by Kildare
Cillian walked to the hayrack separating the work area from the stall where a few cows could come in at night and bed down. One dairy cow and a calf were in the stall. The milk cow. All the other cattle would be out to pasture for the summer. The Brown Swiss stared at him with her dull brown eyes, contentedly chewing her cud. By the age of his current avatar, milking was already one of his many chores. Every morning, whether freezing cold or blistering hot, he could be found plopped down on a bucket, tugging away at the teats.
Doors on the far wall opened onto the corrals where the pair could go if they wanted. These doors and four windows provided the only natural lighting for the barn. On the long winter nights when the sun set earlier than their tasks were completed, kerosene lanterns were hung inside the barn to hold back the night’s embrace. Electricity wouldn’t come until years later.
He climbed the flight of stairs leading up to a hay loft on the second floor. Heavy studs ran up from the floor and met at the peak above and looked like the ribcage of some wooden monster. The loft was running low on hay, but would soon be brimming almost to the ceiling.
With nothing of real interest in the loft, he climbed back down the stairs. He looked around the room, taking in everything he could. He wanted to remember this, to hold on and never forget, lock it away somewhere in the recesses of his mind where it would never be lost. But it couldn’t last. As soon as he went out, the memories would start to fade again, like photographs yellowing in the light of time.
Cillian crossed the dirt yard to the white house and a navy blue, Ford Model A pickup parked nearby. The house had no actual yard, only native grass recently mowed by the horses. He stopped at the door, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and prepared for the flood of memories and emotions lying on the other side. A tingling sensation swept over his body, goose bumps prickling his arms and neck. This was going to be far more emotional than the barn. He opened his eyes and looked away as he turned the knob. His hand slipped free of the metal and he stepped away from the house, unsure if his eyes deceived him.
II
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6
The silhouettes of three riders approached from the north on the hills above the valley. Though too far away to make out their faces, Cillian knew from the way they rode that the riders were Christian, Corbin, and Johnny Bad Gun, an Arikara-French man who had been Christian’s righthand man since before Cillian’s birth.
Cillian’s nerves were wound up taut at their approach. They were still a quarter mile away. Too far to make out anything more than their general shape. Would they be the same as he remembered them? The last time he had seen his father and Bad Gun they had been old men. He could no longer recall their appearance from when he was a child. The later memories had overwritten the earlier. There were a few photos, of course, but they were so one-dimensional. As for Corbin, Cillian could only remember how he had appeared in his youth.
Cillian crossed back to the edge of the barn and stood in the shadows to watch their approach. The closer they neared, the more Cillian began to tremble, his heart racing. He couldn’t contain his excitement and nervousness. Felt like he would explode. Details of their faces shaded beneath cowboy hats emerged. They were the ages of his youth, probably from the same time as his current avatar. Cillian had forgotten how young Christian and Bad Gun had once looked in real life.
The three riders rode into the yard and dismounted at the entrance to the barn. Cillian smiled inside at the sight of his father’s youthful movements. His memory held too many memories of the man’s later years when he was hindered by the stiffness of old age. He had hated seeing a man with as much energy as Christian slowed down. Witnessing the slowing of his mind was no easier.
Johnny Bad Gun moved with the same quick ease, too. The last time Cillian had seen him, he was so crippled up from arthritis he could barely walk. Even then he was still working for Christian and lived in his trailer not far from the house.
Only Corbin’s movements matched Cillian’s memories. He gave Cillian a gentle punch on the shoulder as he walked past. The sight of Corbin was more than Cillian could bear. Hard as he tried to control his emotions, he couldn’t hold back the tears. He looked away so they wouldn’t see him crying.
The men unsaddled the horses, carried the saddles, blankets, and bridles into the barn, and placed the equipment in the tack room beneath the stairs leading up to the loft. Corbin led the horses to the corrals and released them into a pen with five others. Christian emerged from the tack room and walked over to Cillian. Cillian had forgotten how big his father had looked when he was a child. He seemed more giant than man, with broad shoulders and arms bigger than most men Cillian had ever seen. Big as he was, Bad Gun was even bigger. Christian laid a giant paw on Cillian’s head and gently ruffled his hair. All the tension Cillian held was released like a cork popping.
“I missed you, Dad.” He hoped his father didn’t notice his red eyes.
Christian looked down at him with a puzzled expression. “We’ve only been gone two hours,” he said in his thick Norwegian accent. He frowned. “Out trampling my grain, I see. If you kill all the wheat, Cillian, what are we supposed to eat?”
“We can eat the cows,” Cillian suggested.
“And what will the cows eat in the winter? Snow?”
Cillian hung his head in embarrassment. “I don’t know.”
For the first time he realized he wasn’t an old man trapped in a child’s body. He was a child with the memories of an old man. He wanted so badly to tell his father how much he had missed him, tell him everything that had happened since his passing, tell him about his grandchildren and how they had grown up, but he realized that his father would have no idea what he was talking about and assume he had lost his mind. He reminded himself that none of this was real. It was all a dream, or an alternate reality, or something else.
