0013: White Cloaks

White Cloaks 

They came for him when he was trying to wind down from a long week working at the mines. He'd literally just peeled off his shirt before the van drove into the driveway. When he saw the white hoods his heart sank, and he distinctly had the feeling of watching everything from afar.

"We don't appreciate your boy talking up Miss Partisons' daughter. " The one said.

"We thinking a father neglected to teach his son the proper way of things. The right way."

With that they beat him. He was glad his wife wasn't stupid enough to run out.

He wondered in between the blows when the tipping point would come. Sometimes a man got beat. Sometimes a man got hung.

It seems the beating was enough then, and they left him in the dirt. He was aware, through the stinging pain and swollen jaw he'd wet himself, and somehow that was the greatest indignity of it all.

His wife sobbed over him and hugged him, even as the jeep drove away into the distance, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.

And the man watched it till it left the horizon, and knew a certain fatalistic truth: That'd he'd die trying to make things different.