The Odyssey of Danny Helm

Hill DeMent

Description

Danny Helm was thirteen in the eighteen fifties. His mother died. His brother John mistreated him which was overlooked and called him Miss Puss. Danny did the house work. John took the balloon payment for the hillside farm in the Ozark Mountains and went to California and bought a goldmine. After a few years his father headed for California. The neighbor lady who had home schooled Danny and whose husband had died accompanied them. Danny was abandoned on a ranch in New Mexico where the owners had been murdered. Some wounded troopers took refuge in the barn. Danny removed bullets from them. The Commanding officer of Fort Summer asked Danny to field test a repeating rifle. Danny operated on some Tesuque Indians and was made a Tesuque. He met Becky Summer. She fell in love with him. He went back east to buy a donkey to start raising mules. He was wounded by Abolitionist and treated in Fort Larned. Becky went to bring him home and he confessed he loved her. She planned their wedding. John said that their father had been killed in a mine cave in. Danny and Becky went to California on their honeymoon, to give his father a proper burial. They found his paralyzed father tended to by a Russian. They hit the mother lode and became rich. They returned to the ranch. Danny was conscripted by the Pike Peakers as a surgeon. He was captured by the Southern Army at the battle of Glorieta Pass. He was left to die. When he was found he had lost his memory. He was summoned to Washington by President Lincoln to receive the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal. Becky took him to his old house and he recovered his memory. They went back home.

Sujets

• Trafford Publishing
• Civil War
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Trafford Publishing
• Date de parution: 19 février 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781425195182
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE ODYSSEY OF DANNY HELM
Volume One
A Novel by
HILL DEMENT

With the exception of historical people and historical locations all characters and locations in this novel is fictional. Any resemblance to living persons or locations past or present is purely coincidental.
 
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© Copyright 2006, 2010. 2011 Hill DeMent.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.
 
ISBN: 978-1-4120-9398-9 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4251-9518-2 (e)
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
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Trafford rev. 08/24/2022
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CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue

