No Profanity Here: A Collection of Short Stories

By Michael Royce Ward

This work contains seven short stories, all of which deal with the human spirit with an undercurrent of Christianitythat within each of us is the capacity to do good or evil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466908321

Michael Royce Ward

Michael Royce Ward has worked at a variety of jobs in his lifetime: custodian, warehouseman, clerk, etc. He has worked in the gaming industry and in the accountancy field. A former bank examiner, he is currently an enrolled agent residing in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Book preview

© Copyright 2012 Michael Royce Ward.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4669-0831-4 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-0830-7 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-0832-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011962681

Trafford rev. 12/13/2011

7-Copyright-Trafford_Logo.ai

www.trafford.com

North America & international

toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

phone: [phone].png fax: [phone]

Contents

All It Took Was Reading,

Writing, and Arithmetic

It Doesn’t Hurt to Be Nice

Sometimes You Just

Have to Slow Down

That’s Not in the Book

To Cleanse My Soul

We Shall See

You Gotta Have Inspiration

All It Took Was Reading,

Writing, and Arithmetic

I didn’t expect it to turn out this way, but I can’t complain. I expected, in middle age, to drop in and see the changes. Maybe I’d look up somebody from the group that had stayed on after high school or that had returned home.

The group I’m talking about is the one that graduated from high school during the Great Society. A lot of us went into the military then, Vietnam notwithstanding. In the small farming towns in west Texas, that’s the way it was if you were from the middle or lower class, or if you were known as oil field trash. Maybe those kids were called that because of the breadwinner’s tendency to drink up the paycheck, if given the chance.

Most of the upper-class kids either went to college or to work in the businesses their families owned. Some were drafted, but those who had clout were not. One guy got an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy. And some, once their military obligation was done, used the GI Bill to go college or to get technical training.

Things were going well for the Coast Guard fellow—he was fixing to retire at the rank of Commander—but it all came crashing down when his wife caught him with another man and killed him. It had to have been a crime of passion. I mean, if his wife had had her wits about her, she could have filed for divorce and received half of his pension plus medical benefits. Instead, she got a prison term and a lifetime of regret.

Billy Burke, as I understand it, built up a good plumbing business in Odessa, thanks to the GI Bill. He died when he fell off his deer stand, about a month before he was going to retire. He went through ‘Nam without a scratch. Most of those who used the GI Bill put no roots down back home once their education was completed.

Some guys opted for the Navy because they had never seen the ocean. I asked one fellow I saw, after his Navy hitch was up, how he’d liked the ocean. I was sort of joking, but he barked back that he spent all of his time inside the ship, below the waterline. The only time he saw the ocean was in port. Last I heard, he was in a VA hospital getting treated for a social disease that had been neglected while he had been in the service.

My destiny was chosen for me when I flunked the physical because of my flat feet. Now, just how is it possible to have flat feet and run track in high school? Maybe track caused my feet to get that way. College was out, even though I could have had a partial scholarship. I had always been a slow study, which my grades reflected until I was halfway through my junior year. My long-range plans were to volunteer for the draft, go to college on the GI Bill, and teach tenth-grade English. This was before the Tet Offensive. When you are eighteen, you think you’re invincible—you don’t think you can get killed, much less permanently maimed, as many were during that War.

I was eighteen when I graduated, and technically I was also an orphan since, at that time, eighteen year-olds couldn’t vote. Mom and Dad married late in life. Dad was gone when I was eleven, and Mom died the summer before my senior year. She went to bed one Tuesday night and didn’t wake up on Wednesday. Natural causes, said the autopsy. Truth is, I think she was just plain worn out from working hard every day of her life.

No one tried to pack me off to a group home. Everyone knew I could take care of myself. It helped that the house was paid off; even though it was run-down, it was still livable. Any mineral rights, that I knew of, belonged to someone else. If I had done a hitch in the military,