Explained

Explain

“Can you explain this to me?”

When angry, he pretends to be someone he is not. He doesn’t know how to get angry. It isn’t his fault. Our mother was a saint, our father, wasn’t.

It could have been he inherited his inability to become angry from my mother, or he realized because of my father’s reaction to about everything, he didn’t want to be like him. If I had to find a reason for his unwavering placidity, I would venture a guess that it was a combination of the two. A learning experience that alters your outlook on life, and your behavior becomes the result of two conflicting options which cause you to evaluate each, and end up with a more centrist position of one’s own. 

All decisions are a confluence of experience, suggestion, evidence-right or wrong, and a belief that our decision will make a difference. To whom we can’t reveal, usually because we don’t know. All we can do is hope.

Darnell was a terrible liar. Everyone knew when he was lying. His eyes couldn’t find a stabilizing bulls eye to concentrate on. They bounced about like a ping pong ball in a bingo machine. He could just as well have put on a T-shirt claiming himself to be a liar. But liars are usually more subtle, as they wish to appear not only truthful, but to lie with the eloquence and tonality of a Shakespearean actor. Darnell could do neither. As I have mentioned, it had something to do with his upbringing, or at least half of it.

Lying is an artform. Some people are naturals at whatever they do, Babe Ruth, Mohamed Ally, thousands of others. Their abilities passed to them from untold generations of chromosomes floating around in the petri dish of human possibility, until they randomly find what can only be assumed as love or lust, but regardless of reason, a star is born. 

That wasn’t the case with Darnell, however. If he inherited anything, it was his inability to decide. He was trapped on the endless wheel of indecision which either drives one crazy, or on a philosophical adventure, that allows detours from perpetual responsibility of the universal dice, cast by the God of your choice.

It was Darnell’s inability to lie, coupled with his inability to decide, that resulted in what came to be known as the “Chicago Fire.” Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, un-named for personal reasons I presume, was credited with kicking over a lantern and starting the fire in October of 1871, that killed hundreds of people and left thousands homeless. 

Because lying is an art form, and not everyone is an artist, although they try, we are subjected to a variety of what is considered by the most liberal observer, to be art. Darnell’s assignment as a fledgling reporter for the Sun Times, to definitively document the cause of the fire, and dispel the notion that a cow, of all animals, caused the fire. Much speculation at the time focused on Mrs. O’Leary herself, as she was known to have quite a temper, and the man she was married to, Herman O’Leary, the Bull, as she referred to him, was the recipient of the majority of her derogatory orations. 

Some say that it was for that reason Herman took to drink as a way to soften the verbal battering of Mrs. O’Leary. Others say he believed drinking caused hearing loss, and had vowed to continue the experiment until he could prove it "one way or the other."

Darnell found both versions of speculation to be too “scriptural,” as he put it. He talked to many of the neighbors, as he wrote in his first published piece, “Hot Ashes to Go Round,” about anything and everything. They all seemed to have conflicting stories of what happened, but no idea how.

Darnell was not known for flowery rhetoric, or rhetoric of any kind, as he was normally because of his confused state, speechless, lost in an internal debate about one thing, or possibly something else. No one was ever quite sure, him being an incessant mumbler.

Darnell managed to leave the wheel of uncertainty long enough to make the acquaintance of one Mary Fish. Mary fish was a neighbor of the O’Leary’s. She was sifting through the ashes of her tenement building in search of a ring that had belonged to her mother, and had been passed down to her. She used the ring as a temporary necessity during her first marriage. It was to be a temporary stop gap, until Herman O’Leary saved the “monetary stability necessary,” as Darnell quoted to his quickly growing following in the Sun Times, to replace the improvised solution with “the real thing.”

Darnell’s equivocal use of the word not only added flavor and entertainment to his audiences speculation, but allowed for the necessary participation of any article to allow the audience involvement required to become a purveyor of the story. It was because of his inability to remain off his spinning wheel, which was his reality, and his inability to separate fact from fiction, that caused his conclusions to be based on what others told him, in all honesty to be the truth, and nothing but.

It was the disconnectedness of truth, lies, speculation, and Darnell’s choice of words that caused not only the populace of the city of Chicago, but those that read the Sun Times, to believe that it was Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow Betsy, that kicked over the lantern that turned their fair city, to a smoldering pile of ash.

Darnell’s inability to express emotion, was claimed later to be the cause of small misstep, or white lie, depending on which part of the city you lived in.

Darnell’s lack of emotion left him socially on an island of one. When Mary Fish agreed, not only to speak with him, but invited him to sit on her now incinerated porch and drink imaginary coffee from a useable coffee can; he didn’t know what to say. His mind spun in its usual fashion in search of an exit, and on that day for some reason found one. He accepted.

They spent the afternoon discussing the particulars of the fire. Mary's involvement with the now Mrs. O’ Leary, and the reason the ring had meant so much to her. It apparently was the only proof she had she had been married, not wanting to subject her, soon to slip from the petri dish child, to the taunts of bastard, he took no notes. She had grown up under the umbrella of sanctimonious eyes, and did not want the same for her child. 

Mr. O’ Leary having not so much as lost his hearing as his memory, didn’t remember being married to Mary O’ Leary Fish, and was fearful of being hauled into a paternity suit, thought it best to deny he even knew Mary. Mary being a likeminded spirit as Darnell, decided that rather than trip over the low bar of responsibility set by Herman, and not wishing to hurt the now Mrs. O’ Leary, decided to tell Darnell the truth. 

Darnell didn’t know what to do. He’d never been out of his environment for more than an few hours previously, and he’d spent the entire afternoon with the x-wife of the person who eye witnessed the tragic fire, and its cause. 

He in the vein of Mary, decided that telling the truth, the whole truth, would serve no purpose. Rather than explain that it was Herman who kicked over the lantern when Mrs. O’ Leary through the milk pail at him, he’d fail to tell the whole story. A lie by omission, but still, one he'd have to talk over with his priest. 

“Spilt milk is after all, spilt milk,” Darnell explained to me one night at O’ Leary’s Pub, when he was confessing to having not only been part of the conspiracy, as to the actual cause of the Chicago Fire, but to having reported the cow Betsy as the culprit, when in actually the cow’s name was Beulah.

Need I say more.