Ghosts of Yesterday

by Jack Cady

  My shot caught a second raider in the face. A 45-70 is a dreadful weapon. The man’s head did not disappear, but most of it did. This raider wore filthy store clothes, and one could not tell much about him because of the missing face.

  Silence. Yells ceased. Movement ceased. From somewhere in the trees came the chuckling call of ravens. More silence, as if we and the world waited and wondered. Then ravens flocked above the dead men. They hovered in trees.

  “Thin pickings,” Bester said about the ravens. “They wait for the souls to depart.” He still scanned the forest as he searched for the enemy.

  The ravens descended in a flock but did not alight. They flew in circles no higher than two feet above the dead men. They called as they flew, and then, dropped. They covered the corpses. I could swear, and I am not a mystical man, that the dead man with the red hair uttered a curse. His lips moved, his dead eyes rolled as sounds of crashing came from the forest.

  Then Thunder exploded, not from the west but from above. Thunder boomed stronger than massed artillery. It pounded onto the forest, and the very side of the hill trembled. Thunder rolled about valleys and hollows, and wind rode the Thunder. Wind rose among trees, and small branches flew all around. Yet, there was no rain.

  Sunlight pinioned the dead men across the stream. Wind moved red hair of one, blew against blood and gore of the other and tore at clothing. Ravens rode the wind as easily as kites on a breezy day. Then they rose with the wind and disappeared over the forest.

  Wind wrapped around us and forced us to ground. Sunlight seemed brighter, and where there should have been rain, and should have been lightning, there was only Thunder. We yelled to each other through crashes of Thunder, and our voices were like spirits calling across distance, like echoes across time.

  And all of it happening in sunlight. When Thunder stopped as quickly as it began I found myself lying not far from Charles. The tethered horses were crazed. The mule stood drooping, beyond madness, broken and stunned.

  “Good shooting,” Bester said, and I did not know whether he spoke of his shot or mine. “Pretty good dust-up.” He emerged from the forest and stood beside me. He looked toward Charles, looked at the horse. “I figured,” he told Charles, “we’d end up trading horses, not losing ’em. Let’s chew this over.” He watched forest across the glade while I watched forest behind the dead men. “I heard six men,” Bester said. “We got the two who weren’t yelling. There were eight, all told.”

  “Free the remaining horses, keep the mule.” Charles did not like what he was saying, but then, Charles is fond of horses. “Better the raiders have them than they fall as prey.” The horses were domesticated beasts. They were unlikely candidates for life in a forest of predators.

  It made sense. The trail was playing out. If raiders had horses, they would have to go back along useable trail, not forward.

  “Strip all gear and cache it,” Bester said. “Make it plain what you’re doing. We’ll lay a trap.” Bester gave a low laugh, and it was neither humorous nor kind. “Somebody will get the horses, never fear.” He continued to watch the forest. “Thunder,” he said, “that’s what the old woman sent. That god-blessed bear is Thunder.”

  Charles calmed the two remaining horses. We left them unhobbled in the glade. It’s a tribute to Charles that they grazed, because a short time before they had gone mad.

  We cached saddles and harness, tossed saddlebags onto the mule, then trekked into the forest. We walked for a good half mile, then tethered the mule and turned back.

  “One volley,” Bester said. “That’s all we’ll get.”

  By the time we returned to the glade two raiders sat astride our runaway horses. The man in command was well groomed compared to four others who were at the cache retrieving saddles. The commander sat his horse in the style of an aristocrat. Although he was not a large man his presence was forceful. He dressed in brushed gray coat and clean trousers. He gave quiet orders that were obeyed immediately. I thought at the time that it would be of some note to kill this silken gentleman. In these wet forests it seemed that one mostly killed riff-raff.

  The two men Bester and I had shot lay like discarded rags. They were ignored by the living raiders. Since the departure of the ravens the corpses looked shrunken. The red hair no longer glowed. It looked bloody-brown.

  We took cover at the edge of the forest. We had a clear view of the glade.

