by S. L. Hawke
“Rifle!” we both said to each other. So no ammunition for the pistol was left except one bullet and our ambusher had a rifle with two shots, one already used. I quickly checked Andrew’s wound. There were two holes in his blood heavy shirt. So the bullet passed through. Miraculous and lucky, unless his guts were hit. The red stain increased and Andrew paled. Still, his eyes were clear. We looked at each other and knew what to do.
I had a full two chambers in my rifle, which was tied to my mare. Both horses were probably down the tree line. We had to find them.
“Can you run?” I whispered, as I took Andrew’s rifle. He cocked his pistol.
“Do I have a choice?” Andrew whispered back. Why wasn’t someone asking us who we were? Or telling us to git? As if summoned, we heard movement among the tree deadfall.
Some training never left you if battle was your training ground. I knew exactly where our mysterious gunman was. Putting my finger to my lips, Andrew nodding at me in understanding, I crawled away under the brush towards the walker.
Pulling a katana without sound is a lifelong endeavor. Many masters spend their entire lives achieving just the knee walk and the pull. But out here, with the creaking of wind-shaken trees, water running from a nearby creek, the silence of a pull wasn’t important. My sword was out. Now it was time to take care of this situation.
Our hidden assailant was almost as tall as myself. He was wearing black, and his face was covered. I had two options: run him through or confront him by disarming him, literally cutting his arm from the rifle he was holding, killing him slowly. Something held me back. There had to be another way. Then an idea came to me.
I rested the blade on the back side of his neck, near the vein that when cut would kill him in an instant. He cursed in Mexican Spanish. I answered in Castellano.
“Please, on your knees.” I pressed enough to see a drop of red flow. “Or you will find God a little sooner than you had planned.” The rifle dropped. I knew the pistol was in his belt in front of his body. “Ah! Hands higher!” I emphasized, moving out of his vision each time he tried to turn. “Close your eyes. We do not know you, you do not know us, and we can all be on our way. That’s all we want.” The man in black knelt down. I hit him on the head with the butt of my tonto in my right hand. He fell, revealing his face. He was Hispanic, young, rather hefty, and reminded me a bit of Lorenzana. I didn’t have time to think more about it.
I tied up our bandido using his now three pieces of rifle as an anchor for the ropes I found in the cabin. The smell, I discovered, was a long dead man, his red flannel underwear the only thing still visible underneath the leaves, mold, and vermin waste. An unopened bottle of whiskey lay nearby, miraculously not taken by the thief. When I pulled the bottle out, an old pouch fell and spilled four gold coins. I half smiled, gathered the pouch up and put it on top of an old rat-eaten foot trunk.
I dragged our unconscious bandido into the old cabin and left him there with a tattered blanket over his face. The coin pouch I placed in his mouth. I don’t know why I did that, but I got the feeling while looking at the brown mummified face of the cabin’s occupant, that he’d want it so. I tipped my hat to the mummy and left with the bottle.
Andrew hadn’t moved from the tree trunk. I opened up his shirt and, breaking the wax seal on the old bottle, removing the cork, regretting the poor use of such a fine bottle, I sloshed the contents on Andrew’s wounds. He cried out in obscenities.
“FUCK!!! There’s some cream in the pack–” He yelled angrily at me. I grinned, pleased that there was life in him.
“On the horses, which we have to find. You stay here – I’ll go find them. But let me bind this up.”
“Great. Nursemaid too?” he growled as I put pressure on the wounds and tried hard to bind a clean handkerchief to them. Then I left him there to find the horses, our saddlebags, and get to Santa Cruz as fast as I could possibly go.
It took me far too long to get my mare to come when I whistled. But she impressed me by holding the reins of Andrew’s horse in her mouth! I gave her some cake as I distributed all the bulk and weight of our saddlebags and bedrolls on Andrew’s gelding; then placing Andrew in front of me was my first thought, but he could not sit on the edge of the Western saddle, so I removed my saddle and blankets, heard Andrew’s mare protest at the extra weight of mine, and rode bare style, as I had done in Japan during the hot months.
