Good for the Soul, A Short Story
A tale of life, death, and the eternal nature of the living soul.
By now, you’ve likely seen the new Bright Morning Star Press tab at the top of the Further Up & Further In webpage (and if you haven’t, time to go take a look!). This is my creative space to release short stories and other works of fiction within my larger Substack body.
When I originally wrote this short story, which I call Good for the Soul, it was intended to be submitted to a local Eastertide-themed art competition here in the Palouse. I did send it, but it didn’t win, and that’s okay. I’m happy with how this Great Depression-era tale turned out and wanted to get it out into the world. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together…
“Get your nose outta that comic book and come help me!”
Horace Loggins wasn’t what you’d call a tender man, but he wasn’t an ill-tempered one either. His mopish red hair bounced in the breeze and a quick flash of muted sunlight pinged off the golden bicuspid settled into the lower left side of his warped jaw. The older man, brandishing a patched pair of overalls and a sheepskin jacket to fend off the biting wind, had lodged his pickaxe too deep into the frozen dirt and now needed an extra hand in ripping it out.
“Come on boy, you ain’t paid to sit around all day.”
I put down the worn issue of Action Comics I’d traded my lucky baseball for last fall and played the part of the hero in the red cape gracing the front cover. It had been a tough year for everyone in the rolling hills, and no amount of work was going to change that. But, as Horace had told me many-a-days before, work was good for the soul. I would’ve argued with him if I thought it’d change his mind, but he had a few dozen years up on me in experience, and so I surrendered to the excruciating truth.
“Careful not to bring it up too fast. I don’t wanna lose another tooth.”
“Or an eye.”
“Or an eye.”
On three we heaved, and the pickaxe came up looser than a wheel on one of those Hoover mobiles that we saw pass by every now and again. The tool was free, but we had fallen backward into the snowy mush, victims of the fading winter’s final tricks. Horace had been trying to remove a particularly large slab of rock from the wheat field before the sowing could begin the following month. The soil hadn’t quite dethawed, which wasn’t the most ideal condition for planting, but the work still needed to be done. Foreclosures had hit the local farms faster than the wildfires could in the summertime, and winter had refused to offer us any favors either. They said that things were beginning to look up because of the war in Europe, but we had yet to see any evidence of that way out here.
Horace helped me up and we glared down at the cold plate of basalt staring back at us. It wasn’t quite as black as coal nor was it as yellow as the gold I’d heard was once found in places like California or Montana, which meant it was worthless. Horace bent down and knocked on the rock with the tip of his pickaxe.
“Sucker’s really in there.”
“Think we can get it out?”
“Not with this.” He dropped the tool to the ground. “Maybe if we had some dynamite. Good ol’ fashioned T.N.T. would do the trick.” He said each letter with a particular emphasis that highlighted the southern accent he’d learned to mask after all these years out west.
“Those are two different things, aren’t they?”
“What?”
“T.N.T. and dynamite. They’re not the same thing. They do the same thing, but they aren’t the same.”
“Aw, what do you know?” He dug his blackened fingers into the chilled dirt and pushed deep beneath the grot. After a moment, he’d concluded that the rock was deeper down than he thought.
“It’s gonna take half the day to dig that thing up.”
“Then we better get digging. Work is good for the soul, after all.”
The hours of carving up the raw earth had numbed our fingers to the point where we thought they’d fallen clean off. Hank Morgan couldn’t pay us much, but what he could, we gladly took and went on our way. Folks might’ve made anywhere from eighty cents to a dollar out east, but here, we were lucky to get by with thirty. Not that we needed that much. We were happy in our stopgap little cabin in the woods at the base of the mountain; if you could call it a mountain.
The cedars were magnificent. They towered over us like giants and could swallow us just the same if we weren’t careful. The sparrow’s songs eased any fears we might’ve had in the trees, though Horace kept a close eye out for snakes of all kinds. He always slept with his pickaxe close in case he needed to behead one of “the Devil’s children,” as he called them.
Through the forested canopy above us, we could still see the glittering of stars hanging up there with nothing better to do but taunt us with their otherworldly light. I wondered if they might send me down a baby in a rocket ship and if I might be the best sort of person to take care of him if they did. The fire was fading as Horace tossed another collection of dried roots and twigs onto the dual lamplight and fireplace. They burned with the ferocity of wolves, which thankfully were nowhere to be found.
Horace was whistling a tune I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but before I could ask him where it came from, he pointed at the heavenly choir and smiled. “You know why they glisten like that, dontcha?”
I shook my head.
