Ghosts of Yesterday

by Jack Cady

  ……

  The corporation bulldozed, seeded, and called the sheriff. One fire might be accidental. Two fires spelled arson. The sheriff went through motions, but couldn’t see the point. After all, the houses were worthless.

  ……

  “It’s a trick question,” Mac confided to Debbie on one of those afternoons when wind drops and fog gathers thick enough to hinder traffic. Across the road Hell-Fer-Certain stood in the fog like a ghost. “The difference between a bartender and a preacher is no difference at all.”

  “Because?”

  “Because jobs have nothing to do with the basic guy.” Mac looked around his bar like he saw it for the first time. “That preacher is not a beat-up church, and this bartender is not a bar. You got it?”

  “If you came to that smart an answer,” Debbie told him, “then it wasn’t a trick question.”

  If Mac had changed, and if Jeremiah was using different images, Debbie changed as well. Although she told no one, images of fire occupied her, as did sadness. “There’s a word called ‘expiation,’” she said in a low voice. “I think we’ll learn about it.”

  The third fire took Heather Hill Farm, and the fourth took River View. By then August was long past, September waning, as fall rains began in earnest. The valley filled with flame and steam. Cattle now grazed nearer the road, stood looking across fences in that dumb, animal manner that seems asking for explanation.

  Then, on a night when the sky seemed to seep absolute darkness, as well as seeping rain, Debbie trudged toward the bar. Throughout the valley, as fires continued, sadness had become not only ordinary but a custom. We did not understand that it was not simply a few old houses being burned away. Symbolically, flame engulfed our history. People headed to the bar where night could not be defeated, but could be allayed. Neon signs colored our night world. Cone-lights above pool tables suggested focus and illumination. As Debbie passed the reader-board in front of Hell-Fer-Certain she sensed movement in the darkness. She gave a small, involuntary gasp.

  “It’s only me.” Mac’s voice sounded controlled, but fearful. “Pop is running the joint for an hour or two.”

  “You’re standing in rain before a church that drives you nuts. Plus you’ve been acting spooky. Are you the arsonist?” Debbie hesitated, thought about fires and Mac’s whereabouts. “You couldn’t be unless you’re setting them with a timer. You were behind the bar for two fires out of four.”

  Mac made a vague motion toward the church. “He is,” Mac said.

  “For the love of God.” Jeremiah’s voice came from darkness before the church. “For other loves as well.”

  “You’re helping him” Debbie asked Mac. She felt for a moment that she should flee. “What are you doing out here if you’re not helping him?”

  “Because I thought I liked the guy. Because I’m sick-a selling beer. Because it isn’t raining inside… how the hell do I know….” Mac’s voice turned apologetic. “…sorry … I’m not sure why I’m here, but I am sure that hell is about to start popping. Look west.”

  Debbie turned. “You guys are scaring me. You are.” In the west, like beginning sunset, a slight glow of orange showed at docks and cannery. “Mass fire, massive,” Debbie whispered to herself. “If any of that goes, all of it goes.”

  “No water down there except what’s in the ocean.” Mac turned to where Jeremiah stood in darkness. “I reckon this is supposed to mean something?”

  “I reckon it does.” Jeremiah’s voice did not sound preacherly, but grim. “Or maybe it’s just a reckoning.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Debbie sensed Jeremiah’s presence but could not find him in the darkness. Rain patted on her hooded parka. It puddled at her feet. “Everybody was getting by,” she said. “Things aren’t great but we were making it.” She watched as the orange glow increased. “I won’t cop on you,” she whispered to Jeremiah, “or at least I guess I won’t. But, you’d do well to have an explanation.” She turned to Mac. “Everybody will be going down there pretty quick. Drive me.”

  Mac stood quiet, a man afraid, or maybe only indecisive. Debbie took his arm. She turned toward the darkness before the church. “Go ahead and tell me this is the will of the Lord,” Debbie said to Jeremiah. “Then I’ll know you’re nuts.” She walked toward Mac’s pickup.

  “Redemption by fire.” Jeremiah’s harsh whisper came from shadows before the church. “I don’t think the Lord has much to do with it. You’re an artist. Figure it out.”

