| |
There had indeed once been a chapel built upon Toes-Up Rising, but that was a long time before the town of Rueful Regret was ever dreamed up – back in the days when white men were rarer than dancing pigs and the wind blew just a little bit cleaner.
In fact there had once been a medicine lodge built at that very spot – a place where the holy men of the Karankawa Indians would sit and gather and talk about holy things.
Mostly they would just sit and fart around because nobody had ever bothered to explain to them the difference between sacred meditation and the fine art of farting around. The truth was the warriors of the tribe were far too busy farting around themselves to bother mingling their own fecal fragrance with the far too pungent aroma of the holy men.
After a time the holy men died off.
The fact was they had farted far more often than they had fucked.
Soon only one old holy name by the name of Medicine Ass remained to sit in the sacred shaking tent – which mostly shook in the fear of another sacred fart. He was called Medicine Ass because he had to use a sacred soothing ointment upon his not-so-sacred bottom hole.
Medicine Ass took up with a wandering Jesuit monk by the name of Father Lamar who had been defrocked for wiping his bottom upon a page of the Holy Bible – which he had used only because the almanac had run dry – and the two kindred spirits had built themselves a mission together.
Well, actually it was more of an adobe shanty that had originally started out as nothing more than a wannabe-privy with delusions of ambition – but the Jesuit had carved a cross upon the adobe and he had called it a mission – which was a good enough name for it as far as Medicine Ass was concerned. The two of them sat together in their mission shanty and had farted around for three more years – just mostly shooting the sacred shit before an argument over the frying of eggs had broken out between the two of them and Medicine Ass had opened the Jesuit’s throat with his knife.
Which ended that.
Medicine Ass was more than a little surprised when blood the very same color of his own had spilled from out of the Jesuit’s freshly-opened throat. Medicine Ass had been certain that the wound would have bled out a horde of pale white smoky butterflies – the man had been so full of hot air and the flutter of angel wings.
Medicine Ass buried the Jesuit deep in the dirt of Toes-Up Rising many years before that first mule was ever buried there. Then – in a fit of pent-up and pissed-upon – Medicine Ass tried to burn down the adobe shanty.
Only adobe did not burn very well.
Medicine Ass burned up his last mule and his last blanket and then he sat down in the ashes to wait out what fate might have in store for him next.
Which was a very fancy of saying that he parked his not-so-sacred ass atop the burned mule and just sat there farting around until he petrified himself in the after-odor of his brown runny farts – which is sadly something of a habit with Karankawa holy men.
After a time his eyes sanded shut and his thoughts turned inwards and he wondered to himself just how a man’s farts could smell so very sweet to his own nose and so very god-awful awful to anyone else’s nostrils which was right about the time that crazy one-armed white man had crawled out of the desert dragging a coffin behind himself.