Linda Fuller-Smith
Once a professional ballet dancer, Linda Fuller-Smith now enjoys a more sedentary writers’ life. Currently at work on a book of poems related to the 1927 school bombing in Bath, Michigan that killed her grandmother’s sister, Linda was awarded the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award for Fiscal Year 2018. Her poems have been published in journals including Gyroscope Review, Caesura, Common Threads, and Botticelli.
The Duty of Coats
Bath, Michigan, May 18, 1927
The coats are alone
in the second-floor cloakroom.
Are they Galen’s? Iola’s?
Emma’s? Floyd’s? Plaster dust
clings to their lightweight
wools and twills and a step
outside their doorway
is a one-story drop. What little
remains of the classroom
floor hangs from a single
corner’s mooring. The rest,
along with three walls,
ceiling beams, desks,
lies like a jumble of giant
pick-up-sticks in Miss Weatherby’s
room below. Townsmen used
the butcher’s rope to raise
enough collapsed roof
to give light to the coats
hanging where they were hung
this morning by children
no longer needing their protection
from the chill spring air.
Allen McMullen Recalls Andrew Kehoe’s Gift
Bath, Michigan, 1927
I didn’t see Mr. Kehoe’s body after the explosion.
Guess there wasn’t much left to see.
My curiosity didn’t run that far.
We neighbored back and forth
four or five times, something like that.
I knew enough to keep a civil distance.
He was installing a lighting system for Mr. Witt.
I use to go up and look on. Sometimes he give me
a ride down home. One evening he says to me,
Have you any use for a horse?
I said I expect I could use one once in a while.
There is two horses tearing my barn down.
Come on over and get one, he says.
About a couple days after that he brought this horse over,
pulled a paper out of his pocket,
“Received one hundred twenty dollars in full payment
for one bay mare, ten years old, blind in left eye,
named Kit.” He says, You stick to that.
I didn’t pay him a cent—made up my mind
that I was probably going to get in trouble
in some way or form so I took the horse back.
He poured me some cider in his kitchen,
says, Al, you made a mistake
by not keeping that horse over there.
Why he should give me that horse?
He didn’t owe me nothing.
Wondered maybe he was thinking to off himself.
I seen a picture postcard a time later
showed them two charred horses
toppled like uprooted trees in the barn
he burnt. Heard he bound their legs
with baling wire so they couldn’t run off.
Reckon I should’ve kept that horse.
*Note: Much of this text is from Allen McMullen’s testimony
in the Inquest into the Cause of Death of Emery E. Huyck.
