I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

Part Nine

The light of dawn, made gray by the lingering winter storm, began to creep over the Mall and monuments of Washington D.C.. From the padded box he called an office, Wyatt Douglass stared sleepily out the lone, wide square window behind his desk. He was watching the morning in a daze, the concrete and granite buildings beyond the thick, unpolished glass obscured by a thick layer of frost. He mostly could see only himself reflected in the light of his brightly glowing computer screen. The old monitor hummed loudly, limping through its long days and fast approaching a state of desperation in terms of needing repairs. Wyatt never held his breath when he went to push the ON button. He just assumed it wouldn’t respond and so was pleasantly surprised each morning to be wrong about that. Once, he actually let himself wonder where he was on the waiting list. That, however, was months ago.

Wyatt should have been at home. But, there had been work to do before he could rest. He was nearly finished now. All that remained was filing his report, officially closing the case of the events at the Parrish farm. Wyatt turned his head enough to look at the buzzing monitor. The whole process was taking much longer than normal.

Two files at idle on the screen. Words were organized into sentences and those sentences assumed the structures of basic paragraphs spanning multiple pages. The letterhead of his agency and office were affixed to the top of each document. The similarities between the two files ended there, leaving the bulk of the contents in stark contrast to each other. The shorter of the two was a report he could have written blindfolded from his office without ever actually having traveled into the field. It was exactly what had been called, exactly what was expected from him. It was an inside the box write-up that patted the backs of the agents and agencies involved. It described the scene and characters precisely as it had been predicted Wyatt would find it in. It was a reassurance the bubble housing the world those in the know lived uneasily under had not begun to weaken or come apart.

Wyatt blinked, shifted his eyes over barely a degree to stare at the second file. There were more pages in this document. There was more to be described, more to take into account. He had done his best to piece the bloody puzzle together in his head from all the information he had collected. This report no longer assumed the innocence of those agents or authorities that had fallen at the scene. Wyatt shifted in his chair as he considered exactly what he had written.

Staring again at the frost on his office window, Wyatt imagined the Parrish house the morning of the raid. That’s exactly was it had always meant to be. He’d discovered the paper trail upon his return to the Capital. Wyatt saw the orders to seize the property. The use of any force or means necessary was clearly printed more than once throughout the chain of command, from the building he sat in to the local sheriff’s office that would be providing an escort. A raid is exactly what Old Man Parrish knew was coming.

The wise, old farmer had seen the signs like a wide-eyed sage. He had readied his family as best he could. He had hopes of standing their ground like any injured citizen would. There was a machine much larger than themselves about to roll over them. One family, a few tight-knit individuals were standing alone against the cold, oppressive powers which had swollen to extremes without check. Old Man Parrish knew what he was facing and knew what he had to do.

One of them had to get away, they had to be elsewhere and cease to exist in that house. His daughter, young but able, might have a chance. She could live and find a way to tell their story, to confess the truth about what happened. During the tearful goodbye’s, Wyatt imagined the purging of her life amongst them had earnestly begun. Any picture of her was removed and thrown, with school papers and diaries, into a hot and hungry fire in the gaping, brick hearth.

Madeline had told him it was her brother that had led her into the barn. Wyatt calculated it was at this point the sedan with his peers, along with their escorts in dusty patrol cars from the local sheriff’s office, were cruising up the length of the driveway. Here, a detail Madeline may have never been aware of existed in a veil of lies and deceit. It had taken a return to the scene after the snowy morning with her. Wyatt discovered tire tracks he hadn’t noticed before. The mud and snow made them seem to glow with a harsh and violent clarity. The truth will not be hidden, Wyatt had thought. It was the tread of tires fixed to a vehicle too big to be an ambulance. A haunting thought hung in his mind. He dared not shudder but a cold no chill in the winter air could compare with surged within him. A black-boot squad, Wyatt had guessed without doubt.