“They’re singing ‘s all. They look down on us and up at one another, and they see the splendor of the Almighty. They can’t help but sing. And when one shoots by, well, you know that one couldn’t sit still much longer.” He smiled as he stroked the unkempt mob on his head. “Sometimes, they just have to dance.”
A tear welled in the old man’s eye and caught wind of the fire before retreating to the dirt below. Horace didn’t move though. He sat still, looking upward, as if there was nothing and no one else in the world. He gazed deeply into the heavenly bodies like a man might look at his lover. I had never seen him like this before, and I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. There wasn’t anything to fear from the man, but this was a side to him I wasn’t used to.
“All my life, I’ve been runnin’ from the master weaver who sowed the heavens and lit the stars. I’ve cursed and stole and rambled about like a man free of truth and consequence. But runnin’ gets old after a while, much older than I’ve ever been. It ages you faster than children and deeper than war. One day, you just can’t run no more. The sooner you realize that, the sooner the chains will fall off you too.”
That was all the old man said before he packed it in for the night. He retreated to the roof and four walls and fell fast asleep. The words stuck with me as I turned back to the stars. It was almost like he’d just read me a sermon he’d been rehearsing for years. I never considered that I might be running from something, never thought that I’d gotten here because of anything I’d done or failed to do.
The next day, we toiled in the dirt for what seemed like days but was only a few hours. The grime had retreated under our fingernails and our brows were caked with a mixture of sweat and gunk that had consummated their brief courtship all over our tired faces.
We continued to rip up Hank Morgan’s field in preparation for the seeding but were interrupted when we saw an automobile about a quarter mile east of us drive right into a ditch just off Highway 95. We normally didn’t pay any mind to the road that cozied up to the Morgan family farm, but this was an exception.
The dark green automobile, I think it was one of those fancy Ford De Luxes, just sat there with its grill in the snow-banked dirt and the chassis caught in the brush that bordered the road. The car couldn’t have hit any ice since it had all practically melted. Maybe the driver fell asleep at the wheel? In any case, I looked over at Horace who was still staring at the Ford.
“Think we should do something?”
He was speechless.
“Horace? Should we help?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
I looked over at the car, still as a rock in the ground, and then back at the old man who had already ventured toward the crash. I followed him as he trailed across the field and stopped at the immobile mobile. It took us a few minutes to hike over there, but when we arrived, the conditions hadn’t changed––save for the wind, of course, which was picking up.
Horace pressed his face to the front window and tapped on the glass. “Ma’am!” No response. “Ma’am, wake up!” I stumbled up beside him and peeked inside myself, laying eyes on the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.
She was about my age if I had to guess. She sported bright, blonde curls that accented her pillowed ruby lips. Her eyes were closed as her head arched against the passenger window, but I imagined that they were green. A thin trail of blood had dried up on the glass, but the small cut on her forehead didn’t look bad.
“It’s a girl!”
“Of course, it’s a girl!” He reached for the handle. “Keep her steady.”
Horace was careful not to open it too quickly as to let her fall out into the dirt and melting snow. I braced her softly with my arms and caught her before she could fall right out. Her head lay comfortably on my shoulder, and I realized it was the first time in years I had ever been closely embraced by another.
Eyeing a blanket from the backseat, I laid her down on the ground on the soft sheet of wool. I checked to see if she was still breathing, placing my ear up against her mouth. Soft breaths of air flowed in and out, but I placed my ear against her chest to be sure.
“She’s breathing.”
“Good! Now come help me with this.”
I closed the driver’s side door and we set ourselves at the front of the Ford as if we were preparing to race down Highway 95 ourselves. We fought hard to break the automobile loose from its lodging in the ground, and after a few moments of pushing, it wiggled free. We rolled the bent frame back onto the empty stretch of road, unsure what to do with its passenger.
“We ought to get a hold of the authorities.”
“Should we try waking her up?”
“If pulling her outta a car didn’t do the trick, then I’ve got no other ideas how we might wake her.”
“A slap in the face might do it.”
“I’m too old to go to jail for slapping a lady on the side of the road. You slap her and see what happens when she wakes up!”
I thought about it for a moment, but thankfully didn’t have to for long. As we were arguing, the girl had rolled to her side and was beginning to wake. Her low moan caught my ears, and I rushed over to help her sit up.
“Uh, hi ma’am. Are you alright?”
She shook her head. “I think so. Where am I? What happened?”
“It looks like you went into a ditch. You were unconscious when we pulled you out.” She cradled her head and fought to stay awake. “Horace and I were working in the field just over there when we saw your crash. We were able to get your car back on the road, but I think you might want to get it looked at. It looks pretty banged up.”
