The Journal of Admiral Wade And Other Short Stories

The Journal of Admiral Wade

And Other Short Stories

by

Denele Campbell

The Journal of Admiral Wade

And Other Stories

by Denele Campbell

Copyright 2015 by Denele Campbell

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including the information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Stories included in this collection are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Parker’s Cross Roads

Fresh Air

The Negotiation

Cold Springs

The Journal of Admiral Wade

Valley of Flowers

Her Natural Home

Jill’s Magnificent Bosom

1Parker’s Cross Roads

Gray half-light of dawn shone through the dirty glass of the living room window. Claire picked her way through stacks of lumber, rolls of insulation, and who knew what as she crossed the room. The kitchen light hung from wires and cast Glen’s profile in hard shadows.

Coffee’s ready, he said, gesturing with his cup.

Thanks. She eased into a chair, trying not to look at the jumble of nails, mail, and random items cluttering the table’s surface.

There’s not a place in this house where I can relax, she said.

Wow, Glen said. Less than five minutes.

Fuck you.

I wish.

She resisted the urge to throw her coffee cup across the room. At Glen.

With a patiently annoyed expression pasted across his face, Glen leaned back against the kitchen cabinet with his arms folded. That would be the kitchen cabinet with the stained white Formica countertops. The one with darkened varnish around the door handles where a thousand dirty hands had touched and another thousand hands had tried to clean.

Including hers.

You agreed, he said. What happened to ‘Sweat equity is a good idea, let’s try it.’?

Oh gee, less than five minutes, she said, mimicking his voice. You said a few months. It’s been exactly, she looked at her watch with an exaggerated gesture. Eight months—and the place still isn’t livable.

Oh, that’s bullshit and you know it. We’re living in it. No one can turn an old place around overnight. You knew that going in.

Maybe we shouldn’t talk in the morning.

I’m working every day, he said.

So am I.

He slammed his coffee cup into the sink and ran water in it. Why do you do this?

You know what? Briefly, she regretted her criticism. Then all of her anger flooded back. She shoved the chair backwards to stand up. I don’t. You can have it.

If he said something as she tore out of the house, she didn’t hear him. The cool air soothed her face. She strode down the driveway and started down the dirt road. She didn’t exactly know where she was going, but she had to get away. Away from Glen, away from the house. Away from everything their lives had become.

The farther she got, the more she felt Glen breathing down her neck. He’d get in the car and come after her. She’d have to lie and pretend. Be someone she wasn’t. How had it come down to this?

She picked up her pace, breaking into a jog. The hair on the back of her neck stood up like when she was a kid and phantoms chased her down the dark hallway. She wished she’d thought to grab her purse and cell phone. She’d call someone to come pick her up, drop her off at work.

Sunrise broke the sky into bands of high pink clouds, all of the light high above the tree tops. Her shoes pounded the packed dirt road. Her breath came easily. She rounded a corner thinking she’d seen a house here before.

Instead an old church stood off to the right where the road widened. Grass grew in the parking spaces. She realized she’d never driven down this far before. They always went the other way because that was the direction of town. The exterior boards had weathered dark gray. Probably as old as the place they were trying to live in, minus the dirty cabinets.

After a moment’s hesitation, Claire seized the oval knob and pushed the door open. Chips of white paint littered the threshold. Rows of pews lined up on either side of a central aisle. Surely a church would have a phone. She walked down the aisle. The old wooden floor creaked. Hymnals lay on the worn pews, boxes of tissues. Weird dim light leaked in through tall amber-glass windows.

Would Glen look for her in here? She felt safe. Removed.

Claire stood there thinking how shadowy it was in the church and how the air was musty like a closed up old building, about how much time must have passed since she escaped the house and Glen hadn’t come after her. She’d lost track of time and didn’t care to look at her watch. She had a couple of hours before work, hours usually recruited by Glen for her to help hold the end of a chalk line or carry the other end of a beam. Time he expected her to praise his progress and exhibit enthusiasm.

What the hell was wrong with her anyway?

At the front right corner of the elevated pulpit area, three steps led up from the floor. Three steps to nothing. She climbed the steps and a tall window suddenly took shape. How had she not seen that? Not really a window, she realized as she placed her hands on either side of the opening to lean in. Dark varnished wood framed the opening. No glass.

