The Preacher: An Origin Story
This is a short sloppy short story that I wrote about the Preacher. It gave me an idea of who the man was that hunted Ada Picou. This short story is only hinted at in Showdown. Happy reading!
Stories of war trickled down to his young ears.
Blood and violence fed him at the dinner table. Fear and worry sat heavy upon his home. The man with the piercing blue eyes was once a small child. He lived with his mother and father in a meager cabin on the outskirts of a town in West Virginia.
Shell-shocked, starving, soldiers from the Confederacy stumbled across his family’s land.
News of their coming preceded them. Like locusts, they ate and took as much as they could from anyone. Desperation in their eyes, he saw them first.
They called out to the little boy with the blue eyes.
“Whatcha doin’ there, boy?” one asked.
“You got vittals?” another followed.
Torn uniforms, sunken cheeks, and hollow eyes, they swayed as they talked. “Boy, we’s talk’n to ya.”
He ran.
In one door of the house and out another. His mother took him in her arms and fled into the trees. The soldiers did not see either of them go.
His father stayed back, in the house. Armed with only a kitchen knife, he was overwhelmed and beaten.
He crawled off on his belly, still alive.
The soldier chased him into the yard. As they beat him, they cursed him as a liar.
“Yer hide’n yer stores, we knows it.” One spat and turned over the furniture.
The family did not have much in their home, and what they had was thrown outside. Boards in the floors and walls were pulled up.
“I told you, we don’t have anything,” the boy’s father yelled. Someone put a boot to his face.
In the trees, he and his mother smelled the smoke before they heard the fire.
The darkness of the woods near the home became illuminated and exposed them. The blue-eyed boy stood with his mother in the glow of what had been their future. A future erased by the Confederates. His little fists were white and tight as tears blinded him.
His mother wept over him, unable to look at their home.
She did not see his father, bloody and broken, as he crawled to them.
He fled his home and his state. It was overrun with war and soldiers. The years passed, and he grew up on the road. He hunted and fished for food.
Reconstruction offered his father opportunities for work. The United States rebuilt itself and tried to heal.
“No scar this deep will heal anytime soon,” his father would say.
The blue-eyed boy nodded and agreed.
They found themselves on a riverboat on the Mississippi.
“Work is work, son, even if it is around this southern filth.” His father eyed the boat with suspicion.
His mother bit her lip and found work in the captain’s quarters.
“What are you doing in there for the Captain,” the boy asked. “Just cleaning.” She hung her head low and found something else to talk about.
His father turned to drink more frequently.
On a feeder river, down by Brashear City, the boiler exploded. A few men died, and many people were injured. His father escaped, having been drunk the night before and still passed out.
The family emerged from the debris, wet and muddy, and slipped up the bank.
The boy with blue eyes found himself settled in enemy territory. After hearing him talk, everyone knew he and his family were Yankees. His knuckles stayed bloody. Daily, he came home to dinner with bruises and cuts.
He turned dark and brooding under his mother’s eye. Somewhere between the riverboat and the city, she had found opium. Afterward, she never saw the other children spit on him or chase him with sharpened pieces of scrap metal.
She wasn’t there when her son killed another boy.
Running through the edge of town, chased by a small group of older boys, the blue-eyed boy could barely breathe. He knew they would beat him if he stopped, he ran. Thin and small, he was faster than the others. All but one.
Close to the river, the boy ducked behind a shack.
The chase was over, he thought had lost them.
As he crouched and caught his breath, one large boy rounded the wall.
“Whatcha hide’n from ya piece a shit?” There was a knife in his hand, and he scowled as he inched forward.
“Nothing. Just leave me be.” The blue-eyed boy stammered and waved his arm out.
“Like Hell I will.” The knife flashed and sliced into young flesh.
A change came over the boy with the blue eyes, and he stopped begging.
His visage went dark and appeared older than his years. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, and his eyes relaxed. He held the other boy’s gaze.
“What’s wrong with ya boy? You git into yer ma’s Chinese molasses?” he asked with a wry grin.
Before anything else could be said, the small, thin, blue-eyed boy heaved a heavy river rock over his head in an arc and brought it crashing down.
A skull cracked. Dark blood ran down pale skin.
Quick as a flash, the boy with blue eyes leaped upon the stunned attacker. They fell to the ground.
“Stay down,” the blue-eyed boy held the other’s face in the wet earth.
The Mississippi lapped at his scalp and his hair drifted in the murky waters. The larger boy struggled and flapped his arms and feet. He was pressed harder into the smothering, wet soil. Gray and black matter stuck to his head and filled his ears.
The pale dirty body jerked and then was still.
Blue eyes, dry and distant, stared off into the river as the body floated away. Slower than ever before, the boy walked home. He stood straight, and his head was held high. He arrived home and found there was nothing to eat.
“Damn you both!” he yelled at his parents.
His father was drunk on the floor, and his mother lost to opium.
“We need food.” He kicked the bottles on the floor.
His father grunted from a corner.
The boy with blue eyes went to bed that night thumbing his new knife.
Something within his father had heard him. The next day we went out for food. Without money though he resorted to theft. Almost to their shack, he stumbled down the street. The old man was gunned down at the door.
“Thief, you ain’t running from me.” A man called from his horse as he slid the smoking carbine into the leather boot. “Justice is done.”
“Like a dog,” his mother cried, half naked in rotting clothes from the doorway. “Curse you, Jean Louis Picou!” She shrieked and howled, seeing her husband’s blood running in the dirt and his cold, emaciated body laid at her.
She took the rest of her opium.
The boy stood in the yard that evening, shocked and numb. Both of his parents lay dead in a town he loathed. He was sick and shaking.
Men rode up to his house that night and he ran. He had no idea who they were, but everything he had loved and knew was gone. “You're not taking me too,” the boy whispered, his breath hot. He lost himself in the woods of Louisiana.
Over time, he proved his skill as a hired gun. He was an ominous bully who earned his pay torturing others. Rarely did he go back north. He found pleasure in wringing everything he could from the southerners. Every day he found new ways and opportunities to make the people around him suffer. His evil reputation grew along with the rumors of his wicked ways.
Only once did a light come into his eyes.
“Picou, you say?” he asked. The blue-eyed man licked his lips.
“Yes, I need them moved. Any means necessary. Business interests are looking at adjacent properties and looking to establish a town, railway, and a few other investments,” said a man in a suit who mispronounced everything in Louisiana.
The hired gun nodded, savoring the pleasure it would bring him to make this kill.
The man who was hiring him adjusted his large and bulging frame, “just scare them off will you, there are children there, and we don’t need any bad press right now.” He added, “might shut the whole thing down. You know.”
The man with the cool blue eyes adjusted his black hat and smiled a wicked grin. The businessman’s blood turned to ice.
“Oh, I’ll take care things, you’ll see. Nothing at all to worry yourself over.” The man in black turned and left the office, pocketing the large envelope of cash.
“An entire Picou family? This is a right, pleasant turn.”
The thundering sound of hooves was lost in the cries of the cicadas.