  ……

  Immense fires, fires as big as cities burning, cast heat so huge they must warm the toes of heaven. Lesser fires, like the burning of a way of life, are localized, thus more spectacular.

  By the time Mac and Debbie arrived, fire already covered docks and rose into the night through the roofs of warehouses. Sounds of burning, the crash of timbers, the roar of volcanic updrafts silenced the sounds of seawind and surf. Fire moved toward the enormous cannery as heat melted asphalt on the road between warehouses. When the road began to burn, a stench of petroleum mixed with dry smells of woodsmoke from flaming walls and floors; this while rain wept and blew across the scene, sizzled, pattered through mist.

  Mac and Debbie stood halfway down a hill leading to the cannery. Heat coasted up the side of the hill and stopped their advance. Behind them, cresting the hill, headlights of old pickups pointed toward the fire as people arrived, the beams of light swallowed by fire. Firelight rose toward the scud of low-flying clouds, and black smoke crisscrossed through the light as heat mixed and churned the winds. As more and more people arrived headlights were switched off. People milled, clustered together, sought an illusion of unity, of safety. Fire swept into the broken doors of the cannery. Fire illuminated faces in the crowd. Firelight glowed orange on cheeks and hands. It glossed clothing with a sheen of red. Fire caused shadows, made eyes seem like hollows of night.

  “Is this expiation?” Debbie whispered beneath the roar of fire. She watched as flame burst through the high roof of the cannery. Then, because it seemed nothing so awful could be focus for good, she looked away, then gasped. She tried to turn, tried to look back up the hill, or at the wet and weeping heavens, or anywhere except where her gaze finally was forced to focus.

  On the periphery of the fire vague movement began in blowing mist. At first the movement seemed only swirls of mist, then shapes began to coalesce. Shapes drifted like unimportant murmurs. Mist blew among them, seemed to offer substance, and the shapes became human figures drifting toward fire, unhesitating, herd-like and passive; not, after all, only the ghosts of fishermen drowned, but the ghosts of dreams summoned to the burning; dreams that like threatened beasts gave final screams, then fell into mute acceptance.

  …and Debbie saw a young Mac bouncing a basketball while coaching kids, and a young Jeremiah standing before a mission school. Mostly, though, she saw a young woman sitting before canvas, saw the turn of a young wrist properly pointing a brush, sensing the depth of colors in the palette, saw a young woman alive with the high dreams of art; then watched the diminishing form of that young and lovely woman, a woman aspiring to creation, drift slowly, inexorably, to disappear into the roar of flames.

  “I think,” said Mac in a voice too husky to come from anything but tears, “that it’s time to get the hell out.”

  “And I think, said Debbie, “that your expression is apt. But I’m not sure I like you anymore. Go back without me. I’ll catch a ride.” She managed to control her voice.

  ……

  Climax and anti-climax. Fire swept across the scene in fountains and waves. When the cannery roof fell machinery glowed red. Water pipes and steam pipes twisted, boilers stood like the crimson cauldrons of medieval hell, and people gradually stopped exclaiming, because nothing, it seems, can be remarkable forever. People climbed in their trucks, turned around, and told themselves and each other that what they really needed was a drink. The show was over, the festivities ended, a way of life had passed and no one even knew it.

>   Debbie, riding four-to-a-cab in a rickety pickup, looked beyond headlights and into mist. She felt slugged in the stomach. A glow stood in the sky.

  ……

  To those who arrived from the destruction of the cannery, Hell-Fer-Certain Church burned as an afterthought. Flame lighted the inside of the church, and stained glass windows pictured scenes from Bible stories. Stained glass gradually fell away as heat melted lead, turned glass to powder when fire burst through to rise along the outside of the building. Psychedelic colors of pink and orange and green twisted beneath flame, turned brown, turned gray, and fell to ash. Fire roared to the top of the steeple where wind caused it to wave as a hellish flag. When the cracked bell and the broken loudspeaker fell from the steeple, only Debbie gave it more than passing thought.