Our ambusher was starting to make noises of panic and rage inside the cabin. He would be able to free himself soon if I did not get us on our way. My mare whinnied in excitement and encouragement and took off, pulling her shocked, bulk-laden equine companion behind her as fast as we could go down the rut- and hole-ridden track.
Time seemed to speed up for me as Andrew fainted. I stopped by a small stream, wary of being ambushed again, changed his blood-soaked ‘bandage’ and tried to make a poultice of moss, as I was taught so long ago, in Hawai’i. But this moss wasn’t the same; still, it soaked up blood, and binding it helped. I gave more water to Andrew, helped him relieve himself, as I used to do with my son, and kept on, into the night. I passed Chinese workers with lanterns, but they were silent and kept to themselves. There was no sign to tell me which direction the town lay, and all I could think of was reaching the main river, then I would see a section of the town if the map we had was accurate. It placed Harris House past the River Bridge on a street named Willow just near the western side of the township.
My mare seemed to know we needed to travel hard. All those days of coddling her, spoiling her, treating her like a lady, had finally paid off. I still marveled at her bringing me Andrew’s horse’s reins in her mouth. I certainly did not teach her that trick. The cavalry officer up at San Francisco told me she was ‘special’ but in a harsh way, a code for ‘unable to be ridden’. She went as fast as she could, whinnying at Andrew’s horse to keep pace. Andrew’s gelding was frothed at the mouth. We made Harris House, its sign in full view, figuratively on my last legs and literally on Andrew’s gelding’s last legs. Only a good groomsman could save that one.
Andrew was pale and grey, two things that did not bode well. The bullet had gone through his side, it turned out, and had glanced off a rib. Despite my poultices, Andrew kept bleeding. Now a true fear seemed to grab hold of me. Andrew might die. I could not lose him too. Fergus’ death was still with me and I had yet to sleep without dreaming of taking his bullet. Finally, hearing water, seeing wagons and people crowding a main road, I had arrived. We made Santa Cruz by afternoon, a day and a half later. I fought back tears.
I almost fell off my horse when I came into town. Margaret, or the woman she had become, ran up to me and caught me, weeping as she did so. Lam was there as if he knew we were coming. Nearby was a young Hispanic man who quickly helped assess Andrew’s condition. Then the same young man helped take the horses away.
“They have medicine and what we need. He will live,” Lam said quietly to me. I nodded, relieved that we did not have to fight for Asian medicine. Would Fergus have survived if I were allowed to see to his care, allow Lam to care for him?
“You must go inside. Eat!” Margaret cried at me. “How I‘ve missed you. How we’ve needed you here. Mother, she…” I pulled away. This was too much. The years had gone by in my life leaving deep canyons of loss. Margaret acted as if no time had passed. I needed time to steady, time to take this all in. Someone was watching me. It was the young groomsman.
Searching for the water pump, I hobbled to it. After a few good shakes I drank the cold water. My horses had disappeared. A sensation of panic gathered in me, seeing Lam follow the other Chinese servants carrying Andrew on a stretcher. I went to the stable, mostly to calm down.
The boy who took the horses away had already seen to the saddles. I went into the main stall to check on my mare when I saw something I could not believe.
The person caring for my horse was female, in men’s clothes.
“She likes fresh oats.” My voice was dry. I could barely stand. But t
he way the young ‘man’ turned to the side, the carefully tied kerchief worn around the neck, the slight inward quality to the shoulders…I stared at this well-kept, well shoe-ed person, small and perfectly formed, dark hair oiled into a neat short braid, hairless smooth face with generous lips...The ‘young man’ was neither, I was absolutely certain. When she turned to face me, I knew. We locked eyes. Hers were amber, glowing softly within, like lava. Yes, she wasn’t a young man.
She was a beautiful blended woman who could pass for Hispanic, but upon close inspection and experience of my own, was neither. She reminded me of my son and the thought of her being forced to hide in this manner both angered and hurt. Her amber eyes returned my frank and rather impolite stare. She suddenly seemed to know my thoughts. Time stopped; my fatigue and pain stopped. I lost my breath.
