Shadows of Glory

by Ralph Peters

  And cold. Now, I am not indulgent in my comforts, though I welcome a warm bed and ready meals. Nor am I unfamiliar with the winter, for the hills of Wales that bred me do not coddle. Yet this was cold to freeze forgotten parts. No Indus heat or sun of Punjab here. It was a very Russia of a place, if what I hear of Russia is half true. I sought to keep my shivering to myself, and sank into my greatcoat. For the truth is the typhoid had left me weakened.

  I envied the sheriff’s red hands, happy on the reins. My world felt hopeless drear.

  There was melancholy, and I succumbed to it. Longing for wife and child and warmth I was, and wishing away my charge as a shirker will. What man would seem heroic, or virtuous, if we knew his private thoughts?

  Sudden as a child’s fear, a black form loomed before us. We had heard no sound. Yet there he was. Gathered like a ghost from shrouds of fog.

  A horseman, coming on at a canter.

  Perhaps I was too given to my dreaming, but the surprise of him made my heart jump. He pranced up beside us, great cape snapping out. His horse, if I may judge, was not so fine as his clothing wished itself. I saw a bearded smear of face set deep, shadowed by a broad hat of the sort artistics wear. His eyes were icy as the day itself.

  Yet he was mortal, and seemed no menace, after all.

  “A bracing afternoon, Sheriff,” the rider called out.

  I have an ear, see. It comes out of the Welshman’s love of song. I can place a man by the music of his talk. And I picked out the rider as one of those Irishmen who strain to speak like an English gentleman. Worst of both worlds, you might say, if you were in a hard mood. He summed a lifetime’s longing in four words.

  The sheriff muttered half a greeting, and the lead horse gave his tail a be-gone flick. The rider faded toward the town and the hooves of our team crunched in steady rhythm. The horseman might as well have been a ghost.

  “Fellow just went past?” Underwood said abruptly. “Calls himself ‘the Great Kildare.’” He grunted. “‘Great Bamboozler’ would be more like it. Professor of a dozen kinds of nonsense. So he claims. ‘Science of Mesmerism, Egyptology, and Spiritualist Phenomena.’ Figure that out.”

  He applied the whip to keep the team from slackening and scratched a crimson ear. Frost had formed on his mustache ends. “Took a rent on the Kyle place. Down toward the Steuben County line. Might as well be on the moon, it’s so far to the back of nowhere. Worthless soil. All high and barren. But who knows what a fellow like that has in his head? Not here to plant corn, don’t I know it? So we keep an eye on him. Though there’s no warrant out on him in New York State. Bill Remer did tell me that much.” He shifted and possessed a bit more of the seat. “I warned you about those damned-fool types that drift up here. All spooks and hobgoblins. And damn me if honest folk don’t take ’em serious. Must be something in the air.”

  The only thing I felt in the air was cold.

  And then grace struck. The road crested, and the fog and cloud fell behind us at the turn of a wheel. Twas as if we had pierced a wall.

  There was beauty.

  Now I have seen the Kush of the Hindoo, in all its brazen magnificence, and am no stranger to the ravishing Khyber. Not least have I seen the sweet valleys of Wales in the spring. But this . . . this was glory!

  The horses welcomed the relief at the end of their climb, and we rushed between broad fields chaste with snow. A red sun fell. Stripped trees shone ruddy, glowing. The snow crimsoned between the shadows cast by black pines, and bracken lit gold.

  Yet this was but a meager preparation.

  Waves of ridges stretched westward, as far as Heaven, arrayed in lilac snow and dusky rose. The crests scorched scarlet, as if with winter burning. Words are too weak for such beauty! We might as well attempt to write of love.

  As I watched, the sky formed into ribbons. Lavender bordered the purple of wine, and watery orange met lemon. Who could count the endless shades of red? I would tell you Heaven blazed like a heathen market in that hour, but all comparison is false. For the great bazaars are harsh, and hot, and sharp with calculation, but the Lord composes gently in His grandeur, and His generosity is endless. He fires the lily, and softens the flame.

  In between the highlands, valleys dropped. Deep. Blue and purple declined to moody gray. Those gorges seemed all mystery to me. Oh, how I felt the yearning of that landscape!