  As emotionally exhausted people drifted toward the bar, Debbie found she did not want a drink, did not want company, but did want to wring an explanation out of Jeremiah. And, Jeremiah, it turned out, was not to be found.

  Debbie looked toward Mac’s bar, saw the glow of barlight, heard the loud voices of people with little information and large opinions. She turned back to the church and watched the last flames die to yellow flickers above coals. The flames licked feebly at mist, and Debbie became conscious that in the fields beyond Hell-Fer-Certain, herds lined the fences; cattle white-faced, ghostly in the illumination from dying flames, and mute.

  ……

  We woke, next day, bewildered. Dullness spread across the valley. It invaded our lives, or rather, seeped into our lives. We lived in a place where dreams had died, a world of rain and cattle and embers. It was a world stripped of sense, stripped even of ghosts, and we began to understand that hell need not be spectacular, only dull. At least that seemed true.

  Debbie watched, wept, thought, and recorded in her journal this history of our destroyed world. With the eyes of an artist she watched herself in mirrors, saw drawn features, the high and accented cheekbones of age, the ravages, not of time, but of loss; and she despised Jeremiah. She listened as hatred flared among us, hot hatred because people wanted someone to blame. As guesses turned to rumor, then to conviction, it became obvious that it was Jeremiah who dealt in flame. People cursed his name. Men sought for him throughout the valley, and swore vengeance.

  Our destroyed world, what had it been? Abandoned farms, abandoned fishery, and dregs of memory that recalled honest lives and loves. Many of us had come to this place in search of spiritual amity, of community; but all of that died long before the fires.

  “But,” Debbie said to Mac on a gray morning before the bar opened, “how much of this sits on our own shoulders?”

  Mac, who since the fires had remained largely silent, did not answer. Debbie turned from him and watched Sarah, because Sarah’s shock seemed deepest, bone-breaking deep. Sarah made coffee and muttered Bible-text about king Nebuchadnezzar who God changed to a beast “…that you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with beasts of the field; you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and you shall be wet with the dew of heaven….” and then Sarah’s voice whispered gabble, as though she spoke in tongues.

  “The sumbitch rubbed our noses in our own lives.” Mac moved like a tired man after a twelve-hour shift. Gray light crowded against windows of the bar in the same way that, beyond the burned church, cattle crowded fences. Mac picked up a broom, looked at it like he could not understand its use, then leaned it against the bar. He sat on a barstool and waited for coffee.

  “…and he was driven from among men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws….” Sarah’s voice trembled with fear or ecstasy, and Debbie could not say which.

  “That preacher drove himself,” Mac said to Sarah, as if they were holding a normal conversation, “and he’s driving us right now because he was serious, and we only think we are.” He turned back to Debbie. “He’s not in the fields. He’s ashes. He’s across the road right now, ashes in his burned church. I watched him set the fire. I walked away. He didn’t.” Mac turned back to Sarah. “He’s preaching right now, if you listen you can hear… what do you hear?…or, maybe it’s the voice out of the whirlwind… like in the Book of Job.”

  It seemed to Debbie that, if Mac were not exhausted, he would be nearly as hysteric as Sarah. “I hear nothing from across the road,” she said, “and if he chose to burn it’s his expiation, not ours.” Even though she detested Jeremiah, her mind filled with sorrow. Then she felt guilty without knowing why. And then, she felt something she could not at first understand. She had not felt joy in many-a-year.

  She began to understand a little. Her first understanding was that she no longer despised Jeremiah. She fell silent. Listening. It seemed to her that from the fields came a sense of movement, the herd movement of cattle; and from the coast, echoes of screams.

  “You’re right about one thing,” she told Mac. “He rubbed our noses in our own lives. Even if he’s ashes, he’s still doing it because nobody’s leaving town. We’re all still standing here, and we’re unreal. We’re staring over fences.”

  “The dreams were real,” Mac whispered. “We’re the husks of dreams.” He looked across the road where white-faced cattle stood in mist. At the intersection of roads trucks slowed. An engine roared as a tractor-trailer driver caught a higher gear. Another engine roared. “Why did the guy do his own atonement and leave us holding the bag?”

