Prologue
Autumn 1860
Inside the Coffees’ rustic cabin, LeeAnn screamed in the flickering candlelight. Through sweat and tears mingling down her face, she whispered, “Goddamn you people. Somebody, help me.”
The boar’s head mounted over the bed peered down with brutal intent, while the so-called midwife, Georgine Myrtle, watched on from the shadows.
The buffalo check printed blanket LeeAnn lay on matched the tension in her husband John’s familiar frown. He said, “Shut up, LeeAnn.” Then, he turned his shouting to the woman who smirked in the darkness. “And you! Do something. LeeAnn’s a mess!”
Georgine ambled forward, knelt down, and slid a Bowie Knife under the bed.
“What the hell was that?” John said. “That knife was blood stained. You some kind of a witch?”
Nobody’d ever ignored the prominent town figure’s tantrums. However, if Georgine heard the chair breaking against the wall, one could not tell. Standing tall and commanding like a cult leader, she instructed, “Push with all your strength, LeeAnn. The son of Sam Hill will soon arrive.”
Flashes of lightning revealed agony across LeeAnn’s face to the sounds of John shuffling through his wooden chest in search of his hunting rifle. During the chaos, a hooded dark entity stepped into the room, capturing everyone’s attention.
“Stay away,” John said, drawing his gun. He would have fired had he not fallen motionless at the sight in front of him: the midwife had his newborn, dark-haired offspring hoisted up. In the twinkling of an eye, the baby’s shadow was sucked into the ghoulish, sickly green hands of the dark entity.
The bullet John fired fell off the entity and clanked against the floor. A crunching sound drew attention to a wing forming out of the entity. Georgine slumped beneath it and took refuge onto their escape.
Chapter One
What’s Happened to Our World
I, Doc Apollo, commence my report on the morning after Martin Coffee’s birth. On this day, Georgine came galloping up to my stead on a pony that shared her silver color hair.
Sitting on my front porch, I squinted under my brown top hat and said to myself, “This early, Georgine?”
Stolen novel; please report.
The cocks went haywire. Cows mooed. She had a grown son and silver hair with a face so young? Was a midwife but with shoulders square and proud? Oh, the contradictions, and no formal way to inquire after them.
The pale woman hovered, nearly whispering through her dark lips. “Poor Mrs. Coffee doesn’t take pain good at all. Mercy—she blasphemed like an outlaw.”
I gawked at her looming, slender figure in black. It was my first time seeing her since I got sober. The corner of her mouth had curled up in a smile.
Before I got a word in, she motioned her hands with the bones of her fingers threatening to stretch through. “Doctor, mind your manners and let me finish. Before anyone spins the yarn on this matter, I must inform you that I asked Mr. Coffee to allow me to put something under the bed to ease the intensity.”
Roosters out in nearby plantations crowed like they wanted to alarm me. “Where’s this wild horse a-running, Georgine?”
She waited for them to be silent then tossed a glance their way as if they had bent to her will. “If you and these darn animals stop interrupting me, you’ll hear. I slid one of my son’s Bowie Knives under their bed. He kept them inside his coat pockets during the Mexican War.”
Our boys in sky-blue coats, caps, and muskets defeated the Mexicans in serpent and eagle shirts, masses of wounded men falling off horses in smoke and gunshots. Her son would only choose a knife over our ground breaking artillery for something sinister, not country.
Georgine went on. “A knife under the bed is believed to ease discomfort in matters such as this.”
Folding my hands in my lap, I forced a tense smile and swallowed. “Now, listen here. Why do you think you white folks haven’t shot me dead?”
A sneer formed under her pointed nose. “You’re drifting off topic.”
I kept my composure. “Not so far off, Georgine. Now it’s your turn to a-listen. When you get malaria, I’m the one who strips you stark naked and drenches you with buckets of cold water.
Inside my bag, there are painkillers, opium, vaccines, thermometers, knives too, but you know what I don’t do with them?” Fixed smile and calm voice, I continued, “Stick them under people’s goddamn beds. What I’m saying is…Keep your delusions out of my field.”
Georgine shot the top half of her body back in surprise and straitened her beret.
The scene, an acre of countless dead leaves from the world— my coat and her dress flapping in the wind— she gripped my bowtie and took a superior tone. “You think you can trample all over anyone you like.” I gritted my teeth, as she whispered, “Oh Doctor, if only you knew. There’s a force that will lambast people like you to dust and curse your seed so fast, and right it will. If justice were only clean, I would have had it many years ago. Now we’re taking it the dirty way.”
Taking justice, cursing our seed? Our children, she meant? After those words sunk in, I leaped from the bench, coat lapels in hands and standing on tip toes. “Best thing you can do is get off my land. I will run you away from any patient I find you nearby, you hear?”
Looking right to hiss, she said, “Have a terrible day, fortunate fool.” She marched off my porch toward her pony. While her ride kicked dust, she croaked in a possessed voice, one deeper than a man’s. “Sam Hill’s gonna bugger you.”
I darted inside, but when I returned with my grandfather’s musket, the powder had cleared.
***
Reflecting upon it over the subsequent weeks, it was clear to me that she meant to skip town, leaving behind a lot of hurt and a-finger pointing.
A morning came where six sets of hoofs trotted onto my property and brought my heart to pounding. My rehearsed defense was stuck into my throat. I leaped out my recliner and rushed outside. When I came to a stop, it felt like my eyes leaped at what I saw.
John Coffee had come a-hunting for the man who sent that awful midwife—that man was me. And he brought backup.
