THE REENACTOR by Matt Carmichael
Frank Such kept the dog in the freezer out back until the ground was soft enough to dig. He’d wrapped her in a heavy duty garbage bag and kept her in the garage in a large white cooler with streaks of silver where dents and scratches cut through the paint. Frank laid her on top of stacks of meat wrapped in white paper and labeled with red markers. Strip steaks and beef cuts and some pheasants, all killed on Cy Wright’s farm. A couple of chickens, too. There was some venison from the buck that Cy’s son Jake had shot out of season, but the kid had cured it wrong and all Frank could taste was salt.
She was a good dog, a lab mix of some sort. Her name was Rosie.
Rosie got hit by a snowplow during a late winter whiteout. There was no blood in the snow; all of the damage was internal. Tony Hull was driving the truck. Frank knew him from when they hauled trash together, before Tony got a better job with the streets department.
“By the time I saw what was going on there wasn’t nothing I could do,” Hull said out in the road after it happened. His nose dripped down into his mustache and his eyes squinted against the weather. He swiped a gloved hand across his mouth.
The sun was just coming up and making things white. Snow drifted up against the dog. Snowflakes dissolved on her eyes.
“If I hit the brakes I might have spun and slid into god knows what else.”
There wasn’t much else around but the Such’s silver mailbox pocked with rusted pellet holes from when some farm kids had been joyriding with a shotgun. The rest was field and ditch.
“Wasn’t your fault,” said Frank. “You go running out in front of somebody like that you’ve got to expect it. Better you saw her get hit than the snow burying her ’til spring.”
“I’m really sorry, Frank. I know she meant a lot to you.”
The truck’s engine chugged.
Frank knelt down beside the dog and brushed the snow from its hair. He carried Rosie home and wrapped her in a plastic bag he found in the garage and put it in the freezer and broke the news to his wife, Callie.
By early March the snow was gone and the ground was slick and the earth gave way in muddy clumps when Frank stabbed at it with the shovel.
Callie was a preacher and she’d been wanting to give Rosie a proper burial. And she wasn’t happy about the dog lying there with the rest of the meat. She just hoped Rosie would understand.
Frank chose a spot to dig along the fence of the horse pasture. A pair of cardinals flirted in the branches of the pear tree above him. Everything else was brown and blue. Lou the horse thought he was going to get fed so he stuck his head over the fence and waited.
Callie had wanted a horse since she was a little girl. On her tenth birthday her father took her riding. The horse she was on got spooked and started galloping down the road. Callie said she was scared, but flying like that on the back of that horse was one of the greatest thrills she had ever felt in life. Lou was a beautiful white with large brown spots on the sides, but the trainer they hired said it would be too cruel for Callie to ride the horse. She was too heavy. Callie had been slightly overweight as a child, but it got out of control after her folks passed away – before Frank met her. The trainer offered to break the horse so Frank could ride him, but Frank turned down the offer. He said if Callie couldn’t ride him, then nobody would.
Frank was three feet deep where the soil still hadn’t thawed through when his shovel bit the dirt with a metallic clank. He knelt down and brushed the dirt with his hands and pulled out a rusted piece of metal about as long as his forearm. He looked at it for a second and tossed it onto the ground. He assessed the hole. It was enough to be a grave.
When the hole was filled again Frank pressed his palm against the dirt and said goodbye to Rosie. He picked up the blade he’d found and carried it inside.
Callie was at the kitchen table writing her next sermon and picking away at a roasted chicken. Callie Such was a pastor from Kenosha, and at three hundred and twenty-five pounds, she was down nearly seventy-five from when Frank met her. Frank washed the blade in warm water and showed it to his wife. She held it up to the light hanging above the kitchen table.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Frank asked.
Larry Goodnight grinned and fingered the blade at the counter of his hardware store. Frank had washed most of the dirt away already, but a layer of rust had chewed away at the surface of the steel. Goodnight dug his thumbnail into the blade and plowed out tiny mounds of dark red powder.
“It’s a socket bayonet. Civil War. Terrible condition though. Isn’t going to be worth much like this.”
Goodnight ran the blade up and down his arms, drew it to his face and dragged it across his cheek. It left a smear of rust just above his jaw.
“Dull.”
Frank knew Goodnight since they were kids and they played high school football together. The Civil War was Goodnight’s favorite war and he was always going on about it. He led a battle regimen in the reenactments that drew big crowds outside of Hebron three weekends every summer. Goodnight once petitioned the city council to paint the water tower into a musket ball, but they declined. It was still painted like the basketball they’d turned it into when the high school won the 1952 Illinois state basketball championship. That was over sixty years ago.
Goodnight stuck his finger through a metal ring at the end of the bayonet, opposite the blade point.
“You’d see your arsenal markings here if this thing could be cleaned up. Figure out who made it. Sometimes track the use . . . figure out how it ended up here.”
“Can it?”
“Can what?”
“Can it be cleaned?”
Goodnight picked up the bayonet and scratched at it some more. He peeled a small flake of rust and flicked it to the floor. He wrapped the bayonet back in Frank’s hand towel then found a pen and notepad beside the register and began to write.
Frank helped himself to a piece of lemon candy from a jar on the counter. He tongued the lozenge and gave the rotating counter display of personalized key chains a slow revolution. He couldn’t taste much anymore. Ten years of trash collecting had left him with bags under his eyes and a dump of a nose spent up by the cigars he smoked to mask the stench of the garbage routes.
Goodnight put the note on the towel and gave it to Frank.
“You won’t be able to figure out where it came from. The markings are gone. But you could get her looking a lot prettier than that.”
