Uncle Julius

UNCLE JULIUS

by
Timothy G.M. Reynolds

In two blinks of an eye my Uncle Julius went from being a self-proclaimed psychic healer to being the talk of the state. In our state --- Kansas --- being hit by a train has that effect on a person’s reputation, psychic or not. Julius was known for his psychic healing, though. He’d even used his ‘powers’ to control objects, including the time he first used them to stop me from running away from home on a my big brother’s bike.

He willed the bike to stop and it did, dead in it’s tracks. I, on the other hand, flew most awkwardly over the handlebars and landed on my head. When my vision cleared I swore that the front tire had become caught in a storm grate, but good old Uncle Julius claimed it was his psychic powers. Who was I to argue? I was only a six-year-old fugitive.

From that day on, Julius spent one-hundred-and-forty-four minutes each day working to refine his power. He said that one-hundred-and-forty-four was a number of power. He’d read it somewhere and accepted the fact without question. When he went about ‘refining’ his power, what he really did was sit in front of the big G.E. wireless in the living room of the farmhouse and concentrate on adjusting the volume with only the powers of his mind. This was back in the days before television took away humanity’s imagination and from what I remember of the typical broadcast back then, the volume was known to vary all on its lonesome, with or without Uncle Julius and his powers.

Mother was not impressed and said he was putting crazy ideas in her sons’ heads. Nevertheless, once Julius was satisfied that he had some measure of control over his powers he graduated himself to tougher tasks. One Saturday that summer he made the leap in faith to try influencing a living creature. He was up at sunrise that day and spent the first two hours staring at the swallows which swooped and dived from their nests in the barn to the fallow field and back. When I noticed his focus I asked, in all innocence, if stopping a flying bird would make it drop like a stone to the ground where it could be hurt, or worse. Well, that ended the experiment with the swallows. Julius wasn’t a cruel man, sometimes he just needed someone to point the light out to him.

He thanked me for the insight and assured me that, if they could, the birds would thank me, too --- and I was still young enough to believe him. He then took my tiny, six-year-old hand in his hot, pudgy, cloud-pale paw and waddled me around to the side of the house where mother had her vegetable garden.

“Lad, there’s a rabbit hereabouts whose bin eatin’ your mother’s carrots ‘n tomatoes. She wanted me to set up a trap to catch him but I think I have a better way.”

Well, we built our blind out of some of Mother’s best bed sheets and planted ourselves in the wicker chairs from the porch to watch through the spaces between the sheets. I really didn’t expect to see the rabbit because I’d seen him out there getting his fill while Uncle Julius was staring at the swallows. Mother said I was to throw rocks at him if I ever saw him, but he wasn’t growing carrots and he didn’t make me eat carrots. He ate the carrots I hated so much and that, in my books, made him my friend, and I don’t throw rocks at friends.

Now, Uncle Julius may have had some strange ideas, but, except for that freight train incident, he had the most incredible luck. If a flipped coin landed heads five out of ten times for me, for Julius it would land tails eight times. At the time, like him, I believed it was his powers. When the rabbit hopped out of the bushes only five minutes into our vigil, though, even my uncle said “Well, ain’t that lucky.” Then he leaned forward, hands raised palms forward, closed one eye and stared kind of lopsided at the bunny, and me, his blood kin who hoped some of the power could rub off, leaned forward, raised my hands, closed one eye and stared, too.

In my experience, even at six, rabbits, when not being chased, are cautious little critters. To this day I’ve never seen one hop more than a couple feet without stopping to listen and sniff, and that little carrot-eater didn’t disappoint me. He’d take two hops and freeze. After a second or so he’d move again only to stop again after two more hops. It was typical cottontail behaviour, but the barefooted six-year-old in dungarees and his fortyish uncle in his almost-new, straight-from-Sears-Robuck white summer suit, swore that every stop that rabbit made was caused by nothing less than the powers held in our brains. I started that vigil just wanting to keep my off-beat uncle company on a sunny Saturday, but I finished it a firm believer in the extraordinary powers of certain human minds.

I became a convert that day and, as is typical in rural communities, word spread faster than a ticked-off bumble bee, and pretty soon, some of the more superstitious farmers came by to ask the psychic if he could heal or predict. Well, if he couldn’t before, Julius certainly found that he could now. Never as popular a man as my hard-working father, his brother, Julius now had visitors on a regular basis, and he loved it. They’d come to him for bunions, breaks, sprains, gout and one daring old gent brought his piles, but Julius was wise enough to refer him to the herbalist down the road.

