Josh Poole is, in his own words, a “.. writer and visual artist working out of the sleepy Virginia town of Lexington.  I’ve been published in The Woody Creeker, Air Mail, The Rockbridge Advocate, and many others. “ 

The Great Ezekiel

Written By Josh Poole in Consultation with The Great Travis Wellman

Warren Ezekiel Rutherford, better known by his stage name, The Great Ezekiel, was a struggling magician in his late 30s.  He had, at one time, been on a trajectory to become not only as famous as the great Houdini himself, but perhaps, at least, it seemed in his mind, to surpass the fame of his idol.  There came, however, a crossroads in Warren’s life.  His talents had been largely wasted in the valleys of rural Kansas, disappearing into thin air the moment the carnivals moved or the small crowds dispersed.  Warren was, in spite of his talents and ambitions, unwilling to move to the big city to acquire the fame that his mind desired.  He was, in spite of those ambitions, still living with his senile mother in a country house without electricity.

It was on an irascible, dry Kansas afternoon that a crowd gathered just a few mailboxes down from the Rutherford residence, his mother not among them.  In the front lot of an old general store, no less than twenty people gathered, mostly farmers, none of them older than fifty and none of them younger than fifteen.  The crowd had assembled for one thing, for the burial of Warren Ezekiel Rutherford, a stunt that Houdini himself had failed to navigate.  Warren, dressed in his best suit and top hat, saturated in dirt and the dust that floated in the air, began to speak from atop a wooden crate that had once contained sweet potatoes.

“I shall make not only your minds warp and twist in their attempts to understand my abilities, my resilience, and my cunning.  I shall warp too, the very rules that govern the universe as I survive being buried, under several tons of gravel, concrete, and fertile Kansas soil.  To reemerge, to be born again, as the greatest magician on the face of the Earth,” Warren proclamated from atop the crate.

The crowd didn’t make a sound sans the exclamations of a man who, without explanation, held a beer in one hand and an unopened container of treacle sugar in the other.

“Do it, we won’t miss you.”

Warren shrugged, “I can always count on the generosity and kindness of my fellow Kansans.”

There were audible laughs among the crowd, and, at least in Warren’s mind, some of them seemed to warble with traces of fondness.

With that, the act commenced as the sun reached its full force directly above and all the people leaned impatiently against their trucks or sat on the tailgates.  Warren leapt into a pine box, one that he had constructed himself due to lack of funding, and motioned for his assistant, a local boy who was certainly no older than 15, and who sported a freckled face and auburn hair.  The boy obliged, placing the top over the casket and sealing it shut with the nails and hammer that had been provided.  It took him some time, as he was not a working boy.

“Fill it in!”  Warren declared from inside the sealed coffin, and the boy motioned towards a half-dozen shovels that rested on the general store porch.

“You mean we gotta bury him ourselves?” Jerry Thompson, a husky farmer asked.

“It’s to get the audience involved,” the boy replied.

“I don’t want to get involved,” came the nasal voice of Helen, Jerry’s spindly wife.

“You never want to work,” Jerry replied.

“It’s so dusty out here,” Helen said with a groan.

The boy, not disgruntled, annoyed, or acknowledging the commentary floating in the air around him, took his shovel, and plunged it into the soft soil to begin the process.  He felt the bite of the impact on every thrust, and the sensation of the rough, wooden handle biting into the soft curtains of his palms.  The others, feeling guilty of the sight of the boy, joined in with the rest of the shovels.  Warren, The Great Ezekiel, was buried alive by the townspeople as the sky grew dark and the winds picked up.

There were no safety rigs, no string tethered through the heavy dirt connected to a cowbell, no signal, no recourse, no escape plan but for glory.  Minutes elapsed, and the townspeople began to murmur amongst themselves as the boy, stoic as he was inexperienced, remained completely quiet at the edge of the burial.  He believed in The Great Ezekiel, he had seen his work with the cards and the way the man could guess the thoughts of anyone in the audience.  A few feet of dirt could never hold such a man down, the boy thought.

“How long can someone breathe under there?” A voice asked.

“Hours.”

“Minutes,” Jerry said.

The boy paid them no mind, no interest, disregarding them in the way that a cow fixated on a loamy pile of hay would disregard the countless flies floating flippantly about its head.  As the time continued to float overhead, the boy’s gaze did not change.  He had no features of concern, and nothing but the utmost confidence in The Great Ezekiel.  The magician was, after all, the boy’s only chance at anything but sweating into old age in the fields owned by his father and his father’s father.

“What’s that?” Jerry asked, and the tone of his words snapped the boy from his reverie.

“Oh my God, it’s a dust devil,” declared Nelson Lawler in a raspy, sawhorse voice.

The boy turned around to see the source of the winds and the shade, and of the dust that had been floating about near that country store and gravel road.  It wasn’t a storm so much as it was a wall, a tsunami, some sort of great wave that never had to crash against the rocks as it flung itself along the flat Kansas ground.  It was miles away, but travelling at a pace that would set it upon them in a matter of minutes.  The voices, the ones that had once been so confident and patronizing, fell apart into a cacophony of fear.  Jerry ripped Helen up in his arms as the two fled through the crowd towards his old Dodge pickup, while Sarah Lee and the Lee sisters were the next to board their coupe and depart.  Even the farmers, who had seen so many such storms, soon fled towards their trucks as the noise of the storm rendered all else inaudible.

As the vehicles flicked on their lights and fled along the gravel road, the storm buffeted through the area with the outermost reach of its decimating mass.  The boy, however, did nothing.  He did not look up as the townspeople fled.  He did not move, even as the small particles of dust, charged by a wind unlike any he had ever felt, bit through his clothes and into his skin.  The boy, a devoted assistant, never moved.  He remained, his eyes fixed to the ground, to the same spot he had been staring at since The Great Ezekiel was buried.  The storm began to engulf the general store and the boy.

A hand appeared, thrust from the spot in the ground that the boy’s brown eyes had been locked onto for so long as the dust storm raged around him.  He was coughing, the boy, as the dust built up in his throat and in his lungs, but still, he gripped the hand and pulled with all his might until The Great Ezekiel emerged from the Kansas soil.

“I did it,” The Great Ezekiel said, his eyes and mouth unable to sense the difference between the ground he had clawed his way through and the dust storm that was drowning them.

“Not even Houdini could do that trick,” the boy said, his eyes squinted into slivers as the storm engulfed them.

The boy hunched over the Magician, his ears next to the Magician’s mouth so that he could hear his words.

“I am the greatest magician in America,” The Great Ezekiel declared, “we’re going to get out of this place, Daniel.  I promise you that.  We are going to get out of this place.”

“The greatest of all time,” the boy added, as their forms disintegrated in the dust and wind.

© 2021 Josh Poole