced boy picked up a stone, squatted on his haunches and started making random lines and circles in the dust. “Everyone says you’re the toughest kid around. I’m tough too.” He raised his eyes smiling at the boy on the steps. “Don’t have any friends here. Seems like you don’t either.” He shrugged, knowing it to be true. “Figured we could settle things between us and then be friends. Don’t matter who wins. Kind of start things off right, you know.”
“Don’t want no damn friends.”
“Samuel Eugene Stone, you mind your language.” His grandmother’s voice came firmly through the screen door onto the porch.
“Yessum.” He turned his head back to the freckle-faced boy. “Don’t want no friends.”
“Well, I do.” The challenger stood, blond hair waving lightly from the motion. Tossing the stone, he bounced it off the block of wood in the hand of the boy on the porch. “C’mon. Let’s get it done.” He grinned. “Not leaving ‘til we do.”
“How old are you anyway?”
“Sixteen.”
“Bullshit.”
“Samuel!”
“Sorry, Nan…” Sam Stone considered the boy in front of the steps. “You ain’t no sixteen. I’m sixteen. You don’t look more than twelve.”
The freckled faced boy puffed up, poking his chest out, shoulders squared. “Hell you say.”
“Mind your language. My Nan’s inside. She hears.”
The boy nodded. “Sorry.” He grinned and shrugged. “Okay, I’m fourteen goin’ on fifteen. Now let’s fight.”
With a sigh of resignation, Sam closed the knife and tossed the block of wood into the yard. He stood up amidst the pile of wood splinters and descended to the dirt and scrub grass yard.
They stood facing each other, the older boy’s dark eyes peering intently at his challenger, evaluating, waiting. He was about to turn and go back to the steps, sure the freckle-faced boy was all talk, when a headlong rush pushed him stumbling backwards.
It wasn’t much of a fight. Sam Stone stood several inches taller and had a reach several inches longer. He recovered quickly from the boy's initial attack. Methodically dodging, he allowed the wind milling blows from the fists of the smaller boy to fall harmlessly on his arms and shoulders. When the opportunity came, he swung, striking the boy hard in the side of the head. He went down with a thud.
Dust covered, he pulled his face out of the dirt and spit blood onto the red clay where it turned dark brown as it soaked into the ground. He looked up and smiled. Sam Stone shook his head and reached a hand down to the boy, jerking him to his feet and swatting him on the back helping to dust him off.
“You boys come up out of the sun and have some lemonade.” Sam’s grandmother stood on the porch with a large plastic pitcher and two glasses. The glasses had been jelly jars before being converted to their current use.
“Yes, Nan,” Sam said turning and leading the way up the porch steps.
“Sammy, will you introduce me to your friend?” She smiled as his head turned sharply at the word ‘friend’.
“Yessum, this is…” He turned to the freckle-faced boy wiping the trickle of blood from the side of his mouth. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Tommy,” he smiled. “Tommy Burke, but you can call me Mick if you want, Ma’am…on account of my middle name’s Michael and my family came from Ireland…Mick’s what you call Irish people.”
“Yes, well Thomas Burke, I believe I will call you Tom or Tommy, if it’s all the same to you.” She spoke softly, looking into his young eyes. He was tough, but still too innocent to know why people made names for people from other places. She nodded with a smile. “Yes, Tom or Tommy…maybe Thomas Michael if you’re in trouble.” She used the edge of her sleeve to dab at the blood gathered at the corner of his mouth. “I hope you’re not one to get in trouble much, Tommy.”
“No Ma’am,” he said with a grin. “Not much anyway.”
“All right then,” she said with a serious nod. “You can call me Mrs. Stone, or Nan, if you want. I’m Sammy’s grandmother.” Introductions made, she placed the pitcher on the steps beside the boys, handed each a jelly glass and turned towards the screen door leading into the dark, small frame house. “You two sit here and drink your lemonade.”
Sam poured, filling each glass to the brim. “It’s not real lemonade,” he said. “It’s Kool-Aid.”
Tommy shrugged. “It’s good,” he said taking a big swallow from the glass. Wincing, he rinsed his mouth, sloshing the yellow liquid around and spitting it out in the dust. The bleeding from his cut cheek had almost stopped, but the raw spot inside stung.
They sat quietly, each at opposite ends on the weathered top step of the wooden porch. The afternoon was coming on, the June air heavy and humid. It was still early summer. July and August would bring the dog days, Sirius the Dog Star, rising with the sun each morning. The old folks always said that was when it was truly hot.
It all felt about the same to the boys. The sweat and the heat didn’t much bother them. The year was 1967, and air conditioning was almost unheard of out in the Georgia countryside. You wanted air conditioning; you had to go to the movie house in Parker, the county seat. That was fifteen miles away, and the one-dollar cost of a ticket was to be spent only for special occasions.
Nan wanted to see a new film, ‘In the Heat of the Night’, that was coming in August to ‘theatres near you’, but she wasn’t sure it was coming to Parker. Sam hadn’t been to a movie since he had seen ‘The Sand Pebbles’ the year before. He hadn’t quite understood what the fuss was in China, but the battle scenes on the river were good. He wasn’t happy that Steve McQueen didn’t survive the conclusion.
As far as the summer heat was concerned, you might as well be mad at the sun for rising at all, as be mad at the heat. Wouldn’t do any good, and it made no difference. So, the boys sat quietly side by side in the shade of the porch, sipping lemon Kool-Aid.
