The Book of Morgan: The Collected Short Stories, Essays and Fantastic Tales

By Tony Morgan

The original title of this collection was The Many Realities of Ynot Nagromthis because some of the people who may have read my novels and/or a few of the short stories contained in this volume have asked me if I consider myself a science fiction writer. As you will see, many of these thirty stories and essays are far from that genre; therefore, I do not consider myself to be such a writer. Rather, I see myself at times consumed with the possibilities of alternative realities.

For instance, what if
there was a way the South would have been able to win the battle of Gettysburg and, with it, the Civil War,
the Titanic had missed the iceberg,
we were able to build a Super Hadron Collider the circumference of the moon, which then opened a parallel universe to ours, and
George Custer had not chosen to leave his two Gatling guns behind on his way to the Little Bighorn?

As the cover proclaims, I have also included my literary essays, short stories, and personal tales for all of you. And as the Koran begins, Not a word of this book should you doubt.

Tony Morgan

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503555587

Tony Morgan

Tony Morgan is the Chief Strategic Officer and founder of the Unstuck Group, a consulting group that has served hundreds of churches throughout the world since its launch in 2009. For 14 years, Tony served on the senior leadership teams of West Ridge Church (Dallas, GA), NewSpring Church (Anderson, SC) and Granger Community Church (Granger, IN). Tony has authored more than a dozen books and ebooks which offer valuable. practical solutions for different aspects of church ministry. He has also been featured through his writing and speaking with organizations that serve churches including the Willow Creek Association, Outreach Magazine, Catalyst and Pastors.com. Tony and his wife, Emily, live near Atlanta, Georgia with their four children - Kayla, Jacob, Abby and Brooke.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The original title of this collection was The Many Realities of Ynot Nagrom, this, because some of the people who may have read my novels and/or a few of the short stories contained in this volume have asked me if I consider myself a science fiction writer. No, I’m a storyteller, and to my surprise, something of a literary critic. As you will see, many of the thirty stories and essays contained in this volume are far from that genre; therefore, I do not consider myself to be such a writer. Rather, I see myself at times consumed with the possibilities of alternative realities. For instance, what if…

• There had been a way the South could have won the battle of Gettysburg and with it the Civil War?

• The Titanic had missed the iceberg?

• We were able to build a Super Lunar Hadron Collider the circumference of the Moon and then opened a parallel universe?

• George Custer had not chosen to leave his two Gatling guns behind on the way to the Little Big Horn?

All of these and more are real possibilities not purely fictional musings; they contain alternative realities which follow a different space-time continuum than our current one, and are what used to be called the metaphysical. I hope these few words of enlightenment do not have the unintended consequence of deflecting those of you not comfortable with the above mentioned theories as I do not demand such an understanding of my readers; they exist but are invisible to you.

As the cover proclaims, I have also included my Literary Essays, Short Stories, and Personal Tales for all of you. These short pieces illuminate my varied interests from anthropology to paleontology, literature, ballistics, space travel, Meyer Lansky, Albert Einstein, the Titanic, William Shakespeare and Mark Twain, among others. Please note I have not attempted to reproduce most of the idioms or accents of the people who populate this volume because American English is the only language in which I can write and please try to remember, in the end, I am just a storyteller.

The stories and essays comprising this collection were written during the decade from 2005 – 2015.

TONY MORGAN

March 13, 2015

FANTASTIC TALES

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THE ULTIMATE UNFRIENDING

He had found himself a widower five years ago and he much preferred this terminology to lost his wife, which always made him want to ask when he heard this expression—Where, on the MTA? Now he had moved from his beloved Boston to an age-limited (over 55) community in a small town in Connecticut. My way of heading south, he liked to say. But he had always loved the change of seasons in New England and would not consider going further. On this day, his 72nd birthday, he had decided to clean up his computer files. Out went the old unpublished stories; out went e-mails from years ago; however, when it came to his Friends list, he tried to be more circumspect.

