WARNING: This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. Contains graphic gay male sex, reluctance, anal sex, nongraphic violence, and gay love all of which may be considered offensive by some readers.
All sexually active characters in this work are at least 18 years of age.
This book is copyright © Dirk Hessian
Published by BarbarianSpy in 2011
Published by BarbarianSpy at Smashwords
Cover design © S Bush 2011
Cover image: © Les3photo8 | Dreamstime.com
ISBN E-book: 978-1-921879-66-1
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All characters in this book are the product of the author’s imagination and no resemblance to real people, or implication of events occurring in actual places, is intended.
Not all books listed below may currently be on release.
BOOKS BY DIRK HESSIAN
Blue and Gray
Colonel’s Treasure
Beginning of Time
Prophecy of Noto
The King’s Men
Labyrinth
BOOKS BY HABU
The Handyman
Grab Bag
Cairo Surrender
Fetish Galore!
Homeward Bound
Journey to Mirage
Choke Hold
Sporting Life
BOOKS BY SHABBU
Dirty Pool
Operation Black Jade
Yap, Yap
Cigars!
Angel in the Barn
Gayly Complicated
Despoiling David
The Tree of Idleness
Rough Road to Happiness
I Met a Man
The Interview
BOOKS BY SABB
The Legend of Holleystone Grange
Surprise Encounters
She is He
Wrong Man
Loyal to his King
Barbarian Tales - Book One - Traveler’s Tales
Barbarian Tales - Book Two - Journeys Begin
Barbarian Tales - Book Three - The Inheritance
Barbarian Tales - Book Four - Road to Persepolis
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Blue and Gray
Dirk Hessian
Chapter One
Able Jenkins didn’t have to go to war. That southerners wanted their own country and wanted to keep darkies as slaves was no skin off his nose. He was exempt from being conscripted as well and had no truck with darkies. He’d rarely even seen one. And yet, as far as Able could remember it, it was a darkie by the name of Jeremiah that led to Able going to war.
Darkies weren’t a problem in the Pennsylvania town of Hamburg in the early 1850s; there weren’t any there that Able could recollect. And they weren’t the reason that Able left Hamburg. It was because of Germans that Able first learned of the petty and mean side of his father. But it wasn’t because of all Germans; only the new ones.
Adam Jenkins owned and ran the small town’s general emporium, and he’d always had a reputation as a pleasant and helpful man and, more important perhaps in an area dominated by Amish and Quakers, an upstanding and righteous man. Although it wasn’t all that apparent to others, to Adam’s family that all started to change because of political strife in the German revolutions of 1848 and the refugees fleeing to the United States. Those who arrived with this influx were known as the Forty-Eighters, and they were unlike the German immigrants in years previous in that they didn’t diffuse in Pennsylvania when they arrived. They formed unitary communities, communities that sought self-sustainment, communities that created their own schools and networks and, most damning, communities that wanted to have their own stores.
Adam Jenkins’s store began losing some of its German-ancestry patrons because even the Amish began to be drawn by their “own kind.” Slowly the new German immigrants were buying up the farms around eastern Pennsylvania. Adam Jenkins’s business was dwindling and he started talking about moving west. He talked more and more of the Horace Greeley “go west young man” spirit.
There was little likelihood that Adam himself would remove his family to the less-civilized and populated western sector of the state even as many others in Hamburg were doing. Whenever he mentioned the possibility, he would end with the observation that it might be something he would have done if he was younger. However, his son, Able, was younger. So, in the end, perhaps it was all Adam’s fault that Able ended up going to war when he didn’t have to.
The petty streak in Adam showed in his starting to call in the credit he had extended to German families living around Hamburg—even ones who had been rooted there before Adam’s family arrived. He did this out of spite as punishment to those who were shunning his store and buying only from German merchants. That this drove customers that he still had right to the German folds he was railing against didn’t seem to occur to him. The mean streak, however, concentrated on a particular friendship his son, Able, was forming that flew in the face of the losing battle Adam was fighting.
“I don’t care if he is teaching you more about boxing than anyone else, son, I don’t want to hear you’ve been with that Wasser man again. You can surely find friends more your age. He is a rotten apple, that one is. And he is too old to be someone you should be carousing around with.”
“No one my own age can help me like Heinz can, Papa. You yourself encouraged me to take up the boxing. You said it would make a man out of me. And you don’t know anything about Heinz—other than he is one of the new Germans. There’s nothing rotten about him. He is a fine man.”
“You are from the town; he is from the farm. And he can hardly speak English yet. My customers do not like the thought of you mixing with his kind.”
“He speaks English just fine, Papa—and he learns more each day. He’s clever. But when you speak of “his kind,” you just mean that he is a new German, Papa. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that all you have against him?”