Uncle River - My Stolen SabreUNCLE RIVER
My Stolen Sabre




Uncle River describes himself as a writer of cultural science fiction: "Trained 
in Jungian Analysis and holding what he believes to be the world's only earned 
Ph.D. in Psychology of the Unconscious (Union Institute, 1974), Uncle River has 
lived as a hermit/writer in the mountain Southwest for the past twenty years. In 
1972-73, while studying Jungian analysis in Zurich, I sent some writings to 
friends in Oklahoma that I whimsically signed Uncle River. When I next visited 
Oklahoma in 1975,1 found myself known as Uncle River, the writer." You can find 
out a great deal more about him in a fascinating interview with him by Don Webb 
(cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/cpaod6/6river.html), who says Uncle River "has 
written and directed plays with magical remanifestations both light and dark. He 
has spoken with men who ballast their boats with gold. He has seen Carl Jung's 
pants and worked on building a pyramid." And "he writes about the most basic 
problems of social justice in his own magazine Xizquil and in columns elsewhere, 
yet the magazine (as well as his own writings) is full of surrealism and 
speculative fiction." He has published one novel, Thunder Mountain, much poetry, 
and some short fiction.
"My Stolen Sabre," a fantasy story about a sword, appeared in Asimov's, the sort 
of unusual fantasy one sometimes finds in that SF magazine, and is a tale of 
ancient and mythic powers. It is told with wit and style.



My sabre… well, I thought of it as that for over thirty years…was asleep at the 
time that it was stolen.
My sabre acquired its particular personality as a Power Being, early in its 
corporeal existence, during the most-violent (so far) trauma of the United 
States of America as a Nation. At the time, the sabre was the prize possession 
of Cavalry Lieutenant Jereboam Starr, a dirt farmer, who happened to own the 
Devil's own stallion, and who had relatives in both the Cherokee National Jail 
in Tahlequah, Indian Nation Territory, and the English House of Lords. The 
latter, and the fact that Lieutenant Starr was literate (in both English and 
Cherokee) was why he received an officer's commission. Well, the horse didn't 
hurt. It was wartime.
Jereboam Starr's fancy British relatives did not know he existed. He could have 
proved the lineage, but had neither reason nor means to make any point of it to 
people he didn't know and didn't expect to. Locally, well—the regiment's 
colonel, who recruited Jereboam, was a relative too… and knew about the horse.
The sabre came to initial awareness in the realization that the Nation which had 
killed Jereboam's maternal grandmother on the Trail of Tears and pretty well 
broke Grandpa's heart, was having a big-time trauma. This wasn't just a fight. 
This was a crack in the Nation's soul! Flat-out weird, from Jereboam's view, 
when you considered what Nation. Now, the sabre, becoming self-aware, did not 
think of itself as Cherokee, nor Southern, nor American, nor human at all. But 
being in circumstances to acquire an identity… well, you know who you know to 
know yourself by.
Jereboam and the sabre and the horse cracked skulls, smashed shoulders, and 
generally kicked ass off and on for four years. They got knocked down a time or 
three too. Jereboam, the sabre… and the stallion… survived the war. Eventually, 
the side they were fighting for lost. Jereboam went back to the farm. The 
stallion went back to causing runaway wagons and related mayhem all over 
Tahlequah every time Jereboam rode that Devil-spawn to town for twenty-three 
years.
The horse also hated skunks and snakes. That stallion was fast. The snakes ended 
up red-wolf-bait. But the horse was also stupid. He never caught on to the 
skunks' range. They usually got away before he stopped sneezing. They nearly 
always got him first even when he did get them too. You'd think a horse that had 
been around that much gunfire would catch on to the concept of range. But, oh 
no!
Jereboam never would name the horse… unless "Damn You!" counts, as in, "Whoa, 
Damn You!" Probably not. The horse certainly didn't pay any heed. Jereboam never 
named the sabre either. The sabre woke up anyhow, in the aroma of blood, sweat, 
and powder, but to the poignant flavor of cracked souls.