Let me point out something before I go on: Julius Flack was gullible enough to believe himself a psychic, but he was a thinking man. He always had an answer for everything.

“Why don’t you make it rain an’ save the crops, Julius?”

“If’n I make it rain now, Jonathan, we’ll have a colder winter due to the variation in pressure caused by the unexpected cloud cover and the new level of humidity during this new moon.”

“Why cain’t you heal my leg faster, Mr. Flack?”

“If’n it heals too quickly, Bobby, the break will take calcites from the rest of the bone and weaken it, an’ then your limp’ll be worse than before.”

“Julius, if you kin make a hoppity rabbit stand still, why not make my chickens lay twice as many eggs?”

“Chickens only got so many eggs in them, Herman, an’ if you force them to give them to you all at once it’ll kill them an then all you’ll have is one good roast, a handful of feathers, a bunch of eggs and an empty spot in your coop.”

Even my brother took a shot at him. “Uncle Julius, kin you use yer powers t’ make the girls at school like me?”

“Lucas, lad, I’m a psychic, not a miracle worker.”

He didn’t always make sense, but he did have a sense of humour. If he got a dilly of a question, though, he simply countered with “That’s more a question for church on Sunday” and that shut up the lot of them. They were willing to believe a psychic healer walked among them but they were also deeply religious and some questions threatened to lead them onto sacrilegious ground.

It may not sound like it, but every once in a while Uncle Julius had a flash of common sense and it was usually when was at his healing. While he was concentrating his power on a back injury he would knead the muscle with his hands. He said it was to help the transfer of power but I know now that a good muscle rub has been known to do wonders for an injury.

Another time, I sprained an ankle while playing with father’s snowshoes and Julius applied his power while my foot was propped up in a snow bank. Whether I now credit the snow’s cold or my uncle’s powers, the swelling did go down.

Did Julius notice any of the coincidences? He never said, one way or another, and, until her death last year, my mother never discussed the matter. And Dad? Well, it was his little brother, and it never hurt business having a healer in the family --- someone who drove from two counties away to see that healer could quite often be convinced to take home a bushel of fresh corn, for a small price.

One day my uncle returned from one of his forays into the city, walking on a cloud of joy. Mother, ever hopeful, asked if he’d found a job.

“A job? No. A calling? Yes.”

And that’s all he said until dinner, when the whole family was gathered around the table. I was making a mountain and lake of my mashed potatoes and gravy and Lucas was eating everything that got within reach of his long ten-year-old arms. He was going to grow to be a giant and Mother let him eat because she knew that he would be very good for the farm when he was older.

Julius told the story all at once, in an uncharacteristic blurt. “I stopped a streetcar today. It came to a complete stop. They tried to say it was a power surge on the 3rd Street line, but they just can’t admit the truth. It was me.”

Mother stayed quiet, Dad nodded and made some weak agreement and my brother payed no attention whatsoever, intent as he was on his feast. Only I showed any enthusiasm.

“A streetcar, Uncle Julius?! That’s better’n a rabbit or a bike by far. Next thing you know you’ll be stopping a freight train.” I’d said it. I couldn’t take it back even if I’d known what idea I’d just put into the head of my well-meaning fool of an uncle. 20/20 hindsight isn’t much of a gift.

“A freight train...” He just locked his gaze on the candle for a moment and a smile grew from a seed to a whole crop in a handful of blinks. No one but me noticed, them having found that sweet potatoes taste best hot.

For a week things went on as usual with folks dropping by to visit with Uncle Julius, ask for his help and maybe even buy some corn or a handful or two of carrots harvested by the resident six-year-old. That Tuesday night the moon was full ripe and the night felt thick with energy. That must have been what inspired my uncle because he sat on the porch until 2 a.m., leaning forward, arms up, palms forward and one eye closed, staring at the moon’s disk as if he could soak up all its mystical powers to augment his own.

Maybe Uncle Julius really did stop that streetcar, and maybe, after more practice, a small, empty freight train could have been within his reach, but at 11:55 the next morning the fully-laden, two engine, Wichita-bound Kansas Central ran over all my hopes and dreams and snuffed out any hope I had of learning the real power of the human mind. Something must have distracted him.

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