Mean Yellow Jacket

Mean Yellow Jacket was published in Readers Break, Vol. VII, November 1998, Pine Grove Press.

About 1,500 words

MEAN YELLOW JACKET

G.D. Peters

The orderly had a quizzical look on her face when I asked if Uncle Jeremiah had uttered any last words.

“Mean yellow jacket,” she said.

“Mean yellow jacket?”

“That’s what he said,” Virlie confirmed. “Mean yellow jacket.” She was an elderly woman, and quite pleasant.

“Did he say what he meant by that?”

Virlie furrowed a brow, reminding me what I had asked her.

“What he did after that was expire,” she said, shaking her head. She spoke slowly, rubbing her hands, pausing now and then, her tongue clacking as she worked her lips together. “They call me in when it got looking bad; wasn’t nothing they could do for him so I just set with him, you know, let it take its course. He known his number was up, see? He jes’ laid there, you know, real quiet, and he had this funny smile on his face, like he had a secret under his pillow.”

“Is that right?”

“He jes’ smiled and smiled, and then started nodding his hay-ed, and he pulled a finger at me to come closer, see, so I leaned in and he smiled real wide, almost to laughing, and his hay-ed nodding up and down like he’s gon’ share his secret. I leaned my ear close to his mouth and he says ‘mean yellow jacket,’ and then he expired, you know, with that smile on his face. Damndest thing I ever seed.”

Virlie finished with the sheets she was changing.

“I didn’t know Mista Jeremiah had no kin,” she said. “You know he was a kind man. Me an’ him both been here nigh onto twenty year now, see.”

I thanked Virlie for everything I knew she’d done for Uncle Jeremiah, including being with him during the final moments of his life. I held her hand in mine, pressing a twenty into her palm as I turned to leave.

“Thank you, Mista Christopher,” she said, “thank you kindly,” as she stuffed the bill into the pocket of her apron. “Mista Christopher,” she said as I was half through the doorway, “I ast’ you a fayva?”

“Sure Virlie, what is it?” I said, turning back.

“This been wearing on me ever since Mista Jeremiah passed on, see. I sure ‘preciate it if you ever do find out what he meant.”

I understood. A dying man’s last words, and she had no way of appreciating the secret he’d shared with her. Surely an unsettling circumstance, she only wanted some closure.

“Sure Virlie,” I said, “I’ll let you know.”

As I drove from the Mountain View Nursing Home with Uncle Jeremiah’s few remaining possessions in a cardboard box beside me on the seat, I can not with certainty say I’d have been quite inclined to look any further into the matter if it had not been for Virlie’s parting request. While Uncle Jeremiah had been known to me, he was actually a quite distant relative, the oldest brother of my cousin Rachel’s grandmother on her mother’s side, Rachel and I being related through our respective fathers, so Uncle Jeremiah was not actually a blood relation of mine. But being the only family member anywhere near Lancaster County it was I who got the call to make the final arrangements at the home.

Rachel put me in touch with her Uncle William Brett, who was Jeremiah’s nephew. We met in Lancaster, at the office of lawyer Frank Church. Uncle William asked me to be present at the reading of the will and though I was uninterested in the legal proceedings I was curious to learn what William might have known of Uncle Jeremiah’s storied past, though he was unable to shed real light upon the subject.

“What I know of Jeremiah you’ve already read in the magazine articles documenting his explorations,” William told me. “The only other thing I know is he was involved in a big murder trial when he was a boy, mixed up in it somehow or other but it’s never been solved.”

The reading of the will was quite brief, the will simply providing that Jeremiah’s sole possessions, which were in the cardboard box I collected at Mountain View and presented to lawyer Church, would devolve to whomsoever signed for them and carried them from the home. According to Mr. Church I now owned these possessions. I offered them to Uncle William but he declined.

“You heard Jeremiah’s will same as me,” he said, “it’s what he provided and I respect his last wishes, whatever his reasons might have been.”

