Bobby Roy 3

Bobby Roy 3

By The Leapin’ Lilliputian

from where she floated, and at the edge of the pond, as if he grew there like the birch and willow, stood this wild, beautiful Indian man, leaning on his long gun, eyeing her. He was gone in a matter of five minutes before Marjorie could confront him. She found later that his name was Wetzel.

       Countless times Wetzel saved the white colonists’ lives when all that stood between them and hell or heaven were a few minutes and a miracle. When Indian parties raided small villages, hamlets or single farms he regularly appeared in the nick of time to warn them, take up a rifle in their defense, or sometimes even parley with the leader of the thieves to turn them mysteriously from their morbid task. He saved thus, in his years in the forests of Tennessee, a woman big with child whose husband was in town having beers with friends, an old man leading a couple of Clyesdales through wooded countryside, a bridal couple in the midst of conjugating their marriage in a shady bower on a hillside above her father’s rich lands and barns, an old lady who had fallen into her rain barrel headfirst (though she sadly suffered a degree of retardation and clairvoyance that alarmed even her husband), a small boy who had wandered off into the bush in search of his puppy, Puddles, a six-year old girl whose hair had become tangled in spruce branches far from home and whose parents by nightfall had still not located her, as well as numerous groups of people in crises in municipalities of varying size and nature. Wetzel died oddly on a mountaintop under a beech tree of enormous girth and weight. He had chopped it mostly through with his hatchet when the wind shifted directions bringing the trunk and his cry of timber back upon him with a suddenness he had not foreseen. He was then in his late thirties. Poor Wetz.

       The kegs of gunpowder that Guy Fawkes delivered into the basements of the parliament in London had “brandy” clearly painted in block letters on each of them. No one knew, not even the conspirators, that this day would see the end of politics as it had till been then known. From this time forward would the trust between regent and republican only meander along. No more would statesmen’s wives meet peasant wives with the same candorum envii nor exchange small talk on the relative intelligence of each other’s children, the shape of the milkmaid’s belly, or the length of the stable boy’s saddlehorn. Trust changed then, at that very instant, into suspicion. The secretive, the clandestine, and the dearth of volunteers may be traced to this historical moment. What happened when the match struck was cataclysmic, both spiritually and temporally. Gunpowder had until this moment been unknown. It’s properties had been tested only away from public view by certain agents of the parliament, ironically, who suspected that salt peter mixed with nitrogen could generate terrible explosive power beyond all expectation and experience.

(to be continued)