Cutlass Wonders

Cutlass Wonders

{Being the First Tale in

A Measure of Poe & Three Quarters}

Steven Mooney

Steven Mooney Books

Olympia, Washington

Cutlass Wonders

Copyright © 2020 by Steven Mooney

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-7345356-6-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020905113

Cover Art & Design by Jessica Bell Design

Published by Steven Mooney Books

This tale is dedicated to Dina,

Peter, Maureen, and Michael, and to the memory of Doodlebug

Each story lives the humor of the ulcer while other maladies suffer to be heard.

– Randal Poe

Book One

Commencement Blues

It was to be a day of surprises that launched a season of them when through the privet he spied the Benz home early, ticking in the heat, tympanic to his parents’ yelling crescendos that scattered birds and boomed in the porte cochere and hit him full volume as he opened the door, and even though he knew how to turn it off, this one was especially heated; when he heard the word college, it caught him up. We must stand through thick and --Thick as a brick!"

A free thinker, poets don’t need algebra, he’s—

A dolt, a wildcard, now this college denial—! and something slammed the wall before his mother marched past trailing bourbon fumes while Randal lurked outside the den and observed his father fulminate and splutter while flying shards about their mountain land and that cutlass caught his ear before the senior Poe removed the sword from the mantle hooks and held it aloft. Alas poor Yorick, the pen is mightier, so out with you then! Randal watched his father march past with the stage prop and said Dad twice before their collision in the breezeway.

You! ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a witless whelp! Out, damned spot,’ and thrusting the instrument into the umbrella stand, the elder strode off.

Randal drew the cutlass from the bin as from a stone and unsheathed it in glittering light that anointed his riposte with his own quote of the Bard, addressing the cigar smoke that lingered like a shroud: If the man were alive and would deny it, Zounds! I would make him eat a piece of my sword. The cutlass had been in the Poe family for generations, an heirloom vestige of a bygone epoch, and Randal seemed to have inherited it by default.

With the sword and a crumpled letter side by side on his desk, Randal learned he’d been denied admission to Carolingian College. His ascension to one of the South’s storied institutions had been taken for granted; surely the only son of a noted playwright and professor would follow in his father’s footsteps, or paw prints thought some, as the elder cast a simian resemblance in height and gait and patchy black beard. Yet the son was miscast in his father’s eyes.

As he cleaned the scabbard with a pillowcase, disappointed by the rejection and stunned by the way it isolated him, the cripple unable to follow the Pied Piper, he was unable to accept that he’d be abandoned on the platform while everyone else would be getting on the train. What broken rules were these? College was a given, it was the standard follow through from senior year. Everybody was going. And had he heard correctly, he was to be kicked out of the house? He swished the air with the blade slashing at bureaucracy and parental stricture and then holding the sword aloft with both hands, he vowed that if he was to be made the goat of these corrupt, screwed up rules, then he’d rewrite them and shape them to his honor. He slid the sword under the bed before fanning the yellow pages.

Darnell’s Lock and Gun.

Hey, I’ve heard y’all buy old weapons and so on.

Got pawn, collectables, modern and antique: we do it all. But we close in a half-are, why don’t you come on in tomorrow.

Randal wandered through the house like a ghost as he hatched a plan that didn’t begin with getting kicked out of the house: he’d take whatever he could get for that blade, grab some cheap wheels and, well the plan ran out of gas at the city limits, but getting started was the thing, and the sword was the key. In the den he paused before the photograph of his triple-great grandfather brandishing the sword and noted again that he was a dead ringer for the guy, as though he couldn’t see himself. He stared at his ancestor whose own life plans had been diverted by war; it really sucked about college; he assumed he would study English and history, the good stuff. In the dissipation of his dreams, he saw Fate in the role of Falstaff withholding the penny, and himself as Pistol; since the world is my oyster, I’ll take the sword and crack a baker’s dozen!

The next morning after his dad had left and he’d found his mother ensconced with an urn of Irish coffee, he took her wheels and drove downtown. Of their numerous cars he liked her Cadillac best except for a soured sense memory from the time the ape had gotten him in a headlock and wrestled him into the trunk for a refusal to go to church; and then just the car thing: his family was rich, and he deserved to have his own wheels, even classmates from the other side of the tracks were mobile. Randal stewed as he drove: anything he wanted to do, no matter what, Mister Big Shot Playwright was reading his mind like some black magic (he’d often pictured his father as the eighth dwarf in Snow White’s train, cast from fairyland), using enchantment to write literature and screw him in every act and scene.