  “Take the horseman on the right,” Bester whispered to me. To Charles and Ephriam he whispered, “on my signal.” When he was satisfied that all was in place he gave the command to fire.

  Both horsemen were dead before they hit the ground. The leader’s chest exploded. He jolted up and back. Some dying instinct flung him backward as he tried to clear stirrups he didn’t have. The horses wheeled and once more ran. The second corpse lay trampled. Two men at the cache, shot by Ephriam and Charles, had been carrying saddles. They staggered beneath the heavy bullets: .45 caliber, 70 grains of powder. They fell, then one tried to rise and run. Charles finished him off, while the other gasped blood and then lay motionless. Two other men fled into the forest.

  “Prayers do get answered,” Bester said. “I got to figure that nearby, some women have been prayin’ for widowhood.” He rose and spat toward the corpses, then walked away without a second glance. Ravens chortled in the distance. I took satisfaction in hearing them.

  We trekked for another day and then the trail played out, but not the way we had supposed. We found ourselves on a high ridge looking into a barren valley. In the midst of mountains covered with dense forest, we viewed naked ground. Smoke from fires showed where downed trees still burned, and a clear stream turned into a dark flood as it rushed through the valley. Stench of putridity rose on a breeze. The remains of a broken cabin lay scorched beside the stream. At the head of the valley another cabin sat gutted and smoking. This had once been a settlement.

  Guns lay tumbled, and bodies in ragged gray lay scattered. Bodies dressed in sturdy blue lay in waves across the face of the hill. We walked toward a battlefield of a too-familiar kind.

  “…difference between spirits and ghosts…” Bester whispered. “You can generally smell the ghosts.” For the first time since we met Bester we saw him hesitate. He probably tried to guess our minds, as we were trying to guess his.

  After losing the horses and killing six raiders, I hoped any differences between us were past. We had stood beside each other in battle. We had relied on each other.

  “This is the past,” Charles murmured. “Hang onto that, gentlemen. It’s been said and done.”

  “Agreed,” Bester told him, “but we walk through it, not around it.” He looked west where a sky dark as ravens was cut by hot streaks of light, and illumed by orange glows of fire. “Not because we want,” Bester added, “But I figger there’s no god-blessed avoidance.”

  We descended into the valley, and we were as heavily laden with memory as the mule was laden with gear. The animal grew increasingly skittish, though broken of spirit. It still walked well. A well-found mule is one of the strongest of living creatures. Some even have character.

  I remembered thinking that if we moved toward the future, nothing the future would have to show would be worse than walking through this valley. Then I wondered how, if ghosts of Spaniards could not see us because we were their future, could we see our future in that orange-glowing west? For a dazed moment I had the sense that we not only walked through the past, but toward it. And that made no sense.

  Dead men and dead horses lay all around. Stench covered the battlefield like a blanket, and small animals moved among the dead. We walked with care. Grotesque faces, men and horses, broken and twisted limbs, even oddly fashioned deaths… one cannoneer leaned against a blasted stump, and his death had not come from shot. A piece of wood pierced his throat, wood exploded from his cannon’s carriage.

  As if mesmerized we followed the blackened stream. The mule seemed ready to bolt. The stream tumbled around corpses, and even the runni
ng water carried stench. When we passed the first broken cabin I looked inside and wished I had not. A man’s head peered with ivory-blank eyes. Only the head. Longhaired. Teeth curiously shiny, the lips more smile than grimace. The body had been exploded.

  Charles grunted like a man hit. Bester snarled. Ephriam made no sound. I recall thinking that we were passing through the worst of this particular battle. The going would get easier.

  The going did not, and I wish that a clear record of this part of our adventures did not have to be made. We passed the depth of the valley where the stream curved away and ran toward a distant river. At the bend sat the other cabin we had seen from the ridge. This cabin had not been under direct fire from the battlefield.

  As we approached we heard tiny cries echoing from the cabin. We knew full well that we dealt with specters, yet the cries sounded authentic. We had to look.

  A corpse lay beside the doorway. It was dressed in rough and torn garments. A rusty pistol still lay in its outstretched hand. This was the remains of a settler, a three-for-a-penny farmer.

