Murder Ballad (a short story)

I hadn't planned on posting this one quite so soon, but results are out for the latest wicked writing contest by Macabre Monday. I want to get the most eyes on it as possible. More on this topic soon.

“Hiding, biding, fighting for attention.

Doin anything for smallest mention

of your name.

Right where.

It doesn’t belong.

Too blind to realize. That you did me all wrong.
To late to see the hate, that has been draggin’ along

My nerves, my patience,

wrapped in all that latent

Shame, pain, lust for murder.
curses to her mother,

the last one who heard her

voice”

They’ve got me in chains down here. They’ve given me nothing but a wall to spit on, and a bucket to aim my piss at. A high window and low hopes. But even if I was free to walk the fields outside, it’d be no different.

Knowing what I know. Tasting what I tasted. One glance over this side of Hades’ wall and you can never go back.

***

I don’t remember my pop playin’ the radio even once as as a boy. If he ever caught me boogyin’ to the latest tunes, he’d slowly walk over, wouldn’t say a word, would just grab the dial between his workman’s fingers and twist it downward.

Either in that moment—or hours later if we were out of the house—he’d make sure to bring out his old guitar and pluck away at it for me. I’ll never forget the beauty of that scuffed blackwood. Those uncut strings flaying from the top of the neck as he strummed his fingernails across the darkest chords I ever heard, and sang that saddest old folk songs this land ever gave birth to.

Even at that age, I could tell he wasn’t much of a singer, but it wasn’t about that.

The day I had enough fluff on my upper lip to find the words, I pointed at my chest and said, “Pa, why does it hurt like this? When you sing, why does it hurt in here?”

At first his big bushy brows closed in like he thought I might be tryin to tell him I was sick or something. But when I rubbed my chest some more and added, “—and why does it feel so good when it hurts?” this made him put down that old guitar and crack the widest smile I’ve seen to this date.

“Why, you gotta realize, these old stories are like a phone call from an old friend, Mitch.” His eyes got glassy for a minute, then he added. “Only, it’s for our souls.”

I didn’t really know what he meant by that, but I knew it was important. I held onto it until I’d grown enough hair on my chest to half understand.

***

One part I never got were the murder ballads though. Why were so many of these songs about heartbreak. Enough pain to make a man want to kill, enough sorrow to make him want to destroy the thing he loves most in the world.

How many average folks can relate to that? Do we all have past lives filled with murder? Shit, I could hardly stomach wringing the chickens necks back in the day.

We were never left wanting for that chicken pot roast come dinner time, mind you!

I guess we can make ourselves do anything if the situation demands it.

***

“Ball bearers, beware of,

The devil beside you,

“sharing” your burden,

Whilst quietly herding,

you down,

down,

down,

to the very same place, that this coffin is bound.”

My own ballad started as they all do:
With a girl who was smarter than she let on, with a feeling that was warmer than the county fair bonfire. I guess she never would have pulled it all off if I’d been able to see her real soul—the coldness I was hitched side by side with on a daily basis.

Right from the start, Suzy-Anne let me think I was the one chasing. I first saw her at a April horse sale. She was leading a proud black eyed mare around the circle, flashing eyes at every hat wearing chest puffer with a ticket in his hand. Usually, horse-sellers will run up to the first interested party they see and waste no time getting the beginnings of a negotiation going. But Suzy-Anne knew what she was sitting on that day. She knew, by the time she got out to the back stalls there would be half a dozen buyers waiting for her. If only to get a moment to speak to her.

I’ve wasted three good pages trying to lead into a description of her now, but I think it’s best if I leave that part out. It always starts out the same. I describe her hair, I sketch out her figure, but when I get to her lips…her voice…and her eyes…

Shit, there’s a frog in my throat as I type this.

Three good pages screwed up, torn and thrown onto my cell floor. So I guess you’ll just have to use your imagination.

I was one of the hat in hand hopefuls who hung around those manure smelling stalls for her that morning. Keith Olden, Fred “the talker” and two other well respected community men stood with me, but by some twist of Satan’s moustache, she gave little old me the time of day. Once I’d sniffed out that “in” I courted her like no man has ever courted.

Four weeks later we were sayin’ vows. Despite the four bags of copper I handed over, that proud old Mare stayed hers by proxy.

III

Bleeding hair is like toasted bread. By the time you’re cupping it in your hands, it’s too late to go back. By the time it’s crisping to a tasty brown or congealing from liquid to something else, it’s far too late to change your mind and take a milder road.

But do know the part they never talk about?

The Godliness of that change.

The moment, where that one thing. The choice, every one in the room—including you—thought was impossible, suddenly gets taken. They thing you didn’t think you could do, you just did.

All the rules we set down for ourselves as kids and carry around for the rest of our lives. All the loopholes witches like Suzy-Anne learned to twist around their pretty, pointed nails, suddenly fall limp to the floor.

Don’t you look at me like some devil just yet. I didn’t know I was bound for this.

If I’d known I would be walkin’ the chain gangs this afternoon, tomorrow’s afternoon and every other damned afternoon until my scalp grows liver spots, I woulda shot that black eyed mare the day I saw it and left Suzy-Anne back at the sale yards. Short of that, I would have at least taken a shovel to the soil.

Wouldn’t have been the first man around these parts to lose his lady. Lord knows at least half of those who ran off with their “back door men,” were guilty of no larger sin than talkin’ back one time too many, testin’ his nerves after one scotch too many.

No. If I’d only known. Things woulda ended up different.

See, from a boy, I always suspected I might find myself here. From the very first murder ballad, ‘I hung my head. Ballad of Hollis Brown, Kate MCCANNON.” I had an itch that I’d be standin’ over a body one day, howling a painful song of my own, outta sheer guilt.

“Why’d you make me do this? Why’d you make me go so far?”

But the truth is. When Suzy-Anne’s skull first started gushing, I didn’t feel an ounce of pain. If anythin’ it was all over too quickly.

Did you ever take a girl’s wrist and feel how delicate it was? Well, the rest of them ain’t any different.

That surge I’d been lookin for. Mostly dreading, but lustin’ after by just a little bit. It never came.

She wasn’t dead yet, when I heard her ma pull up.

Maybe Suzy-Anne senior would have been spared, if she hadn’t cursed my name the very moment no one answered the door.

As if she knew. As if she had me figured as this type of man, long before she forced me to prove it to her.

Just like Suzy-Anne, she didn’t know as much as she thought she did. Just like the nosey neighbour. Just like the mail man. Just like the copper who came a day later, and when the fools of this town proved themselves no match for the devil…just like all the Samaritans along the way who picked up a lone hitchhiker down towards state lines.

I don’t know why the touch of the devil is always taught as something dark. These murder ballads never failed to link those pointed horns to pain. But if it was only darkness we had to avoid, it wouldn’t be so hard.

We forget the devil is oft described as a tempter. We don’t think about that part enough.

When I heard murder ballads as a boy—closed my eyes to them at night, hummed them out in the work fields—I used to wonder, how many average folks can relate to them? And now that decades have piled over me, made me older than the version of my Pop who used to strum out those minor key sorrows, I feel no different.

What man who has ever had the grace of taking a life—not imagined doin it—what man who has actually felt that feeling, comes away from it with remorse?

Suzy-Anne did end up in one of my songs. But it wasn’t a ballad. For me it was a born again hymn. My come to Lucifer moment.