It was Palm Sunday and Callie’s stole was red. Her white robe was custom ordered from Iowa to fit her figure. The bottom was tailored to brush the floor and cover up her Velcro shoes. Her congregation loved her. They said she was vulnerable but confident, like she’d already been through hell and needed more than anything for there to be a heaven. Somebody once said she had the biggest soul in southeast Wisconsin.
She stood in the narthex and greeted her congregation with the smile that they loved. She handed them palm branches and made small talk as they came in. Frank stood at her side looking short and skinny, like a kid, in her presence. He only smiled and nodded while Callie did the talking. Frank thought most of the people in her congregation were awful.
Mrs. Osbourne went to church alone since her husband died. She always wore the same dark blue skirt and blouse and topped her white hair with an elaborate red hat. Mrs. Osbourne wore one of those ancient perfumes – heavy and overwhelming like it was embalming her at the same time. She was never satisfied.
“That piano player needs to go,” said Mrs. Osbourne.
Callie laughed her deep laugh that Frank was careful never to call jolly.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s too jazzy. It ruins the service.”
“People like the energy.”
“The last guy we had was better,” she said.
“The last guy we had is dead, Mrs. O.”
Mrs. Osbourne took her palm and walked through the door.
Jane Vandecar, in her forties, was half the age of Mrs. Osbourne but just as irritable. And she wore too much gold. Jane never said hello. She just jumped right into whatever was bothering her like it was urgent that Callie hear it.
“Kathy Riley won’t be singing today will she?”
“She’s a member of the choir. She sings every Sunday.”
“Well then tell her to keep it down. She sings too loud. Shouldn’t be doing that with the voice she’s got.”
“That’s the voice God gave her and that’s the voice God wants to hear,” said Callie. She handed Jane her palm and moved her along.
“She’s a beautiful baby,” said Callie to Keith and Jodi Lee.
They were a young couple; she taught pre-school and he was a military vet. Callie stroked soft strands of hair from the child’s forehead.
“How old is she?”
“Almost four months,” said Jodi. “She was early. We induced her just before the New Year so we could claim it on last year’s taxes.”
Jodi laughed and bounced the baby and took her palm.
The rest of the congregation filed in and gathered in the narthex until Callie led her congregation into the church for service. Two teenage acolytes carried tall candles, a third held a bible up over his head. The rest waved their palms in the air. They sang in celebration, a triumphant procession just like Christ riding into Jerusalem. All glory, laud, and honor.
By the time she took the pulpit to address her congregation, Callie looked out of breath. By the time the ambulance arrived she was dead.
Frank kept his mind on the trash after she died. The garbage was like water – he hauled it away by the truckload and it just seeped right back. It flooded the same containers and flowed over into the gutters it did the week before. Cable bills and cardboard boxes and milk cartons and toilet paper rolls, cans of diet soda and porno magazines that his route partner – a new kid named Almost – always flipped through no matter how soaked or stained or dirty they were.
Almost drove the truck. He was a skinny and awkward twenty-one year old. He talked like Donald Duck and windows of drool formed in the corners of his mouth when he grinned. His father – a contractor and consistent winner of municipal bids – got him the job. They called him Almost because in his first days killing time playing spades down at the municipal shop all he talked about where the things he almost did. He almost played minor league baseball with the Lake County Captains somewhere in Ohio. He almost went to college but instead he stuck around for a girl. He almost got married but instead she stopped loving him. He almost went to work pouring concrete for his father but he hated it.
In July when it was hot and humid and things went rotten fast, trash collection stopped when the municipal union picketed for more money. With no work Frank grew restless and hired a trainer to teach him to ride Lou the horse. Frank and Lou learned to know each other fast.
Frank spent the nights cleaning out the house, finally getting rid of all the things he and Callie never used. In a closet he found the bayonet. It was still wrapped in the white hand towel. Goodnight’s note had fallen but Frank found it on the floor behind some black cleats and a pair of clean white cross trainers that Frank hadn’t thought about in years. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d run.
Goodnight’s handwriting was terrible but Frank could make it out. Soak overnight in black tea, wipe, repeat with white vinegar, WD40 for what’s left.
Frank followed the instructions and soon the blade was nearly all silver with small dark brown spots left in only a few places. Several coats of WD40 later and the bayonet looked damn near as good as new. He sharpened it with an electric knife sharpener and cut his finger on the edge of the blade. In the kitchen he ran his finger under the water and rinsed away the blood. The bayonet gleamed from the kitchen table. He’d pulled a Civil War socket bayonet from the ground in his backyard. All he needed was a rifle he could afix it to. He found one at a flea market along with a complete replica of a Union soldier’s uniform. He called Larry Goodnight and asked if his company could use another soldier for the summer.
Frank Such sat on his horse, Lou, and assessed the field. Sweat soaked through his cotton cap and made dark brown hooks of his bangs. About a hundred yards ahead, confederate soldiers crept through the corn. Their bayonets caught the sun and sent minnows of light across a lake of tassels. Large crowds of people watched on from a hill. He spit into a rag and polished the brass on his jacket. His jacket was clean and dark blue. His pants were just as nice.
He touched his hip, where his new Griswold and Gunnison .36 caliber replica sat tightly in its holster. The barrel was blued and the handle was walnut and smooth. It was a Confederate gun, and when anybody knew anything or asked about it Frank made a big spectacle of it and said he’d taken it from the tobacco stained fingers of a dead Rebel. People loved hearing the story and they laughed whenever he told it. A cannon fired and the battle started. Frank ran his fingers through Lou’s mane, gripped the reins, and gave the horse two hard kicks in the side. Lou took off running and Frank held on as tight as he could.
Matt Carmichael’s fiction has appeared in The Adirondack Review.