The Fool Killer

After the Civil War, a Southern boy aged 12 runs away from his foster home, wanders the countryside and meets various odd characters along the way. 12-year-old George Mellish, tired of beatings for both real and fancied misdeeds at the hands of his foster parents,runs away from home by hopping a freight train and lands somewhere east of the Mississippi River. The first person he meets is Dirty Jim Helliman who lives in a fantastically filthy hovel and with whom George feels a kindred spirit, both having "suffered" at the hands of a clean woman. It is (really dirty) Dirty Jim that tells George of the mythical, eight-foot bogey man called "The Fool Killer." George gets sick and Dirty Jim takes him to town where Mrs.Ova Faversham takes charge of the feverish boy. When Blessing Angeline, Mrs. Faversham's 10-year-old daughter, tells George that her mother intends to return him to his foster parents, George hits the road again. He meets Milo Bogardus, a young Civil War veteran, who has been robbed of his memory by a war wound, and is as lost in his own way as George. THey come upon a camp meeting, where the fanatical Reverend Spotts is conducting a revivalist meeting and during the religious frenzy, George blacks out. He comes to and is alone, and is unaware that the Reverend has been murdered, and starts in his search to find Milo. He finds a home with the Dodds, small town store keepers. When, at supper, Dodds makes mention of the murder of the Reverend Spotts, George blurts out that "The Fool Killer done it" and tells them the legend as told to him by Dirty Jim. That evening, while George lies in bed, a shadow appears at his window. It is the figure of a tall, gaunt apparition, ax in hand ready to strike---"The Fool Killer!" —Les Adams <longhorn1939@suddenlink.net> It's the 1880s US, which is still reeling in the aftermath of the Civil War. Twelve year old orphaned George Mellish, who considers himself a bad boy, nonetheless runs away from his puritanical foster parents due to the unwarranted abuse they afflict on him. He doesn't have a plan beyond general thoughts of heading west due to stories of potential riches from the gold rush. He finds that he isn't able to survive without the kindness of strangers. Still trying to find his place in life, he builds on each encounter to form this thoughts. The one that sticks in his mind the most is that told to him by his first friend on the road, elderly Dirty Jim Jelliman: that there is an eight foot monster wielding an ax to kill the fools of the world, which in reality is a parable meant to scare George into not acting foolish. The strongest connection he makes is with Milo Bogardus, a loner in being emotionally scarred by his time in the war, he suspect of strange people and places. He does not remember anything about his life, including what happened in the war, before waking up in a hospital, where he, a John Doe, was bestowed the name Milo Bogardus, that of another soldier who had just died. George has to reconcile the incompatible worlds which he has passed through, namely that of Milo's against that of the kindly Dodds, who not only take him in and treat him like their own, but treat him fairly. What happens is affected by George's belief that Milo may actually be the Fool Killer. —Huggo