My mare interrupted this moment by trying to bite this woman, startling me, but the woman knew her horses and quickly offered my mare a sorghum treat. It was impressive, her action, the fluidity of her movement, exquisite.
The moment made me smile, halfway. The brush down on my mare’s back was done well. I ran a hand over the hocks, too tired to check the hooves. I wanted to look at this grooms woman again, but fatigue overtook me. Tomorrow I would question this, perhaps get angry, I didn’t know. “Make sure she has clean hay. Stable looks good, but keep her away from the others.”
Now all I wanted was for Andrew to live. I looked away from this beautiful creature, feeling a mixture of things: shame, confusion, and exhaustion.
It didn’t take me long to reach the door of the boarding hotel of Sophia’s. The smell of baking, the feel of flour in my face, of sour yeasty bodies all around me was gratefully stilled by the waiting bath in the back of the hotel and Lam’s smile with the news that Andrew had woken up and demanded something to eat. I scrubbed myself red, then soaked. Lam shook me. I had fallen asleep in the bath.
Shivering, I rose and put on the last set of clean clothes I had left. I told Lam to see to himself, then felt shame at giving a Master orders. Lam bowed slightly.
“We are not to act differently, as our power lies in secrecy.”
The horse boy, uh, girl came to my mind.
“The young Latina–” I caught myself using the feminine. Lam smiled. He patted my shoulder.
“First things first. Your family needs your focus now. The young person will reveal her story in time. But if you really want to know, make sure that she is always with you. Then the need for secrecy will be no more.”
I bowed slightly at the advice and then took a deep breath.
It was time to face them all.
What on earth would I tell them?
Welcome
To
“Space-time itself is a thing. It has its own dynamics, it bends and warps and ripples, it carries energy, so it’s a thing, alright, and it’s material just as much as the matter we see around us.”
- Professor Fay Dowker, Guest Speaker, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Toronto, Canada.
Santa Cruz City Limits Present Day
The Main Gate
“Selene, did you just see that?” Barton, Evergreen’s Renovation Site Manager, looked uneasily over his shoulder, up the main path of the cemetery. It was our weekly Monday workday and a bright, warm sunny morning. March was turning out to be a beautiful month. Our volunteers from the Homeless Shelter were walking up the Glory Path, as the main paved walkway to the Cemetery was called, carrying black garbage bags and pushing wheelbarrows loaded with shovels, rakes, and picks for today’s renovation project: shoring up the retaining walls of the upper plots. I had just finished my other job, cleaning the face of an historic marble obelisk monument with a damp rag and a soft toothbrush. The stone, thought to have been granite, revealed itself to be white marble.
“What?” I too jumped, but with a feeling of cobwebs sticking all over me. Barton was looking in the same direction, at the bright white gates that heralded the main entrance of Evergreen Cemetery. Though built in 1920, replacing rickety old wooden fencing and a metal locked gate, these tall white pillars, engraved with their donors’ names, held up a metal painted arch that has defined Evergreen Cemetery to this day as an historical monument. Now, near the sides of these pillars were yellow rose bushes, replete with blooms. It had never looked so well-tended. I loved this place.
“A shadow just went up the center….ahhh, shit. Never mind.” Barton shrugged. “Those Ghost Hunters, uh…they wanted an evening tour. Are you up for that? I don’t want to do this kind of tour alone.”
“Sure. I’ve always wanted to see if they really do some of that stuff you see on TV,” I joked. It was a little creepy, getting the call to ‘investigate’ the cemetery. But the woman who identified herself as the owner of the group was a lot nicer and actually interested in local history, unlike a few other groups that had made the same request. At least that was what Barton had said.
“You called me over to look at something you found?” Barton was also a history buff. He looked down at the hole I had dug near my feet.
“That’s a headstone alright,” he managed to say.
A.J. Sloan was written right across the face, with a carving of an open book underneath his name. It reminded me of why I had come here, why I gave Evergreen my energy and interest. It was he, Andrew Jackson Sloan, who brought me here.
