Firetale by Dante Graves

They were the same age, with similar traits of character,
and they quickly hit it off. When Roger wasn’t spending time with
Lazarus or preaching in the church, he could often be seen in
Margaret’s company.
    At first, Jerome Bernardius paid no
attention to his wife’s new friendship, but when it was whispered
about even among the slaves in the cotton fields, the seeds of
anger were sown in the planter’s heart. He became suspicious and
angry. At last, he announced to Roger Abernathy that the Bernardius
family no longer needed his services, and he was free to return to
New Orleans. The priest was shocked. He knew people were whispering
behind his back, but the simple-hearted young man believed it was
obvious that his relationship with Mrs. Bernardius was just
friendship. Abernathy tried to explain this to Jerome, but the
planter did not want to listen. When Abernathy persisted, Jerome
beat him, tore off his Roman collar, and threw the priest out of
his home.
    Abernathy went back to New
Orleans, and no one in the Bernardius estate ever saw him again.
Jerome, however, couldn’t move past the quarrel. His confidence in
his wife, despite the innocence of her relationship with Abernathy,
was shaken. He became an anxious and nervous man, and soon had a
stroke from which he never fully recovered. With his health
compromised, his involvement in his business decreased, and the
plantation suffered. In 1842, he decided to hand over the
responsibilities of the estate and the plantation to his wife and
son, and a year later he died quietly. Until the Civil War, Lazarus
tried to manage the business, but with no experience, no real
desire, and no support from his mother, who had become a closed and
inhospitable woman since Roger Abernathy had been banished from the
Bernardius home, he was doomed to fail. Before Lazarus turned
thirty, his mother died, and he finally lost all interest in his
father’s plantation, which had become a burden to him.
    A fter the war, the estate was all that
remained of the once thriving business of Jerome Bernardius. The
slaves were freed by Lazarus or escaped. Eventually, Lazarus sold
the house for a pittance and went to New Orleans. He saw the city
as a place where he could start a career unrelated to the
plantation business, perhaps a career as a journalist, or, if he
was lucky, as a writer. But Lazarus never had the chance to use the
money from the sale of the house. Immediately upon arrival,
Bernardius was careless enough to venture into a dark alley, where
he was hit on the head with a baton and stabbed in the back. He
came to his senses at night, as his body was loaded onto the
stretcher of a police carriage. He was scared, he felt giddy, but
otherwise he was unhurt. The police clearly took Lazarus for a dead
man and did not expect the corpse to come to life. When he did,
they figured he was a tramp, filled to the eyeballs with alcohol,
so they let him go to the four winds. Bernardius lingered in New
Orleans for two weeks, with no money or shoes, in a vain attempt to
restore his father’s old connections. Barefoot and disheveled,
smelling of sewage, he was not allowed to set foot in the noble
houses. Exhausted, Lazarus trusted in God, hoping He would send him
salvation from misery and suffering. But in the end, he was stabbed
again, this time, right in the heart.
    When Lazarus Bernardius came to
life, the first thing he saw was light. It was so bright and blinding that he
had to squint. He tried to cover his eyes with his hands, but he
could not move. Lazarus blinked, trying to clear the tears from his
eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw that the light was not a
supernatural phenomenon proclaiming that his earthly sorrows were
finished and Heaven waited. The light came from a lamp on a white
ceiling. The feeling of weightlessness that had filled his body
when Lazarus woke up began to fade. He felt a sense of his own body
weight. He also felt tingling in his fingers and toes and warmth in
his chest.