Jereboam never married, and never lived with any of his children, though he 
acknowledged all he knew about, including a couple of maybes. He out-lived the 
God-damned horse and settled to a tranquil old age with a tranquil mule that 
worked hard and willing a good six or seven hours a week, and with a still. He 
lived long enough to buy an automobile. But he didn't like it. It was kind of 
fun to drive, and he was smarter than that sneaky arm-breaking crank every 
sumbitchin' time even if he was a slow old geezer by then. But the fumes ruined 
the flavor of the whiskey. His customers agreed. "Hell with it," Jereboam said. 
"When I get too old to tend the mule, the customers can come to me. If they're 
too old, they can send a grandkid."
It was a warm spring afternoon in 1927 when Jereboam fell asleep on the porch in 
his ratty easy chair while watching the chickens eat ticks and the hawks eat 
chickens, and didn't wake up. Jereboam's grandson, Benson Catron, found the 
sabre, hung it in his tool shed, and gave it to his boy, Ben, Jr., for a tenth 
birthday present, three years later.
Ben, Jr., didn't remember his Great-Grandpa Starr very well, but he did pull out 
the sabre and wave it around every now and again, sometimes even from horseback. 
He also brought it with him when he married Emalee Salt and they moved into a 
room they weathered in on the side of Emalee's grandma's barn, the last of 
November, 1941.
It never even occurred to Ben, Jr., not to enlist so soon after marrying on 
hearing of the Declaration of War, following Pearl Harbor. He was somewhat 
embarrassed to learn, though, that his and Emalee's two months in the snug, 
hay-aromatic room on the side of Emalee's grandma's barn had not sufficed to 
seed a son to come home to. He promised Emalee (in English, letters in Cherokee 
never getting past wartime censors, who didn't know what the language was) to 
remedy this failing as soon as he got home… from wherever he was, which the 
letters didn't say, another wartime precaution. The letters stopped coming in 
late '43. Out of respect (and a lack of suitable prospects), Emalee waited till 
after the war ended to remarry. By then, no one quite remembered what the sabre 
was all about. But it obviously deserved some sort of respect. Emalee gave it to 
the Aximanda Fire-Baptized Holiness Church rummage sale.
Rev. Pice spotted the sabre while encouraging the ladies setting up goods 
(including many freshly home-baked) for the rummage sale. Among the church 
ladies that day was Myrna Gouldin, who told the preacher that her boy, Jimmy, 
was heading up to Chicago for a factory job. A preacher looks out for his flock. 
Rev. Pice figured that sabre would help Jimmy keep his Spirit up among so many 
Damnyankees. (Rev. Pice grew up in Georgia. When he accepted the Call at the 
Aximanda Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, one of his new congregation, Leonard 
Dalton, asked him, "How old were you when you learned 'Damn Yankee' is two 
words?" Rev. Pice replied, "Is it?" He knew he'd feel right at home.)
Rev. Pice bought the sabre himself for three dollars and a quarter, and 
presented it to Jimmy Gouldin with a fervent prayer for protection among the 
Heathen… a somewhat mixed metaphor, Jimmy having Cherokee, Dutch, Creek, and 
English in his ancestry, in about equal measure. But so it goes.
The sabre never made it to Chicago. Jimmy's car broke down in Springfield 
(Illinois, not Missouri). Jimmy sold the sabre to a tourist in front of Abe 
Lincoln's house—along with an assortment of suitable instructional narrative 
incantations. Jimmy didn't really give a damn which side the tourist was on, but 
did regard proper handling of a Power Being as a duty.
Jimmy went on to Chicago, where he made enough money to bring his family up a 
year later, and they all lived well-fed and miserable ever after.
The tourist didn't get it. He didn't know that the incantations were for 
anything. He thought Jimmy was just embellishing his sales price with folk 
tales. Charming, but insignificant. He kind of admired the artistry of Jimmy's 
pitch though. Parted with a whole seven and a half bucks for the sabre.
The tourist may not have noticed the sabre as a Power Being, but the sabre 
noticed… Cracked souls. No soul! The sabre found the tourist (who from the 
sabre's point of view had no name) weird.
The tourist eventually hung the sabre on the wall of a room with a miscellany of 
other souvenirs, in his house in suburban Philadelphia, where he lived with a 
wife, 3.7 baby booming rug rats, and a psychotic live-in Negro (to use the term 
of the times) maid who muttered to herself in fluent Greek and Latin. (Well, if 
you were fluent in Greek and Latin and could only find a job as a maid, mightn't 
you go nuts too?) The tourist was rich enough to have a house with more rooms 
than he needed… with central heat on in all of them. People used the souvenir 
room erratically, and more to store stuff in than to do anything in.