Near the blackened, crumbled remains of the barn, Wyatt had stood utterly bewildered. In the first visit, he could not fathom the need for the old building to be razed like that. “He burned it down,” said one of the wounded deputies. Wyatt had broken into his hospital room in Ardmore before his flight. It didn’t take long for the government wet nurse, Gordon Parks, to track him down. But Wyatt still managed to gain a few minutes of free interrogation time.

“Who?”

“The kid.”

“Who,” Wyatt had asked again, his voice sharp and direct. They were knocking on the door of the hospital room by that point. Wyatt had jammed it, trying to give himself more time. “What kid? The farmer’s kid?”

“Yeah! The so...son.”

“Why did he set it on fire?”

“I don’t know. He was a stupid farm boy.”

As calmly as if he were going to fluff the young deputy’s pillows, Wyatt reached down and firmly placed his hand upon the bloodstained bandage taped below the man’s right shoulder blade. The pain he felt must have been instantly tremendous by the watery, wide-eyed glare he shot at Wyatt. “Try again,” Wyatt said.

“Ahghh! I don’t know! I was near the back door of the house.”

“What happened to the boy?!”

“He had something in his hand! Aghh! He was coming out of the barn! He surprised them!”

“Them? Them who?”

“The...ahghh! Please....aahghh! The black-boot guys!”

Wyatt’s stomach had dropped. He knew it. He stepped back from the deputy. The knocking on the door had turned to heavy pounding by that point. With racing breaths, the deputy said, “That’s when all hell broke loose.”

Wyatt didn’t get to speak with the other deputy. He didn’t need to. He had the scene in his head. Having smuggled his sister to the cellar in the barn, the Parrish boy emerged from the barn, startling the black-boot taking a flanking position around the farm house. He must have had a gun or shovel or ax in his hand. But, he also may have only had the padlock for the barn door. The black-boot fired his weapon, killing the younger of the old farmer’s two sons. Parrish must have been watching at the window. He smashed the glass and fired his rifle, a deadly spray of shotgun shell striking the anonymous soldier in the back of the neck.

The next shots came from the back door, bullets piercing blindly through the wood. It was one of his fellow agents. Old Man Parrish simply must have pivoted to the corner of the wall near the window, aimed at the wooden door he knew would not stop the blast of his gun and fired. By now the house was being stormed. The second agent must have stepped over the fallen body of the first, kicking open the door and firing. They would miss, leaving the spray of small craters in the wall near the spot Parrish was using for cover. Parrish would discharge another rough, blood from the agent stumbling backwards splattering the foyer.

The family wouldn’t last long against the force sieging their home, but they lasted long enough. The other two agents would be felled before it was all over. The blood in an upstairs bedroom amongst constellations of bullet holes had told Wyatt one of the family members had been acting as a sniper. An agent was trying to get away, making them the last of the opposing force to die, not the first.

Wyatt sighed with ill despair. The burning of the bard hand been nothing but after-the-fact theater, smoke without the mirrors. He turned his chair away from the window to face his desk. He looked at the computer screen, taking another deep breath. Of all the elements he had included in the longer file, there was one detail left out. He smiled, thinking of her as he submitted the long document into the system for review. He deleted the first one, the shorter version, wondering how much he had just made the bubble shake.

Wyatt turned the noisy monitor off and reached for his coat. The hazy, gray light of the morning poured into his office from the lone window. He looked out to the nation’s capital once more. He thought of Madeline out on the plains. He hoped with all of his heart she would make it to where she was going. Even if she didn’t, he wondered if she felt like she already had. Despite her sadness, Wyatt wondered if a part of her was smiling. She had survived and told her story. Somehow, she had known-or, at least had enough faith-that Wyatt would find the strength to deliver her story, her family’s story, to the world.

As he closed the door to his office, Wyatt knew everything would be different now. Maybe no one would read his report. That didn’t matter. He knew. Wyatt walked out of his office into a different world. There was no grass to be greener. He was in a hallway. And, it was winter. So he thought of another saying as he waited for an elevator, feeling a sense of insufferable gloom shrugged off his shoulders.

The truth shall set you free.