Not wanting to be rash with this list of people who at some time had meant much to him, even if they hadn’t communicated in a while, he carefully went down the list. As he viewed the list alphabetically, he came to Alan A. This man was also a writer of sorts such as himself, but as he thought about him and his undistinguished writing, he decided this one would be the first to go. There, he pushed the button and the man was gone from his life. Delighted, he decided he would repeat the process once every month thereafter.

He didn’t dwell on what he had done until a few weeks later. A Skype message beeped on his computer and it appeared to be from Alan A. Shit! he thought, but he answered it anyway. To his great surprise it was not Alan at all, but what appeared to be a police officer. Hello, said the officer, are you Mr. M? Yes, I am, he replied. How can I be of service? We are investigating the disappearance of an Alan A. here in Denver and we are calling on everyone who appears on any of his computer contact lists to see if they knew where he was or what had happened to him. Shocked, our man replied he had not seen or heard from the man in years and therefore could be of no help in this matter. The officer then asked if he knew of anyone else who was a mutual acquaintance. No one who wouldn’t have been in his computer, he replied. Thank you, said the officer who was about to cut off the contact when our man asked how long Alan had been missing. About a couple of weeks, was the reply. It’s the darnedest thing. His car was still in the garage, it looked like his bed had been slept in, no sign of forced entry or a struggle, just gone.

About a month passed when he decided to make his next deletion, Betsey B. He had always enjoyed her bubbly company and she was an excellent mixed doubles partner in tennis, but since she had moved down south, the very right-wing rants she posted to his computer had annoyed him no end. Yes, he said to himself, Betsey has to go! And with the press of a button she disappeared from his life. However, this was not to be when, a few weeks later, his Skype beeped again. This time it was a detective who was calling from Miami Beach, and yes, it was about Betsey—same questions, same story, and he gave the same answers. But now he was a bit shaken and decided not to mention the Denver incident. What was going on? Could it have been the Haiti experience? Not possible, he said to himself, "Voodoo?"

He thought back over that time when, in 2010, he had volunteered as an EMT right after the terrible earthquake devastated Haiti. He had gone with one of the Non-Governmental Agencies and was assigned to a small city named Leogané. This small city was at the epicenter of the quake and 80% - 90% of its buildings were destroyed. As it turned out, most of what he was able to do was try to help find people trapped in the rubble. First it was live people, then just bodies. After weeks of this work he decided to take a day or two off and see the countryside. A Haitian named Pierre-Paul, whose mother’s body he had helped dig out, had offered to take him up in the hills to show the American something unique.

They had hiked for a couple of hours in the heat when they arrived at a small, bedraggled hut. After a few moments to look the place over inside, Pierre-Paul motioned him to come in. Once inside he saw a very thin, quiet, elderly woman who held out her hand—Money, said his Haitian friend who had entered behind him. How much? asked the American. Five U.S. dollars, came the answer with a hand holding up that number of fingers. She is worth it. But before handing over the money our man indicated he was thirsty, very thirsty, and he was given a half of a coconut shell with what tasted like cold coconut water. How the hell does she keep this stuff cold up here? he asked himself, and he turned over the $5. Then, and only then was he motioned outside to sit on a log in the clearing. There he waited a few minutes and then the show began—and what a show it was!

The woman burst from the hut in a mask and dressed in a feather and bones costume, all the while chanting furiously in a language the American could not understand. She brought with her an old, cracked bowl into which she put some herbs and plants, lighting them as she continued to dance and chant. Our man could not believe where all the energy was coming from. He suspected drugs. It was then the woman picked up one of the chickens which had been wandering around the clearing and, holding it by the feet, dramatically chopped off its head with a machete.

Now she began to swing the chicken around her head, the blood flying all around, while also pointing a stick at the American as she danced. "Just like the movie, Weekend at Bernie’s 2, he thought, almost expecting to see Bernie come out of the hut doing his zombie walk. Suddenly she jumped forward, touched him on the back of his right hand with the stick, and disappeared back into her hut. Is it over? he asked the Haitian. Yes, said the man, and you have been exceptionally blessed with a great power by the Mobu, for she is a high priestess of the Voodoo cult. Thereafter, our man had never felt he had been given any great power and had dismissed the idea out of hand. Voodoo," he thought at the time, nonsense, but what a great show!