The sabre contemplated how its current condition differed from Ben Catron, Sr.'s 
tool shed. It concluded that old Jereboam had done a more thorough job braining 
Yankees than he realized.
Later, the sabre changed this opinion.
The tourist acquired miscellaneous stuff for several more years, until sheer 
quantity of acquisition turned treasures to clutter. Among those items disposed 
of was the sabre. At least someone would pay five bucks for the damn thing at 
the Saint Robert the Munificent parish rummage sale, which, unlike the Aximanda 
Fire-Baptized Holiness rummage sale, was not conducted to raise money for the 
church, but for the local suburban Philadelphia chapter of the Busy Bee Do-Good 
Philanthropic Society.
The sabre felt like it had come home: Turned out you didn't have to be Cherokee 
or Southern to have a cracked soul. What possessed Jim and Jeannie Parkins to 
settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a quirk of the Commonwealth's liquor 
laws. They were, anyhow, both Yankees. Jim was twenty-nine at the time. Jeannie 
was fifteen. They carried a copy of their wedding certificate with them, as well 
as a copy of the Massachusetts statute that permitted an underage wife to be 
served alcoholic beverages in public establishments in company of her husband. 
Jim bought the sabre because he had five bucks, and figured he could get ten for 
it.
He was right. That's how much I paid him, in his crafts and whatever shop in the 
basement of the Pacifist Store, in Harvard Square in 1965. It was my friend, 
Mark, who I'd met at Herbert Marcuse's home when we were in high school (when 
Kennedy was president, and before Marcuse moved to California or the New Left 
was invented for him to be elder philosopher to), who spotted the sabre and 
recognized it as Civil War vintage. ("War Between the States" was terminology 
not then current in Harvard Square. When, during the presidential campaign of 
1976, I asked people if they noticed that Jimmy Carter used that phrase rather 
than "Civil War" every Southerner I asked had noticed; not a single Northerner 
had.) Neither Mark nor I thought, in 1965, that there was any incongruity in 
finding such an implement as a Civil War cavalry sabre in the Pacifist Store.
Though it assisted me in occasional protective ceremonies over the years (and 
no, I will not tell you what incantations I used), I only actually employed the 
sabre as a physical weapon once. I was a senior in the most-experimental 
accredited college in the United States, in the scenic hills of 1969-psychedelic 
Vermont, settling into November and the customary months of frozen Hell to come. 
I had a nine A.M. class three days a week and taught a class (on C.G. Jung's 
work on alchemy) at ten on a fourth day.
This was 1969, an era when American economic genius had produced college 
dormitories with really thin, flimsy walls just at the time when really loud 
stereo systems became mass-affordable… not to mention the rest of what went on 
in 1969. Academic policy at this college effectively allowed students to do any 
damn thing they pleased, or nothing at all, for about two years; but you didn't 
get to be a senior unless you credibly studied something. The college actually 
had about an equal reputation for capable, creative graduates and for loony-tune 
students, but dormitory demographics did not make life easy for a studious 
senior who kept early hours. Not only that, but the campus coffee shop jukebox 
was directly below me. The coffee shop was open whatever hours someone was 
willing to tend it.
One night, at three A.M., I had had it! They wouldn't shut the jukebox off. They 
wouldn't even keep it down. After my third or fourth increasingly raving descent 
to ask for some QUIET, I charged down and pulled the plug. The coffee shop 
patrons plugged the jukebox back in. Several grinned. I suppose I was a pretty 
good show.
I didn't see it that way. After another few minutes in bed, an attempt more due 
to confusion as to what else to do than any hope of sleep, I got up yet once 
more, long hair a-fly. Wild-eyed, not to mention a bit blurry-eyed without my 
customary glasses, wearing just a knee-length blue-checked robe belted on (I 
slept naked), I grabbed the sabre, and stormed down the flight of stairs to the 
basement where the coffee shop was, yet once more.
… And realized that if I drew the sabre, nearly four feet long including its 
hilt, in that relatively small space with twenty or so 1969-experimental 
college-three-A.M. spaced people all around, someone was liable to get hurt.