She leaned in and looked around into a strange square space. An odd light shone up from below where the floor should have been.

An old bell tower. How interesting.

A yellow glow illuminated the inside of the tower. She peered upward but couldn’t make out the top or whether a bell actually hung up there. Around her, narrow wooden lathe sat tightly together in horizontal rows.

Oak, she murmured. Glen would go wild.

The oak glowed in the yellow light. Claire stepped up on the low sill, balancing. She peered around the tower, looked down through dim swirly air and the warm light coming up from underneath. Below, she could see the ground not very far down. Morning light flowed in.

Without actually deciding to do so, she stepped into the yellow swirly air. The warm air flowed up in a rush. She dropped slowly in an orderly, upright manner. She wore an old fashioned print dress like women wore back in pioneer days, a petticoat swelling out from her legs like an umbrella. The billowing skirt slowed her fall. She gently floated down.

Rows of golden lathe rushed past, each board of bright glowing wood alternating with the dark line where it joined under the next board. She picked up speed, descending with air rushing past her ears and fluttering her hair. She should have reached the bottom by now, but she kept falling, her skirts ballooned out like a sail, rows of lathe rushing past her eyes faster and faster until the bright and dark lines fluttered by in a blur.

Suddenly her feet hit firm ground. The building was open at the bottom. She walked out into the sunlight. The place seemed familiar.

Claire looked around briefly, adjusted her long dress, and pushed back her hair. A worn footpath hardly wide enough for a person on horseback led away from the church. After a few minutes hurrying along the path, her skirt hem brushing against fallen leaves and twigs, she came to a well. Two wooden buckets filled with water sat beside it. She picked up one of the heavy buckets and followed the path as it rounded the bottom of a grassy hillside.

An old log cabin sat in the wide valley. Frost had tinged the grasses beige. Water sloshed from the bucket as she hurried toward the cabin. The door had long since vanished. Morning sunlight shone through the opening and made a white square on the dirt floor. Holding her breath in anticipation, she walked into the square of light.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkened interior. The scene shocked her. Groaning men lay on straw piled on the ground, some on soiled blankets. In the center of the cabin, three men gathered around a table where an injured man sprawled. Blood soaked his shirt.

Two of the men held down his arms while the third man dug at a jagged opening in the man’s side. His flesh bulged around the opening, creamy and red and dark. Bloody bits of white cloth littered the ground around the table. Moans and sobs filled the air. The men at the table turned to Claire.

Bring that water over here, one of them demanded.

Claire stared at him as she hurried toward the table. Tall, lanky, he looked just like Glen, the same dark hair, a familiar expression on his face. A know-it-all, take-charge guy.

She bit back her retort. In the thick muddle of her thoughts, she reasoned that this man spoke in harsh tones because of the trauma of the occasion. Glen didn’t have any excuse.

Galvanized to action by the suffering around her, she found a big white bowl on a chair next to the table, carried it outside, and tossed the red slurry onto the frozen grass. After she poured fresh water into the bowl, she turned away from the agonizing scene at the table and used a dipper to give drinks to the men on the floor.

The man on the table died screaming, and men came in to carry him outside. She followed them outside. A careful row of bodies lined up under a big bare-limbed tree. Booming sounds pounded her eardrums. Men shouted. The crackling sound of gunfire came from the hillside above the cabin. She ran back to the well, brought more water.

Blood and water splattered her skirt. Cold penetrated her hands. Her knuckles ached. More injured men arrived and tears filled her eyes at their desperation.

The sound of horses caused her to turn as a group of soldiers rode up near the cabin. Smeared with sweaty grit and gunpowder, their gaunt faces reflected the grief of fighting and loss.

They’re moving this way, one of them shouted. Fall back if you can.

Wounded men on the ground outside the cabin called encouragement toward them, urging them on. She heard their voices but couldn’t make out their words. More men on horseback rode up, clothed in the same gray garb. Shouts echoed up the hillside as they thundered away toward the river.