In spite of his rejection of the idea he still, to this day, had a black mark about the size of a quarter on the back of his right hand where the Mobu’s stick had touched him—it would not come off no matter how hard he tried to remove it. Voodoo, was he losing his mind? No, he would prove this was all a coincidence. So it was that he deliberately returned to his computer the next month and removed one Ira G. from New York City. The man was a distant cousin who had made a fortune on the stock market but never shared a dime of it—yes, he had to go. Our man then waited to see if anything would happen.

This time his Skype never rung, but his doorbell did. When he opened the door there was a man in a dark suit who showed him his FBI credentials and asked if he could come in; our man didn’t even ask him why. After introducing himself as Special Agent Smith, he proceeded to unlimber his computer and, after opening it, asked the man if he could account for his whereabouts on three dates in the past months. He thought for a while and checked his date records, Yes, he could. He gave the Agent the names of the people he had played tennis with on the first date, the time and place of his writers’ group meeting on the second—obviously he could not have been in Denver or Miami on those dates—but with the third and most recent incident he was struggling to remember. Since New York City was a place easily reached by car or train in one-and-a-half hours from his home, he would need a whole day’s record for an alibi. However, his calendar only said PB, and it was then he remembered he had driven up to Kittery, Maine to see his friend Peter B. The Agent thanked him and said he would be back after checking out his stories but he was not to leave the immediate area. At this moment it seemed appropriate to ask the Agent why he was being asked all these questions. You are one of four persons in the world with whom we can find a connection to each of three people who went missing on these dates.

It was several days before the Special Agent returned. He sat down as before, opened his computer, and announced that everything the man had said checked out and he could now remove him from his list of suspects. However, before he did that he would like to ask Mr. M. a few questions. First, did he know any of the three other names on the Agent’s computer? Mr. M looked closely at the list on the computer screen which included his name and three others, and answered that he had a faint recollection of the names he saw there, but could not recall from when or where. Next, the Agent asked if he, Mr. M., had any theories as to what might have happened to these three missing people. Mr. M. certainly did, but he was neither brave enough nor foolish enough to say so. Therefore, after a few moments of apparent reflection, he replied that he did not. It was at this moment that our man first noticed a mark on the back of the Agent’s right hand, a mark just like his own, and to his horror that hand was about to hit the Delete button on his laptop while it was highlighting his name!

THE END

OCCURRENCE AT GUINEY’S STATION

INTRODUCTION

It was only a small framed building in a town that one could hardly find on a map, but there they were, two of the most famous men of their time shaking hands and sitting down to sign the surrender – Robert E. Lee, resplendent in his Lieutenant General’s dress uniform, and Ulysses S. Grant, wearing his dusty old campaign jacket. It was a hot August day, just like the days in July when the great battle had been fought in that small town in Pennsylvania. Both men separately reflected on the importance of that battle and how things might be different if it had gone the other way. But neither man was inclined to dwell on the subject as the ultimate act of surrender had to be attended to and the ceremonies completed thereafter. Lee had chosen old General Isaac Trimble to lead the Southern contingent at the surrender, and Grant had selected General Lawrence Chamberlain as his representative. both of these more junior officers were sensitive to the feelings of the man standing opposite, and each had great respect for what the other had done during those three days in July…

A LOOK BACK IN TIME

The sixty-five year-old Sam Clemens sat on the front porch of his house on Hill Street in Hannibal, South Missouri, as it had been named after the war, contemplating, as older men are wont to do, the events of the past 40 years since he had married his childhood sweetheart, Laura Wright, and determined never to leave the River. In a few days the centuries would be turning from 19th to 20th, so he could now relax in his retirement and wonder what his life would have been if he had chosen a different course and followed the dreams of his youth—going to the West to undertake the adventures that had characterized the lives of so many other men of that era. He had especially been drawn from time to time to the idea of a life such as Bret Harte had experienced. How wonderful it might have been to have lived the dual existence that Harte accomplished; first, the thrilling life of a young writer out in the Wild West, and then the delight of being the literary toast of the cultured East.

