by LeMay, Jim
“What did happen to you?” asked Lou with obvious concern.
Matt shrugged. “You’ll hear all in good time, my friend.”
“Still,” said Leighton, “you ain’t heard the news ’bout Columbia almost gittin’ burnt down.” Obviously eager to tell him.
“Oh,” said Matt, “I guess you’re talking about the fight between Chadwick and Matheson.” He took a long pull from his beer.
Leighton and the others gawked in surprise that he knew of the conflict.
“Where’d you hear about it!” said Lou. “In Nellie’s Fair or on the way back?”
“Tell me what you guys know first.”
“Well, we got the whole story,” said Lou, “from Ruben Garcia just awhile ago. He’s down telling the mayor right now.” And Lou told the story as Ruben had related it. John had edged up next to Matt when he first came up to the bar, as unobtrusively as always to avoid being pushed away. He wanted to hear what Matt had to say about his part, if any, in the action. After all, when he had asked Matt if he had anything to do with the Columbia affair that morning, Matt had said he had. Matt listened quietly during the whole account, only grunting from time to time to indicate surprise or interest. Lou ended with the concern they all felt because the bodies of neither Chadwick nor Matheson had been found. They would not feel safe until there was some evidence that those two were dead or somehow permanently out of action.
After Lou finished, several of the gang insisted Matt to tell them what he had heard and where he’d heard it.He finished his beer and planted the pint jar firmly down on the bar.
“All in good time, guys. That’s the first beer I’ve had in days and the first good beer I’ve had in a lot longer time, and I’m not even awake yet. Give our good innkeeper time to refill this pint and we’ll continue this confab upstairs. What I have to tell is for us alone.”
As soon as Bernie refilled the pint he led them upstairs.
* * * *
Once settled in their room, Matt took another sip of beer and said, “I couldn’t tell you downstairs. This is gang business, and there were too many others around.” He told of his encounter with Matheson and his gang at Stanley Market and Tim’s account of the ambush at Summerfield Crossing. They found Tim’s story of great interest, especially since it substantiated Matt’s theory of Downing’s perfidy.
“So who beat the hell outta y’?” said Leighton impatiently. Matt frowned, annoyed at Leighton’s eagerness to hear of his misfortune, but otherwise ignored him. He described the trip to Columbia with Tim where he met Chadwick. And how surprised he had been to find McCutcheon with him until Big Mike explained his mission: to learn the truth behind the contradictory gossip regarding Chadwick’s activities and intentions.
“And here’s the part you’ve been waiting for so intently, Red,” he said and told how Geraldo Grimes had spotted and betrayed him, of the beating by the off-duty guard and his companions, and of his incarceration in Chadwick’s basement storeroom. Then of the struggle with Chadwick and his toughs and his subsequent escape from the basement and town.
“Wow,” said Kincaid, “what ‘d y’ do then, Matt? Ran like hell, I bet.”
“You got that right, Jack,” he said. “Picked up Tim at the barn, high-tailed it for Columbia, and went straight to Matheson.” He told of his lie to Matheson about Chadwick wanting to kill him.
Matt paused, pretended to become preoccupied with a long pull at his beer, suddenly not sure how to end his story. He remembered his ruminations while on the road over the violence in Columbia and his participation in it. And his scheme to convince the two gang leaders to turn on and, hopefully, destroy each other. He thought of the brave youth who had given his life to save those of his people and, incidentally, Matt’s. Phil Blankenship had lost his rightfully deserved glory, according to Ruben’s report, because his girlfriend’s traumatic experience placed her testimony in doubt and there were no other witnesses. The kid deserved to be a hero, along with his young lover, whose name Matt did not know. Cynical middle-aged ex-intellectuals had no need for such honor.
He knew how he would end the story.
“Well, Perfessor,” Leighton demanded, “you gonna tell us what happened next or not?”
