Lies & Ugliness by Brian Hodge

Author:Brian Hodge [Hodge, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror short stories
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2016-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife to a Cheyenne Gallows

I expect the first thing I should set down is my name. A man’s name is all that connects him to his past and the people he has shared it with and squares up his life in the scheme of those others. But it has been a good long time that I have been severed from all the past that truly matters, back when it might have been considered a true thing that I had yet some measure of goodness in me. The man who wore that name is no more.

So I will content myself with a name that was hung on me by another during the War, and has dogged me during these years since. Methuselah was that name, and it was hung on me by a boy who did not live two minutes after it left his lips. We were but two of many around a campfire in the autumn of 1864, to a man each of us riders with Bloody Bill Anderson in the war he waged against the Federals. When the boy called me Methuselah, I did not know who or what this was, but because of the way he laughed I suspected this should be otherwise.

He was the oldest man there ever was, the boy told me. Lived over nine hundred years. Or maybe it was closer to a whole thousand.

Nine hundred or a thousand, sounds like horseshit to me either way, I said. Where’d you hear such a thing?

It’s in the Bible.

That explains it, then, I said.

I looked around to say without speaking that just about anywhere you could rest your eyes was something set in flat contradiction to a gospel of love. I had not seen any more of the world than Missouri then, but if that was any indication of the rest, it was hate that was winning.

Yeah, well, the boy said. Out here I guess I’m doing my best to forget my Sunday learning, but that one there just stuck. Oldest man who ever lived, says so right in there, so I figure that’s a good enough name for you.

There’s plenty older than me.

Not around this fire there ain’t, nor anybody else saddling up with Captain Anderson. Nor most likely with Quantrill or nobody else neither, from what I seen.

And because I no longer wished to abide the tone of his voice, I drew one of my pistols and aimed across the fire and blew off one of his kneecaps.

How about the meanest man in the Bible, I said. Does it tell who that was?

But because he could do no more than roll upon the ground and scream and hold his twisted leg, I rose and took aim on his moving head and finished it. I figure now it was the whiskey that had put me in such a mood, but my aim was still true enough. Then I sat down again to work at the rest of the bottle.

I’ve read me some of the Bible, said another of us in time.

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