“Reckon we’re friends, now…huh?”
Sam Stone looked at the freckle-faced boy at his side and gave a soft sigh of resignation. “I reckon so.”
2. Job Interview
They spun in unison, pumping their arms up and down vigorously at the semi rig roaring down the two-lane county road towards them. From the dust on the shoulder, they could see the grin on the driver’s amused face and saw him reach up to oblige them, sounding a loud blast on the truck’s air horn as it roared by.
Only inches from the boys, they felt the wind of its passing, hot and dusty, rustling their hair. It was a logger, carrying felled pine trees to some mill, some place the boys had never seen. The air current sucked along by the truck carried the scents of diesel and pinesap. It was a strangely pleasant smell, the two odors mixed together, and they drank it in, smiling at the sensation of the wind and the smells mixed with it.
Finished with their distraction, they turned and plodded through the grass along the road’s shoulder. Half a mile ahead, the whitewashed block walls of Spannell’s Store were becoming visible around a bend. Spannell’s was the center of activity and commerce for the small gatherings of shacks and frame houses that sat along the country roads. The gatherings weren’t towns, or even settlements. They were only clusters of houses here and there where circumstance and chance had caused them to pop up out of the Georgia clay like the weeds along the roadside.
The cluster where Sam Stone lived with his grandmother was about two miles from Spannell’s. Tommy Burke’s father had moved his family into a small house at the edge of the gathering of houses, about a half mile from the Stone’s place. The Burke’s house was a shack really. Not old enough to be one of the old slave cabins still dotting the countryside a hundred years after emancipation, it was an old sharecropper’s shack. Its previous owner had worked the local farm that still held most of the open acreage in the area. A succession of dirt-poor farmers, black and white had scratched and plowed the hard clay, sharecropping cotton and raising vegetable gardens.
Most of them, the sharecroppers, were long gone now. The price of cotton being what it was, working shares would not provide enough income for even the most modest needs, and sharecropper families were known for modest needs, indeed.
Tommy’s father worked at a small garage in Parker, making the fifteen-mile trip each day, each way, in a beat up pick up with the tailgate missing and at least one piston not firing. You could hear the truck rattling down the highway from a mile away.
At the crossroads where Spannell’s huddled in the dust, the boys went quickly under the shade of the awning stretching the length of the storefront. Two farmers stood in the gravel to the side of the building, wiping their brows with dirty handkerchiefs and talking about the heat, the crops and the flies. Two old fuel pumps sat in the middle of the gravel, one for gas and one for diesel. There was no selection of high test, mid-grade or regular gasoline. You needed gas; you got whatever gas Mr. Spannell had managed to get offloaded into his tanks. It didn’t matter; he charged the same for all of it. The fact that it was always five cents higher than what you could get in town was of no consequence to the locals who appreciated not having to make the drive to the big chain gas station in Parker and who viewed Spannell’s as their own private social club.
Sliding back the top of the large soft drink box that stood by the front door, the boys reached down and fished around in ice-cold water for their favorites, hidden in the dark of its bowels. The sides were marked with RC Cola, but the box held a vast assortment of cold drinks. Sam’s hand emerged from its refrigerated innards with two hourglass shaped bottles of Coke. Tommy pulled out a grape Nehi.
They popped the caps off the drink bottles on the opener built into the side of the box and pulled the old squeaky screen door open, stepping into the store’s dark interior. Three large fans hanging from the ceiling pushed the humid air around the store. Standing in the doorway allowing their eyes to adjust to the dim light, their noses sucked in the thick aroma of hamburgers, dogs and fries sizzling on the grill or in the deep fryers in the diner area at the back of the store. A couple of old timers sat at tables in the diner waiting for their lunch.
Sam Stone smiled, walking to the cash register.
“Hey Mattie.” He placed the Cokes and Tommy’s Nehi on the counter and fixed his eyes on hers, smiling again.
Snapping her gum absently, Mattie Spannell, the dark haired beauty behind the register looked vacantly at the two boys, flipped her hair off her shoulder and stood up straighter causing the fabric of her white cotton blouse to stretch tightly, achingly over her breasts. They stared unashamedly at her chest, smiling broad, dreamy grins.
“That it?” The gum snapped again. Seeing their faces, her expression changed slightly from complete indifference to their existence to one of bemused curiosity. Mattie Spannell was accustomed to the open attentions of the local male population under the age of twenty-five and to the surreptitious attention of every other male in the county.
The two nodded, eyes riveted to her chest.
“Ninety cents.”
Sam slid a dollar bill across the counter and watched as her soft hand with red painted nails lifted the bill and punched the keys of the old cash register. His hand lingered on the counter hoping for some accidental contact with her skin. The anticipation of some touch, however incidental, that would bring her sweet flesh against his started a tingle in his groin.
“Thanks boys.” Mattie slid the dime across the counter and smiled, standing even straighter, as she smoothed her skirt over her hips. Tommy Burke looked like he might pass out on the spot.
They made their way to the back of the store, wandering through the maze of shelves holding cans of sardines, tuna and Vienna sausages. Others held bread and baked goods, snack cakes and treats. Some aisles were devoted to motor oils and various liquids that promised to make your engine run like new when poured into a tank of gasoline. At the rear, they sat at one of the tables near the grill, sipping their drinks.