  Far below the high road that we followed, a crooked lake shone smooth with mending snow. Yet there, toward the center, yet unfrozen, a steely wet warned. Houses, tiny against majesty, smoked in the hollows. On a bluff, a lone horse stood, rimmed by the bloody sun.

  I full forgot our purpose and the cold.

  Now you will laugh and say, “This Abel Jones is a queer one, given to romantical blubbering like some poet fellow.” And I will grant my fondness for the beautiful, and let you think it makes me less a man, if so you are determined. But when the Good Lord sends us such a prospect, you will not find ingratitude in me.

  Oh, wonder of ravens atop a fence, feathers oiled against the flaming snow. Broken stalks stood gilded in the bracken, tangled as our lives. In a farmhouse window by the road, the first lamp of the day shone.

  “There is beauty,” I said, helplessly.

  “What say?”

  I blushed, for I had never meant to speak.

  “A fine view, that,” I told the sheriff. “You spoke well of your county. There is true.”

  He made a sound deep in his throat. “Got to get you out to see the mills, man. Industry’s the thing.”

  So we rode, with the afternoon dying around us. We traveled some miles, though a shivering man cannot measure finely. Now I am hardy, as a rule, and a good healer. I showed the ones who said I’d lose my leg. But even the glory of all nature could not sustain me. I will not give excuses like a child, but the typhoid had blown me good, and I was not yet my old self. Cold it was, yet sweat come to my skin.

  The landscape changed, although I could not say clearly when or where. Gone lonely, almost desolate, there was a wrongness about it now. Despite the blanket of snow, I sensed the poorness of the soil. The trees not cut for timber had a stunted look, and cattail fringes marked the moors and barrens. Twas the sort of place where the last-come farmer must work twice as hard for half the harvest. But beautiful still, I give the country that, though it lay a world removed from the prosperous town behind us.

  “Should’ve told Bucky how long we’d be out,” the sheriff said. “Could’ve mounted us a pair of lanterns. Won’t be much moon.”

  “Is it far, then?” I asked. The muscles of my face were fair frozen, yet my back was slimed with sweat.

  He shook his head. Melt sprayed from his eyebrows and his ears, and the trails of his mustache crackled. “Just shy of the tavern crossroads. Hop, skip and a jump.”

  The sleigh rushed through the spreading dark. Night swelled out of the ravines and copses, creeping up from the deep-set lake.

  Without warning, the sheriff yanked back on the reins. As if we had come unexpectedly to the edge of a precipice.

  We skated to a stop.

  The lead horse saw whatever the sheriff had seen. He reared and fought the air. The mare beside him neighed and danced. I saw only empty road before us, and a sketch of blasted trees.

  “Damn me to black blazes,” the sheriff said, if you will forgive my frank report.

  He jicked the reins, sending the horses forward again. Slowly. We hissed and scraped along ruts packed to ice. The sheriff stopped the team a length short of a great tree.

  I saw it then.

  Hanging by a rope from a black limb.

  We both got down, my legs stiff as my cane.

  There was little wind to feel, yet the figure swayed.

  Too small to be a man.

  Surely not a child?

  Or . . . the poor widow?

  I heard a queer rustling as we neared the figure.

  Twas no man, but an effigy. A corn dolly of the kind the poor crafted for their children in the ol
d country. Only this was bigger than any toy. And dressed in rags.

  The sheriff struck a match.

  The doll was garbed in blue, in a mockery of a uniform, with acorns fixed to the shoulders where an officer’s rank would be. The top half of its head had been blackened with tar.

  A signboard hung across its chest.

  The match went out, and the sheriff struck another, holding it as high as he could. We struggled to read. Neither of us whispering a word.

  LOOK HEER AND NO YUR FATE

  The second match died and the sheriff made a clucking sound. He struck another light and turned to speak.

  Twas then the shot rang out.

  THE PANICKED HORSES NEARLY knocked me down. My cane went rolling. But the sheriff moved with startling speed. He grabbed the lead horse by the bit. When it failed to calm, he punched it on the side of the head. Then he hurled the slackened reins at me. I caught them as if tossed a lighted bomb.

