Peculiar Calm

Spring of 1917

The day it happened it was a day of peculiar calm.

Like a storm cloud on a late summer day, the silence and tension built until it burst into a sheet of thunder, rain, and with a waterspout descending onto the lake.

I hit him square in the jaw – more to be correct, square in the teeth.

He looked at me stunned, and before he could react, he spit out a tooth rattling out onto the ground.

It should never have come to this, but he had it coming.

He said, “You knocked her up.”

Without any thought or deliberation, I whirled around and punched him in the teeth. It wasn’t the words that got me, it was the tone of his voice.

Shannon looked at me wide-eyed.  He looked down on the ground to see where his tooth lay. He looked back up at me – wide-eyed.

This incident, altercation, rather, would have been forgotten in due time and our affairs gone back to normal. But it was different this time. I had given his wife, Annie, a permanent reminder of how much of a bastard her husband was.