“Huh?” said Matt, feigning surprise. “I thought you knew. Matheson went down to Columbia to duke it out with Chadwick, and I went on to Nellie’s Fair to get our money. One more thing needs clearing up, though: the part of Ruben’s story that folks in Columbia don’t believe. You see, I met this Jerry Jordan Ruben mentioned on my way back from Nellie’s Fair. Just like the Columbia girl said, he lived north of Newcastle and was in Columbia for the market.”
“Did you ever hear tell a anybody by that name?” asked Mitch of John.
“No,” said John with his Matt-like shrug, “but there were a few folks living out in the country that didn’t have no reason to come see us and we never went to see them.”
“That’s the case with this farmer,” said Matt. “He said he and his family never visited Newcastle. They just mentioned it as a way of giving the general location of their farm. He said he happened to be near Chadwick’s house when the fighting started though he didn’t know it was Chadwick’s. He said he saw a young man shoot Matheson. He knew it was Matheson because he heard someone call out his name. Then he hid in a hedgerow between Chadwick’s house and the one next door. He was afraid he’d get shot if he tried to get away.
“After he’d hidden there for awhile, he saw two people shooting at each other from windows in the two houses. He recognized Chadwick because he had tried to recruit Jerry into his gang – which Jerry said showed how bad Chadwick needed more men; this Jerry Jordan is the least likely killer you’d ever see.”
“Kind of a Perfessor type like you?” chuckled Leighton.
“Now that you mention it,” said Matt, “a lot like me. Anyway, he got a good view of the guy that shot him, right in the middle of the forehead. He was the same young fellow who had killed Matheson! Chadwick fell back into the room. An instant later another guy appeared in the same window. Shot the kid with a Kreutzer.
“Jerry said that scared the shit outta him, people shooting each other so close over his head. He sneaked into the house next door. There he saw the kid that’d killed Chadwick, what was left of him anyway, lying in his girlfriend’s lap. She said the kid’s name was Phil, and Jerry told her he’d seen Phil kill both Chadwick and Matheson. Then he realized that being in the house was a bad idea. Chadwick’s men might come in looking for survivors any minute. He’d been too rattled to think of that when he’d run in. He helped the girl out of the house as soon as the shooting quieted a little and left town as soon after that as possible.
“That’s why the folks in Columbia can believe their young Phil is a hero and why I feel confident that the two bosses are dead.”
“How d’ y’ know y’ can trust this feller’s story?” asked Mitch.
“I rode with him long enough to get a good feel for him Anyway, the story matches the girl’s.”
“Sounds good ’nough t’ me,” said Stony. “The two stories match too good for one of ’m t’ be bogus. Then guys bein’ gone ’ll be a relief t’ ever’body.”
“I tell y’, boys,” said Doc, “the scariest part a Matt’s story is how close Matheson was t’ Coleridge Gardens an’ how close he come t’ lookin’ for us. I’m sorry y’ took all the beatin’s for us, Matt, but y’r runnin’ inta them boys there sure saved our ass. We owe y’ for that.”
“Most important,” rumbled Lou, “was the clever way you pitted the two bosses against each other. If you hadn’t done that, Matheson would likely ’ve turned up here and caught us with our pants down.”
The others agreed that Matt’s trick had saved them, as well as the people of Columbia and perhaps folks for many miles around.
Matt frowned. “It didn’t take much cleverness. I just used the information they gave me against them. Their own greed and fear did the rest.”
“It�
��s better than that, Matt,” said Lou. “You pulled a great joke on them, a fatal joke as it turned out. Matheson wanted to return to Chadwick. And Chadwick wanted him back. You turned that around so they ended up killing each other instead of getting together. Your act as catalyst driving them apart was the most important thing. It made their deaths almost inevitable.”
They talked the adventure over and over. The consensus built, among old guys and young alike, that Matt’s cleverness was the most important factor in the whole affair. Somewhere inside, Matt grinned. He had received praise for only the part of the action he wanted and the young man had been named as the hero (Matt had thrown Matheson in for what Missourians called boot and Cajuns called lagniappe).
