Flying Crows by Jim Lehrer

said,
    â€œI had gone to my grandmama’s house that morning of September 27,
1864, to help her clean her cistern. Our little town of Centralia was in a wide
prairie with barely a tree high enough to climb, which meant you could see
from the roof of any building for miles around. We only had two hotels, a saloon, and two stores that sold dry goods plus our little train station. There
were about twenty-five houses, only two of them two stories high. One of
those was my grandmama’s, and I liked to go up to the second floor and look
out to see what there was to see, which usually wasn’t much. But this morning I hadn’t been up yet because I had a chore to do. Some cottonwood
leaves and limbs had gotten down in the tank during a rainstorm a few nights
before.
    â€œI was outside on the north side of Grandmama’s house when, out of the
air like a bad breeze, came the voice of somebody yelling, ‘Bushwhackers!
Bushwhackers! They robbed the Columbia stage! They’re all over town!’ ”
    Josh smiled, cleared his throat, and began talking in his normal adult
voice. He couldn’t keep up that squeaking for the entire presentation, but he
did stay in the first person, telling the story through the eyes of a boy in Centralia in 1864.
    â€œI knew about the stagecoach from Columbia, a bigger town and our
county seat, thirty miles south of Centralia. It came every day about this time,
and I often watched it approach from the south from Grandmama’s second
floor.
    â€œI raced around to the front of the house and saw little Willie Hooper running down our street raising dust. He was the one doing the hollering, so I
immediately put any worries to rest on grounds that Willie, two years
younger than me, was known for being afraid of his own shadow.
    â€œBut in a few seconds, coming up behind him in a huge cloud of flying
dirt, was a man on a big black horse who was dressed all in black, too. He
rode right on by Willie to me—to Grandmama’s house.
    â€œ ‘Breakfast, boy. I want some breakfast. You got some woman around in
that big house here who’ll fix me breakfast?’
    â€œIt was a little late in the morning for breakfast, was what I thought first.
But then I looked closer at the man. I could tell he was evil. His look struck
me as being a cross between a black crow and a gray rat. He had a thin mustache and dark brown hair that was long and thick and everywhere, falling
like a prissy girl’s over his ears, where it kept going into a wide beard that circled and covered the bottom part of his face before ending right in the center in a point. His hat, his shirt that looked velvet, his pants, and his boots
were all black. That hat was wide-brimmed and made of felt and it had a
star-shaped pin that held the brim against the crown in front. I had heard that
the bushwhackers wore a star as a sign they were organized like soldiers. The
star was silver, about the size of a lawman’s badge.”
    Josh closed his eyes, lowered his head. There wasn’t a sound in the auditorium. Even Lawrence of Sedalia was quiet.
    Then Josh raised his head. His eyes were open, but now they were slightly
squinted. “His eyes were cold like the ice across a frozen lake on a dirty gray
day. I shivered from fear.”
    Josh saw Lawrence shiver and put his hands over his own eyes—as he always did at this part.
    â€œThen I saw the pistols. There was one in a holster on each hip and
two more stuck down in his belt in front. They were enormous, the size of axes.
    â€œ ‘You ought to try the El Dorado Hotel, back the other way by the station,
right in the center of town,’ I said, pointing south. Like I said, what we had in
our small downtown wasn’t much, but there
were
places to eat.
    â€œThe man grabbed a pistol from his belt and pointed it right at me, right,
it seemed to me, at a spot between my two eyes, both of which were at that
moment filling with fear and