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E. Coli: A Tale of Redemption
Written by Terry Howard
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Ken paused in front of Jimmy Dick barely long enough to say, "Incoming," before moving down the bar and taking shelter in the back room. Jimmy glanced in the mirror to see his ex-wife, Bina Rae, framed by the early afternoon sun, walking toward him from the slowly closing door of the otherwise empty bar.
"James, I sent you a letter. You didn't answer it."
Jimmy didn't say anything.
"I went down to Genucci's and made the arrangements. Everything will be out of the way when the time comes. You need to stop in and pay for it."
Their only child, Merle, had brittle bones. Jimmy had been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. When the baby was diagnosed, the pediatrician told her Jimmy's exposure might be the reason why. He came home from working overtime to find his wife had taken his daughter and moved out. She blamed him for the baby's condition.
The court gave him visitation rights along with the child support payments but it never worked out. There was always some conflicting schedule or a big fight, or both. Merle eventually ended up in assisted living and Veteran's Affairs paid the bills. Jimmy had tried to visit her in the home after she moved in, but Merle made it clear she didn't want to see him. This was, pretty much, his entire contact with his ex-wife and child.
Now, the home was telling Bina that Merle wouldn't last much longer. So Bina made arrangements with the funeral home.
"Aren't you going to say anything, James?"
"Have a beer."
Her voice was scornful, "You drink too much. It's bad for you. You never did take care of yourself."
"Back up time, before we left, in a number of carefully controlled studies, it was determined that if a person drank a half gallon of water each day, at the end of the year they would have absorbed more than half a pound of E. coli. In other words, when you drink water you're drinking shit. 
"However, if you drink whiskey or beer or any other liquor, you're safe because alcohol has to go through a purification process of fermentation.
"So you've got a choice.You can drink beer and talk stupid or you can drink water and be full of shit."
Her voice dripped with disgust. "What did I ever see in you?"
"A good living?"
"Stop down to the funeral home and pay the bill, Jimmy." With that, she walked out of his life, again.
"Ken," Jimmy Dick said softly, "whiskey, and leave the bottle."
****
A few weeks later Genucci's Funeral Home opened up the overflow area and then put out extra chairs for Merle's funeral. They had been told to expect a small turnout. After all, Merle had spent half of her life in assisted living, her father's family never visited, she had no friends outside of the home and her friends from the home would not be attending. Her mother's family, her mother and three of her adopted children were all the guests they were told to expect.
"Merle's father will pay for things. He will not be attending," Bina Rae told Freddy when she made the arrangements.
When Jimmy stopped in Freddy asked, "Bina Rae says you won't be attending?"
"Bina . . ." Jimmy was trying to be polite so did not pronounce it Bi'tch'na as he normally did. "Does not know what she is talking about. Again, as usual."
Freddy concluded that separate seating would be in order. The family area in many funeral homes is often at right angles to the general seating. This provides privacy to the bereaved. Providentially, the converted dwelling he ran the funeral business out of just worked out that way. When the time came, he would seat Jimmy in the general seating area, out of sight of the family.
While not many people were familiar with Merle, a lot of people knew Jimmy Dick. Many of them knew him as 'Dick Head,' a name even Jimmy would admit to being fully deserved on the rare occasions he was fully sober. Yet, somehow they managed to respect him. And while he never talked about it, Grantville was a small town where your business was everybody's. They knew the story. They felt he got a raw deal and were inclined to be supportive.
"You goin' to Merle's funeral?" was a question frequently asked at Club 250.
"Yeah. I didn't know her but this is going to be hard on Jimmy. He's bought me a beer anytime I was broke, figure I owe him." This was a common point of view. Normally people figured they'd paid for any beer Jimmy bought by putting up with his usually rude and shrewdly critical wit while they drank with him. Still, a funeral is different.
Then there were the down-time Anabaptists, who met in Club 250 on Sunday mornings until the cops started asking questions about them causing trouble. This was all the excuse Ken needed to throw them out. Complaints had been filed about a church they were starting just outside of Grantville's jurisdiction. Jimmy organized an armed escort to stand guard over the new church when the local Lutherans started getting nasty in spite of the Anabaptists having the local count's permission. They thought well of him for it for it.
The biggest surprise was the number of people who showed up because James Richard Shaver had defended Grantville's honor on the fields of Philosophy in the face of a nasty stuffed-shirt German who still continued to bad mouth up-timers and up-time values. He asked Jimmy if war was mankind's greatest glory or greatest shame. "Neither," Jimmy replied, "our greatest glory is to love our wives and raise our children well, our greatest shame is an un-cherished child." The philosopher from Berlin didn't like the answer.
Bina Rae had a staff member from the home to say a few words and then there was a walk to the cemetery followed by a quiet, catered meal planned for the immediate family at Bina's house.
Jimmy found himself in the middle of the street between Club 250 and the Gardens with half of the people who walked back from the graveyard with him going one way, and half going the other.Both halves were ready to buy him a drink. To everyone's shock, he went home to do his drinking alone.