“Come on,” Christian said. “Let’s eat.” He strode toward the yard on his great long shanks that took a stride to every three for Cillian. Cillian was the last to enter the house. The three removed their boots in the entryway and hung their cowboy hats on pegs on the wall. Cillian looked down at his bare feet. They looked clean enough to get past his mother, who would order him to go outside and scrub them spotless if she saw any dirt.
They stepped through the door and at first Cillian could see nothing of the room around them. Then an opening parted and the memory of the kitchen came flooding back, as if he had only seen it yesterday—the table under a white cloth, the heavy wooden chairs, the blue curtains framing the window, the sparse wooden walls with a plaque inscribed by an Irish blessing. He remembered everything with such clarity that for a moment he felt like he had never been away.
The oven was different. It wasn’t the one he remembered. It was older, much older. They had never owned such an oven. He started to panic. What else wasn’t right? He studied the rest of the room, looking for other things out of place. Then he remembered. They had bought a new oven when he was about ten. He had forgotten about the older one. He sighed and relaxed. Everything made sense again.
“Well, sit down, Cillian,” his mother said in her thick brogue. “Let’s eat.”
He snapped out of his thoughts. Everyone else was already seated. His parents, Johnny, Corbin, his younger brother Otto, Britta, his older sister by three years, and his younger sister by six years, Carina. They all stared at him. He blushed and found his seat between Corbin and Otto. The table was anchored by his father and Johnny at each end. The three boys were seated on one side. His mother and sisters sat across.
Isabelle said grace and then dished out the food. She had cooked hamburgers. Pickles were the only side. As a child their meals were often simple affairs. Little more could be afforded. Most of Cillian’s childhood had occurred during the Great Depression, when people felt lucky if they could keep the bank from repossessing their land. Such a fate had nearly befallen his family on several occasions that Cillian could remember, and likely many other times he was neve
r aware of. Each time their situation had seemed too grim for any hope, some little reprieve had provided them with just enough money to make the mortgage payments. He had never heard his parents complain about their hardships, but he couldn’t imagine the stress they must have felt trying to keep the farm afloat and feed and clothe five children. Only after having children of his own had he realized the iron quality of their characters. They had refused to be broken.
Christian had been wise enough to save some money in the event of an eventual downturn in the wheat or cattle markets, but he had never expected both to occur simultaneously. Cillian still had vivid memories of the burnt, withered wheat fields, the lean, starving cattle, the blowing, choking clouds of dust, and the swarms of grasshoppers so thick they dimmed the sun.
The weather of 1936 had been so brutal everything in later years seemed mild. That winter had been the coldest in the state’s history. One blizzard alone had killed forty of their cows. By spring, half the herd was gone. Christian had planted a crop of wheat in the hope rain would come. It didn’t. June was the driest month in the state’s history. July was the hottest. There was nothing left to harvest by August. Christian had remarked to Bad Gun that there were so few cattle left it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any grass.
Times got lean. To keep the bankers away, Christian took odd jobs doing whatever work he could find, and Isabelle waitressed at a dinner in Killdeer, a town twenty-five miles away as the crow flies, and even farther by road. Too far to drive every day, so she usually spent two weeks staying with a spinster friend in town, before coming back to the ranch for a few days. Cillian’s sisters went with her, leaving only Cillian and Otto to help Christian run the ranch. Even Johnny Bad Gun had found other work. It was the only time Cillian had ever seen him and his father separated.
Those years had hardened Cillian, forged him into the man that he would become. The constant trials had taught him almost every lesson he would call upon to guide the rest of his life. Looking back, he had never felt deprived because of his family’s poverty, but blessed. Poverty had taught him to never expect anything to be handed to him. A man got what he worked for and nothing more. Nothing was guaranteed, least of all success, but an unwillingness to work ensured failure . . . unless you were a wealthy man’s son, and he despised them. Not because they had money, but because their wealth created weak characters. They’d never had to fight for what they owned. Never had to work from before sunrise until after sunset, every day, year after year, just to survive. A person who had never been poor could never appreciate being rich.
Cillian studied his mother’s face as he ate. Wrinkles creased her brow and the sides of her lips and eyes. Wisps of gray streaked her black hair. He hadn’t realized how much age was already showing at this point in her life. If his math was correct, she was only about thirty-seven, but she looked a decade older. She was prematurely aging. How much had the stress of raising five children contributed? And then there was Corbin. How many years had that taken from her?
Cillain knew well the emotional toll the hardships of ranch life had taken on his parents, but he had been too young to realize the physical toll. Seeing it now was a shock, though it shouldn’t have been surprising. Not with what they had faced—the constant worry and stress, the demanding labor of the work, the long bouts of isolation, and the feeling of powerlessness at living at the mercy of markets controlled by wealthy men back East. The more he understood the adversity his parents had battled, the more he had admired them. People of his parent’s generation had been forged of a tougher metal. His adult life had been easy in comparison.
Cillian wanted to run around the table, hug the poor woman, and thank her for everything she had done for him and his siblings, but he couldn’t. He would cry and she would think something was wrong with him, though he suspected she would appreciate the sentiment.
