Frances Xavier Cabrini

Dear Readers: Don’t be concerned about the allusions; get the drift, the thrust, the dust of my desideratum. If you must…look up words. Please check the recent Archives here for Chapter One, should you have missed it. Even if not, there’s an altered version now available. Wouldn’t hurt, in any case, to start over for momentum’s sake…in more than one sense. And please remember…this is fiction.

by Richard Oxman

“Nothing more to be done for now,” thought well-monogrammed Malone. Made the grade, the *madmen* had, Bad Big Time.

There was never anyone to contact for quiet moments. Now not a sound penetrated the placid, bare room, padded. He felt his glands’ gook, and perhaps something in his eye too. But he only saw the pad and pencil on his lap. His name in Gaelic. He thawed.

Al “Ivan” Martin Malone, our Man on Horseback, descendant of ascendancy woman Violet Martin (pen-name Martin Ross), was hearing a shrieking coming across the very blood red sky he had configured. Incessantly.

But muted for our unruffled, unmuffled, Paddy.

Untroubled by The (Greater) Troubles, he distracted himself with trivia. His countenance aligned with Yeats’ men of action:

“…who shoot to kill and never
See the victim’s face become their own.”

He had not *become* his enemies, nor could he; the lines he composed came easily:

12\. Exodus is the second book…relating the departure under Moses…from slavery. What if those waters hadn’t closed…?

11\. “When the curtain call came, some of the girls who had been serving as ushers rushed to the footlights like Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane, loaded with bouquets.” So said Robinson Davies in The Manticore. 1972/16  ? Macbeth, Malcolm, Macduff….

10\. (1865)      Surratt is executed for her alleged role as a conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination, although there is ample evidence of her innocence, and no woman had ever been executed in the U.S. previously. Fourteen years before the birth of moustached Emiliano. Mortimer. Martin Amis. Marlon. Rumpole of the Bailey: “It wasn’t a gaucho….” London Fields: “He knew –he even hoped– this was probably false (and felt the formation, across his upper lip, of a Zapata moustache of sweat.” Brando: “Make-believe media ignoring mendacity, duplicity, chicanery and corruption” Not a mild Adolphe Menjou moustache out of Slaughterhouse.

9\. (1893) Vladimir           , Soviet Georgian poet who wrote “Ode to Revolution” is born. Not on July 19th.

8\. (1898) President            protracted negotiations with the city of Santiago, Cuba –threatening to commit the worst atrocities imaginable through his General Shafter– result in a capitulation which embraces the entire eastern end of Cuba. With the fall of Santiago the occupation of Puerto Rico became an obsession.

7\. (1898)      and the other Hawaiian Islands are annexed. All their legislation…their efforts to rectify are distractions, disingenuous.

6\. (Before ‘16) Pearse praises Maria            educational methods. He saw that the Intermediate Board offered schooling, not education.

“…There is no education system in Ireland…. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to educate the Irish, in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.”

True education would lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square, said Lady Bracknell.

5\. (1946)          Frances Xavier Cabrini is canonized as the last American saint.

4\. Matchless Mine. Moore’s opera premieres. ‘56?

3\. Margraten Cemetery opens near Maastricht Airport.

2\. (1968) Muruora Island blasted. Not enough Waterloos for the French, keeping up with the Joneses.

1\. Yardbirds with           disband ‘68 also. McCarty. M&Ms.

He wrote “McCarthy meets Lennon at picnic. Dead Eight, dead weight, beat”…and then crossed out the above with the entire Yardbirds entry, substituting the following:

“The child scrambled up to the top of the wall and called again and again; but finding this of no avail, apparently made up his mind, like Mohamet, to go to the mountain, since the mountain would not….” He did not finish the quotation from Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

“What happened on July 7th” was the title he finally agreed to give his Maginot Line list, notes.

And then he added, “and Why.” And “Top Baker’s Dozen” to top it off.