A New Beginning

I Have to do This

A foreboding sensation settled at the pit of your stomach the moment you found yourself standing in the small garden outside your cousin's home in Saint Denis on the day of your father's scheduled arrival, an unopened telegram in your hand. Today is the day you were to see him again for the first time since you left your birth home last year to pursue a lifelong dream of studying at St. Denis University. But instead of the long-awaited reunion with your pa, you are holding a piece of paper, WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM printed in bold letters marked Emergency delivery – never a good sign.

Perhaps the presentiment had started even earlier, when you first opened your eyes this morning and the sweet, delightful butterflies of anticipation accompanying you to bed last night had been replaced by this strange, ominous feel of something being amiss. You had brushed it off, or tried to, imputing it on a night of restless sleep, a forgotten nightmare still lingering in the subconscious of your mind. Oh, how wrong you were. And how right had been your first intuition.

With trembling fingers, you tear open the sealed, yellowish paper and read the few printed words. It has today's date, Friday, April 6th, 1900.

As you read, each word fills you first with disbelief, then denial, which is promptly replaced by anger, finally settling on anguish and grief. You read and reread, as if you had misunderstood the meaning at first perusal, or even the second, or if you just read it enough times the message will somehow change. Eventually the dreadful truth sinks in. Your knees go weak and you sink to the ground, whimpering and sobbing with your head buried in your palms. You cry, quietly at first, then louder and louder until you are practically screaming at the top of your lungs and have to be escorted inside.

~*~

The trip back home with your extended family you all but barely remember. Your uncle meets you at Wallace Station, his back hunched from being the bearer of grief and bad news. You remember hugs. Sniffles and sobs and mournful eyes. The wagging of a stagecoach and finally, the smell of home. You stand in front of the dining table where you had bid your father a hasty goodbye all these months ago. Your father. Dead. Gone. Taken from you, just like that. You are now an orphan. Parentless.

People are gathering around you and a hand escorts you to the couch. Your father's couch. Now your uncle's couch? It is not until now that you realize you have been standing in the dining room all alone while the others stepped outside to allow for a moment of reflection in solitude.

You sit in the middle with your late mother's niece Millie to your left and her husband Thomas to the right as your uncle details the events leading up to your father's death, as relayed by his murderer. On his way to Wallace Station to board the night train to Saint Denis, he'd been held up at gun point, whereupon he blatantly refused to give up the money needed for the train ticket, as admirable, reckless or foolish it might be, depending on who you ask. He also refused to let go of his travel bag containing a gift to you. He had begged, pleaded the gunman to leave him be so he could see his daughter again. For that he had been shot, robbed and left to bleed out in the middle of the road where a traveler on his way to Cumberland Falls had found his body in the early morning hours. From what he could tell, your father had already been dead for hours. The bastard had been caught by bounty hunters for other crimes when fleeing towards Valentine. Your father's travel bag with its belongings, however, is still missing and the perpetrator refuses to say anything on the matter.

The voices around you grow distant and incomprehensible as you silently recite your father's latest letter to yourself. It is one you had read so many times you know it by heart. Sentence after sentence detailing his excitement for the upcoming journey and to be reunited with you, his angel. Then, in a cruel form of self-torment beyond your control your mind conjures an image of your father splayed out in the middle of a dusty road, encircled by a growing pool of his own blood. Your body goes cold as you picture him alone and scared, knowing he'll never see his angel again as the kindness in his eyes fades away, replaced by cold, unfeeling death.