Sure, Sam himself had written a few articles about his life as a riverboat pilot under the pseudonym Mark Twain, and sent them off to Mr. William D. Howells, the then editor of the atlantic Magazine. He had even been encouraged by that great man of letters to keep trying. Yet, overall, he was satisfied with the life he had chosen with his two great loves, Laura and the River. Yes, he remarked to no one in particular, this life has been the best one for me.

It was this life that had enabled him to write the one piece Mr. Howells had deemed worthy of publishing. How proud Laura had been when the package came with a small check, a copy of the Atlantic with Sam’s composition in it, and a note from Mr. Howells saying what fine writing it was. It was part of a novel he never finished about a boy and a runaway slave rafting down the River. He had called the piece "A Morning’s sunrise on the river," and, as he remembered, it started something like this—

"We set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes the streak look that way everything smiling in the sun, and the songbirds just going at it…"

As he began to doze a little, Sam’s mind drifted back even farther, to what now could have seemed his fanaticized and over-romanticized childhood. How he, little Sammy Clemens, had begun his sojourn on this earth November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. Born two months premature and coincident with the arrival of the great comet to be called Halley’s, he was sickly and underweight and not expected to survive—but he would until, as he often said, that damn comet comes around again. However, it was the time of his childhood in Hannibal where he and his friends ran free on the banks of the Mississippi that always captured his mind. It was in these moments of half-sleep when the remembrances of the boyish adventures returned, swimming and rafting on the great river and then watching the prodigious steamboats which were to become his life’s work and greatest pleasure.

But now so much had changed over the years—the railroads displacing most of the paddle wheelers, great industries growing up where before there had been only farms, even the immortal river had changed. Hat Island was gone, and Goose Island, so were the Two Sisters and a whole string of islands around Cairo, South Illinois. Even the town of Napoleon had vanished under the waters. It had been there that his beloved younger brother Henry’s burned body, one of 150, had been taken after the side-wheeler Pennsylvania had exploded near Ship Island.

Pennsylvania, Sam said to himself, was that some kind of portent of the many others who were to die in the greatest battle of the ‘War Between The States’? What would it all be like now, he wondered, "if the South hadn’t won the war?" Of course everyone knew the battle at Gettysburg had been the reason for the Confederacy’s victory, although few, if any, people now alive knew how that victory had come about, but Sam Clemens believed he was one of those few.

––––––—

His understanding of what had actually happened in those spring and summer months in 1863 came from the mouth of one of the forgotten heroes of the Union, old U.S. Grant, or Sam as his few remaining friends had called him back before his death in 1885. It seemed at the time Grant was writing his memoirs, this before the throat cancer would finally do him in, and was obsessed with the story that night they found themselves together. So it was as Clemens had sat with the old man in the salon of the side-wheeler that he heard the extraordinary story.

First sworn to secrecy, the younger man could not believe what he was hearing—how Lee, Longstreet, and Pickett had conspired to claim the great victory for themselves, a victory that day in Pennsylvania that was not truly theirs. No, according to the old man, the triumph at Gettysburg was the work of someone who at the time was known to have died months before. However, Clemens, always the skeptic, was initially inclined to disbelieve the story although what Grant said next, Clemens was ready to accept as truth—

The southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

T. J. JACKSON

No one would have described Thomas Jackson’s youth as a happy one, not even a pleasant one, but he did manage to survive his first 18 years with surprising results. To call his family dysfunctional would be a step-up from the reality; a disappearing family would have been more like it. Even Tom’s own birthday was uncertain, it being either the 20th or 21st of January 1824 in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The first of the disappears, just two years after the event of his birth, were his father Jonathan and his sister Elizabeth (age six), both of typhoid fever, both on the same day. But in the apparently futile spirit of addition, his mother Julia gave birth to Tom’s sister Laura Ann on the very next day. Needless to say, Julia, after remarrying one Blake Woodson, did manage to depart this life during childbirth when Tom was seven, and then his brother Warren followed a few years later with the tuberculosis.

