Circumstantial Reaper

  

--Simo Häyhä, read about him once, a stone-cold killer in the old style. A farm boy during the years between wars, hunted deer and such. Joined the military, trained as a sniper. Russia crosses into Finland and in the snowy wastes of a forest in the dead of winter Simo waits for them, camouflaged in white, belly to belly with the cold. The Russians weren’t camouflaged so were easy to spot; he favored an iron crosshairs, no glass sight, no glint of reflected sunlight, so blended well with the surroundings; dozens took bullets through the head and gut and lung and heart. These invaders were deer of a sort and he felled them daily for weeks on end. The nickname they gave him, either the Russians or his compatriots: “The White Death.” The White Death once a farm boy, dug in, picking off poor souls foolish enough to cross his people’s border. This detail remains, so I’ll mention it: a key trick of his technique was to pack his mouth full of snow, to chill it, lower the temperature of breath as it left him; breath-plumes would be a fatal tell; would out his hiding place; Russian snipers would aim for the breath. Usually I’d make a turn here into metaphor. This time around I’ll let it sit. Kill accountants figure the man took upwards of five hundred lives in a few short months…buried a village’s worth of Russian man-children and made a national hero for it. He would’ve taken more of them if an exploding bullet hadn’t removed half his face. The face was repaired; it healed; disfigured for the remainder of a very long life. What’s the appeal? Why retell it? The White Death at the end of his life pushed around in a wheelchair, by a cranky staffer, in a nursing home. Memory tells me he lived to be a hundred; lived a year or so beyond that until time finally decided it didn’t want him. He loved his wife, let’s pretend. They fucked with tender intent and sired four honest children. The kids remain, two still exist, and then they don’t, even now as I write of them.