History is written by the victor. The paraphrase of a quote by some historian just outside his memory. But things are not always as they seem. The victor’s tale need not be constrained by the truth.
Lou announced a mighty thirst and suggested they all join him in a beer of celebration.
As the others began to leave the room, John detained Matt. “Can I bother you for a minute, Matt?”
“Of course. What’s up?” Matt sat down on his cot.
John sat on the cot across from him and described Brother Gephardt’s sermon regarding the four horsemen, the Beast, and Armageddon, at least as well as he could remember it.
“I don’t know what to think about all that, Matt,” John finished. “It seems kind of like a tall tale, but the part about the pale horse bringing plague could be right. Chou’s Disease sure was terrible. But did the other horses really come?”
Matt thought for a moment. “A metaphor is the use of one word designated to characterize another. At best you may consider the horsemen as metaphors of worldly disasters. Or think of them as I do, like characters in a richly colorful fantasy. Let me give you a little background.
“The young preacher took his sermon from the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Christian Bible. In this case ‘revelation’ means the unveiling of knowledge that could never be discovered by mankind through reason alone. It must be revealed by mystical means through a religious leader or prophet or stay forever beyond man’s reach. Another word for revelation is ‘apocalypse’ so you can also call this book ‘The Apocalypse.’
“From around the second century B.C.E. – that means Before Current Era – through the second century C.E., Jewish and Christian writers put out a lot of these books. As a group they’re called the Apocrypha, which means they are of questionable authorship or authenticity. They were popular reading for a long time because they took the place of true literature, which was pretty scarce in early Jewish and Christian communities. Some of these books are accepted by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox canons but, although a few of the books in the Protestant Bible have apocalyptic passages, this is the only one included that’s purely apocalyptic. And there was a lot of controversy over admitting this one.
“But I’m straying a little so let’s get back to the subject.”
John flushed, afraid that Matt would think he was having trouble understanding. “Oh, no, Matt. Don’t leave anything out. I want to know all about this.”
“Okay, but I will stay a little closer to the subject. Anyway, this particular book is supposed to be one of the most intricate and richly symbolic of the Apocrypha, a ‘best seller’ of its time, and it has compelled study and reinterpretation for close on two thousand years. Every time we’re beset by a new round of disasters, people invoke the Book of Revelation as symbolic of their specific time. It has fit so many historical events so tragically well, especially war.
“Take the so-called First World War and the years from 1914 to 1920. The four horsemen are, as I recall, War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence. That war was the most stupid and brutal bloodbath in modern times until then. So that was the first horseman: War. And Revolution followed, a revolution in Russia that influenced world events one way or the other for almost a hundred years. Famine, the third horseman, devastated Germany and Russia just after the war. And to top it all off, in 1918 there was a worldwide flu epidemic that killed more people than the war had. That was the fourth horseman: Pestilence. There are lots of other examples from world history that make it look like the four horsemen are riding us down. Our American Civil War is another.
“What the book was really discussing was events of the time. It was written during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian to speak out against his persecution of the Christians. The author had to disguise his subject matter by use of allegory and metaphor and change names to avoid prosecution and execution for treason. The author’s readers knew what he was talking about of course. When they read about ‘abylon’, they knew he was talking about Rome, the ‘Evil City’ of their day.”
“What about this ‘Beast’?” said John. “He’s supposed to be a man who’s alive right now.”
Matt shrugged. “He must’ve been a man of the author’s time. The author was afraid to give his name because of the Roman censors so he used numerology to hide the guy’s name. There again, his readers, at least the more knowledgeable ones, would’ve known who he was talking about. He was using a common technique of the time to disguise the so-called Beast’s true name. It involved assigning numerical values to the alphabet and then showing a person’s name as the total of the numbers that represented the letters of his name. You could do that in our alphabet by letting A equal 1, B equal 2, C equal 3, and so on. Using this system, a man named Abe could show his name numerically as, let’s see....” Matt frowned in concentration for a minute and then announced, “Eight. A is 1, B is 2 and E is 5. Abe equals eight.
