BLACK TONGUE by Dan W.
Smathers June 2005
One day a little boy
caught black tongue. No one knew how he got it. We thought maybe
he inherited it from his mother. But, we called on her one Sunday
after church and she smiled and invited us in. She had baked a
cake with powdered sugar and strawberries all around the base,
which she fed to us townspeople. We decided it couldn’t
possibly be her.
“Well, if it’s not her it must
be the father,” chirped a young woman from the church choir.
We returned to the little boy's home and
found our suspect changing the oil on his old Ford truck. Upon
hearing a crowd murmuring and shuffling their feet in the gravel,
he crawled out from underneath his truck and began wiping the oil
off of his blackened fingers. He then pulled some hand cleaner
out of an old dirty can and removed the grime from his palms and
even his fingertips and said, “Hello,” offering his
personal handshake to every single man, woman and child in our
group of concerned citizens.
“It’s not him,”
said a little lady with black shoes.
“Could we see the boy?”
I asked, trying my best to sound like Father Flanagan.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Heya Jacob. Some people want to meet you,” yelled the
father. “Everywhere we take him he says the most horrible
things. We’re getting kind of worried. I mean you never know
when he’ll pop off with his tongue. I’m afraid it might
spread to his whole body.”
Out of the house strolled a
young boy about the age of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and
sauntered over to the truck.
“Yeah?” he said,
causing one young man in our company to wince.
“Son,” said the
young man, “Do you remember where you might have caught
black tongue?” He asked as nicely as he could.
“Well, I was over to
the railroad tracks t’other day.”
“What’s over at
railroad tracks that was calling you?” Asked our minister
who is a mother of three.
“Well, the prisoners in
the jail throw us cigarettes and magazines,” said the boy
with so much as a blink of the eye.
“THAT’S IT!”
chanted the group in unison.
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