The Revelation of Sam Hackett

.... quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him,
as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing
have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze
against the sky, at the hour of midnight ....

~~~ Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

So hot it would boil blood in the veins,
is what they all swore on that August day,
so goddamn hot that Old Satan himself
would seek out shade and a tall lemonade.
You might as well roast yourself on a spit
as to hack at cane all day in the sun
or stand ten hours in billowing steam,
skimming froth from a simmering vat.

With the sun at its zenith, every man's fuse
was gone, and the whole place about to blow ~~
the critical moment came during lunch
in midst of a turbulent game of craps ~~
some oath was muttered, a casual slur
intended for none in particular
but overheard all the same in the heat
of a reckless toss, and before the bones
could bounce Sam Hackett was on his feet
and lunging like fury across the ring
of hollering men straight at Abner Hicks.
The little man ducked and darted off slick
as a rat with Hackett in hard pursuit,
whacking away at his heels with a knife.

After that things went from bad to dire
until now, at the hungry end of the day,
the entire reeking, mutinous crew
was bunched at the farmhouse door, demanding
three and a half week's pay.

The old man
reclined on a cot in the stultifying
shade of a curtained-off room, recording
sums in a blackcloth ledger that lay
on a hardwood table beside the cot.
Next to the ledger a fat roll of bills
clamped with a rubber band, stood on end
like a clenched fist.

Outside in the sun,
Hackett's haranguing grew loud ~ he was sick
as a dog of taking guff from a gimp,
sick of the godawful slop for soup
and sick of standing out here in the heat
while Sultan sipped on his tea ...

Hackett!
The voice rang out like a shot.

Hackett roared
and, shoving his way through the crowd, strode in
through the open door and stood for a bit,
squinting against the gloom. By degrees,
he made out a rumpled shape on the cot.
Pathetic, he thought to himself. Then he spied
the fat roll of bills on the table-top
like a swollen plum that ached to be plucked.
He was just reaching down when the lethal hiss
of metal sliding on oiled metal
gave him a start: the hard blunt end
of an Army-issue Colt .45
regarded him squarely between the eyes.
The old man released the slide with a snap
and a distant smile, watching Hackett
from a vantage somewhere within himself
as cold and remote as a winter grave ~
and just for an instant, from every side,
from every part of the room, there arose
the reek of something unspeakably vile,
a vapor that seeped up out of the floor
in tendrils that curled around Hackett's legs
and torso and tightened around his throat ~~
a stench like nothing at all upon earth,
of nitro and cordite and clouds of chlorine,
of sulfur and brimstone and scorching flesh
and, worse than the reek, the inhuman cries,
the cries of the hopelessly torn and maimed,
of the lost and forsaken on barbed wire,
of the dying and damned ~ and then it was gone
and there was nothing that Hackett could hear
but the old man’s chuckle, while all he had felt
in that instant of pandemonium,
now glittered like ice in the old man’s eye.

Hackett edged nervously back.

“What’s the rush?”

Hackett stood helpless, attempting to clear
a sudden infernal fog from his head.
The old man smiled a chilling smile
and tauntingly eased the Colt from his hand
to the tabletop. "That's as dumb a move
as I've seen," sneered Hackett, grabbing the Colt
but just at that instant beneath the house
there came a rumbling and wrenching apart
as a bottomless smoking abyss of fire
yawned at his feet.

From a distant meadow,
suspended a moment or so on the wind,
the rising bellow of a yearling bull.
All the color had vanished from Hackett's face
and the pistol lay forgotten at his feet.
When he tried to speak he could barely rasp,
"How much I got coming?"

Again that smile
as the old man took up the roll of bills
and slowly peeled off a five and four tens
and held them to Hackett who snatched them away
and folded and stuffed them into his shoe.
The old man leaned to his ledger again.
"Send Carmichael in," he said.

Outside,
the unruly workers grew quiet as Hackett
emerged from the doorway and pulled the brim
of his cap squarely down. He paused to squint
and spotted Carmichael squatting alone
in the shade of post. "You're up," he snarled,
daring the crowd with a scowl to show
the least recognition of what had passed.
He strode out among them with such disdain
that every man stumbled back from his look.
Carmichael ground a butt in the dirt
and regarded Hackett’s face as he passed.
"Do you see him, Curtis? Gray as a stiff!
He looks a different man altogether."
Curtis just shrugged and said he had seen it
time and again -- had seen a man enter
that house as a man and then stumble out
as something less . . ."

"Meaning what exactly?"

“Meaning get up there and collect your pay
or you’ll never see it.”

Carmichael stood
and looked after Hackett’s receding back.
Some fifty yards out from where the man walked,
a dustdevil torqued up out of the fields,
uncoiled and whipped its way over gravel
and all but swallowed poor Hackett up ~
and just for a moment, as Carmichael watched,
the whirling and windblown dust coalesced
to a writhing red figure at Hackett’s side,
a figure in torment, and Carmichael felt
a tingling along his scalp.., then a gust
of evil blew up into Carmichael’s face
and the big man sank to his knees. Curtis
tried pulling him up, but Carmichael gaped,
unable to move. My God," he muttered,
surrendering to a sudden shudder
"You saw him, didn't you? Where did he go?
I'm losing my mind!"

“Come on,” said Curtis,
“it was nothing, believe me, nothing all ~
it’s time you got yourself out of the sun.”