The remaining Jackson children were disbursed among scattered relations, with Tom going to live with his paternal uncle, Cummins Jackson, who owned a grist mill in Virginia. It was here, because he had to work from dawn to dusk, that young Tom had only the dark nights to read and study, something that had become almost an obsession for him. But unlike his contemporary, Abe Lincoln, who at least had candles with which to accomplish his studies, Tom Jackson had only the light from bundles of burning pine knots to read by. Given his full day’s work the lad had little time to gather enough of this light source to provide for his nightly 2-3 hours of study. So it was that one day he struck upon a plan as to how to get a regular supply of these pine fagots, enough to accomplish his need for learning.

One of his uncle’s slaves called Jim—dark, friendly, in his 30’s—had made a strong impression on young Tom as an intelligent and sympathetic man. The two often talked, as if they were friends, about the happenings of the day and life in general. However, what struck the young boy was how Jim, like himself, was interested in learning, but of course the slave could not read and had no access to books. Even more so at this time—it was after the Nat Turner Incident—it was against the law in Virginia to teach a slave to read, but so desperate was young Tom to acquire enough pine knots to continue his studying that he was willing to risk imprisonment or worse to achieve his goal. So the following conversation ensued:

Jim, said Tom one morning.

Yes, master Tom.

Can you keep a secret?

I sure can if it’s your secret.

How would you like to learn how to read?

I would give my right—no, my left arm.

Well you wouldn’t have to do that, only make sure I have a bundle of pine fagots each night big enough to burn for at least three hours and I will teach you.

But Master Tom, ain’t that against the law? You could get in big time trouble for doing that.

Jim, I am willing to risk all that I am on you if you swear to do the same for me.

I do, Master Tom, I do swear by God Almighty.

And so Tom Jackson became a self-taught scholar who, by the age of 18, had himself become a schoolteacher at Jackson’s Mill. This might have been all we know about Thomas J. Jackson if not for what was to become the first of a lifelong series of what some might call accidents of fate, but which Tom always believed to be God’s will.

It seems that he had been only his congressman’s second choice for an appointment to West Point in 1842, but when the first choice chose to leave the Academy after only one day, Tom Jackson was permitted to take the entrance exams. Because of his limited formal schooling, Tom barely passed but with scores so low that he was initially ranked at the bottom of his class. Four years later Thomas Jonathan Jackson graduated from the United States Military Academy 17th out of a class of 59 students.

Jim, on the other hand, had long ago been found out reading to his children, and, although beaten severely, he had refused to acknowledge how he had learned, after which, as punishment, Tom’s uncle sold Jim away from his family to a woman named Miss Watson in Missouri. Tom was never able to find out anything more about him, but twenty years later there was this character in a book about a boy on the Mississippi with an escaped Negro slave named Jim, a slave who always reminded him of his Jim, although of course this fictional Jim couldn’t read or write.

MEXICO

Some 40,000 men from both sides had died in this unpopular war, although most of those on the American side from disease rather than bullets. Be that as it may, General Scott had decreed a grand celebration and so it was they had come to march. They weren’t all there in the City of Mexico at the time of that great victory parade in 1848, the men who would write history during those three days in Pennsylvania, but almost all. George Meade, Winfield Scott Hancock, Bobby Lee were there plus James Longstreet, Ambrose Powell (A.P.) Hill, and Richard Ewell; so were George Pickett, Richard Armistead, and Thomas J. Jackson. Even Sam Grant and Jeff Davis had been there, but others like John Buford were not. Neither were Lawrence Chamberlain, Jeb Stuart, Dick Garnett, or Isaac Trimble, men whose deeds in that battle to come were as heroic as any of more famous names who paraded that day.

Those who were there, junior officers in those days in Mexico, had all proven their abilities and bravery in that disliked war. Almost to a man they were hero graduates of West Point, but if asked,