Tag: abuse

Arrows

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excerpt

Tell him I promise his village won’t be damaged, nor his
fields touched. Tell him.”
Losada dismounted and the others followed suit, but he stopped
them with a gesture of his hand. “Infante, Ávila, Galeas,
Maldonado, Pedro and Rodrigo Ponce, Gregorio de la Parra, with
me. Ten harquebusiers and ten pikemen, come forward as well.
Carlos.”
He snapped his fingers, then turned to me. “Friar Salvador, if you
please, come with me. The rest of you, stay where you are, don’t let
your guard down. It wouldn’t be the first time they welcome and
then betray and kill. Keep an eye on your surroundings. At the first
sign of trouble, Juan Suárez, sound the charge. All of you! Diego de
Paradas will command in my absence. Camacho! You are second.
Good luck and may God be with us.”
“Harquebusiers, check your priming!” yelled Diego de Paradas.
Losada put a hand on the hilt of his sword at his hip, as if to
reassure himself. Behind him, the harquebusiers grabbed their
powder flasks and rammed the charges down the muzzles. A flock
of parrots cawed overhead.
“Take good account of everything, Friar Salvador,” said Losada.
“I have a mind to have you write a record of this expedition.”
Recording the expedition would be considered a great honour and a
great responsibility. I nodded. But I knew immediately it would be
impossible to record the truth.
I admired the orderly arrangement of the village. The streets were
smooth under my feet, the houses skilfully made. Earthen pots
steamed over the embers of fires; hammocks were neatly
distributed; baskets and heads of plantain hung from the wooden
structures. Strings of yarn were stretched over primitive looms. On
the sloping thatched roofs, dozens of round cassava cakes dried in
the sun. Human and animal skulls and bones hanging among the
baskets and plantains reminded me of macabre tales of cannibalism.
The Indians stepped aside as we entered the village. They stared
at my feet and then at the rest of me, for I was the only barefooted
Spaniard, let alone one wearing a frock.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Poodie James

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His mother’s elderly cousin and his wife were
the last in the succession of foster parents. They resigned themselves
to raising the boy in their drafty little house at the water’s
edge. Then illness sent the old man to his bed. In a panic, his wife
arranged for Peter to enter the state school for the deaf, a collection
of brick buildings in the fog on a bluff at the edge of a forest of
dripping firs and sodden undergrowth. In seven years at the school,
Poodie learned to read lips and use sign language. He studied
Latin and French and spent hours each week in the library. He
learned shoe repair, leather working, carpentry and printing. He
swam on the school’s team, stroking endless laps up and down the
big pool in the natatorium. He was one of the happiest children
ever to have lived at the school, and one of the most independent,
so hard-headed that he countered all efforts to channel him into a
vocation. Other students went off to jobs in shoe shops, apprenticed
themselves to carpenters, found work with printers. After he
was graduated, Poodie used part of his stipend to buy a ticket east
to the dry side of the state, fleeing the drizzle and mist. The train
came out of the mountains into the valley lying in the spring sun
under apple blossoms as under a snowfall. The river ran broad and
gleaming past the town. He turned to the other passengers,
laughing and pointing out the window.
“He must be home,” he saw a woman say.
“Home,” he repeated, the only word they could understand in
his stream of sounds as he got off at the depot. He walked around
the town with his canvas suitcase, smiling at everyone he met.
Home, he thought, home.
Poodie slept on a bench in the depot. After three nights, the station
master gave him a note. He would have to stay somewhere
else, it wasn’t a hotel. Struggling through the scrawl of Poodie’s
reply, the station master saw that he had nowhere to go and only a
little money for food. “Home now,” the note said. “This is my place
now,” it said, and “Need work.”
“Ruthie,” the station master’s brother said to his wife that evening,
“that young fella out there is Poodie James.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W7SHCMV

