Tactical Regard on Homefront

On Eatonton Ga., June 1873 

Red and blue make(s) green.  Anybody who has a family is a communist.  Everybody who uses money is a capitalist. Looting is the official USA religion now.  Green is the new deal.  Jimmy can pick Jill up the pail of water, etc..  General strike until there is M4A.  Capitalist party is over.  But our business is down south now, and into the longest days of 1873 with a financial panic coming- but that’s another story as well.  Pope Pius IX declares Gorcumse holy martyrs… because they were killed by the Geuzen in 1572. So the story could begin there. Geuzen (beggars) was a name assumed by the confederacy of Calvinist Dutch nobles, who from 1566 opposed Spanish rule in the Netherlands. The most successful group of them operated at sea, and so were called Watergeuzen …Sea Beggars. There is irony aboard here.

McCandless knocked loudly on Daisy’s door. You ‘wake, Miss Daisy? She rolled to her side and groaned. The slightest of light was in the northern sky, not yet even giving color to anything below it.  She swung her legs to the edge of the bed and sat for a moment trying to gather thoughts for the day. There, under the oaks that lined her entrance road, were tents.  They were perfectly and geometrically arranged and demonstrated that the property had become somewhat of a military operation. The arrival must have been in the middle of the night and the camp must have been constructed with stealthy but tactical military-like performance. She shook her head and exchanged her smile for tight lips. The stairway awaited and she strode downstairs with great purpose and consternation.

Twa Corbies

These will have to be relocated to the back lawn in great haste! Please be kind enough to send your commanding officer to my dining area immediately! Without boots! Moments later, Henry stood in the doorway bootless and with newly hand knitted socks to comply with her passed down orders. Daisy and McCandless stared him down, neither of them rising to welcome him. After a longish, awkward, silence, a smile crept back onto her lips, then spread to Henry’s. Daisy motioned him into the room and held out the back of her hand in anticipation of his kiss. Vot iss? Where is the signet ring of the dutchman’s gold?

Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of perching singing birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers.  In colloquial English, they are the crow family, or, in jargon, corvids. Henry had no more control over them than he did during war, being a civilian and such.  True, they were deutschers all… but ties to the old country and friendship with General Schurz only went so far.  Some were hard men… and some were prosperous American businessmen… for now… tell me, darling, about the Hearst family.  You know them, ja.  Attended their wedding, perhaps.

After a lovely breakfast, Daisy cheerfully cleared the table herself and helped in the kitchen for the following hour. Henry watched a reset of the men and their camp on the back lawn. Dilger got bored with the reunion Henry had planned and headed back to Ohio via Front Royal.  Eatonton was no place for him, even with a chance to play with the new Hotchkiss gun.  What the boys were doing in back with the tents was anybody’s guess.  Rosa Meade Thorn was only ten years old. Austro-Hungarian Empire forms.  Barbed wire patented by Lucien B. Smith of Ohio. 

Rosa heard all connections in a starlings’ murmuration years ago.  Baby stars… like Pleiades.  Kapu mate, Mother of Graves.  Ja they often sing when they clear the table, gamblers corbies and such… and that’s where the best listening is.  To speak of such things as Rosa knows would be madness indeed, and Henry was mad as a flatter, just the flip-side of a taunt, and Henry always tried to blend in.  A local girl on Cemetery Hill taught Henry life is a transition illusion… much more than the battle ever did.  Rosa talks inside the head.  Even if she is dead.  Sometimes she answers questions.  Witches are present among the Indians like in the old country.  Rosa is near Buddhahood.  Like all invisible folk- sometimes reveal things you wish you never knew. 

What is true.  What does real mean.  Such pilwah is for babies and amateurs.  Philosophers and scientists maybe… but in 1873 science was still a baby.  A hundred years later Beanfield Hank will be telling war stories nobody wants to hear.  Like Dilger who is real as Jubal Early.  Today the machine has become sentient.  Like the tents in Daisy’s yard.  So much to explain between raptor and raven.  Jayhawkers.  There’s another story.  But for now- it is 1873… and the machine is not yet awake.  But profit maximization is well on its way, along with the terrible karma of taking an oath. 

Like weird John Brown, the meteor of the war.