Absolution

By: Kevin M. White
September 11, 2008

Max woke with a start, eyes wide open and searching the darkness. The air was warm and smelled faintly of corn and manure. He rose from the bed, careful not to wake his wife. Something was wrong. It was quiet. Too quiet. Not the quiet of the city where lights go dim and cars sit silently in driveways. This was an absence of sound. No wind in the corn stalks. No insects calling for mates.

Max grabbed his overalls from the rocking chair near the foot of the bed and slipped into them through the unclipped suspender. On bare feet he walked silently from the bedroom and down the darkened hall. He walked past his daughter, Elsie's, room. She had gone to Lincoln last year to study at the university. Moon light shown weakly through her open window illuminating the hand made quilt his grandmother had made years before and which she now used as a bed spread.

As Max rounded the narrow turn in the hall to head downstairs he felt, rather than heard, a presence in the living room below. He cursed himself mentally for not grabbing the rifle from the closet in the bedroom. Slowly, he worked his way down the steps until he reached the bottom.

His feet touched the corded throw rug at the foot of the stairs and in spite of the tension, he could not resist curling his toes and kneading the knotted fabric like a cat.

The lower part of the house was basically one large room with areas carved out by furnishings to delineate kitchen, dinning room and living room. Directly across from Max the front door was wide open and a dark figure stood within its frame. The faint aroma of mold and rot worked its way across the threshold and into the sleepy farmhouse interior.

Max took a step back, catching his heel on the bottom step of the stairs as the figure slowly walked into his home, turned left and proceeding to his living room. As it passed a pair of matching, red and green, plaid rockers it turned regarding him with an awkward tilt of its head.

"I left my boots on the porch," it said, as if it were chewing a mouthful of cornmeal.

Max moved to the front door. He kept an eye on the intruder until he could see the front porch. Briefly, he glanced out the doorway and saw two, muddy military style boots neatly placed to the left of the door mat.

"What are you doing in my home," Max said as he turned back to the figure. He swallowed hard, realizing his voice lacked the strength or authority he would have liked it to have.

The figure was now in the middle of his living room. A mere outline in the blackness with the moon light only serving to pull it deeper into shadow.

"You don't know me?" the figure queried. "you don't remember?"

Max stepped forward in spite of his growing apprehension. He could barely understand what the figure was saying and no matter how hard he squinted the details of its countenance failed to come forth.

"My appearance won't help you," it said

"Who are you," Max said, fear seeping into his voice. "What are you doing in my home."

"Your home," it belched, the words bubbling up like foam in a stew pot. "Time has been good to you."

Max frowned, perplexed. He wondered for a moment if the figure was an escapee from the mental ward in Worrell county. Or maybe a soldier suffering from shell shock. He'd read about that once over at the VA.

The figure turned and walked across the middle of the living room stopping at the wall and looking up at the many pictures adorning the whitewashed surface. The moon light caught a glimpse of silver on the shoulder and lapel of a uniform coat. Wisps of hair, tangled and unkept, swept over the brow. The figure regarded him before turning back to the pictures.

"A wonderful family," it croaked, tracing the outline of several of the frames with a skeletal, thin hand.

"Who are you?" Max repeated, moving behind one of the plaid rockers. "What do you want."

The figure's hand dropped to it's side as it looked up for few more moments at the pictures as if trying to commit the details of each one to memory. "Who am I? I am your sin. I want nothing from you. You, however, have wanted something from me."

Max's brow furrowed. His sin? This man had to be insane. What could he possibly want from him?

The dark figure turned to face Max, it's head lolling to the side, the cheek nearly touching its shoulder. "I know you have tried but surely you cannot have forgotten."

Max looked down at the floor searching his brain to make sense of this mad dialog. As the figure began to speak, memory like a strange beast from the depths of a bog, floated to the surface with growing clarity.

"Italy, a burned out cottage in the country side," the figure said. "You were hiding with two wounded soldiers when my patrol came upon you. We were only four and the war had taken its toll on us as well."

The figure moved closer as Max continued to stare at the floor.

"You shot the first of us as we approached the remains of the low, rock wall around the cottage," it continued. "The second died moments later. Antoni and I made it inside but you put a bullet in his spine from the top of the stairway."

"It was war," Max murmured.

"It was war," the figure agreed without malice.

"We had dropped in to Italy five days before," Max said as if in a dream. "A storm took our planes off course and we missed the drop zone by miles. Hundreds died in the parachute jumps. We were lost, low on supplies and picked off by the dozens by roving patrols ."

