The Coming of Elliot Stephens Jan 16 '07    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Rick Bragg - Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg From $6 260 Drum Machine Patterns From $8 The Bottom Line Number three in my "Let's Make Nick Cave and William Faulkner Proud" series. It’s long been said that the arrival of Elliot Stephens was preceded by a number of omens, the kind which should’ve had the more superstitious of Fillmore’s citizens striking down that goddamned Yankee when he first strode boldly into town. Folks can be forgiven for putting little stock in the incoherent ranting of Lester Sykes, that self-styled prophet from the colored neighborhood, who collapsed on the courthouse steps describing some vision in which he’d seen a giant iron fire-breathing snake make its way across the swamps in order to rest its great big filthy hissing head upon the northern edge of Fillmore, but who could look back at them other things that happened and not realize that something awful was in the works? In the three months leading up to his triumphal entry into our bustling den of river rats and ex-Confederate soldiers trying to wash away the memories of what they’d lost with the strongest drink available at Francis Turner’s bar, Providence did its best to warn the population of Fillmore against engaging in any manner of business with Elliot Stephens. The Methodist church was charred to its foundations by a massive lightning bolt from the Lord Almighty’s hand, while strange lights danced about in the windows of the Baptist establishment across the way when it was known to stand unoccupied. The waters of the bayou frothed and foamed and flooded the first three streets of Fillmore’s warehouse district shortly after a phantom stern-wheeler was reported gliding silently by the docks under a moon some said was “looking a little bit queer”. A young man fishing down by the old powder magazines claimed to have pulled ashore an alligator gar with teeth of blackest obsidian that whispered the name of Elliot Stephens before wiggling back into the murky depths and, in what was surely the clearest indication of God’s disapproval of our impending association with that opportunistic railroad baron, a wail was heard on several moonless evenings from one side of Fillmore to the other and seemed to come from the shadows themselves; a mulatto girl named Isabela Gates described the sound as best resembling the racket a locomotive makes when pulling into the station. The panic these signs planted in the chests of the average locals didn’t extend to the mayor, who was simply bribed into compliance with Stephens’ plans to grease his rails with the blood of the riverboat trade that put Fillmore on the map. A minor fuss made by the steamer captains who rightly felt that Stephens was muscling in on their livelihood was quelled by threats to have the wharves incinerated and a federal garrison brought in to address our “refusal to fully implement the policies of the Reconstruction”, whatever the hell that means. And so the trains came rolling in with the predictably disastrous effect on the Fillmore of old, as dockhands and paddle-wheeler crews lost the battle to hollow-hearted men with strange designs and stranger accents. It wasn’t long before characters of every stripe began to show up in Fillmore on the backs of those infernal inventions, which vomited forth a regular stream of those who came to hitch onto the rape of the town, those who looked plainly lost, and just about everyone in between. Once word got out concerning the profitability of having a line to Fillmore, the hammers went to work again, and a set of tracks that veered off in a more northerly direction appeared to connect us to the Appalachians and points beyond. It was on that second line that the Reverend Curtis Mule rode in to wreak havoc on a formerly glorious riverport already wilting in the grip of decay, and while I’ll speak in greater detail later of that wicked charlatan’s misadventures, allow me to end this spiel with a word in favor of Elliot Stephens: while he may have killed the Fillmore of yesterday with his engines, crossties, and steel rails, at least he had the decency to personally survey the community he intended to murder. Whoever bankrolled the construction of line number two, to the best of my knowledge, never even considered such a gesture, but then the Lord didn’t think that man important enough to whip up a thundercloud, much less the mystifying array of harbingers and heralds that he used to announce the coming of Elliot Stephens. Other pieces in this style and series: Where Everybody Looks The Same http://www.epinions.com/content_4938047620 Abner http://www.epinions.com/content_4937785476

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