  The sheriff grabbed the whip from its socket and leapt off through the snow, heading for the grove that held the gunman.

  “Hold the damned horses,” he shouted back over his shoulder. “I’m going to cut that bastard to the marrow. Shoot at me, will he . . .”

  Now, I’ve been shot at with a better aim. No marksman that one, for no bullet hissed near by. Perhaps it was only a warning. But the monstrous pair of horses meant me ill, and no doubt there. I felt it. I did. I stood with a death grip on those reins, looking to my balance on the ice of the road, for without my cane I was as tethered to the team as they to me. Twas awful. I would have chased a band of assassins with naught but my knuckles, rather than mind those beasts.

  I turned my face away from the brutes. So I would not have to see their hellish eyes. Still, I felt their breath morbid upon my ear. A gruesome snout come nudging at my back. A great Sindhi cobra would have held less terrors for me. Better a pack of Pushtoons with their jezails, or dacoits with their daggers, than the horror of a horse.

  One of the monsters licked me.

  But I forget my tale.

  The sheriff jumped through the snow like a very deer. Perhaps it is a trick New York folk learn to get them to the privy in the winter. Spry as a lad in his courtship days, the big man raced toward the trees from which the muzzle had flashed. With no attempt to conceal himself. Bold as a drunken grenadier. Waving the whip and cursing to shame the devil.

  “You bugger,” he cried. “You dirty, sneaking bastard.”

  Such were by far the softest of his words.

  I feared a closer shot would strike him down. But none came. He disappeared into the wood, a black shape melting into greater blackness, and I heard him thrash about. Five minutes more and he re-emerged farther down the treeline, a dark bulk motive on a field of snow.

  Twas night.

  He come back sweating and steaming, going at his ears as if to tear them off in his rage. “Won’t be the end of this business,” he barked. Oh, there was anger in the man. “Don’t you think it will. I’ll track that fellow to Canada, if I have to. All the way to Californy. Shoot at the damned sheriff . . .”

  “I do not think, sir, that he was shooting at you.”

  We both glanced at the doll hung from the tree.

  “Aw, call me John, would you? For cripes sake. You’re stiff as a corpse, you know that, Abel? And you’re here with me. Somebody takes a shot at you, they’re as good as shooting at me.” In a last burst of anger, he trudged to where the effigy dangled, gave a barely successful leap—he was too solid a man to leave the earth for long—and yanked it by the leg. The dolly broke in twain and the bottom hushed to the ground, while the torso, sign and blackened head hung swaying.

  “Oh, for crying in a bucket,” he said, and kicked the fallen half of the doll.

  “My cane,” I said, pointing with my free hand. “Use my cane.”

  He took it up and knocked the dolly down. But for the head and neck caught by the noose. He tried and tried again, but could not reach the last of it.

  Though not a quitting man, he finally stopped. He picked up the little signboard and tossed it in the sleigh, but left the rest of the figure.

  “Well, you’ve seen the spot now,” he said. “And seen it good. Reilly was hanging from the same damned limb.” He patted at the lead horse and took the reins, offering me my cane. “Let’s get on back to town. You’re shaking like a man with the trots. Not used to the cold, I take it?”

  I would not tell him of my bout with typhoid. For complaint makes us small.

  We rode a while in silence, with the snowfields pale in the darkness. From a knoll, we saw lights in the distance, the town teasing us. A long, cold way remained.

  The sheriff breathed hard long after his exercise, for such a body has great need of air. He puffed clouds. With an abiding fury upon him. Men of height and stature are not accustomed to challenge, though such is the lifelong lot of my slighter kind. Besides, he was a mighty man in his trim world, where all was subordinate. I knew the sort. The army makes them colonels, and they won’t tolerate disorder or surprise.

  I thought he had grown sullen. Then he laughed.

  “Abel, my friend . . . you might be right about knowing the Irish. I’m not in a position to judge that. But it’s sure starting to look like the Irish know you.”

  WHAT IS MORE WELCOMING than the glow of lighted windows, and the smell of woodsmoke, on a winter’s night? The clouds were gone and starlight paled the streets. I longed for warmth, and the town seemed as welcome to me as home. Yet, behind its shutters and curtains, not all wished me well.

