“Nobody, exactly. I just—”
She whirled around to face me, and her eyes were shiny. “Look. I’m no expert on the hereafter. Nobody is, ’til they’ve been there. But, I don’t believe people go to hell for making mistakes. If that’s the case, heaven’ll be a pretty lonesome place.” She took a step toward me, the lines on her face softer. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I need music to play some Twister.”
I stood on the side of the plastic square while she walked over to the stereo. A country music record scratched through the speakers. It turned out Miss Leslie was just pretending to be old, because she could touch her hands to the floor and bend in funny ways. Before I knew it, our arms and legs got all pretzeled together, and we laughed until my stomach hurt.
When we were finished with the game, Miss Leslie played the same record over again from the beginning. I liked the man’s whiney sound, and I swayed around the room, opening drawers and looking for something else to do.
Miss Leslie picked up my jacket. “Want to walk over to Grinder’s? It’s only a short way.”
“Okay. What’s there?”
“It’s the old hotel and historic site, one of the most notable ones on the Trace. It’ll be educational. Plus, we might be able to see the Milky Way. It’s a new moon tonight.”
I pushed my arms into the sleeves of my jacket and followed her out the front door. Her big truck sat quiet down the driveway. “Do you think we should wake up Merry?”
She locked the door and clicked on a flashlight. “Let him rest. We won’t be gone long.”
FORTY-NINE
I woke to the chanting of tree frogs, still in the cab of the truck, curled against the cold back wall. I rolled over and glimpsed faint constellations through the windshield. Both dippers and the hunter twinkled bright. No moon.
With stiff legs, I vaulted to the front and climbed from the passenger side of the truck. My eyes lit on a cozy log cabin. New cedar construction, but built to look like it had been there a couple hundred years. Around the corner of the house, light spilled from a window onto a broad front porch, and a wooden swing creaked in the chilly autumn breeze.
I stepped to the edge of the porch and peered in the window. The abandoned room was homey, with some sort of game spread out on the floor. Two mugs sat on the table under one window. Maybe Leslie is putting Em to bed.
I moved to the door, ready to lock myself inside for the night. Faint music swam through the cracks. A ghostly tune I knew from someplace I couldn’t remember.
Blue eyes crying in the rain....
It was how I existed most of the time. Damn my watering eyes. I couldn’t let Em see me cry.
Turning from the door, I spotted a clear path through the trees. A leafy tunnel paved with prehistoric dirt. Applause feathered through leaves and brushed my face. Beckoned me to retrace my own footsteps through the shadow of my undoing.
A dry stick cracked underfoot, but my heart was quiet. At peace. No scrim of cold sweat formed on my brow, and my headache fled. I held up one gnarled hand and waited for the tremor, but all was still. The only sound was my footsteps, advancing along the Old Trace in the dark, merging with the echo of the path I had traveled so long ago.
I saw it all again, outlined in the dewy grass. Ghosts shimmered everywhere.
Hoofbeats pummeled through my chest, and a tired horse whinnied close by. The air carried the stink of back flow from a chimney, and through the clearing, a boot scraped on stone. When I closed my eyes, candlelight flickered in a dimly lit room. In my mind, the place was the same as when I left it.
Except for one thing.
It jutted from the ground at the far end of the meadow as though lit by an unseen spotlight. Its glittering mineral deposits hypnotized me. Without control of my steps, my feet trudged toward the substantial marker with its stacked squares of graduated stone and a broken pillar at the top. It loomed larger with every step.
Unbidden, a cold chill hacked through me. I knew I should run, but my feet wouldn’t cooperate with the demands of my brain. Another few steps. I strained to read the letters etched in the rock, willed them to be something other than words that knit together my name.
M
eriwether Lewis.
His courage was undaunted.
His firmness and perseverance yielded to nothing but impossibilities.
A rigid disciplinarian yet tender
as a father of those committed to his charge.
Honest, disinterested, liberal, with a sound understanding and a scrupulous fidelity to truth.
