Kettledrum

Excerpts from the on going work 'Kettledrum' by S. Wilhelm von Wahrenberger. HIs other published titles are 'He Came From Earth' and 'Hunters Killers Madmen Part 1.'


“When I said ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ it wasn’t to save the life of those who were to be killed…it was to save the soul of the killer.”

                                                          -God-



                                                          Prologue


Iron John Stone was not the kind of man given to words; his nature gave him to action and silence. For some this made him a likeable man, hard to find a disagreeable opinion in a man who said very little. On the other side of that coin, it made him an object of scorn to little emotional child like men who could, and did, through the lens of a bent imagination, place upon his powerful shoulders the hobgoblins of unrealized fears.
         These things mattered to him not.
         What mattered to him was the fact that despite a financial poverty, he had things that any man could want, but few could have. In the canoe against the starboard side lie, what he considered the finest bolt-action rifle a man could own. While nothing special in and of itself: Sturm&Ruger Company made them by the thousands, this one was a shooter. A precise instrument of his will, it never missed, he did. More than once, this tool had given him the ability to survive another winter, or to keep his possessions, meager by volume, from the paws of thieves. There are many like it, this one is his.
         Separated by two rucksacks and a larger canvas bag, all bound to the canoe by lashings of rope is a brown wool blanket that concealed a tremendous truth under an image of non-description. A soft clay like shape, a feminine outline, soft and round without edge, his woman slept quietly.
         Truth was he viewed her as a wife, though no ceremony ever confirmed that. She hid from the cool damp morning mist under the ancient heavy brown wool blanket. As she stirred mildly, her face slipped out into the gray vapors of atmosphere without waking. Her high checks and steeply angle jaw line harkened back to her distant Eastern ancestry, a linage of yellow men that existed thousands of years ago, an unwritten history that culminated in the vessel of her being. Her straight black fine, glossy hair concealed her ears, and followed the lines of her face, framed a saga of life and death, of success and failure with the beautiful lightness of being.
         Iron John watched her eyelids flitter as she passed into a dream state. He paddled the canoe with a greater attention to silence. With each slice of the blade, the canoe with the gentleness of a feather, glided across the flat jewel of the wide sheet of watery glass, speckled with the red, yellow, and amber leafs of autumn.
         Moving with the gossamer touch of angel’s wings, he paddled upstream. Looking at the face of his love, he then looked beyond at the flat water, to the line where the sky touched it. At this point the rainbow of fallen leafs began to ripple away from the canoe. One particular leaf unmoving, barely touching the water, sang to his silent affections. Undisturbed by the relative behemoth of his canoe, it stayed placidly in its place with an impeccable stateliness. A finger print, a signature, a testament to a greater reality.
         He could feel the leaf.
         This is what mattered to him.
         



                                                        Chapter One, Mothers




}To understand the life of a man, you must first understand his mother. The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world, and from this tempo, a man’s life is paced.  At his beginning, the certificate of live birth, as issued by Dalesville General Hospital simply read ‘Baby Boy’.  She was nineteen, it was 1967, and in those days, the unfortunate casualties of a specific criminal felony were considered socially untouchable.
No father listed, just a suspect on an Iowa Sheriff’s blotter.
A little more than a day after his birth, she saw him for what in all practicality was assumed to the first and last time, an event that medically speaking passed without incident. She changed his diaper held him for a moment. In that corner of space and time, that moment lasted an hour or so, and then she handed him back to the nurse. As her bundle of joy disappeared into the long lonesome corridor of the maternity ward, part of her soul was cleaved asunder.  As his life passed into the aether of time and space, she became a casualty for the second time.
A fatality of social convention.
She was told to forget and move on. Those words are spoken by the kindness of fools and only believed by a sociopath. For it is the worst thing you could say to a girl under those depraved circumstances. It neatly glossed over the sub-text, the real meaning, for it told her she was a brood mare; a horse used for breeding and nothing more.
‘Baby Boy’, age thirty-six hours, passed from the arms of another nurse, the young girl stood off  in the distance watching, as he was given to the hands of a married woman in the parking lot of the hospital. Once in her arms she delivered him in a plastic laundry basket to another woman who would rock his world.  With the legalities of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania fulfilled, the new mother inquired of the old.
What was she doing when her son was taken from her?
She was crying.
She never stopped crying. She became a cat that traveled from house to house, from one saucer of milk to another. When that hurt became too great with one man, she found another, and then another.  Along the journey of her life, fate gave her a miscarriage, and then she produced another kitten, a girl, and became quite the artist…a painter of all things beautiful and all things tortured.  On the beaches of Florida she and her kitten would build castles of sand to honor the stray kitten taken from her litter. Her ‘Baby Boy’, the one that existed somewhere lost in space and time, the one she named ‘Victor’.

                                                          Chapter Unknown
                                                          Geshelia's Opus


She was portrayed most often as an icon of success. For her, she was an image of wealth and glamour, and more importantly, she could have the attention of powerful men she so desperately craved. That she could have excitement in her life. The vanity and a trophy of wealth and power that played to the passions of the baseness of men and continually through subterfuge, that image is pushed toward the impressionable empty girl. That via attaining material success you could feed the passions and be a powerful player at the gaming table of chance, you could take a roll at the dice and be important to a big man. Through those advertisements she was lied too.
For him, they told him if he bayoneted the rifle right, if he took that hill, if he led the charge he would be a hero. In short the world would be given to him if he bought into the notions and platitudes, for following the last order given, for holding the line, for God and country. He’d have glory without grief, and be rewarded with silk ribbons and shiny medallions, the bells and baubles and bling of a hero’s welcome home.  If he just did as he was told, he would be storied and fabled, and in his lifetime might even become a legend. Those were the lies on the recruiting posters.
Should these icons, these benchmark standards ever collide there was the sophistry of counter-argument. That she was a disposable mass produced item, and his personal obliteration was a sacrifice for the greater good of the common man.  In such a manner the more observant were dissuaded from further inquiry into the man behind the curtain, the intention of the advertisement or the recruiting poster. For most men who saw the curtain, they never parted them, for fear of seeing themselves as a compliant dupe.
However, once John Stone peered behind the curtain and saw the man pulling the levers it was too late. In there, in that epiphany, he understood the truth.  For in that moment of time and that point in space he realized he was trapped. If he were to write of what he saw, the word ‘love’ would be sparsely used. Romance would of course, in consideration of the subject matter, be considered blasphemy. Though such words in colloquial use conveniently avoided that acknowledgement, and pretended to encourage a suspension of disbelief in what should be an obvious truth.
Stone was a member of a standing army of occupation. Even though Germany during the Cold War was a paradise of extravagance, built for a wild young man, most people could, and did, use that extravagance  to ignore one salient fact; No matter how friendly you where, how decent they were, you might even marry their daughter and stay afterwards, you weren’t a tourist.
In addition, that Army faced another, located tens of miles away, both ready to inflict animal stupid on the other for certain kinds of men.  At first when he sought refuge from that undercurrent of something evil, in a Gentlemen’s Club, he did sample of the carrion, and fed off it as vulture does on a carcass.
As a soldier, he was like her; Soldiers and prostitutes share a commonality.  He was a certain kind of man; she was a certain kind of woman, who through circumstance became slaves for the self-satisfaction of the tyranny of evil men. Both engaged in commerce against their will, they bartered and traded in things that should never be bought or sold. One sold sex, the other dealt in blood. They were bought for a lie and then sold for a Deutches Mark, for a Pound Sterling, for the U.S. Dollar.