“The Jews, Greeks, and Romans all did this, and it continued down through the Middle Ages. The study of the scriptures for numerical significance was called ‘gematria,’ a corruption of the Greek ‘geometria’ and our ‘geometry’. The so-called ‘number of the beast’ was derived through some form of gematria. It was probably meant to signify the current ruler, Domitian. Most of the emperors treated the Christians pretty equitably, but not this Domitian. He was a true asshole. His name and title couldn’t be written according to the Hebrew system of gematria in such a way that they’d add up to 666, but he probably had some nickname that could.
“If you believe that the four horsemen are scourging the earth during our time, then it’s only natural to accept the notion that the Beast is amongst us right now. You said the preacher warned that we should be on the lookout for this Beast and his minions so we could get rid of them. Let’s hope he doesn’t take a dislike to someone in particular whose name adds up to six-six-six.”
“Or maybe several people’s names,” said John. “Maybe our gang’s names add up to six hundred sixty-six.” He grinned to let Matt know he was kidding. “How about that battle, Armageddon, Matt? What’s that all about?”
“That too was named after something the author was familiar with: a place. Armageddon is a corruption of a Hebrew word that means, ‘the Mount of Megiddo.’ A couple of huge battles took place there. The author probably didn’t know about the one from the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thutmoses III, who defeated a coalition of Canaanite cities there. It happened before the Israelites got to Canaan.
“But he would’ve known about the one that happened about six or seven hundred years before his time. It also involved an Egyptian pharaoh, this time against a Judean king named Josiah. This Josiah, well-loved as a reformer, was killed there. This second battle of Armageddon would have seemed a clear case of the forces of evil overwhelming those of good to the author of Revelation. He probably figured it would balance things to have the final battle, where good overcame evil once and for all, at the same location.”
John mulled this over for awhile and then asked, “Why do you know all this and the preacher doesn’t? Isn’t it his business to know?”
Matt shrugged. “I had a great education. He’s so young he couldn’t have gotten any higher education. He was probably in elementary school when Chou’s hi
t.”
“But Reverend Gates should’ve gone to college. He could tell Brother Gephardt he’s wrong to believe in such things.”
“People seek truth in lots of ways. I just gave you some of the historical basis behind certain Christian beliefs. Even if Gates knows this stuff – and I gotta believe they teach it in Christian seminaries – he probably doesn’t find it very comforting. His version of ‘truth’ is one that is so mystical and powerful that it’s just too much for humans, with our puny intellects, to understand. I’m sure he gets a big rush from contemplating these higher mysteries and that he achieves the ‘peace that passeth understanding’ that such folk talk about.
“People like me are a lot different of course. I’ve always been a very curious person; I have to find knowledge for myself. If there’s some higher truth beyond human understanding, I’m not the least bit interested in looking for it. I mean, what good would it do me if I couldn’t understand it? And if I, as a fairly intelligent person, can’t understand it, why should I believe some wild-eyed preacher hollering from behind a pulpit? How did he come to have some insight hidden from me that allows him to explain the mystery?
“I’m not saying people like Gates are insincere. Far from it. I’m sure he believes every word he preaches and that the same goes for his neurotic underling. And that he’s sincere when he prays for lost souls like mine. And that he feels sorry for people who lack his faith. He wakes up joyfully every day secure in his beliefs and assured of the rewards awaiting him in heaven.
“I’ve heard people from many religions say that the agnostic or atheist must be a very lost, angry, and lonely person. Just the opposite is true. Like I said, I’ve always been blessed by a healthy curiosity – I’ve got to know – and it gives me great satisfaction to find things out. Of course I’ll never have the final answer to most things, but that’s the way I want it to be. Just as Socrates would rather be a dissatisfied Socrates than a contented pig.
“I enjoy the eternal search for knowledge. Peace of mind that derives from something that can never be proven or demonstrated seems like small comfort to me. It’s a form of intellectual suicide.