Why would someone inscribe those words about me?
I scratched my eyes. In the center of the rock, I saw it all again. The unfurling of my life.
I had always loved the outdoors, but in my life, it became my glory. The dream of America gave me access to powerful people. Responsibility. Its whispering trees and rushing waters erased my penchant for dark thoughts. Nature made me whole, an exploration of sheer joy.
Or so I thought.
The success of my trip to the Pacific was some kind of powerful drug. Everyone knew me. I was envied for my skills. In my dreams, I heard their whoops, their breathless expressions of admiration and awe.
Until success abandoned me.
It evaporated while I pushed papers, trapped inside a jail of an office in a position I deplored. A job I took from a monster. Wilkinson. He knew the art of the smear against his fellowman, and he wielded it like a master. Everywhere I turned, he laid snares to trap me. To thwart me. To make me a mockery. Letting him best me was my biggest mistake.
Dying does funny things to a man. Death seethes in the bowels of memory. I didn’t know the truth until I breached the divide. Eternity wasn’t golden streets or a lake of fire. It was Nowhere.
I rubbed my face and turned my back on my own grave. It was a sad thing that lost souls never died. We couldn’t be buried in the ground. It was my lot to hack my way through my insufferable existence. To reclaim the promise, the glory, that slipped through the hourglass of my life.
A cloud of breath issued from the trees. I blinked. Once. A single blink, and a hulking image materialized on the other side of my grave. The Judge. Wilkinson.
And, caught between his hands was my darling Emmaline.
She struggled to break free and run to me, but the Judge’s fingers dug into her arms. A vice that would crush the life out of her.
When I breathed, I realized the stink of his cigar had been there all along. An extravagant foulness. Like burning money. He smiled through a cloud of smoke. “Meriwether Lewis. Will you ever be rid of me?”
FIFTY
Emmaline’s face was streaked with tears. When she spoke, her voice was a croak.
“He killed Miss Leslie, Merry. He shot her. I saw everything.”
I pivoted to face that monster, but when I opened my mouth, Wilkinson bested me.
Always, he bested me.
I could imagine him, minutes after my death. Feet propped on a remote desk. Mouth curled around a cigar. A smile to celebrate the demise of his nemesis.
My story couldn’t end that way.
“Give the girl to me, Wilkinson. She belongs with her father, not with the likes of you. I don’t care who she reminds you of.”
I held out my hand and prepared to take her from him, but he stepped them out of range. Blew another plume of smoke and let his knowing eyes roam over me.
The cigar burned between his lips. Ash fluttered down on Em, into her hair and across her face when he spoke. “I think intelligent people will see this differently, Lewis. And, if I can convince them, well………you already know winners write history.” He clenched Emmaline in his arms. “Here’s how I see it. You’re the one that’s led us on a chase through four states, killing innocent folks all along the way. Emmaline’s mother and now this trucker woman. You shot at men down in Mis
sissippi. If we get technical, you even tried to kill me.”
Em kicked back at the Judge and screamed. “He didn’t have anything to do with my mother’s death. You—”
He twisted her arm behind her, lifting her from the ground until I heard a sickening pop. Her face contorted, and she bit down on her lip to keep from crying out.
Wilkinson put his cheek close to hers. “You may not know me now, little beauty, but that’s all right. I’m patient. My wife lives within you. Given enough time—years, even—I’ll draw her out.”
“No part of me will ever love you. Not ever.” She thrashed against the prison of his grip.
God damn him. I took one step in his direction before he stopped me with the grinding click of a pistol. Pointed at my head. My skull lurched at the memory of shattering at the wrong end of a gun.
Would a head shot feel the same in Nowhere?
I sucked in air. “You know you can’t kill me, Wilkinson. I’m already dead. Just like you.”
Em lifted her gaze to me, questioning.