He finished his second sandwich and pushed his plate back.
“You have a good appetite, Cillian,” Christian said. “You keep eating like that and soon you’ll be as big as Corbin.”
A statement meant to fill him with pride brought him only sadness. He couldn’t help but stare at his older brother. Over seventy years had passed since he had last seen him. Corbin had a thin, youthful face with light hazel eyes and blond hair. Other than his hair, he looked much more like Isabelle than Christian. He and Cillian both had thinner frames. Only Otto had their father’s stocky build. Corbin, with his handsome, chiseled features, had always been a hit with the girls. When they went into Killdeer for the fair or a rodeo, he always had a couple of cute girls flirting with him. At that same age, Cillian had never managed to impress the girls much. He had to rely more on his sense of humor than his looks, and even at that he suspected he was inferior to Corbin.
How he had adored his older brother.
These thoughts were too much. He hung his head and shut his eyes, trying to hold back the tears. Too many suppressed memories were bubbling up. It had been much easier to push thoughts of his family away when he wasn’t looking into their eyes. Seeing them now was almost traumatizing. An urge struck to run far away, but he resisted. Even though it wasn’t real, he would never get this chance again.
“Are you all right, Cillian?” his mother asked.
“Yeah,” Cillian choked out. “I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t. The emotions were more than he could bear. He wasn’t sure how old he was, so he didn’t know what year it was, but he had a pretty good guess that Corbin would be dead within the year. The emotions were becoming too much.
“A man from the bank came while you were gone,” Isabelle said to Christian.
“Did you tell him he could go lie with the pigs?”
“Christian Rysgaard, watch your tongue in front of the children,” Isabelle fumed.
“Why would he want to get in the mud?” Britta asked.
“He means in the biblical sense,” Corbin teased.
“Young man, do you want your ears boxed? Now quit this conversation.” Isabelle shook her head in disgust. “You two are terrible.”
Otto had started laughing, though he was too young to understand. A glare by Isabelle silenced him. Cillian thought he caught a flash of a smile from Johnny Bad Gun. Not an actual smile, but a glint of spark in his dark eyes. One rarely saw more than that from the man. He had seen that look from Bad Gun before when Isabelle rebuked Christian. Cillian had to agree that there was something amusing about watching the little woman dress-down such a towering man.
Had this conversation and meal actually happened? He didn’t remember any of it, but he didn’t remember most of his youth, so that wasn’t surprising. Or was it all some kind of illusion? More than anything else that had happened so far, this dream—if it could even be called that—shook his faith in his ability to determine reality.
After the meals were eaten, Christian excused the children from the table.
“Cillian, I want to show you something I found down at the river,” Corbin said.
“What is it?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
Cillian followed Corbin through the doorway, out into the bright light of the sun. Suddenly it was gone, and he was back in the circular room with the archangels.
“What was that?” Cillian asked. “How do I go back?”
“You cannot go back,” Gabriel said. “You asked for a demonstration to prove this is real. We archangels are not gods, but we have been vested with immense powers to fulfill our duties.”
“Was it real?”
“Yes and no. It was a memory of sorts, though your thoughts were new and you could influence what happened. A new simulation of an old memory might be the best description.”
“Do you still doubt us?” Raphael asked.
“I don’t know.” If anything, he was more confused now than ever. The experience had certainly felt real but he wasn’t sure what that meant.
“Enough words have been uttered,” Michael said. “Will you help us?”
“I’m not sure. What if I refuse?”
“Do you wish to ever see your children again?” Sariel asked. “To see your wife, Evelyn? Loki will destroy everything you know. He is going to bring about Ragnarok, Armageddon, The End of Days. We must stop him. Do you understand that? Whether or not you help us, we believe he will find you. You might be the best hope we have.”
Gabriel looked sympathetic. “We know this is much to process.”
“Damn right it is.” Cillian walked away from the table and stared out the window. A cloud of hot pink and purple gas was sprinkled with the lights of thousands of stars, many larger and brighter than any Cillian had ever seen before and ringed by their own blue halos. He had no idea where he was, but it offered a mind-blowing view of the cosmos. Lost in the silence, he forgot for a while where he was. In the face of such overwhelming beauty, words lost all meaning, were worth no more than the breath they were carried on.
He moved along the curve of glass, never taking his eyes off the wonders beyond. The gas cloud thinned to wisps bathed green and then ended altogether and only the stars in the void shone, so great in number they could have just as well have been infinite. Then another nebula, red of core and ringed with wreaths painted every color of visible light. God painted with so much better materials. What crude designs humans were when compared.
Next a massive star. Great arcs of fiery gold leapt into the air and plunged back into the fire. Nearer was a planet, the surface red and black, rent by fissures of molten lava. A young planet still forming. The star and planet receded behind him and he stopped where he had begun, looking at the dazzling glow of the pink nebula.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“This in an intermediate dimension,” Gabriel said.
“An intermediate dimension? You’re not going to tell me, are you?”