Line edited by Trafford
Preface
The story is fairly accurate historically and geographically. It involves a young boy’s travels in the 1850s and ’60s. Danny spent his early years helping his ill mother around the house. When she passed away, he took over the household duties. He was mistreated by his older brother and neglected by his father. His neighbor home schooled him and gave him a good education. They lived on a poor farm in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri, barely scratching out a living.
CHAPTER 1
“Mike, don’t you dare die yet. Like the good friend you have become you’ve got to listen to the story of my life, like I listened to yours, okay? I heard you grunt again, so you must still be alive, and that grunt means yes. They think they left us here to die, but I know you are as stubborn as I am so we won’t do it. What did you say, Mike? Did you say ‘closer?’ No, I can’t move any closer to you right now. Besides, I want to save my strength so I can give that devil just one good kick. He’s worse than my brother. Man, oh man, I’d give anything for a cup of coffee and a piece of Rosa’s dried peach pie! I wonder what my beautiful Becky is doing. I never thought I would love anybody more than I did my mother, but I do. If you get out of this mess before I do, I want you to find my family like I told you I would find yours. Don’t tell Becky what happened to me. I want you to tell Wayne. If you tell Becky, she’ll get all upset and cry. If you tell Wayne, he’ll come after me. What did you say, Mike? Did you say ‘tell me?’ Okay, I’ll tell you about me, but first, I’ll have to rest. It’s hard for me to talk with my mouth so dry. Damn the flies. Damn the cockroaches and damn the rats. I can’t keep them off of me because of that bloody bandage pile. I’ve been thinking that if I weren’t so weak, I’d kill one of those rats and eat it. Of course, I’d share it with you! I tried the cockroaches, but I started puking and got the dry heaves. That made me weaker, so I gave up. It’s hard for me to believe these Texas Rebels can just throw a man away like he was a used bandage.
Can you believe this, Mike? It’s starting to rain a little. Open your mouth, Mike, and let in some of that precious water. Hey, I got a few drops, but damn it, it quit. Did you get any, Mike? I guess you did. I can still hear you grunt. Mike, I’m going to tell you about myself now. Mike! Mike! It’s all right, Mike. You don’t have to answer me. You’ve been a good friend and helper since we were captured by those rebels.
So let’s see … I have some good friends. My best one is Wayne. We got married on the same day. And then there was Colonel Summer. He introduced me to Henry. But Henry wasn’t a person, and I really didn’t like him very much. I don’t want to leave Mrs. Moore out, she tutored me, but then she turned against me. Did you hear that, Mike? I hear my mother calling me. It’s getting dark. She always does that when it starts getting dark. I took care of my mother when she was sick. She told me to always act like a good Christian. She told me to not blame my father for the way he acted. He feels betrayed by his churchgoing Christian kinfolk. I think they didn’t act like Christians, but I forgave them anyway. It’s always better to forgive and make friends than it is to hate. I hope you will always be my friend, Mike.
Everyone calls me Dr. Helm, but I’m really not a doctor, even though they made me be one. My name is Danny Helm. I have an Indian name too, but I can’t remember what it is. I have an Indian brother. His name is Six Feathers.
My real brother’s name is John. He hates me. Are you listening, Mike? We have to keep talking so we’ll know that we’re both still alive. Since it’s my turn, I’m going to finish telling you about myself. Here goes, Mike! My best recollections started when I was about ten or twelve years old. Before that, it’s kind of bleary.
I remember sitting in the hayloft of the old weather-beaten barn. Dad would say that it had holes in the roof and cracks in the walls big enough to throw a cat through. I lived on a hilly, rocky pig farm with my father and mean-spirited older brother. The farm was located in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. It was just small patches of tillable land on hillsides and large groves of scrub oak. There wasn’t a straight row of corn on the place. We had to plow around the hills and have the rows to follow what the government man called the ‘contour’ of the hillsides. During a hard rain, sometimes the runoff would go straight down the hill and form a gulley. More land had to be cleared to keep up with the lost cropland. The soil wasn’t very rich, and the corn sapped it quickly. We had to leave a third of the land fallow in order to have a fair crop every year.
I could look out through a large crack and see the pig sties made of wired-together oak limbs. The farrowing sheds were made of small logs, with hay for a roof and hay for the beds, plus the sticks the sows would carry in when it was near their time. As I looked from crack to crack, I could see the old house where I had spent my boyhood every day and every night. I only went outside to the outhouse or to do the chores. It may have been a weather-beaten old shack by most standards, but it served our purpose. It was the only home I had ever known. I looked back on this simple way of life and wondered if how I was living was all there was to it. I sure hoped not!
My older brother, John, made my life miserable. That was why I exiled myself to the old barn. Our mother had died, and Dad retreated into some kind of shell. Her death didn’t make any sense. I thought that maybe she just went away for a while. Dad functioned without spirit or ambition, ignoring John’s treatment of me after Mom had left us. I am Daniel Junior, but they called me Danny. I tried to fight back when John was walloping me, but it usually made the situation worse. This last time was the worst of anything that he had ever done before.
It was a Saturday evening when I caught John robbing my chicken pen. He was putting some of my laying hens into a sack to take into town for beer money. I had regular egg customers. You see, I didn’t have any roosters around to take care of the hens. My customers, especially the women, liked the unfertilized eggs.
This was the first time that I really mounted an all-out attack on John. I was madder than heck to think that my laying hens would be traded for beer so he could get drunk, come home, and wool me around some more. You have to understand … that egg money was the lifeblood of my little world! It paid for flour, dried beans, sugar, and other staples that were a necessity to the operation of the household. My attack was foolish. It was like a mosquito attacking a hound dog. I smacked old John squarely in the mouth, splitting his lip. John had a very high threshold of pain. He looked surprised and then smiled as he put down the sack of pilfered hens. When I saw that twisted, blood-covered smirk on John’s face, I tried to mount a hasty retreat. I was confident that I could outrun my big brother.
We were as different as a greyhound and a bulldog. John was broad of shoulders and thick-chested. His legs were like tree stumps and just as sturdy. I, on the other hand, was, to be as kind as possible, gangly. My arms and legs were too long for my body. I had broad shoulders and narrow hips. With my unruly brown hair and big, bright, hazel, wide-set eyes, people said that I looked surprised by whatever I was looking at.
Luck had turned against me and in favor of John. I tripped over a rake that I had been using to clean out the henhouse. I no more than hit the ground when I felt like the roof had caved in on me. John had jumped on me like a toad on a June bug!
John started his torture a little differently this time. After he got me flat on my back, he sat astraddle of me, like he usually did, but then he did something new. He held my arms firmly at my sides with his knees and began slapping me on the side of my face. He alternated his slaps, first with one hand and then the other. My a