The apparition stood quietly as Max recounted the tale. Comrades missing. Friends dieing.

Panic followed by terror and days without sleep.

"What do you want with me," Max said quietly. "How do you know these things? I never spoke to anyone in all these years. Not even my wife."

"How do you think I know?" the figure said.

"Stanley had been gut shot," Max continued as if the shade had not spoken. "He should have died days before. He was nearly dead by the time you came. His skin burned to the touch and the smell of the wound would've made a dead man gag."

"You thought you were dead when I appeared behind Antonio," the figure said.

Max nodded. "My clip was empty. I saw the machine pistol over your shoulder."

The figure made a gravelly, chortling sound. "I didn't have any bullets left either."

"We struggled on the stairs," Max said fighting back tears. "I didn't know if there were anymore of you. Stanley was dieing but he wasn't yet dead. We had heard stories of what happened to men who fell into enemy hands. Thomas was with him in a room in the back. It was the only upper room that had any roof left on it. He was helpless as well, blinded by mortar shrapnel three days before."

"I thought I could kill you," the apparition said with a trace of sadness. "Even after I felt the knife in my belly I was sure I could take you with me."

"I don't remember anything after running to meet you on the stairs," Max said dully. "Nothing until you fell back, taking my knife with you where it was buried in your chest. Only the sound of dry wood snapping as you pin-wheeled down the stairs and the odd way you looked rolled over on your neck like a pill bug."

Max wanted to be sick. He felt the shadow's gaze upon him as he sobbed wordlessly in the darkness. All this time. All these years. A life built on random chance and the death of another.

"You've come to take penance," Max said breathlessly. "What is owed has finally come due."

The apparition regarded him silently. Its head spasming slightly as if the effort of keeping it somewhat straight was too great a strain. "You believe I have come to judge you?"

"Why else would this be happening?" Max replied. "It's either a nightmare or my time of judgment is at hand. Am I dead?

"No," the apparition belched.

"Take what you have come for then," Max said painfully. "It's what you might have had if things had gone differently."

The shadow laughed, a hollow sound like someone coughing at the bottom of a well. It thrust its hands forward, skin dry and peeling from the bone. "And what would I do with it Max Keller? Read the paper in you favorite chair? Work the soil? Make love to your wife? I am not your judge."

The air expelled from Max, deflating him like a balloon, replaced by a growing sense of dread.

If this thing had not come for him, to take from him that which might rightfully be his, then what other, more horrible, judgment awaited him? His whole life since 1944 could well have been leading to this moment, he realized.

In 1946 Max and his wife had come back to Nebraska to work the farm that his father and grandfather had worked before him. The work was hard but honest and, at first, his nightmares slowly disappeared beneath the dark, rich soil. In the winter of 1947 his wife bore him a son. Two years later that son died from the pox and Max had the first sense that perhaps he had not survived completely unscathed from the Great War.

In the summer of 1949 another baby boy was born followed two years later by a lively little girl.

In 1959 came the first harvest that brought a true profit to the farm since Max had been working it. In the fall of that year his second son died. An accident, but Max thought he knew better. He might have survived three years of atrocity over seas but his name would not. No Keller would work this land once he was gone.

The knowledge weighed heavily on him, stooping his shoulders and back as much as any of the hard labor he did daily on the farm. There was no escaping the watchful eye of God, he had been told. Eventually, all men reaped what they had so carefully sown.

The rustle of a hundred acres of corn, leaves swishing like long hands dusting off another day's work, stirred Max from his introspection. Beneath that, the faintest whisper touched his ears.

"...forgive you..." the breeze seemed to say.

Max shifted slightly in his chair, dimly aware that he was all alone. It was hard to concentrate and he was so very tired. Relaxing deeper into the chair, he let the night take him.

In the morning Max's wife came downstairs and saw him sleeping in the chair. Initially, she thought nothing of it. He often came downstairs during the night, the pain in his back or responsibilities on the farm robbing him of a full night sleep. She knew sometimes his dreams troubled him as well, but he had never spoken of them to her so she had never asked. With a cluck of her tongue, she noticed that the front door was open as she walked into the kitchen to start of pot of coffee. She would have to ask Max about that when she brought him a cup.

She looked outside as the sun was rising. The air was warm but fresh and clean. As she closed the front door she noticed a pair of worn,soiled boots in very bad need of repair. She did not recall Max having a pair of boots like that. She decided she would ask him about that over the morning coffee as well.