Savages and Beasts

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excerpt

They walked back into the emergency waiting room.
Nothing was different in there. They walked into the hallway
and reached the area where Dylan was kept. The attending nurse
told them to stay only for a few minutes since the patient was
due for a few tests. They nodded their understanding. Dylan was
breathing a bit easier since they had hooked him on an oxygen
tube. Upon seeing them he smiled.
“They’ll do a few tests soon, and then I’ll go back home,”
he mentioned.
“We’ll wait to see the results of the tests,” Anton said.
A few minutes later the nurse came back and told them to
leave. They walked out to the grounds again. They found a bench
where they sat. A multitude of birds were flying from tree to tree
from branch to branch making their presence known with their
fluttering and with their chirping.
Time passed with the bird chirps and the flying from
branch to branch, Anton and Mary enjoyed their morning as
they sat for a while, chit-chatted for a while, walked around for
a while, until an hour later they went inside to check on the old
man. He wasn’t in his partition, obviously having a test. They
walked to the waiting room again. Mary used the public telephone
and informed Sister Gladys about the progress they had
made up to that time. She told her that soon as they’d know the
results from the test she will inform Sister Gladys and then they’ll
return to the School. Sister Gladys understood and said there was
no rush for them to return before they would be informed about
the issues pertaining to Dylan.
One hour later the doctor came to the reception area and
called them.
“Based on your description of his symptoms, his own narrative
we suspected a heart attack in fact his oxygen level

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763602

Arrows

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excerpt

And so I prayed.
To deny myself at that point meant quelling the abhorrence I felt
toward my countrymen and replacing it with love. I needed to clean
the crystal ofmysoul of all intention, so that the pure light of God could
shine through me, like the sun through a window into a dark room.
I tried, I really did. But when I descended into the valley, carrying
my little medicine chest under my arm, in case I should find a
moribund Christian to whom I could offer spiritual comfort, the
expanse of unnecessary death and pain sickened me.
“Are you a Christian?” I asked of those who could still talk,
mostly Indians.
A few spat at me, others looked beyond me. I was amazed to find
only two Spaniards, two harquebusiers who must have fallen
during the first round of arrows.
It pained me to simply pass by most men, but my desire to help
someone and offer him absolution of his sins before he died kept
me going, though I was sadly aware of all the souls that would not
be saved.
“Are you a Christian?” I kept asking. I found a young native man
whom I recognized as one of our party. He had received several
blows from macanas: his head was cracked open and his entrails had
spilled onto the ground. Iridescent flies feasted on the pool of gore
underneath him.
He nodded, shivering and bathed in sweat. “Are you? Good,” I
said, regretting the word ‘good’ as soon as it left my mouth. My
hands trembled as I opened the chest and extracted the ampulla
containing the oleum infirmorum. “Can you talk?”
He nodded and moaned horribly, his eyes wandering aimlessly.
He made a convulsive attempt at confession, and I absolved him
forthwith, giving him the viaticum and anointing his eyelids,
saying, “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may
the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight,”
and repeating it with his ears, nostrils, lips, hands, feet and loins.
I raised my head and saw Pánfilo checking on the dead with his
harquebus hanging from his shoulder and his dagger at the ready.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Poodie James

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Excerpt

“Those people didn’t buy a car, did they Irv?”
“They said they’d be back tomorrow, Mr. Torgerson.”
“They won’t be back, Irv. They’ll go down the street to Pearson’s
and buy a Mercury, maybe even a Lincoln, because you didn’t
cinch that deal, Irv. You’ve got to cinch those deals, Irv.”
“I do my best.”
“Your best is going to have to get better, Irv. You call those people
tonight and you get ’em back in here tomorrow. You tell ’em
you’ll make a deal they’ll like, Irv. I want to see ’em sitting at that
table signing things.”
“They’re from up the river.”
“You find ’em. You get ’em in here again. You sell ’em a
Packard.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Torgerson.”
“I know you will, Irv.”
The salesman turned back into the show room. Torgerson’s
voice tracked him.
“Irv, I just know you will.”
Maybe it was because times were good, Torgerson thought, or
maybe it was because the mayor job brought him attention, but
Packard sales were up almost 20 percent over two years ago. A
third of the way through his first term, he was mapping out his
next campaign. Only I’ll really run, he thought. Last time was a
fluke, I know that. Ken Spear, he’s the one who could take it away,
but I don’t think he realizes it. Somebody will tell him. You can
count on that, because a lot of people would like me out. I piss off
too many of them. But, that’s what happens when you make waves
in a little town.
Torgerson looked up from his musing. Poodie James was passing
in front of the window. Torgerson moved through the show
room and out onto the sidewalk just as Poodie stopped his wagon
and reached into the used car lot for a Coke bottle standing in front
of a ’41 Ford Roadster. Torgerson charged over and stepped in
front of him.
“Get out of my lot,” he yelled. “Go on, get out of here. Go on.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W7SHCMV

