Another Bell Tolling

Another bell tolls, possibility turning into loss, unringing the clanging cacophony that had once been boomtown, its winning poker hand placed near the action once, by a loving God, trying to do the right thing.

A phone call. “I can’t understand it. What happened. It makes no sense.”

Words come through the line, not for the first time. Not the first caller.

Capital invested, unable to leave, its cruel ransom denied.

“I just wanted to help. To make a difference.”

Another echo.

History’s slide.

More vital organs shut down. The body is failing.

The once-tall-town is sealed inside a dark coffin, lowered into far darker ground, broken bones and decaying muscle oozing toxic muck. The pine box is nailed tightly shut, from the inside. It took awhile for historians to discern this important forensic clue. The only movements now are the worms and creeping low-bellied crawlers seeking to devour any positive sign of life still alive within that box.

Signs of possibility.

We can’t have that.

Heroes have come here to join the town’s rescue since the 1960s. The funeral was well underway even then, though destruction was then disguised as prosperity, back then. Mine from yours.

I win.

You lose.

Life is good.

We sure showed Them.

Run off, discouraged, It’s Dead but It’s Ours. Fight over one last scrap of puerile possibility, while in truth, the civic carcass has been in the ditch – its only Easter Sunday resurrections dreamed by outsiders, every other year or two. I’ll make a difference, they think. I’ve done it before. Other places.

Outsider memories.

Bad memories, all.

Lottery tickets, never cashed in.

Triumphalist history, Manifest Destiny, the stories outsiders learned back in high school, we’re a nation of greatness, those same myths or tales or drivers or core beliefs couldn’t find footing here. People don’t always put the greater good first. Unbelief, unbelievable to spectators. Not ahead of their own gain. Or worse, the crawlers or slackers who won’t even benefit from their attack on the newcomer’s light, so many men and women through the years, but through the local gate-slamming infectious cloying virus, what could’ve been different is slain.

Broken.

Devoured.

Limping to leave the place.

History becomes history. Just make it be over. The passage of time becomes decay. Nothing noble about that. God’s purpose in this endless slide a mystery, unexplainable, incomprehensible to the outside world.

It’s not like that, everywhere.

History, so different. Outcomes so driven by human premeditated intent.

The place needs a Vesuvius or Chicago Fire or Black Plague to help its slow suicide make sense, give context or at least an excuse – but even then, in those examples, there was a faith that life would return, a knowledge that hundreds of years, and historians looking back, could make be true.

This town knows better.

Its loss, its victory.

There is no excuse, here.

We sure showed Them.

Like a green-purple-white searing cedar forest fire, sometimes flames of hate burn so hot that the ground below loses its ability to bear life, the fertility underfoot lost to new growth for decades.

Or lifetimes.

Or forever.

This phone call, a good heart, trying with all there is to give. Another casualty – good intention, God intention, hard work, solid capital punished for pushing a place that has no will to live.

Its noose, self-tied.

No want, to give their children any better.

Dear Lord, let the offspring of this once-beloved slow hurtling place escape away to climes where they can prosper, where they can see normal as love, hard work, teams who pull together.

God’s will be done.

We’re all in this together.

Let the sad darkness within their darkness, the giving up and sliding back, the slow-eating sets of teeth buried bloodily inside their neighbor’s flesh go quietly. Let the darkened coffin become finally quiet, some day, when they are gone, let this once-hallowed place be remembered for the lost, heroic history that made it so great.

For the lives, and the childhoods, lost.

For all, that could’ve been.

Amen.