On the Couch
On the couch you sit and read the paper. The paper tells you the news. The news says someone gunned down the family who sat together into the night talking drinking smoking and laughing on the front porch.
The front porch was added onto the house by Great-grandfather. Great-grandfather was crippled years later by being crushed between two locomotives. Two locomotives were on adjacent tracks that were unusually close together, as all the tracks were at the sand pits, and Great-grandfather stood by one of the locomotives and the other one came up behind him and crushed him between the two. The two locomotives couldn’t be moved without doing further damage to Great-grandfather and he was got out of the space in between by the rescue squad.
"Reading An Ancient Text" photo by Flickr user Jason L. Parks
The rescue squad came in a model-T truck and took Great-grandfather to the hospital. The hospital stood five miles away and the way they handled Great-grandfather getting him there made his spinal cord injury worse. Worse than that he ended up not only paralyzed but he had a stroke in the emergency room. The emergency room staff did their best to stabilize him but he ended up spending the rest of his life on a hospital bed in the hallway between the bedrooms and the kitchen in the house he built with his own hands.
Hands that were long, and broad, calloused, and strong from doing heavy work for all the years up to when the two locomotives came together and caught him on the tracks.
The tracks led from the sand pits where the accident happened up and past the house where the family usually sat on the front porch talking and drinking and smoking and watching the trains.
The trains went by day and night until the day came when up the tracks from the sand pits came men with guns, and the guns were raised and trained on the family sitting on the porch, and fired, and the family fell, and the men went inside and began rifling through the drawers where they thought things of value might be hidden, the way Great-grandfather was hidden in the hallway that led to the bedrooms and Great-grandfather had heard the guns go off and he was fearful that the men would rifle the kitchen and living room, and, finding nothing, would head up the hallway toward the bedrooms and find him. Find him and gun him down in the hallway that led to the wing of the house that Great-grandfather had built with his own hands long ago, when he was a young man.
A young man as he had been then could have jumped the intruders and overpowered them; he was agile enough then, and that good of a fighter; guns or no guns, he’d chase them from the house and back down to the tracks that they had come from. From the house they’d run past the bodies of the dead family.
The dead family would be lying there and in his grief Great-grandfather would make the mistake of picking up the pistol that one of the intruders had dropped there. There Great-grandfather would stand on the porch as the police came up the driveway. The driveway was long and winding for the family had owned a lot of land, all covered with Indian grass and the small stunted shrubs that grew all over that area. That area was too large for the police to cover since there were only the two policemen. The two policemen would arrive at Great-grandfather’s house that day, called by a neighbor who’d seen the killings, a neighbor who’s long since moved away and whose house has fallen into ruin, and there would stand Great-grandfather on the porch holding the killer’s gun in his hand. His hand would flex upon the grip as he pointed the policemen up the tracks where the killers had gone, but all they would see would be the bodies at his feet and the blood dripping down the steps of the porch.
The porch held a man with a gun and murdered bodies and the police told the man to drop the gun. Drop the gun, they would say, and he would not, he’d just cry out “They went up the tracks, get them! They’re heading for the sand pits, go get them! Go get them,” he’d cry again and again, and reflexively he’d wave the gun and the policemen would be sure he was aiming at them and they’d raise their guns and fire and he’d be down. Down on his face on the porch full of blood, blood like the blood that had been on the trains that had crushed him all those years back.
Back to the present he came then, again, opening his eyes; back to the bed in the hallway, crippled, with the gunmen rifling the rooms all about him and he waited to be found and gunned down also, and he prayed he’d see Jesus in heaven that day, for he knew they could leave no witnesses. Witnesses were not left by the gunmen, just as he’d thought; they found Great-grandfather and killed him in his bed, after he spat on them like a young man would, his last act of defiance before taking the bullets, and the bodies were all found the next morning by Father Jim who came by for breakfast, as usual.
As usual, like you sit on the couch. On the couch where you sit and read the paper. The paper tells you the news.
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Jim Meirose lives in Central New Jersey and has had short work appear in many leading literary magazines and journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, South Carolina Review, and Witness. A chapbook of his short stories will be released in October 2010 by Burning River. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and the Shirley Jackson Award. One of his stories was cited in the O. Henry awards anthology.