  “That’s a cop-out,” Debbie told him. “Dream new dreams and quit blaming the other guy.” Debbie paused, alive in the knowledge that Jeremiah had failed with Mac but had succeeded with her. Jeremiah had forced them to hate him, had sickened them, so that they must rebel against their lives or die. He had fought that they might once more learn to love. There were many arts, and many roads to them. Maybe Jeremiah had been traveling a road of art, and not religion.

  Debbie yearned to comfort Mac and Sarah, and yet she knew that would be wrong. She felt, in some harsh way, ordained. She watched Mac and saw that her words were going nowhere. But, Mac, being Mac, would think about them, so maybe later… and then Debbie made her voice stern, nearly punishing, and hoped it would not break with compassion.

  “The world is full of gurus,” she told Sarah above the roar of truck engines. “Find another one. Lacking that, you may want to consider a question.”

  SCIENCE FICTION, UTOPIA, AND THE SPIRIT

  Science fiction lies smack-dab on an intellectual center bounded on one end by teddy bears and on the other by youthful cynicism. It is often utopian, and in its pages battle the awful powers of good and evil. It is a literature of darkness and light (sometimes of sin) which carries sensibleness mixed with inanity. It is, more often than not, a morality play.

  The genre could hardly be otherwise. The bulk of its readers are young, although many of its readers are exactly like its writers. The bulk of its writers are men and women who manage to retain their first childhoods well past the time when they might have slipped into their second. Science fiction, whether we are reader or writer, is the business of the child who remains within us. What is more, that child is an important person.

  Let us remember our youth. At age seventeen the world seemed improbably mad. We were given moral codes, social codes, religious codes. Our bodies seemed awash in liquids, our minds a conflicting net of “thou-shalt-nots” and “I gotta’s.” If we were good children (as most are, though scampish) we were inflamed and confused by a world that tolerated every vice while howling after divinity. Some youngsters take a backseat and ride out the whirlwind. A few become crazed or suicidal. Some drop out. Others become compelled by ideas, because they need to figure out what is going on. One method of figuring has been immersion in science fiction.

  Science fiction encourages such figuring because it allows its writers and readers to do what standard literature does not. Science fiction can deal with ideas as from a soapbox or a pulpit. For example, as
a thirteen-year-old in 1945, I was reading science fiction that talked about racial discrimination, and about the horrors of holocaust long before they became polite subjects among polite people; or in mainstream literature. In those days the mainstream writers were either dancing on the issue, or writing nonfiction, or in the case of Sinclair Lewis: howling (Kingsblood Royal was one elegant howl.)

  Only science fiction tried to analyze the ugliness. There were reasons. Briefly, standard literature tries to enlist our understanding by a complete showing of situation and character. It does not try to make an intellectual approach to understanding, as is often the case in science fiction. And, of course, tons of exceptions exist. There are mainstream books that preach, while quite a lot of science fiction attains to the state of mainstream literature. When the subject is religion, though, it is science fiction that steps forward; generally smelling of roses. The young, both writer and reader (and we who have retained our childhoods) move easily toward explanation. With religion, our approach is often made with a good deal of freight. I would like to take a look at a half dozen books which try to handle that freight. Such a look provides an overview.

  The books are: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley; Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein; Past Master, R. A. Lafferty; Bug Jack Barron, Norman Spinrad; and the greatest of the group A Canticle For Liebowitz, Walter Miller, Jr. Aldous Huxley at first used the soapbox. He is best remembered for his Brave New World, which was his vision of Hell.

  Brave New World has Henry Ford as its God, with perpetual amusement and consumption the only ends of society. Babies are conceived outside the womb and raised in factory production lines. Every material want is satisfied, including drugs (soma.) Under the slogan “Everybody belongs to everybody” sexual intercourse becomes routine. One only gets in trouble by settling on a single partner. Worship of Henry Ford exists in common conversation as “Our Ford.” People are perpetually young for sixty years, then die to make room for new production. Since one consumes little while reading a book, the only cultivated senses are physical. Society lives in da da land.