  Bester stood above the corpse. “You ignorant fool,” he said to the corpse. “You should have taken your folks and fled. You doubly-dammed fool. Did you think an army wouldn’t pay its respects?”

  Charles stood in the doorway. “For his sake,” Charles said about the settler, “I hope he died first.”

  And Ephriam, whose experience had been limited to men killing each other at sea, leaned against the door post. Ephriam knew about dead men but not about land warfare. He looked sick. Then Ephriam walked away to stand beside the stream. He stared into the sky, like a man looking for a God that he could curse.

  In the cabin a girl of ten or eleven lay naked, broken, obviously raped. She had been barefoot and one ankle was twisted, broken, and she had thus suffered greatly. She had then been murdered by knife and scalped.

  A young woman, also raped, lay disemboweled with her foetus torn from her belly. A small boy lay with his skull caved in beside an old woman who had been bayoneted. Her blood lay like a thin carpet across the dirt floor of the cabin. In the old woman’s arms lay another boy-child of perhaps two years. It had crawled to the arms of its dead grandmother. It wailed, and the cry was weak from starvation and want of water. Its eyes were crusted and closed. Thus had it lived the last days of its short life, thus had it died.

  “Cherokee don’t scalp,” Bester murmured. “Your northern boys bagged themselves another Confederate.” Bester knelt for a moment before the torn foetus. It was almost a child. The eyes were formed. It had rudimentary fingers. “Brave men. Brave men. A young nation’s pride.” He walked away from us, and did not say another word for the rest of that ugly day. And we had nothing to say to him.

  But Ephriam had something to say to me. He drew me aside. “I reckon that was unusual?”

  “No,” I admitted. “A man could wish that it was.”

  “T’wasn’t manly,” he said. “Don’t mention that, and manhood, in the same breath.” And, from then on, Ephriam barely hid his disgust for us.

  III

  Strikes of light grew frequent as we moved west. Trees usually shattered and smoked, but sometimes the air only sizzled with heat. Thunder walked nearby in the shape of a bear; or so Bester claimed.

  We saw amazing changes in weapons; new smells to the stench of battle, new shapes to the sounds of war. Smells of burnt powder grew sharper. Smoke from cannon and rifle turned pale and gray instead of thick and cloudy. Cannon no longer gave flat reports. Cannon cracked sharp as a slap on the face of the world.

  Stench of the dead remained the same. Razor-back hogs still fed on corpses, while raccoons and rats competed with the hogs. The battlefields were hurry-scurry with movements of feeding beasts.

  We skirted battles, but might have walked through the middle of them. Ghostly weapons exploded, and ghostly men fell. We walked unharmed, except in our dreams.

  Ephriam kept to himself. During the war Ephriam had ordered the corpses of comrades, or pieces of corpses, tossed over the side after battle. He had directed men as they drew sea water and washed gore from decks. But, he had never seen raping of children and the murder of babies. When he spoke at all, Ephriam spoke to Bester. He treated Charles’ mild suggestions as unwanted orders, and scarcely honored Charles with a reply. He treated me as an accomplice. I did not respond. I had my own troubles.

  We felt immersed in new weapons and old miseries. We at first believed we heard one of the new Gatling guns. When we finally identified the weapon we found it was far smaller than a gatling, like artillery reduced in size. It sprayed shot too quickly to count.

  “We have surely passed into the future.” Charles said this as we camped beside a stream. August heat had given way to September mist. Westward, the sky glowed with fire and sundown. Surrounding mountains already lay darkened, the mountains still verdant but with trees in beginning change. We had progressed well and game remained plentiful. The mule proved sure-footed but weakening. It was a large, black animal with a hide that had once glistened in the sun. Now its flesh was thinning, its spirit broken. We lightened its load. We kept all of our salt and tobacco, a little coffee, a little tea, and most of our ammunition.