She nodded and then clung fast to the bruised gash on her head. “Well thank you for your help. It was mighty kind of you to do all this. I might’ve been here for hours if you hadn’t come along.”
“It was nothing, ma’am.” I looked back at Horace who let slip a sly smile. I quickly turned back to my patient, giving her as much care as if I were a doctor. “What happened, anyway?”
“I’m afraid I’m just not used to these things quite yet. My father swears that horses are bound to be a thing of the past and that by the end of the century, no one will be riding them at all. Can you believe that?” She looked over at the Ford resting comfortably on the cold pavement. “But at least with a horse, I can still look at the fields and the hills without worrying about rolling into some ditch somewhere.”
“You need more practice, is all.”
She glanced at me with a soft smile and a dignity I had never seen so closely before. Her perfectly straight teeth showed out from under her pursed lips, but I had already been transfixed by the green glint in her eyes. I had nearly sunken in them when she spoke up again, offering me her name in exchange for my heroic deed.
“I’m Grace, by the way. Grace Fielding. And you are?”
“Why wouldn’t you ask her out?”
“I don’t have the money.”
“I’ll lend you the money.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t, I offered. You need to brush up on those listening skills if you’re going to court that Grace Fielding.”
I shook my head and turned back to the horse I’d been shoeing. I was on the last hoof and trying to keep my focus so as not to get kicked in the face. The old man wasn’t helping any.
“Why wouldn’t you ask her out?”
“You already asked me that.” He ambled to the other side of the barn with his shovel and continued to plop what little hay we had to spare in the stalls. He let the silence hang there for a moment until I gave him a better answer; or at least a more honest one. “I’d be no good for her, okay?”
He stopped when I said that. I didn’t look at his face, and I didn’t try to, but I imagined he was scowling back at me. “Now why would you say a thing like that? Of course, you’d be good for her.” I laughed. He didn’t. “You’re a hard worker. You’re smart. Much smarter than the usual bindle bums I’ve come across. And you saved her life for God’s sake!”
“So did you.”
“Sure, but I ain’t seventeen. And you ain’t an old man, you’ve got a shot.”
I rubbed the weariness out of my eyes and picked up the tools I’d been brandishing. “You should’ve been a lawyer.”
“I shoulda been a lot of things.” He pointed his bony index finger directly at the skipping heart hidden in my chest. “Time waits for no man, son. Don’t waste whatever you’ve got.”
I didn’t think much about those words until the next morning. We had finished up for the night and headed back to our refuge from the cold, looking back up at the stars as we wandered our way home. Unlike the night before, Horace didn’t impart any additional wisdom, and we lay there just listening to the sounds of the forest.
I didn’t expect things to change so drastically, but the next morning, Horace had joined the master weaver in the stars, leaving me behind with his remains.
It took most of the morning to dig Horace a sufficient grave.
I had never dug one myself, but I had seen it done plenty of times before. The old man didn’t have anything else in the whole world but a silver-plated pocket watch, his faded Bible, and an old engagement ring that looked as if it had never been worn. I collected the valuables into my extra knapsack, tied it all together, and hoisted the belongings above the makeshift cross I placed in the ground beside his final resting place, which wasn’t far from our wooded dwelling. I kept some of his extra cash and the Bible, more out of instinct than anything else.
As I flipped aimlessly through the pages, I came across the front cover. Horace’s full name was inscribed into it with a dedication from who I could only assume was his mother. But at the very bottom of the page was a note.
Ephraim – It’s Easter Sunday, and if I can’t make it there with you, I think you ought to attend this morning’s service. Work may be good for the soul, but there’s something else out there that’s much better…
I walked the six-and-a-half miles back to town and debated within myself the whole way if I should follow through with the old man’s last request. After all, he couldn’t do anything if I didn’t go, and it’s not like he was a consistent churchgoer himself. But by the time I arrived at the First Baptist Church on the corner of 1st and Jackson, I had resolved to enter, even if I were to instantly burst into flames.
The bell rang as congregants piled into the wooden structure, and I wasn’t sure what I was really doing there. I sat alone in the back as the choir chimed through “Rock of Ages” and “How Great Thou Art.” I didn’t know the words myself, but I read them off the page of the hymnal the old lady held open next to me.
It was then that I noticed her. Not the old woman, but the young one who stood on the other side of the aisle, nose-deep in the good book. She looked better than the last time I saw her and turned to me with a soft smile before recentering her gaze on the minister up front.
I opened my secondhand Bible and followed along. Maybe the old man knew what he was doing after all.