The Ballad of James McKenna

Day Nineteen: Safety

Day Nineteen
         Safety
Word Count: 720

When Jimmy was young, he had a blanket. It was real Irish wool, and it had followed his mother all the way from County Cork when her family took to the ships in a desperate attempt to escape the ever-tightening vice of English rule and black-rotted potatoes. She'd wrapped him in it when he was born, though it could have fit him five times over. As he'd gotten older, it had become something of a safety blanket to him. All he had to do was pull it up close, tucking himself into its soft folds, and it would chase away monsters and lock the bogey man back under the bed for the entire night. Come morning, when the sun shone bright once more, Jimmy would hug his blanket close and know that it would keep him safe forever.

It hadn't lasted forever. In fact, it had gotten threadbare over the years, until his tenth birthday, when Mother had reluctantly unraveled it for scrap fabric, consigning it to the rag bin and a few days of put scrubbing. Jimmy had forced himself not to cry because he was too old for that nonsense. But, on stormy nights, he'd hugged his pillow close and wished that he still had his blanket to guard him against the evils looming dangerous in the darkness.

During the war, he'd had a token. It wasn't much, just a handkerchief carefully embroidered by his sister Annibel and tucked into the pocket of his Yankee blue jacket, but he'd treasured it as if it were Montezuma's gold. He'd seen only a few short months of action, but he'd been there to clear the Shenandoah under Sheridan and he'd been there to see the worst Petersburg had to offer. The feeling of the fabric between his fingers, the careful stitching of his eight-year-old sister, had filled him with such a feeling of serenity that he was always able to handle the worst battle had to offer. And sure he had gotten through every battle nearly unscathed, only a few scratches to bring with him to Chicago.

The handkerchief he'd lost at Petersburg, when one of his compatriots had taken a minie ball to the stomach. He'd used it to attempt to staunch the blood, but it and the man had been carried off by the medical corps. The next time he'd seen the man, he was dead. He'd never seen the handkerchief again. Luckily for him, the siege had broken days after, and, within a week, Lee and Grant met at Appomattox. Jimmy'd been one of the lucky few to be present at Wilmer McLean's house, though he hadn't seen the ceremony itself. Within three days of the surrender, Pinkerton's had mustered him out of the army and dragged him off to Chicago to join the organization.

After the war, Jimmy always found himself feeling pretty safe. He'd seen men get their heads blown off, or their jaws or their limbs. Every moment was dangerous, the thin line between life and death so dangerously eroded that it might as well not have been there. They were the walking dead, he and his compatriots, and only the most desperate luck had gotten him through that Hell with his life intact. Since then, there was nothing that really frightened him anymore, or managed to shake his sense of safety. The threats of everyday life were so much less imminent, so much less...real than those on the battlefield.

Perhaps it was odd that the war was his safety mechanism, but it was. He had seen the most horrid things that humanity had to offer up and he'd managed to survive it. Was he unaffected by those horrors? No. Seeing his victims still caused the bile to rise in his throat, though he'd managed to learn some control over himself and his stomach over the years. But he was unafraid and unconcerned for himself. He'd signed his life away to join the army, to join the Great War, and he'd managed to walk away with it. There was still a debt to be paid, a life to be lain down and sacrificed upon the altar of the nation's greatness.

It was hard to be scared when you were essentially living on borrowed time. And since the war, borrowed time was all he had.