Carol's Song - Verse Three

"Bobby died right after my youngest. I almost lost it G." She laughed. Well she might have thought it was a laugh. I thought it sounded like a harsh croaking. Actually she wouldn't have to work real hard at talking to the crows if she could make that sound when ever she wanted. "Maybe I did. It was a hard time." She looked at me "You know how it was. Anybody who is still alive knows how it was." The women behind her grunted and amened their chorus behind her. "Yeah Carol. I know." What else was I going to say? It was tough beating Freya to all the cinnamon deserts?

Me and Zane did it. Nobody ate my kid! We were lucky for awhile. We hooked up with a road crew that had some good people in it. Yeah, we did things, but we survived. If there is a God I know they will understand." She didn't sound real positive about that though. I wanted to tell her she needed a new god but like everything else I could say this wasn't the time and the place.

"Then things went to hell again. We jacked the wrong convoy and finally the Army showed up. I guess we were getting too good at it. It was Army police, except they sure weren't armed or acted like police. They chewed through us like a buzzsaw. Wasn't any arrests being made either." She shook her head. "So what was left of us, which wasn't much ran for it. We ran right into the arms of the Brethren.

"The Brethern. May they rot in the Hell they so love to talk about." She paused and once again her chorus seated behind her sung their affirmations of her righteousness. "You know anything about them G?" I shook my head and said "I could make some guesses." She cawed again. "I doubt it. They are special. You know my Bobby was Black right?"

"Yeah" I replied. "More like tan, Who cared these days" I thought "Other than...oh yeah."

"Yeah. Some people care. The Brethren especially. I mean not all of them. Enough to matter. They also believe woman, especially unbaptized and unsealed ones are second class citizens." Yeah, the chorus agreed with that. "I could live with that. Hell, I did. What I can't live with is they took my boy from me." She reached out, grabbed my arm in a grip of steel tendons and ceramic bone, focused those eyes directly on me, and said "You got to get my boy back. Please!"