My husband had died two years ago. I lived through the car crash that killed him and have regretted my survival ever since. My son Mick moved back to the area hoping to motivate me to fight for life. He bought the sixties nightmare of a house I now live in, right on the edge of Arana Gulch. Mick claimed I would only be his tenant until he finished his training in Poland, but the specialized canine unit training only took ten weeks. That was a year and a half ago. Mick got a job in Monterey and then claimed to have met ‘someone’. I met her and liked her. They had decided to live together, but she had yet to tell her father. She had hoped to, but as of yesterday her father had recently been hospitalized. One shock at a time, Ellen had said as she smiled and hugged me. He’s a widower. You should meet him.
Within three months of settling into this small neighborhood, I woke one night to hear someone walking around on the stone patio below the wraparound deck. When I went outside and down the stairwell to have a look, this man was standing on my flagstone, as plain as Barton was now standing in front of me. For a very odd moment I felt vertigo, as if I were looking backward – that’s the only way I could describe how I felt. The air was frozen. We spoke to each other, as plain as Barton and I standing here together, and then he faded away.
That experience kind of saved me. When I asked the long term residents of my neighborhood if they’d ever seen someone who looked like a cowboy in a long rider coat haunting their backyards, there was a resounding ‘yes’ and a slew of ghost stories that dated back to 1924. One of my neighbors worked at the local library and sent me a link to a story about Andrew Jackson or “Jack” Sloan. The story claimed that “Jack” Sloan was a drunk, angry, and violent hater of Mexicans. He deserved what he got, getting gunned down by banditos in the gulch of my back yard. I was hooked.
Andrew Jackson Sloan was buried at Evergreen. He never seemed like a “Jack” to me, more of an “A.J.”. Obsession with local history in full swing, I started looking into A.J.’s story, his death, and for facts to corroborate this horrific story.
That was when things truly got interesting. The facts were not lining up with the story and the longer I investigated the family, finding a few outlier descendants through internet tools such as Ancestry.com, the ideas put forth began to, like the dirt around A.J.’s headstone, crumble away.
When I stumbled upon other facts that supported a different story, something changed. I stopped sleeping on the easy chair where my husband had spent many a day, I stopped starving myself, I began to cook again, and take a shower every day. My self-pitying fate fell away. Getting through the day became a day ending too soon with tasks unfinished.
A.J.’s headstone had been missing for years. A newer veteran’s headstone five feet behind me was put in place because the upper half of the original stone was thought to be lost. That project also had been done because someone had been ‘haunted’ by A.J. They felt he was telling them that he wanted his headstone back.
That haunting was different from mine. Just footsteps and a brief apparition moving across a deck or backyard. My own experience made me feel special, like I was chosen, somehow, to discover the truth about what really happened to this man and that it had nothing to do with his headstone, as we now saw. It had been here the whole time.
Finding this headstone was the first step of proof, in my mind, that we were ‘connected’. To my imagination “A.J.” was a bookworm. The Book glyph on his headstone had several meanings, some that supported the bad-tempered racist theory, as I referred to it.
In my mind, I called him “A.J.” never “Jack”. It was unclear if he were called either name. But I just went with my ‘gut’ on this.
I could not stop shaking. Here it was, granite, slightly red, masterfully carved, from what we could see of the small part that was excavated, exactly as ‘my’ ghost had described it to be in our ‘brief’ exchange.
“Well, Dot told me where to find it,” I said. Dot, the previous historian and archivist for the cemetery, inheriting the job from a descendant of one of the builders of the Main Gate, waved vaguely around this plot space and said she had last seen the pieces, broken off and settled in some mud.
“Well, I was there when Dot told you it was five feet that way,” Barton’s large hands made a thumbing direction to the right of me. “You still found it.” Barton patted my shoulder then squinted down at me with suspicion. “What is it with you and him?” Barton pointed down at the headstone peeping out from beneath twelve inches of sedimentary deposit. “Did you really see him as a ghost?”