It seemed to Claire that she had been here before, that today in some quirk of time and space, she had slipped into a previous life. Unwittingly stumbled upon devastation far worse than any she’d ever known. The dirt road, the church with its bell tower, all of it markers along the way to this previous life. Even though she had never seen it, she knew how the river looked, a stream that ran heavy after rain. It was down past the hills and the well and they were fighting down there.

The row of dead men gained one more body as she stood looking around, and the bone-tired movements of the cold blood-soaked men carrying it out brought her attention back to her bucket full of water. Then she was back in the cabin, where the moans and cries continued and she kept giving the men drinks, dipper by dipper, tears dripping from her cheeks.

She could never tell Glen about this. What would she tell him anyway, that she fell down a bell tower, found a well, and started carrying water to men in a war? That she cared so passionately for their suffering? Trying to convince him would diminish its importance.

What was its importance? She shook her head as she walked back to the well and left the bucket. Without hurrying, she found her way back down the dirt road and finally arrived at the house. Glen was nowhere to be seen. The car was gone. She went inside, stripped off the bloody dress, took a shower, and looked at herself in the mirror. Same gray eyes, same light brown hair.

Her jeans lay on the floor where the dress had been. She closed her eyes and gripped the edge of the sink. She could almost hear the ridicule in Glen’s voice if she tried to explain.

Glen drove up and slammed the front door. She stood in the living room halfway expecting him to be dressed like that man in the cabin. His jaw pulsed.

Where the hell did you go? he said. I thought something had happened to you.

This wouldn’t be the time to tell him.

Down the road. I planned to find a phone and have someone take me to work. I think it’s better if we don’t talk in the morning.

Yeah, well, I just drove all the way to the river. I’m about fed up with your little temper tantrums. Why don’t you grow up?

Screw you, she said. She found her purse and called to him while he showered.

I’m going to work. Do you need anything from town?

Cigarettes and beer.

Why did she bother? What the hell had she been thinking when she committed herself to this man and this property, this life they planned? Nothing about it seemed right anymore. She scrubbed her forehead trying to make sense of it. Had he changed or had she? Why carry out habits of courtesy when they clearly loathed each other?

More to the point, what happened this morning? At work, she looked down at her hands on the desk thinking there would be marks on her palms from the weight of the bucket handle. That night she dawdled over her food, only partly remembering to smile at Glen and make small talk about his success with the tandoori chicken and the mashed eggplant which she knew involved a lot of work in hunting down ghee and garam masala and holding the eggplant over the open gas burner to scorch off its skin.

We could have just gone down to the Indian food place in the strip mall on 5th, she said.

A hurt expression crossed his eyes and she flinched. He did work hard. But she would prefer to buy prepared meals more often so that he didn’t divert so much time to cooking. She’d said as much before, more than once, and he refused to consider it.

Sorry, I don’t mean to belittle your effort. It’s delicious, she said. The best I’ve ever tasted.

He rested his forearms on the table edge. I enjoy the process of preparing food, he said. It’s something I can accomplish in the short term. I need the gratification of a project finished, not like the house. How long have I been on the foundation out there?

He smiled and dimples creased his cheeks. That was his concession. His happy expression reminded her why she thought she loved him. There’s something peaceful about marinating chicken overnight, he added, measuring all the spices and mixing the yogurt for a second marinade.

He talked more about the process and what cooking offered him, but throughout the stream of his words, there was the cabin and the thirsty dying men running like a silent movie in her mind.

~~~

If Claire dreamed that night, none of it remained in her thoughts the next morning. She woke up tired and dawdled in the bathroom. When she grabbed her mug, Glen was already mixing concrete.

At work, she Googled Civil War battlefields, and there were 156,000 hits. She added ‘Tennessee’ then looked at the map of all the Tennessee sites. There were over thirty of them and the more she read, the more she realized it was absurd to think she could know which of these battles had been part of her weird experience. Or even to think that any of them had.

For the first time she considered that perhaps the stress had taken its toll, that maybe reality had started to slip away and in its place came a bizarre dreamlike experience and this sick preoccupation. They had struggled with this old house for months. Glen thought he could get the addition finished and the bedroom updated before winter, but it was December and the addition still didn’t have a roof. Every