  “I recollect one evening,” Bester said, “when our boys sat at a fire like this and admired the better shooting of the enemy.” Bester hunkered before the fire. His dark face seemed to absorb and reflect, at the same time, the fire-glow. He whetted his skinning knife on a pocket stone. The blade reflected the fire, dull red. “One of the reasons you gents took such pains to lose good men was because you were too disciplined.”

  “I like a joke same as the next man. Too disciplined?” Ephriam did not understand what Charles and I knew to be true.

  “Take a lesson from the raiders,” Bester told him. “Never make a frontal attack when you got other ways to jump. If the damned general says t’otherwise, shoot the damned general. Your lads didn’t shoot the general.” To Charles, he said, “I don’t figure we walk in the future. If we do, there’s no sense to it.”

  “It isn’t only time, but place.” Charles sounded pettish because he had lost control of our party. Ephriam ignored him. I looked to Bester, because Bester was the woodsman. Charles was in no position to argue, but was not ready to concede his notions. “During the late war there were no major engagements in these hills.”

  “But we’ve seen them.” I, too, was puzzled. “And we see strange and frightening weapons. We see a panorama of war.”

  “Displacement, maybe.” Bester looked at orange glow to the westward. “You early on lost a horse from one of the strokes of light. But ghosts can’t see us or harm us. It figures that sometimes we’re reading the past, and sometimes the present is reading us.” He examined the knife blade, shaved a bit of hair from his arm, and satisfied, sheathed the knife. He pulled from a pocket the small piece of hardened clay and wires that had fallen from the sky, and which he had shown us when we first met. He studied it like a man studies terrain before a battle.

  “… somewhere east of Eden in the land of Nod….” As Ephriam muttered he looked at Charles, as though he searched for the mark of Cain. He hunkered beside Bester, and those two strong men looked diminished in the gathering darkness.

  “If the future can kill a horse, and strike trees, then it’s part of the present.” Charles spoke easily enough but he seemed edgy. “If the future can survey us then we’re ghosts ourselves.”

  “As, someday, it seems we will be.” I was not entranced with that sort of afterlife.

  “We came adventuring.” Charles mused to himself. “We came in behalf of ethnology, and now we engage in defeating war.” He looked at Bester. “Time is a-whirl?”

  “The war didn’t braid this nation. The war knotted it.” Bester’s face was as studied as our own. “Nothing that came before, and I reckon nothing that comes afterward, will get it total unknotted.” He rose from the fire and faced the western hills. Thunder rolled in the distance.

  “The war
deeded an attack on settled ways,” Bester told Charles. “War tried to make everybody the same.”

  “It was war on behalf of commerce,” I said. “Northern cotton men wanted to control the supply. Southern growers bound themselves to English mills to lift the price. It was war between men with different ideas about money.”

  “You boys think the Confederate soldier gave one whoop or hosannah about slavery? You think wrong.” Bester seemed to be answering me, but in a way I could not understand.

  “I think so,” Ephriam said, and he was grim. “Otherwise, why were we fussin’?”

  “Things got unsettled,” Bester told him. He turned the piece of fired clay and colored cylinder over and over in his hand. “We’re in a place where all kinds of men have brought their ways. These hills took them in and changed them, or killed them. Then war invaded. It wanted to missionary us heathens… and still does… make us into little Lincolns and Sumners. Slavery was its grand excuse.”

  “Damned good excuse.”

  “No one’s denying it,” Bester told Ephriam. “There were white slave holders, and negra slave holders, and Indian slave holders. But that’s not the point.” Bester then spoke directly to Charles. “Maybe you actually do want to learn about folks and not change ’em. If true t’would be refreshin’.”

  “Unsettled,” Charles said. “The ancient tries to preserve, and the future tries to overwhelm.”

  “I’d almost wish for more raiders,” Ephriam muttered. “At least a man’s shooting at somebody who can shoot back.”

  “You won’t get ’em,” Bester told him. “Cowards won’t walk through what we’re about.”

  ……

  Next morning, and well before sun rose above the hills, the mule turned up missing. Ephriam had hobbled it with rope, and Ephriam’s sailor-knots do not slip unless he wills it.