Arrows

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Excerpt

I managed to push him off and he sauntered away,
seemingly satisfied he had not only taught Tamanoa a lesson, but
me as well.
I looked at Tamanoa’s mutilated face. He was choking on his
blood. turned and threw the nose at my feet, then disappeared into
the night, whistling. I helped Tamanoa up and tried to guide him by
the shoulders, hoping perhaps to take him to see Pedro Montes, but
he shook me off and refused to speak to me as he walked towards
the river. And who could blame him? I was a Spaniard after all. It
was for me to prove that Spaniards were not all the same.
I found where Josefa had been sleeping. Gregorio had found her,
too. They were seated near one another, but not talking. Gregorio
drew shapes in the dirt with a long stick and glanced furtively at her
and me. I wanted to tell them both what Pánfilo had done, but I
knew it would not make any difference if they knew. Nobody cared
about the half-breeds.
It was dusk and pleasantly cool in the mountains. Wesat around a
fire. Josefa’s eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, a sign of the depth of
her weariness. The experienced conquistadors had ignored Josefa,
but now that she was widowed, Losada came by to offer his
sympathy and put himself at her disposal to arrange her return to El
Tocuyo once it was safe to do so, if that was her wish.
Infante followed, bowing deeply and kissing her hands. He
expressed his concern about her delicate situation and asked her
permission to inquire after her welfare, so that he might be at her
service in the future.
Gabriel de Ávila, Camacho and others, although modestly, also
showed interest in her that night. Josefa received them graciously,
while Gregorio watched in sullen annoyance. I hoped she might find
a husband among all these men.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Savages and Beasts

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Excerpt

slowly-slowly he pressed the woman’s lips until they opened, her
tongue suddenly was licking his finger, her body started swaying
upwards and down, erotically, sensually, provocatively, full of
desire. He smiled, let his hand travel under the bed-sheet, he
touched her body slowly, methodically like a master in the field
he enticed her until she opened for him and let him explored all
her secret coves. She moaned now, her body was in exhilarating
mood, ready to be used, taken, to be enjoyed. He pushed the
bed-sheet away. He knelt on top of her bed. He pulled her
up on her fours. He violated her, crashing in from behind in a
beastly, rough way. She just let go. She was his. Sister Gladys was
a woman who could do anything to please him. She loved him,
she knew. He knew that too.
All his life Jerome, liked to be on top of things; from a young
age growing in a family of five children, in Gatinaeu, Quebec, he
always competed with his four siblings for who would be up front
when it came to sports activities, to studies, in both elementary
and high school classes; His parents certainly loved education, his
dad, a notary public and a very successful one insisted on education
and three of his other siblings, two boys and one girl got high education,
either in college or university. His youngest sister decided
early after high school that she didn’t want to carry on with her
studies and devoted herself to volunteer work for various charity
organizations. Jerome, a shy person by nature, loved the books and
when time came to decide, this was very important to his father
who demanded timely decisions and results thereof, he chose to
become a priest. He followed religious Studies at the University of
Toronto he conscripted himself in the Canadian Diocese, the head
of which sent him to British Columbia. After a few years in Vancouver,
he was sent to the Kamloops Indian Residential School
where he was truly on top of things from day one.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763602

Arrows

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Excerpt

“Leave me alone, will you?” he scowled.
But I wanted to make peace with him.
“I mean it, Gregorio. You need a bleeding to drain all those bad
humours and grudges. Hombre! I saw you in battle; if I hadn’t been
so busy running, I would have stayed put to watch you. What
shooting and fighting! You are a born conquistador. From now on, it
will be quite comforting to have you around.”
I uncorked a flask of marigold oil. Gregorio chortled at last. He
took a gulp from the mug he was holding.
“I saw you, too,” he said, “running like a hare.”
“Little wonder! I have never been so frightened in my life!”
Gregorio and Benjamin laughed. Perhaps I was more useful to
them as feckless character, someone to jeer at.
“Why, you don’t want to go to heaven, Friar?” Benjamin taunted.
“I know I am but a sinner,” I smiled. “But I could use a bit more
time before God blows out my candle. I’m hoping to find some way
to skip purgatory.”
“Trying to become a saint, are you?” Gregorio said. “Become a
martyr, then. That will do, won’t it?”
“That would be an improvement, no doubt. I’ve been thinking
about it. Perhaps one of these days someone will favour my
aspirations.”
Gregorio swatted at a hornet that came too close. “We’re going to
make it, I think,” Gregorio said. “Losada knows what he is doing.
You can see it in his face. I’m convinced he knows how the bastards
think. He has lots of experience. But, if you ask me, Francisco Infante
is the better of the two.”
Losada struck me as a man of principle whereas Francisco Infante
impressed me as a schemer, someone who would rather run things
for himself, so I decided not to respond to the bait. It was odd for me
to sometimes feel so close to Gregorio and Benjamin, and yet at the
same time I sensed their camaraderie was fickle, transitory. For
them, the New World was strictly a land of opportunity, and the
state of their souls was a distant second.
Were they ever my friends? Or did they even want to be?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Arrows