Bina was dumbfounded at the turnout. Jimmy was a drunk. No one respects a drunk.
A life-sized angel with Merle's face carved in fine white marble stood at the head of the open grave. She had specified a simple grave stone to Alberto Ugolini down at the monument company. Jimmy had changed her order when he paid for it.
"Jimmy, that ain't what Bina ordered."
"I'm payin' for it. It's what I want. If you won't arrange it, I'll find someone who will."
"No, I'll get 'er done," Alberto answered.
****
Three days after the funeral, at about two-thirty in the afternoon, the door to Club 250 opened on a nearly empty bar. Bina came through the door, walked to the middle of the bar, hopped up onto a bar stool and said to her ex-husband, "Buy me a beer."
Without a word he waved two fingers at Ken and two bottles and a glass arrived in short order. Bina poured her own when it was apparent Jimmy wouldn't play the gentleman and do it for her. She downed half of it in one long gulp and let out a sound halfway between a gasp and a sigh. "You loved her."
Jimmy didn't say a word.
"Jimmy, I didn't understand."
He sipped his beer out of the bottle. You can't talk while drinking. He took a breath and then he took another long sip.
"I was hurt, Jimmy."
He looked at the mirror behind the bar.
"I thought it was your fault."
He took another drink.
"I'm sorry, Jimmy."
He waved for two more beers.
"You're not the only one hurting you know?"
Silence still replied.
"Damn it, Jimmy. I'm sorry!"
He said nothing.
"Aren't you going to say anything?"
He gazed into the mirror, not seeing what was there.
Bina slid off the stool and left.
Before the door was closed behind her, Ken plopped a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass on the bar in front of Jimmy without saying a word. To Ken's surprise, Jimmy finished his beer and left without touching the whiskey.
****
Old Joe Jenkins sat on the screened-in back porch watching the garden as the sun went down. An ancient single-shot twenty-two leaned against the door jamb in case he saw a rabbit. Good things come to those with. There's no better bait for a rabbit than a vegetable patch. A raccoon or an opossum was almost as good though they took a little more fixin'.
There was movement off to the right where the trace led through the back of the neighbor's place and down to the hard road. "Company comin," Joe said. His old driveway was off to the left of the house and ran straight off the highest cliff left by the ring of fire. "Good thing I get on with the neighbors or I'd have no way into town."
"Hello the house," a familiar voice called out.
"That you, Jimmy Dick?" Joe called back.
"Yeah."
"Well, come on up."
Joe watched the man he knew to be in his fifties—and who looked ten years older than his age—make his way through the twilight. Tonight Jimmy looked even more haggard and worn than usual.
"Hey, Jimmy, come on in and sit a spell. I've got a jug my pa put down." Joe indicated an old brown jug of corn liquor."Aged to perfection in a charred oak barrel and then put up in jugs. Let me get you a glass."
"Don't bother, I ain't thirsty."
"Thirty-year-old whiskey? Smooth as silk?"
Jimmy shook his head. "I'd take one of those if you got one to spare," Jimmy indicated a cigarette glowing in the ashtray next to Joe's rocking chair.
Joe pointed to a wooden box on the table next to the ash tray. "Help yourself."
Jimmy lit up and took a deep drag. "Damn, Joe have you been sittin' on a stash of up-time cigarettes all this time?"
"Nope. They'd be stale by now, even if you froze 'em. I rolled these. Years ago the wife got tired of me hand rolling the things. Said they looked nasty. So she bought me a roller and a crate of papers for Christmas."
"Yeah, but this is good, mellow up-time tobacco, not like that harsh cow shit stuff they sell in town."
"I got a plant growin' in the greenhouse out behind the barn."
"You're sittin' on a fortune."
"Can't grow it except in the greenhouse. Season's too short. The papers will see me out, but if I took to sellin' the things then when they're gone there ain't no more and I can't smoke the money."
"You could sell the seed and they could take it down to Spain and ship it back."
"Could. Then more people might take it up. Did you see the little book in German that was goin' 'round? Someone tryin' real hard to stop the trade before it starts." The truth was that lung cancer caused Joe's wife's death and the print run of the up-time study on tobacco and cancer was his doing.
"Joe, I know who paid for that book to be published," Jimmy said.
"Caught me, did ya'?"
Jimmy nodded.
"Well, I'm about done for and I figure a man oughta give somethin' back. Once it's out there then any damn fool who takes up with it deserves what they get.
"What brings you to my mountaintop this late in the day, Jimmy?"
"Needed to talk to you. I was wondering if you would teach me Latin?"
"Why in tarnation would you want to do that?"
"It's what you and Onofrio used with that Kraut. I've got the reputation of being a philosopher. It's embarrassing to have the name and not be able to talk the game. Did you know I'm getting mail from all over Europe? It's mostly all in Latin. If I'm going to be a serious philosopher these days, then I need to know Latin."
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.