The Many Fathers of Cody Caldwell

The Many Fathers of Cody Caldwell
 
Cody Caldwell had many fathers.
 
Almost none of them were good men. His mother had terrible taste in husbands and fathers.
 
His supposed birth father was John C. Colt, the brother of Samuel Colt of firearms fame. However it might well have been that Samuel was the father and paid his brother and his wife off to cover that up. John and Caroline Henshaw left New York City the night of his supposed death in a cell in New York City, never to be heard of again by polite society.
 
Cody Colt was born somewhere in Ohio, even his mother does not remember exactly where. Some trail west of Cleveland is as close as it gets. His mother and father kept moving throughout the Old Northwest, as it was then known through his youth. Cody has memories of the man his mother called his father John up until the age of 8. After that his father disappears. What Cody learned from him was precision, accuracy and sorrow.
 
His mother remarried to a man called Barnabas for a few years. Barnabas was a strong man, a meat packer from Chicago who had joined a new religious cult called the Church of the Latter Day Saints, he was also an abusive drunk who treated Cody and his mother like crap. He beat Cody regularly as well as his mother and eventually died in a tavern dispute that caused his mother to leave whatever-the-hell-was-that-town, Nauvoo? Rapidly. What Cody learned from him was disappointment, pain and anger.
 
After that Caroline married someone named Ichabod Caine, who took them to Memphis. All he remembers of Ichabod is cold damp hands reaching for him and his mother standing over Ichabod with a smoking pistol and tears in her eyes. What Cody learned from him was deceit, obsession and lying.
 
After that Caroline married a lettered man named Zacharias Hempler who was a mild mannered merchant in Saint Louis. Life was quiet for a while and Cody had a brief period of normal childhood until he returned to his home one day to his mother crying and Zacharias lying out bleeding over his register with a bullet hole in his head and the till missing. What Cody learned from him was confusion, futility and the pointlessness of life.
 
Caroline then married a farmer named Olsen who moved the family to Colorado and then Oregon. He disappeared one day, apparently in search of gold in one of the strikes common in the west at that time. Olsen seemed like a decent sort but whose eyes were constantly searching the horizon for who knows what. What Cody learned from him was the power of Illusion, dreams and desires.
 
Finally Caroline married a local preacher, Bartholomew Blackstone, he was as abusive as Barnabas was and strapped Cody repeatedly for any perceived shortcomings of faith and obedience. When his mother tried to intercede on day Cody rose up to defend her, which angered Barnabas, oh wait, Bartholomew, even more and he did not stop beating the boy until Caroline found her pistol and shot him dead. She comforted Cody, calling him a good boy and he bleed out dying, his last words were “I am glad I could save you maw!” And then he closed his eyes and passed away.
 
Caroline stayed on the land she had settled on in Oregon however Cody had not saved her. Somewhere in their travels Caroline had contracted syphilis which had become terminal due to the stresses of her treatment by Bartholomew. She would soon join her son in the cold, damp earth of Oregon.
 
Two thousand miles away, several months prior, in the town of Hartford, Connecticut upon graduating from Cheshire Academy one Samuel Caldwell Colt became curious about his father and mother and used his resources to track them down. Samuel was raised thinking his father was John C. Colt and that Samuel Colt was his uncle and Caroline Henshaw was his mother. That last part was true at least. He followed their travels and learned their stories before arriving in Salem a month or so after Cody’s death.
 
He came upon his mother while she was beginning the final, terrible stages of her disease, her mind increasingly wandered. Cared for by the nuns of a local hospice Samuel visited her frequently and she told him the story of her life and that of her many husbands and poor Cody as well. She even confused him with Cody and started calling Samuel that before the end, convinced he had somehow survived and grown up into the fine young man who sat and listened to her tales. Samuel paid for her expenses as well as the funeral, which was but sparsely attended. He then took his leave of the townl However he had learned something from his mother, that John was not his father, instead she claimed Samuel Colt was and she had a marriage certificate to confirm this. Later he would use this to ensure receiving a proper inheritance from his actual father when he passed the following year, although he was never ever actually able to confirm whom his father was or was not.

By this time it had ceased to matter.
 
What Samuel Colt, his true father, taught him was the importance of appearances, doing something that mattered and thinking about things in new ways. No longer truly welcome in Connecticut and with the name Samuel behind him he changed his name to Carlton James Colt and moved on
 
However, now war was stirring and there would be two more father figures in Cody’s life, although not the Cody now long buried in a small church cemetery in Salem Oregon.
 
After Second Bull Run and other battles Lt. Carlton James Colt would come into contact with Jasper Curtis and Grenville M. Dodge and he would need a new cover identity in order to spy on the Confederates from within and so "Cody Caldwell, the Conjuror" was born. From Grenville Cody learned decisiveness, discernment and fortitude and from Jasper he learned how to take all those terrible things he had learned before, how to control them, how to manipulate them, how to use smoke and mirrors and people’s own desires to mask them from the terrible realities of the world and then how to use doing so in such a way as to make this life his own what he desired it and to find some meaning in a world now utter and completely devoid of any such thing.