As I settled onto the sofa, a 2:30 a.m. rerun of the local news flashed quietly across the television screen. On the coffee table before me was the box. I had given its contents only a cursory glance but now felt compelled to honor this life with some small gesture, if only by homage paid to his last possessions, of which I now found myself, by default, the sole heir and beneficiary.

I removed the items one by one: A shirt, obviously hand-woven from some unfamiliar fabric, whose print brought to mind an ancient Aztec civilization. And as Uncle Jeremiah had spent his adult life exploring the far corners of the globe, this did not seem unusual. A pair of worn and faded blue jeans, which upon closer inspection I found to be a very early issue from Levi Strauss & Co., perhaps from before the turn of the century; some people collect these things, but Uncle Jeremiah, apparently, just wore them. One well-worn pair of leather boots, their laces frayed but holding. One leather belt, hand stitched with a brass buckle and matching brass loop, that looked old enough to have been worn at Little Big Horn or O.K. Corral, and maybe was. One wool New York Yankee baseball cap, worn and soiled, a number “3” inked beneath its brim, faded but quite legible, and I am thinking Babe Ruth’s number, but…naah, couldn’t be. One Marine Band harmonica looking as if it might be the first harmonica ever manufactured, something Uncle Jeremiah had perhaps kept from his youth early in the century. One Duncan yo-yo, circa 1961 or so, of clear green plastic, but with a new string. Virlie told me Uncle Jeremiah liked to practice his yo-yo several times a month while watching TV in the rec room. An original 1934 Breitling aviator’s chronograph watch with two pushpieces, and even I recognized this to be quite valuable. At the bottom of the box were two books. One was an original hardbound edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inscribed, apparently by the author, “to young Jeremiah, S. Clemens.” The other was also a first edition, For Whom The Bell Tolls, also inscribed, “Jeremiah, great trip, thanks, Ernie.” These were Uncle Jeremiah’s possessions. The bottom of the box was lined with old newspaper, which I pried out carefully, curious to examine the date and edition. The page was from an old Lancaster Daily Journal, dated 1967. I perused the headlines and found an interview with Uncle Jeremiah as follows:

Lancaster, April 8 — On the fiftieth anniversary of the slaying of Byron Bohannon, a federal agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Jeremiah Brett, 68, of Philadelphia and the only witness to the killing stated he could shed no further light on the mystery of the Ironville Two, though the original suspects are now deceased.

“I testified I didn’t know,” Brett, an archeologist and explorer, stated. “They might still try me for perjury. I will tell you this, there were two men stood trial but I know for a fact John Pony wasn’t there that night. That’s all I can say right now. Maybe when I’m dying,” he said, leaving historians little hope of ever learning who really killed Byron Bohannon.

Another clipping, folded neatly inside the first, was from the Philadelphia Chronicle, dated 1917:

Philadelphia, September 20 — A federal jury today acquitted the Ironville Two, Shawnee Indians tried for the April 8 killing of Byron Bohannon, agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who had been accused of the rape and slaying of 13 year-old Sue Standing Water, a Shawnee girl. The defendants, John Stomping Pony, 28, and Joseph Yellow Jacket, 17, were acquitted when the sole witness to the slaying, Jeremiah Brett, 16, also of Ironville, was unable to identify the killers.

Under cross-examination by federal prosecutor John Barnett, Brett refused to alter his testimony, while admitting his earlier statement to authorities that he had witnessed the killing. “I seen it,” he testified, “but I didn’t seen who done it.”

Brett admitted he was a friend of Yellow Jacket, the brother of Standing Water, and of the victim herself, while refusing to answer whether she was his girlfriend. He testified he could not identify the men at the scene because it was dark.

I set my alarm earlier than usual, knowing Virlie began her morning shifts at eight. She had misunderstood his dying words. I repeated them to myself, slowly this time.

THE END