So I hefted the sabre, sheath and all, and smashed the jukebox's thick glass top 
with the hilt. This did not stop the music. But after that, someone did shut it 
off.
A day or so later, I ran into the man who was in charge of supplies and 
equipment for the campus kitchen and coffee shop. He asked me why I'd smashed 
the jukebox. I told him.
Twenty-seven years later, I finally got up my nerve to ask my father if the 
college had sent him a bill for the jukebox. When I brought up the incident, he 
knew instantly what I was talking about. The college had not sent him a bill.
Less than another year later, on returning home from my father's eightieth 
birthday bash to my hermitage in a remote canyon on the old Outlaw Trail on the 
Arizona-New Mexico line, I found the sabre gone.


The sabre woke up. It did this every so often. It recognized a discontinuity. 
Not only was I not around (as sometimes happened for months at a time in the 
thirty-two years I had had the sabre), but someone else was. Was this like when 
old Jereboam croaked with his chickens? Or when Ben C., Jr., went off to the war 
and didn't come back? Or when Jimmy G.'s car broke down in that sleepy little 
Yankee political hotbed?
Well, no. I wasn't dead, and I didn't sell the sabre or give it to any church's 
rummage sale. Though it could have understood the concept: to steal, theft as 
means of transfer was only incidentally significant to its current position. I 
might wonder if it had somehow failed to protect me that it could be stolen. But 
it didn't see things that way. My opinion on the subject regardless, it was not 
my Power Being. It was a Power Being that lived with me for a period, whose 
essential quality intermingled with a certain part of my life.
Now… Cracked souls (not to mention skulls). No soul. The sabre had experienced 
these in the span of its corporeal existence, as well as a measure of 
tranquillity, or at least placidity. (It wasn't around the Aximanda 
Fire-Baptized Holiness Church long enough to encounter some doings that might 
have added to its repertoire, but that's another story.)
Cracked soul. No soul. Cherokee. Southerner. Yankee. What now?… Perhaps, lost 
soul? What would you call the proprietor of the Antiques and Collectibles Mall 
Emporium of suburban Phoenix?
The sabre looked around. Junk. Kitsch. Household miscellany that would have been 
familiar to old Jereboam… And several other Power Beings: A two-hundred-year-old 
squash-blossom silver and turquoise necklace. A similarly venerable samovar 
(also silver) that a rabbi's widow had carried from Odessa (Russia, not Texas) 
about the time Jereboam finally burned the three-days-gone and already maggoty 
carcass of that damned horse of his. A pair of gold-rimmed goblets whose 
original owner was a seventeenth-century French alchemist, who employed the 
goblets to share wine with his partner in the philosophical quest, before they 
retired to their laboratory-bedchamber. From the sabre's point of view, the 
presence of others of its own kind was far more noteworthy than my absence, or 
what other human might have replaced me.
It was the goblets that helped the sabre readjust.
The goblets had been seized by the Crown at the time of the alchemist's 
conviction (in absentia) for heresy and sodomy, and his abrupt departure for the 
colonies, where he eventually learned distillation techniques for seven 
different perfectly hideous deadly poisons at that time unknown in France, but 
died himself of gangrene due to tissue necrosis following an apparently minor 
scorpion sting, before achieving vengeance.
Being delicate, a significant portion of the goblets' identity as Power Beings 
derived from their having survived the vicissitudes of corporeal existence so 
long at all, including being stolen twice, and surviving through the chaotic 
time of the French Revolution.
When you get several Power Beings newly together in one place, they are liable 
to get talking to each other. After all, most of us will introduce ourselves to 
new acquaintances. All the more, being as old Jereboam Starr's sabre, the 
alchemist's goblets, the rabbi's widow's samovar, and the squash blossom 
necklace didn't none of them feel comfortable with the situation a'tall. Here 
they were ready and primed to dispense thunderbolts and philosophical elixirs, 
and no one around them knew how to tell a Power Being from a mouse turd. Well, 
they'd all been around the soul-dead before. But this present situation was even 
more irritating because there was another Power Being on the premises, utterly 
unrecognized as such though called on continually… which Power Being itself had 
about as much coherent consciousness as, say, your average two-year-old 
Devil-stallion.