  The villains knew I had come, whoever they were, and our match had begun. Now you will say, “What is this business of ‘whoever’? Irish and guilty and done!” But the Fowler case had taught me to judge slowly. I would wait, and we would learn more of each other, like good enemies. The rascals would find I would not be discouraged by a doll or unskilled musketry. And I would find out what I could of them.

  Still, I was glad I had packed the pistol given me by the boys in my old company to soothe our parting. It waited in my luggage. Now do not think me anxious to wield arms. I am a changed man from the hard days of my youth, when I thought a sergeant like unto a king, and I will not handle such tools but for necessity. Let us have amity, I say. But, sadly, not all men will have it so. So the thought of my Colt was a comfort.

  Faint on the breathless air, I heard the sound of a harmonium playing “Annie Laurie.” A maiden’s voice joined in. Oh, music is a gift, and melody a blessing! Yet they are curses, too. For who can hear such sounds without recalling hearth and home? The ballad conjured my Mary Myfanwy and the nudging boy beside her, and soft hymns in the parlor of an evening. Her fair hands played the keys as brightly as she played upon my heart. How music gives us pain, yet we want more.

  The sheriff snapped my revery.

  “Set you down at the Benham House?”

  Rich thoughts fled. After a moment, I told him, “That will be fine, sir.”

  “‘John.’ You’ve got to call me John, Abel.”

  “That will be fine, then, John. For there is as good as anywhere.”

  He swerved to miss a man drunk on a weeknight. Fair tumbling out of a whisky shab. “Irish, I’ll lay you five gold dollars. You . . . are staying at the Benham House?”

  I was not. For I would not have such grand accommodations at government expense, any more than I would at my own.

  “I’ve arranged to board with your Methodist pastor.”

  He seemed stunned for a moment, then gave a mighty laugh. It rang in the frozen canyon of the street. “Well, you’ll see precious little meat on that table, I promise you. Which one of ’em?”

  “Which one?”

  “Of the preachers? Which of our Methodist shepherds is going to put you up?”

  I had not known the town held more than one.

  “The Reverend Mr. Morris.”

  He made a sound twixt groaning and delight.

  “I had not realized,” I continued, �
�that there were two Methodist congregations. Now a fine town it is, your Penn Yan, but hardly of a size to—”

  He snorted. “’Course, it’s not. Your local Methodists went to feuding back in the forties. Scratching like cats. Half of ’em were pew-jumping abolitionists. ‘Free the Negro,’ and all that. Rest wanted to take things slower, not mix religion with politics. So they split. Breakaways built a new meetinghouse and parson’s hole just up from the courthouse. That’s where you’ll be heading, if you’ve set your mind to starve with Rev’ Morris.”

  “So the Reverend Mr. Morris . . . is of the abolitionist persuasion?” Though not of fanatical bent, I wished the Negro free, and would not have a chapel shut its eyes to bondage.

  “Oh, he’s an abolitionist, all right. And everything else under the sun.” Underwood laughed again. “You’re like to have a lively old time. Though the housekeeper’s ornery. And sparing with wood for the stoves, so I hear. Oh, you’ll have yourself a time.” He chuckled, unable to master himself completely. “You’ll have yourself a time, all right.”

  His mocking tone—and such it clearly was—disappointed me. A man of the cloth is owed unqualified respect, and the sheriff sounded little better than a heathen. I began to suspect he was an Episcopalian.

  Well, modern Penn Yan may have been, but it did not have a gasworks. The streets were lit by kerosene lamps set on poles. They cast a paler, harsher light than gas. Twas not late, but the town looked tucked in. The snow lay heavy on the roofs. Almost with the heaviness of death.

  We slid along Main Street. Beyond the shops, the houses of the gentry shone thriftless. Money enables. The finest of the homes had columned fronts, like the handsome courthouse farther along.

  Just past the court, the sheriff drew back on the reins. We halted with a skid before a row of lighted windows.

  “Looks like some sort of to-do at Rev’ Morris’s tonight,” the sheriff told me. “Maybe they’re having a welcoming party for you. God only knows . . .”