Survival Fugue
Somerset, Pennsylvania
i.
Before the Nicely brothers hung
side by side on the double gallows
in the jailhouse on East Union street,
David pleaded with Sheriff McMillan
bargaining for pardon, or at least life in prison,
offering in exchange some piece of information
on Umberger’s murder. A man in a cage
can play nice when life is on the line.
The will to survive is a wild west gunslinger,
the worse the chances, the more clear-headed,
the more dangerous his trigger finger,
which may suffice under circumstances
until the trap opens, the dull thud sounds twice.
ii.
Before their forty bodies atomized
in a fireball of defiant glory,
that terrible slam into the lair
of two old dragons silent over
scarred fields of waving grass,
they food-cart rammed the cockpit door!
With hunters turned into the hunted
at the posse roll-call let’s roll,
sounds of screams and breaking glass,
the torturous route of 93
ended in an upside-down dive
into the Somerset countryside,
all its hostile options spent,
as too any thoughts of survival
paling beside the sacrifice
called to foil such evil intent.
iii.
Before the fourth evening went,
nine men down in the flooded mine
willing survival in a pocket of air
pumped from the surface through a six-inch shaft,
pipe-clanged hope through thick pitch black.
Minutes turned hours turned battering despair
with the ram of ingenuity and grit,
heroes above drilled through smothering rock
a birth canal with a stubborn bit,
and nine men from the watery tomb
were yellow-cage carried up and delivered,
gulping in the fresh cold air,
faces Wild Bill Hickok etched
having laid down their Dead Man’s Hand,
alive to see the sunrise cast
a silhouette over Somerset town,
the pale sky crossed with vapor trails,
the first cars passing quietly by
Historic Somerset County Jail.
NOTES
A fugue in music is a structure which introduces imitative parts at staggered intervals creating an intricate harmonic whole. I like Stephen Johnson’s elaboration: a substantial piece in which the subject, countersubject, plus all the contracted, stretched and bent versions of both, plus the tail-pieces, are combined and recombined, in a regular, carefully contrasted formal scheme, to create a dynamic texture in which each voice is ‘first amongst equals’: each part formed from the same basic material, yet each making its own independent contribution to the musical argument (from https://www.classical-music.com/features/articles/what-fugue/).
1-Historic Somerset County Jail has a unique double-hanging chamber in which the Nicely brothers were hanged for the murder of Herman Umberger in 1891.
2-See the letter David Nicely wrote to Sheriff R.S. McMillan pleading for a deal at https://www.tribdem.com/news/19th-century-killer-s-letter-found-donated-to-somerset-county/article_294c767a-b8a0-11e9-adde-5be5bb5c67e7.html
3-On the infamous day September 11, 2001 one of the four hijacked planes by al-Qaeda terrorists crashed 14 miles outside of Somerset into a grassy field that had once been a strip mine operation (with its two massive dragline excavators abandoned on the property). Flight 93 was brought down by the heroics of the passengers who, upon learning of the fate of the other hijacked planes, banded together to breach the cockpit and thwart the mission of the terrorists, encouraged by Todd Beam’s iconic cry “let’s roll!”. 40 innocent people were killed in the crash.
4-Read the cockpit recorder transcript of the last 27 minutes of Flight 93 here: https://www.nps.gov/flni/learn/historyculture/cockpit-voice-recorder-transcript.htm
5-Nine miners were trapped for 77 hours in a flooded tunnel of Quecreek Mine five miles outside of Somerset from July 24 to July 28 2002. Read about the dramatic rescue story here in which all nine miners were successfully rescued: https://www.pennlive.com/life/2019/07/nine-for-nine-the-quecreek-mine-rescue-in-2002.html
6-Wild Bill Hickok was one of the most renowned gunfighters of the American West. Having been victorious in many a duel, his luck ran out during a poker game in South Dakota in 1876, where he was shot in the back of the head by a fellow gambler while purportedly holding in his hands two black aces and two black eights, a combination called the Dead Man’s Hand.