“There are worse things than death.” He wrapped Em’s slender body in the crook of his arm and brought her head close to his. “Watching your only love expire right in front of you: that’s worse. Being forced to live without her: that’s worse, too. No, I’ve toiled here for too long to fail now. Not when I’ve found her.” He stroked her cheek, but Emmaline’s eyes were vacant, like she’d retreated to some inner place.
“Emmaline is an innocent child. She’s not your dead wife. Don’t sentence her to hell before she has a chance to live. Stop raving, Wilkinson, and give her to me.”
Wilkinson exhaled smoke from a fresh cigar, and his belly shook with a guttural laugh. “Raving? Me? Didn’t they say you were unstable?”
People said all manner of things in the wake of my death. How many times did people connect the wrong historical dots?
I refused to let him bait me. “I am not leaving here without Em. You hear me, Em? I won’t let the Judge have you.”
Emmaline’s voice was a feather in the air. “Why did you take my daddy away from me?”
Wilkinson’s eyes twinkled. “Your own mother orchestrated the removal of Lee Cagney. When she discovered my interest, she was happy to stoke it, perverse as it seemed. Her only concern was the money.”
She sagged against his leg, defeated.
I clenched my teeth. Her own mother. It took one monster to kill another.
He fingered Em’s hair. “Your mother deserved to die for what she put us through. Half a million was what we settled on, to be exchanged when the little beauty here turned ten. I’d have her before anyone else did, and I’d wait until she was ready. Until she knew me. She bewitched me the moment I saw her.”
“When was that?”
“A year ago. She was playing in the courtyard at her mother’s house. My Ann’s voice whispered through the heavy air, right before I turned the corner and saw her there.”
Could it be? Sweat trickled down a deep ridge in his forehead, his face transported through time.
“Can you imagine it? What I felt? When my wife died, I was lost. It was only in Nowhere that she spoke to me, that I realized I could find her again.”
“You always played every situation to your advantage.”
“Everything I did was for my wife. To bring her back to me.”
His hand slipped on Emmaline’s arm. The opening I needed. I leaped across the space between us. Stars exploded inside my eyes when I hit his hard body and dragged him and Em to the ground. When I twisted his hand, Em bit the fleshy sag of his cheek. His hefty form writhed in pain, and he released the gun. It hit the dirt with a thud. Clattered over my grave and into the darkness.
My teeth crunched when Wilkinson’s fist knocked across my jaw. For a moment, everything went numb. I waited for the sensation of my body dissolving into the bar. The final time. Instead, dirt and blood mingled in my mouth. Wilkinson pushed me off him. Ground my face into the earth.
Against the weight of his body, I hoisted myself to my elbows. Scanned the clearing. “Emmaline!”
Her footsteps pummeled into the packed earth. She sprinted through the clearing. Back toward Leslie’s house. Wilkinson heaved himself to his feet and hobbled after her. I struggled to stand. Staggered in their wake.
I put myself in Wilkinson’s back flow. Could hear him panting as he ran. When I reached through the air, he stopped, sudden. Threw out his arm like a clothes line. My rib cage crunched, and I shot backwards and landed on the ground. Unable to take on air. Fuzzy stars faded in and out, blocked by the bulk of his head.
He loomed over me, the weight of his boot on my throat. My tongue. Thick in my mouth. I struggled. Crushing boot. Pain. Needled my skull. Body jerked. Almost gone.
In a last desperate convulsion, one leg knifed into his open stance. Plowed him into the dirt. I rolled away, the rush of new air twisting my lungs in pain. I moved just in time to miss the force of another kick, but Wilkinson was invincible. With a graceful pirouette, his other leg blasted into my ribs. Agony sizzled along my spine. Squeamish from the pain, I stretched along the ground, grabbed a handful of dirt. Threw it at Wilkinson’s eyes.
His electric roar lit up the night. He toppled to the ground and scratched at his eyes to clear them of debris. I rolled behind my own gravestone.
His temporary blindness was my chance. Somehow, I had to finish him. My fight with him was Emmaline’s fight to find her father. I was fighting for her life, for what history would be recorded about her.