He parked in the side lot facing a crumbling brick wall where flag-shaped and faded patriotic colors read: Darnell’s Lock and Gun-Security is Our Business-Buy, Sell, Trade, and with his parcel he entered the store. It smelled of oiled steel and the floorboards creaked. On a pedestal sat a key-making machine beside a grandfather clock that stood sentry over centuries of gunnery and uniforms on hangers and on racks and rows of glass cases and vertical stacks along both walls displayed muskets and other vintage firearms. Mesmerized by the display, Randal stared as history winked.

Can I hep you? Randal turned to face a man with sandy brown hair pushed behind his ears, and wire-rim glasses.

Lot of nice stuff there, much of it carried by our boys in the Civil War, said the man.

Randal stepped up and laid his bundle on the counter and unwrapped it. The tubby clerk peered.

How much you give me for this blade?

The man’s reply was to lift the saber, turn it over in his hands, and then remove the blade from the scabbard and examine its designs. He slid the cutlass home and gently laid it on the glass. Where’d you get this?

It belonged to my grandfather.

Mind my askin’ who he was?

Shives Poe, he was a General.

Shoot a mile! Your granddaddy was Gen’l Shives Poe?

Yep.

Boy, you can’t sell this sword. It’s a gen-u-wine historic artifact. What I mean is, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to buy it, but I ain’t got ten thousand dollars!

Ten—are you shi-kidding me?

Listen, I could a said yeah, give you a hundred dollars and took it for myself, but you see I din’t. Here’s why, this sword belongs in a museum, or a battlefield, one. The clerk offered his hand.

Elmer Butkins.

Randal. What do you mean on a battlefield?

You heard of re-enactors?

I see I got a customer - you hole the fort.

Randal’s eyes tumbled: Ten thousand bucks! He imagined a brass plate in the Smithsonian: ‘From the Collection of Historian Randal Poe’ as he hefted a musket from a rack, aimed down the barrel, and then held it at parade rest.

Beautiful, ain’t it? said Elmer, back from selling a box of .22 longs. That there’s an 1860 Springfield. We carry many of ‘em. You can’t bring just any rifle. We make the same environment as a Civil War battle, and serious about it too.

Sounds cool, what else y’all do?

Tell you what, said Elmer, meet me Saturdee afternoon about five at Suds-n-Duds on Briar Boulevard, you know way it is? I gotta do my laundry, but I’ll buy you a beer and tell ya about it.

Well, okay, but I brought this sword down here because I need money pretty soon and, ah, my dad’s a super tightwad.

How much you need?

Well, and numbers danced as they often had.

Tell you what, you let me display this sword, say a month, and I’ll spot you a couple hundred. People will be askin’ about it, word gets out. That’ll mean business. I’ll make money, and it’ll be safe too, I guar-an-damn-tee-it.

Randal left the store with cash in his pocket and dollar signs in his eyes, salve to a busted spirit that over the next several days didn’t keep a low profile so much as hone a stealth approach to home life, one he had unconsciously refined like an annual production with endless rehearsals for as long as he cared to look back. But this day he looked forward as he pedaled his bike down Briar Boulevard.

A woman in an apron stared at sizzling meat as he entered Suds-n-Duds on the cafe side and took a seat at the bar, fronting a glass partition that separated the room from a laundro-mat.

Hey, Donna, get my buddy a beer, called Elmer as he entered through a back door. They sat and watched the driers tumble. Exciting! Elmer turned up his bottle of Bud and slugged half. Randal again noted Elmer’s belly, a tortoise shell under his shirt, and the same red suspenders as before, and they both watched Donna bend over burgers.

There’s nothing like a cole one, day like today.

Randal took a hit. His experience with drinking was tempered by stealing it from his dad.

I was just out back workin’ on my bike. Carb’s a little funky.

What kind of bike you got?

Harley, fifty-nine flat head, said Elmer as they went out, and Randal ogled the monster of a machine that seemed to be all engine topped with a gas tank, an oval seat and a smaller version behind it.