"Cheezus Q. Rastaman!" exclaimed Antiques and Collectibles Mall Emporium 
proprietor Gorman Wiegland, grey sideburns slick, his silk Western-style shirt 
sweat-stained at the armpits and stretched tight over his beer gut, "this 
[inarticulate growl] computer! Sumbitch done crashed the whole frumbuggerin 
inventory again!"
"Hey, you twit!," snarled the sabre.
"Wazzat?!" Gorman jumped around in his osteopathically designed computer chair. 
How did a customer get in the store without the door bleeper bleeping? But no 
customer was there! Gorman turned back around, shivering with what he thought 
was mere rage, though several present could have told him, had he been mentally 
disposed to take note, that it was the resonance of proximity to wakeful Power 
Beings. "You got me hearing things, Damn You!" he shouted, shaking his fist at 
the computer.
Jereboam's stallion, equally unimpressed by such imprecations, at least had 
behaved in such a manner as to keep Jereboam in shape. The computer merely 
beeped and flashed the repeated message: ERROR. FILE OR DIRECTORY NOT FOUND.
"Wake up, you twit!" the sabre hissed.
"Who, me?" the computer answered.
Antiques and Collectibles Mall Emporium proprietor Gorman Wiegland leaped back, 
spun around. He was losing it! Well, he knew how to fix that. Mr. Daniels and 
Mr. Busch had just the cure. Gorman rummaged purposefully. As it happened, the 
medicine he found first was a bottle of mescal. He downed what was in it on the 
spot, about a pint, worm and all. Saw God and the Devil in six shades of dayglo 
technicolor.
While our intrepid Mall Emporium proprietor was occupied with what he might have 
thought of as maintenance of his mental stability, if he had thought to think at 
all, the goblets gave the sabre a bit of elder-comradely advice: "Go easy. We 
didn't survive the French Revolution (not to mention the heresy trial) pushing 
lost souls over the edge."
"But that nitwit needs to wake up!" The sabre nodded (or would have, if it had 
been equipped with relevant anatomy; the goblets understood the implicit 
gesture) at the computer.
"No such luck, sweetheart," the goblets purred (they found the sabre's militant 
demeanor delicious, if dangerous). "What the nit's got to do is grow up."
The samovar and the necklace got a chuckle out of that. Both had been around 
enough to recognize the goblets' reference to nits as baby lice.
The sabre understood the goblets' somewhat archaic word play too, but the sabre 
did not so readily recognize what the goblets referred to in modern context. The 
sabre had been so isolated for so long.
You see, though I did have a computer, I didn't have a phone in my canyon 
hermitage on the old Outlaw Trail. No phone. No modem. No Net. No e-mail. You 
get the picture. (No lice either, thank God, only squirrels, skunks, flies and 
an occasional bear for company.)
The sabre, stimulated in its new, big city environment, excited, after a century 
and a half, to encounter even one, let alone so many, other Beings of its own 
kind, had not yet noticed the way in which the Mall Emporium proprietor's 
computer being hooked in with a lot of others played so significant a part in 
the computer being a Power Being at all.
Now the sabre looked, past the mercifully somnolent, reeking body of Gorman 
Wiegland, to the obliviously flashing computer screen.
The sabre actually relished the prospect of pushing such souls as Gorman 
Wiegland over any edge handy. The more the merrier. But it did have an interest 
in the continued well-being of its new-found companions of its own kind.
What to make of the goblets' dual personality, with nuances ambiguous and 
unfamiliar to the sabre? Seriously risky or delectably risque? The goblets 
seemed to mean both. What the hell?
"Wake up, you nitwit!" the sabre hollered.
"Huh?" the computer replied—not stupid, mind you, but distracted.
"It already has," the goblets smiled (as it were). "A little patience, darling." 
(The goblets knew a good deal more of personalities like the sabre than vice 
versa.) "The nit will grow up, and then these bald-assed monkeys are going to 
have one whale of a case of brain lice!"
"Huh!" said the sabre, comprehension crystallizing to the analogue of a smile in 
the general direction of the all-but-comatose Gorman Wiegland. A smile to thrill 
the goblets as much as to terrify. "Maybe old Jereboam was doing those Yankees a 
favor."
Cavalry Lieutenant Jereboam Starr had known a trick or two that often worked on 
distracted troops (if rarely with his horse). The sabre turned to the computer 
once more and roared: "Look alive!"






proofed by Erky /// 24-08-2004