omens for men: franklin pierce #14 (1853-1857)

by Wesley R. Bishop

Pierce prayed for a sign as the train pulled from the station, bound for Washington, smoke curling like incense from a funeral thurible. He asked what his presidency would bring—and the answer came sharp and immediate: screeching metal, a snapped rail, the small body of his son thrown from the wreck like a warning flare. “What does it mean?” he whispered into the cold. “More sacrifice? More faith? More compromise?” But no voice answered. The sands beneath the Capitol’s columns ran thin, built as they were atop an hourglass, not a foundation. The nation, too, was a train—lurching, rattling, driven by momentum no hand could brake. “Help me understand,” Pierce begged, but the train only sped faster, and from its windows he saw his boy again, laughing among ghosts not yet dead, faces contorted in glee and doom. Clay’s old scales shattered behind him, Southern clouds boiled over verandas, and Pierce could only exhale as steel and prophecy impaled the century.

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