The Blessed by Ann H. Gabhart Read Free Book Online

him.
    Somehow he made it through the cold months. He wasn’t sure exactly how. It was all as foggy in his brain as the air enveloping him on this day. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Burton Hayes was there frowning in his head. The old storekeeper never smiled. Not even at his customers. But he’d let Isaac sleep in the store’s back room with a sack of beans for a pillow as long as Isaac kept the snow off the walkways around the store. There’d been other odd jobs now and again to make a few coins to buy food. Jobs he couldn’t remember now, even when he tried, while other things he couldn’t forget. Like how cold it was up in the cemetery and how his footprints had spoiled the pristine snow piled on top of Ella. The snow melted. Mud took its place. Others gave him handouts, but charity had a way of running out. Especially when the judge let it be known kindness to Isaac could mean trouble from him.
    Isaac stared down at the murky water and was glad it wasn’t clear enough to bounce any kind of reflection back up to him. He knew how sorry he looked. Just the day before, he’d come face-to-face with that truth when he’d turned a corner and almost stumbled over a cracked mirror somebody had tossed out behind a building. For a few seconds he hadn’t believed the reflection could be his. The stranger staring out of the mirror held little resemblance to the man who had left for the West in such high spirits last year to seek his fortune. That man with hopes and dreams had been buried with his Ella.
    He had leaned toward the mirror as if to peer deep into it and somehow find the image of the man he used to be. But up close the mirror’s crack ran right through the middle of his face and skewed his reflection. That was as it should be. He was cracked and broken, little more than a shell of a man going through the motions of living. His hair straggled down over the dirt-encrusted collar of his shirt. His cheeks looked hollow and his eyes haunted. He slammed his fist into the mirror and watched the glass splinter and fall to the ground.
    It was a minute before he noticed the blood dripping off his fingers. He lifted up his hand and watched the blood pulsing up out of the cuts on his knuckles before he finally pulled out his handkerchief, soiled though it was, and wrapped it around his hand. The cuts didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d cut off his whole hand. Nothing about him mattered. He was a man without hope or a future. A man who had descended so low that he wasn’t above picking through trash to find a crust of bread to eat. A man who would never find work in this town but with no will to leave it. A man getting what he deserved as he teetered on the edge of despair. A man the judge was determined to push over the edge.
    A man ready to surrender to the push but not able to make the jump himself. What was it in a man that kept him clinging to life even when that life was naught but misery? Isaac shut his eyes to the pull of the water as he leaned his head against the rough post and trembled until his teeth chattered.
    The chime of church bells echoed through the fog, and Isaac counted off the bongs of the hours. Seven. He wondered if the sun was shining up above the fog or if clouds were heavy all the way to the heavens. He was so cold. The damp river fog had the bite of ice in it. Not normal for April. But winter hadn’t given up its hold on the city this year. Or maybe it was only the winter Isaac carried in his soul that kept spring from him. Perhaps others around him were welcoming the spring while he had been condemned to never see the sun again. Just as Ella would not.
    Isaac looked up in hopes a shaft of sunlight might break through the fog just for him. A last wish granted before he gave up living.
    Nobody would miss him. Nobody would even know he had died unless his body washed up on the riverbank somewhere. Maybe whoever found him would bury him and say words over his grave. That was as