The Mind of Payne

By Kent Breazeale

When psychologist Savannah James meets mentally ill five-year-old Payne Isaac she sees her role as simple: help Payne. Session after session she listens to Payne as he describes events that haven’t occurred and people she is certain do not exist. She desperately wants the therapy to have a positive affect in his life—a drive born from her need to cope with her own secrets. When Payne discovers Savannah’s secret, he is convinced it is she who needs help—an obligation he believes belongs to him and one that forces him to choose between keeping his friends and helping Savannah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TouchPoint Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301773749

Kent Breazeale

Kent Breazeale has loved the art of story telling since he was a young boy. Growing up in rural Mississippi has given him an understanding of the culture and the eccentrics of the people living in the south. He has written many short stories, poems and wedding vows and has been published in Church magazines. Kent has a collection of short stories that illustrate his natural art of storytelling. Kent and his wife Deb served as missionaries in the remote village of Bullima on the plains of Tanzania, East Africa. They currently live in Falkner, Mississippi with their adopted dogs Harley and Ubu.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank my wife, Deb, for her support. Also a sincere thank you to Sheri Williams at TouchPoint Press and to my editor, Nicole Gardner. I appreciate all of your hard work.

Prologue

You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t waste it. Make it account for something. You don’t want to look back when you’re my age and have regrets. You don’t want to regret that your life didn’t account for something—something good—and you don’t want to look back and think that you failed to allow someone else’s life to account for something as well. It’s difficult to know who will have a positive effect on our lives, to know which opportunities to embrace, but those who have the opportunity to have the greatest effect seem to be sent to us—and it’s the ones that we least expect them to be.

My name is Savannah James. I’m a psychologist. I’ve spent my life wanting to have a positive effect on others, but I know in my heart that I’ve never affected anyone’s life in the same way that he affected mine. He rode into my life that first day on a brown and white pony. He wore a red felt cowboy hat and brown cotton gloves with fringe hanging from the outside seams of the cuffs. His khaki shorts were covered at the waist by a tan, leather gun belt with white-handled pistols holstered on each side. His black cowboy boots were the ones with the fancy stitching behind the toe and the red, white, and gold leather diamonds at the top.

He told me that he couldn’t stay long; that his pony was tied outside and it would need to be fed and watered before dark. He spent the hour leaving his chair occasionally and stepping to the window to see if the pony was still there, to be sure that horse thieves hadn’t stolen it. When his session was over, I stood at my window and watched him as he rode away with his mother in the black Pontiac.

He was five when I first met him in the summer of 1962, and we spent two sessions a month together for the next seven months. His name was Payne Isaac, and I’ll never forget the sessions as he talked and I listened—as he talked and I listened to the mind of Payne.

Chapter 1

The copperhead retreated to the corner of the patio where the concrete steps led up to the back door. It wasn’t the first one; there had been many to visit the patio in Payne’s short lifetime, and he had even killed a few since his grandfather had bought him the new gun and holster set.

He drew swiftly and fired three quick shots but the bullets ricocheted from the concrete patio and landed in the grass somewhere in the backyard. Racine Isaac stepped onto the patio with the empty laundry basket in her arms and immediately noticed the coiled copperhead.

Payne, get away from that snake! she screamed as she dropped the laundry basket and kicked it across the patio between the snake and her son.

The angry copperhead struck at the plastic intruder and Racine panicked from the loud smack of the strike. Payne thought that her short screams of panic sounded like a puppy barking as he watched her dance and hop in place, trying to run and wanting to run, but not going anywhere. Both of her bare feet were in the air, then one foot in the air, then the other, as she finally managed to skip backwards into the grass.

Payne, go git the hoe! she screamed again, pointing at the storage room at the near end of the carport. Payne hurried through the short, narrow breezeway to where the louvered door of the storage room stood propped open with a steel milk crate. The old ringer washing machine stood in the center of the small dark room sloshing soapsuds and water onto the concrete as it churned the second load of clothes of the morning.

Hurry son! He heard his mother scream again as he dragged the hoe from among the other garden tools that leaned in the corner behind the washer. He could hear the clanging of the tools sliding down the wall and falling into each other as he quickly made his way back through the breezeway to the patio.

Racine grabbed the hoe with both hands at the end of the handle and nervously sneaked toward the corner. Payne could see his mother’s arms trembling as she raised the hoe above her head and swiftly brought it down on the snake. He drew his pistol and fired another shot and the diamond-shaped head bounced away from the long, now violently thrashing body of the copperhead.

Racine dropped the hoe and quickly retreated into the grass, unable to control those short, high-pitched puppy dog screams again. Payne blew the smoke from the barrel of the pistol and twirled it around his finger before easily dropping it back into the holster.

Payne, how many times do I have ta tell ya ta stay away from these snakes, son, that’s a high land moccasin. They deathly poison! his mother scolded in a relieved tone. A bite from a snake like that would kill you!

Payne glanced down at the bite mark on his left forearm. He knew the copperhead was poisonous, his mother had warned him many times to run whenever he saw one, but for some reason she had forgotten to warn him to run from Cynthia Jerginson.

***

Payne ambled through the breezeway to the carport.

I need a drink, he said boldly to the bartender and then waited patiently for the short, stubby man to fill a mug and slide it to the end of the bar. He eyed the two men sitting at the small, green table in the corner. There had been others standing shoulder to shoulder at the bar when he walked into the saloon, but they had quickly stepped away and gathered in groups of two or three, whispering to each other. The bartender nervously eased his way down the bar carelessly wiping the surface with a dry rag.

Mister Isaac, we all been talkin’ an’ we thank you oughta be our new sheriff here in Thadius. Thays ain’t nobody else willin’ ta face all the good for nothin’ snakes that come to this town.

Payne turned up the mug and downed the cold liquid. I’ll thank on it, he said with a hard nod before turning and swaggering to the barroom door. He looked out at the driveway and then left the bat wing doors swinging behind him as he untied his pony from the hitching rail and mounted.

He rode around the end of the house and past the swing set to the backyard. When he was sure all was quiet in town, he spurred his pony back to the patio. There were a few spatters and a smudge of blood on the concrete where the copperhead had been. His mother had already taken it hanging across the blade of a shovel to the edge of the yard and slung it across the graveled dirt road into the woods. He had seen her do the same thing with the others he had killed. She would carefully and nervously scoop the snake’s head onto the shovel then scoot the tip of the blade under the body that occasionally still twitched and rolled.

I ‘blieve that devil’s still lookin’ at me, she had once said, noticing the lidless, evil staring snake eyes.

Payne, I left a co-cola under the carport for ya, did ya find it? his mother asked from the height of the kitchen window.

He could barely see her moving around at the sink in the darkness behind the screen.

Yes, ma’am, he answered, frustrated that she had said co-cola loud enough for all of the townspeople to hear.

Cowboys drank beer and he had repeatedly asked her to say beer.

He was a cowboy and it would be humiliating if the neighbors were to hear that he was actually drinking Coca Cola instead of real beer.

Payne turned his pony and rode back to the swing set. He thought about what the bartender had said and he knew it was true. The townspeople—and his mother—needed his protection from the high