Man, I love Harleys!

Chopped it myself and it’s my pride and joy. Got me another back to the house, but this is my baby.

In awe, Randal reached for the handlebars.

Hey! Can chew read? cried Elmer, indicating a tiny sticker, and Randal, his nose an inch from the frame, read:

IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE

LIKE I VALUE MY BIKE

DON’T FUCK WITH IT

Rising, he stumbled and sprawled in gravel. Elmer handed Randal his beer.

That’s the reaction I’d like to get out of a good many people.

Look, you gotta have a comma after bike; if-then clauses need a comma.

You mean coma, what you get you mess with my bike. C’mon, I got to check my clothes, and they went back inside.

At the bar, Randal paged through a stack of mimeographed ads for re-enactments and after-battle and bivouac scenes given by the Third North Carolina Regiment, in addition to some newspaper clippings about the group.

So, you try to make it real?

Historic accuracy, we call it.

You’re not concerned about somebody getting shot?

Hey now, we don’t use live ammo. We did, the law be all over us. Besides, bunch of the guys are cops and troopers anyway, we legal inside and out. Randal pondered the historical accuracy of blank ammunition.

Maybe I could play my grandfather.

It don’t work that way. It did, we’d have a hunnerd Robert E. Lees; there’d be more Stonewall Jacksons than your granddaddy’s dogs. No sir, the Third puts a man where he’s needed, and right now we’re short litter bearers and muleteers.

Randal had pictured leading a charge, waving his sword like a lariat, or infantry attack, rows of shiny bayonets lined up straight as zippers, but ambulance driver? Elmer told him that his duties would be picking up dead off the field of battle. Where’s the glory in that, he wondered, after all, they weren’t really dead so how is that historically accurate? Suppose he collected some dead guys and put them in the ambulance, how long are they supposed to stay dead? What if you were dead out there and had to take a crap? What about jock itch? If you couldn’t scratch that would kill you, he giggled, buzzed.

So, you think you want to give it a whirl? asked Elmer.

I’ll audition, he said around his tongue.

Here’s the dates when you should call. But hey, you come on by the store anytime, you hear?

Randal gurgled as Elmer departed.

2

Dr. Titus Shell folded the newspaper and set it aside and pictured the columnist, Tarleton Ramseur, who’d attended many an opening at the museum, particularly the recent ceremony that inducted its new curator, and he smiled at the thought. Kept at the assistant level for so many years it was a godsend when a plastic Brontosaurus crushed his predecessor at an unveiling gone awry. Now in that title position at the North Carolina Museum of History, he cherished these moments when he could reflect or just kick back and relax with Ramseur’s history column, and the current piece had detailed his museum’s contribution to a National Geographic special on the state’s role in reconstruction. The Civil War was never more than a moment away, it seemed. Only yesterday had another portal opened to him, a most surprising one as well. He’d received a call from a member of a Civil War Re-enactors Association, a group he’d helped fund from time to time. All he really knew about Sergeant Butkins was that he owned a local gun shop. But the conversation had excited him.

You’ll never guess what I got in my display case here.

Newt Gingrich?

Haw haw! That’s a good one.

Get ready: I got Shives Poe’s dress sword, the one give to him by Jeb Stuart!

Indeed! had been Shell’s initial reply. How did you come across this gem? He might have known better if he’d remembered how Butkins loved to ramble, especially when it concerned history. As the gunsmith warmed to his preamble, Shell reviewed what he knew about the General.

Shives Poe had had inherited a mercantile and dry goods store in Umstead Mills, then a rail stop crossroads southeast of Raleigh, and after twenty years had expanded it so far as to include a forge and smithy and a contract with the railroad, thus beginning a familial and financial relationship that would last well into the next century.

For one whose fortunes loomed so large, Poe’s diminutive stature and low center of gravity attracted him to dogs and so he began breeding them as a pastime, one that bloomed when he established Poe Kennels, an endeavor that made him a slave owner; when he needed help to run the place, well, free labor was abundant. Revisionist history, if you buy it, has declared him to be more a frugal merchant than as one lacking in scruples, but an abomination no matter how one approached it. When North Carolina seceded from the Union, Poe was determined to become an officer but business kept him from the