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Excerpt

Through the smoke I made out the hem of her dress some distance
away. She was kneeling beside an inert body, which was pierced by
an arrow through the thigh and another in the chest. It was her
husband.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a near-naked man running. The
smoke partially hid him, but I saw he was tall, with strands of black
hair pasted to his chest by sweat and speed and others floating over
his shoulders. Funny, I thought, I have not seen that kind of long
loincloth before.
Then I realized he was charging toward Josefa. He bore a
belligerent expression, and there was blood on his naked chest
under his quiver’s band. A pang of fear hit me like a bucket of cold
water. Surely he wouldn’t kill a woman, would he?
We were both closing in on Josefa and her dead husband but from
different directions. I was closer than he was. Josefa looked up at the
Indian, open-mouthed and white as the ghost she was in danger of
becoming. I sprinted toward her, heart throbbing, and tore the
buckler from her dead husband’s grasp. There was a serviceable
harquebus lying at his side and the sheathed dagger at his belt but I
didn’t want to use any potentially lethal weapon.
I squared my shoulders and braced myself for whatever might
come. It was God’s choice to see us through or not. I raised the small
shield on my forearm as I had seen others do. His bare feet landed
underneath the buckler, and he delivered a savage blow that
shocked its way up my arm, pushing me back, the clang resonating
in my ears.
He held his arm high, ready to deliver another blow. I was
crouching, peering over the buckler. Josefa yelped. I charged and
overthrew him, grunting like a beast. He fell but was on his feet
before I knew it, the hellish macana still in his grasp. His eyes leered
at me from his horribly painted face. I could feel his anger, his pride,
his hate, but there was a fortitude that sent a chill down my spine.
He turned and swung at my belly, but I leapt backwards as the
macana came within inches. “Run!” I shouted.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Arrows

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Excerpt

In the general direction of the enemy, Indian servants placed
forked poles to hold the muzzles of the heavy harquebuses. The
horses whinnied and stamped their hoofs, rustling the foliage as
they tugged at their halters. Somewhere farther away, I could hear
sheep bleating; closer the squealing of pigs.
Losada had mounted his black horse and was now whirling in
circles and bellowing orders, sword raised high over his head. I
glimpsed an Indian woman scampering into the bush with a toddler
on her back, suspended on a thick band hanging from her head. The
Indian servants scurried about, grabbing whatever they could and
herding the animals. All the riders mounted, and the dust cloud
thickened, forcing me to hold my breath. Gregorio ran past me,
balancing a harquebus in his hand.
“Don’t just stand there, hide!” he bellowed, his voice almost
drowned out by the racket.
“Where is she?” I yelled back.
But he was gone to join the harquebusiers gathering behind the
riders. I hunched into myself, rosary tight in my right hand. I came
upon the fire, blinking to clear the smoke from my eyes, and found
the last place I’d seen her. I stumbled over a basket and nearly fell. In
the name of all saints, I didn’t even know her name!
The servants had disappeared. I was the only idiot awaiting the
arrows. At the sound of grunting, I looked down to see a pig
careering into the heart-shaped leaves of a huge philodendron. I
followed the pig.
It took a moment for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dimness
in the jungle. I could discern crouching human silhouettes. Indian
women were huddled together on the ground, some crying, others
staring vacantly while frightened children clutched at them, some
finding oblivion at their mothers’ breasts. I made hushing sounds
and touched a shoulder here, another there, gesturing toward the
trunk of a big mahogany tree and mimicking the arrows falling

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522