Chapter 5: Heads And Tails




     "I just don't get it," begins a shaky James from his seat on a moss-covered boulder, the saffron-colored leaves of a cottonwood crinkling above his head in the fall breeze. "Why bust the pot when it's half full?"

"Never...you...mind," coughs Benjamin levering the blade from a wide gash in the copper still and swinging again. 

"Keeping the heads and draining the rest is no way to make money for old rope," the son continues, regaining composure after his father takes a second swing. 

"Best...to stick...to one's knitting," Benny responds as he heeds his own advice and tears open the rest of the copper pot.



    The old man had needed to keep some distance from his immovable son blocking the still. He knew that the itchy red spots emerging on his arms and under his beard were just the beginning. Smallpox could take down a previously unexposed settler family as easily as a Native American one.   

     Just before Benjamin threw the ax, he had gotten a memory flash of a moonlit night beside a creek. Back then the clatter of his dropped hatchet had spooked the long-haired girl squatting at a little waterfall above his lean-to. This time around his throwing arm was unleashed by the sudden realization that he'd spent his life chasing an Indian dream. 


     


     "What are you really up to, Pop?" James continues as the warmth of the late fall sun finally reaches the creek. "I've seen you saving the heads and tails over this past moon."

"Maybe...I aimed...too high," wheezes the stooped old man shuffling back down the hollow.




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