“I know you’re behind that ugly monument, you son of a bitch.” His words came out jagged. Disjointed against the racing pulse of his breathing.
I clawed my hands up the cold stone and waited. My breath misted in the crisp air, giving me away. I sucked it in and held it. Wrapped one arm around my chest when I slid my feet underneath me. I closed my eyes and waited for Wilkinson to breach the side of my tombstone, for the final blow that would propel me to what was next.
When I opened my eyes, he hurtled through the air and landed on top of me. His hands crabbed around my throat, squeezing the air from me as we rolled across the grass. Fireworks exploded in my vision, along with the ghostly image of his face. His dirt-ringed eyes and clenched teeth. The mass of his body slicing my back into cold metal.
Wilkinson’s gun.
With a last burst of strength, I clawed my fingers into his wounded eyes. He yelped, and that single sound relaxed his hold. I dug my hand underneath me and grasped the sleek pistol.
Some people believe our whole lives flash before our eyes in the moments before we die. I knew that wasn’t true. But, between the time I wrenched that pistol from behind me and the flash of gunfire, I lived the best parts. Every glory of my life coalesced in that clearing when Wilkinson teetered toward the ground.
FIFTY-ONE
Emmaline’s feet pounded the ground. Before I could turn to face her, she flung her arms around my waist and squeezed hard. I pulled at her arms and tried to shield her behind me.
“Em, I told you to run back to the house. This place isn’t safe. What the hell were you and Leslie doing out here at this time of night?”
I smothered Em in an embrace, oblivious to my aching side. “Em, I’m so glad to see you, to see you safe.”
“Merry, you’re crying, just like me.” She ran her fingers along the worn creases in my face. “Are you crying for Miss Leslie?”
“Leslie. Where is she?”
Emmaline pointed to a patch of trail beyond my marker. “Over there.”
My sore legs loped behind Em’s as we hurried across the clearing to the mouth of the old road. To Leslie, sprawled on her back, one arm at an unnatural angle and blood gurgling from her mouth. I knelt down and met the reflection of Death in her eyes.
Emmaline cradled Leslie’s head in her lap and brushed her fingers along the side of
her agonized face. I ripped her shirt away and found her chest chewed open by a bullet, right at the heart.
“That sonofabitch...needed...to be shot.” Blood ringed Leslie’s teeth.
“Don’t talk.” My fingers probed the wound and found the point of entry, along her side. When the bullet crashed through her ribcage and exited out front, it gnawed every vital thing. I wiped at the blood and tried to make her comfortable. It was the only thing I could do.
Leslie’s glassy eyes fought to latch onto mine. She spoke through clenched teeth. “Who...are you...really?”
I put my mouth close to her ear and whispered my name. “Meriwether Lewis.”
Her body convulsed beneath my hands. One long exhale. Her dying breath merged with the remnant of all others. She hovered in the air around us. I could feel her. Would she slip into Nowhere, too?
“Godspeed, Leslie Lynn. May your beautiful spirit brighten the next thing.” I hoped she heard me.
Emmaline’s hands shook Leslie’s head. “Do something to help her, Merry.”
I scanned the cold air for the mist that was left of her, hanging in the atmosphere. Of all the places to die...
Emmaline’s teary face glowed in the light of the fire. “Why’d she have to die? Why?”
“Come here, Em. Let me hold you.”
She collapsed into my arms, and I let her cry. In the force of her sobs, I found a few more tears of my own. Pent-up grief for my own wandering soul. Sadness, because in facing my grave, that outpost of my original destruction, an innocent woman died. I concentrated on Em’s eyes, hoping to see Leslie there. Cloudy blue stared back at me.
I couldn’t finger the moment when my desire shifted. When staying with a little girl became all that mattered. When reclaiming my name—being remembered—wasn’t important anymore.
I spoke into Em’s hair. “Thank you, Emmaline Cagney. You saved me.”
“How did I save you, Merry? You shot the Judge. When your gun went off, I saw him fall.”
To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis Page 22