Still Valley At 20,000 Feet - Mike Burns (good ebook reader .TXT) 📗

...why is it special? That’s where it all began, Bob. The diary of Nathaniel Achilles Dudleymore--my maternal great-great...(pauses to cough up blood, then continues)...great-great grandfather...recorded what really happened...why the war turned around that day...in Still Valley. A place in Northern Virginia, outside the town of Laysdell.

BOB
During the Civil War, you mean?

GOVERNOR
I’ve never heard that name...for it. But I guess that’s a fitting...name...too...

He points to the sheaf of papers in Bob’s hands.

GOVERNOR
I won’t be giving it to the world, Bob. You’ve got to do it. Swear to me you’ll do it.

BOB
I swear, Governor. One way or another, it’ll happen.

(CONTINUED)
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GOVERNOR
Good, Bob. (looks at him with dawning perception) You’re not from around here, are you, Bob?

BOB
I guess that’s becoming obvious, isn’t it?

The two men share a friendly chuckle at this. The governor of California slumps over, dead.

VOICE FROM BEHIND
Too bad you made a promise you can’t keep.

This scares the daylights out of Bob. He jumps, whirls around. What he sees scares him all the more--the Klansman From Hell. Flame billows from his cross and the eyeholes of his hood , seemingly in time to the flames still licking at scattered plane debris.

But the most bizarre thing of all is the thing in the white-clad nightmare’s other hand. A twelve-foot section of metal from the plane’s vertical stabilizer--the one Bob remembers hearing torn from the tail--which the Klansman carries as if it were no heavier than a suitcase.

KLANSMAN FROM HELL (speaking in a menacing, cracked-sounding bassy voice, which has the sound of an educated Southerner)
Before I snuff out your crummy little lives, I want to hear what that fool from California was going to say. I could use a little DI-version before gettin’ down to serious business here!

BOB: (too angry to be fearful)
Why don’t you read it yourself, you murdering sonofabitching monster? (thrusts the packet out defiantly)

The Klansman looks around, and suddenly spies somebody else from the plane, lying on the ground. He lunges over and seizes him by the slack of his suit coat--the governor’s assistant, the one black person on the plane. The Klansman drags him back over in front of Bob. With his other hand, he raises the section of tail menacingly, like a giant cleaver.

KLANSMAN FROM HELL
I now have two victims I can cut up at will--the governor’s Uncle Tom here, and that pretty little lady of yours, whom I know you don’t dare move (gestures at Julia with the tail section). Now read that letter, SIR!

BOB (speaking in weary resignation, yet one tinged with an indefinable hope)
Well, why not? Here we go:
‘To all my Confederate American brothers and sisters, greetings. As always, my hopes are that this day finds you all prosperous, healthy and happy.

‘But for as long as you all have known me and known about my background and my career, you know that my hopes have always been tempered by my realistic perception of the way things are in the Confederate States, and that things have been this way since the War Between the States. A pessimistic realism has always tempered my hopes.

(CONTINUED)
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BOB
‘Today, however, I can say that the converse is true now. The problems that beset our nation have at long last been tempered by my hopes, in a most unexpected way.

‘I will explain why, but in order to explain why my hopes are gaining ground against my perceptions of the hard realities we all face, I must first tell you the story of a great man, a giant humanitarian of a man who went largely unnoticed by the world during his lifetime, and has been unnoticed for well over a century. But that has changed.

‘His name was Ricard Dentreanoux, a French Catholic priest who founded the parish of Dometier (northwest of New Orleans) and the mission of Our Lady of the Sorrowful Deluge, in the early 1700s. His journals were discovered in a private document collection that was recently donated to the Historic New Orleans collection.

‘Father Ricard was a missionary of great zeal, converting many Native Americans, including most of the members of the Poisson Karankawa nation. He was also a doctor and apothecary, and was a physician to many white and Native American communities in the area--healing, preaching the Gospel, and disbursing medicine, food and sometimes money from the mission’s coffers as he was able.

‘And Father Ricard was exceptional in another way as well. He was not only priest, missionary, and physician--he was also a man of psychic insight, a seer and chronicler of future events.

‘His journals contain numerous examples of his predictions for the short-term future, for himself, for the mission church, or for his parishioners. For instance, he once predicted unerringly that a woman of the parish, a mother of six, would be in labor for almost four hours with her seventh, even though this had happened with none of her earlier children. He also predicted it would be a boy with a reddish birthmark between his shoulder-blades. It all came true.

‘In his later years, before his disappearance, he began having visions of the future that were farther-off in time. These predictions were mostly written in verse form. His recordings of these in his journals tend to be more vague, and more filled with metaphorical or symbolic language. But they seem none the less true. One of them seemed to predict governor John F. Kennedy’s assassination in correct, if very concise form.

Governor? thinks Bob Wilson. Never mind.

‘What does Father Ricard and his amazing talents have to do with why my hopes are greater and my pessimism less where our great country is concerned? It is this: one of his verses seemed to describe the conditions we have faced for so long, seemingly for time without end--and an end to those conditions. To some, this time will no doubt have seemed even longer, considering their continuous oppression, endured for centuries now. Surely the uprooting of such a deep-rooted order of things--or perhaps one should say DISorder of things--will change and transform every aspect of our world. The verse in which he predicted this change was as follows:


(CONTINUED)
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