Ghosts of Yesterday

by Jack Cady

  “Maybe I mistook about raiders. Strayed or stolen.” Bester searched a wide half-circle around our camp and found no sign. He crossed the stream and found no sign. An animal that large would have left a track. There was none. For a wild moment I thought the beast had faded and become insubstantial, like mist.

  “Who would have ever figured,” Bester said, “that a man would mourn a mule.” He divided our remaining plunder into lots for pack and carry. Since my strength was large, even if diminished from the long trek, I chose to haul the cartridges. We still had most of them, and they weighed more than enough to make a man mourn a mule.

  Then time turned tortuous. Our declining fortunes hovered like night mist. We struck westward at a slower pace, and we found that although we were sure-footed, we were not as agile as a mule.

  Since we made slower progress we saw gradual change. Repeating rifles accompanied repeating cannon. Great coils of wire fenced off trenches. Soil exploded upward, and in the midst of explosions men turned to vapor; explosions so hot that not even blood remained. Hand-thrown bombs bounced down hills, or into crevices where rapidly repeating guns chattered in reply. Huge balloons floated high above as men with spyglasses directed cannon fire. Massive machines propelled themselves across the land, but were not steamers. We gazed astounded because the things could move without the use of horses.

  “And nothing different except the weapons.” Charles probably said it, but all of us thought it. We looked at our own weapons, and were filled with doubt. We became accustomed to sprawled corpses that lay beside every sacrilege man has ever wrought.

  And all of it the same except for weapons. Then something changed and our minds recoiled. We heard a buzz, like a water-powered sawmill, but the buzz came from above.

  “There’s your sky god,” Charles murmured to Bester. “Are we believing what I’m seeing.”

  We stood dumbfounded. as a kite-like apparatus flew above the hills. A man tossed a small object from the kite. It tumbled as it fell, and it exploded near a trench.

  “End of the world,” Ephriam whispered. “If they can do that, nothing anywhere is safe.” He looked at Charles, at me, “Women and children first.” He turned away.

  Sometimes the panorama changed. Hills faded into the background and it seemed we walked the streets of broken cities. Only the streets remained. They were filled with smoking debris, and, inevitably, the dead: old men, old women, children, pet dogs, while pet cats ran feral; our world, a charnel house.

  For a space of many days we trudged forward as if dreaming. Memory turned to vision, and vision performed dramas in our minds. We could no longer tell if what we saw was spectral or real. Worse, we were visited with our most terrible memories. We were no longer as strong as we had been. While sleeping we sometimes woke screaming. When eating, we carefully divided and shared deer liver against illness and scurvy.

  In my visions the young boy I’d killed walked beside me like a son beside a father. He offered a name, Tom, and he offered sights he had seen and remembered: He showed me a small, tributary-cruising steamboat a-glitter in bright paint and brass… a one ring traveling circus… a haying. And he remembered a pretty country lass who to me seemed ordinary enough, but to the boy she was the essence of mystery and beauty.

  “Why did you kill me?” he whispered.

  “Why were you there?”

  “I run away to jine up.”

  “Your folks?”

  “Pa got kilt early on. I left, though Ma said don’t.” He thought back through his scant past. “Her name is Susy,” he said about the country lass.

  “Pretty name.” I lied.

  I walked sobbing, and my companions were kind enough not to notice. They dealt with their own visions.

  This dream-state occupied us so we scarcely knew how many miles were passed. All we have is the written record, because, of course, I was scrupulous. It looks like this:

  “Fifteenth, ninth month. Followed small river five or six miles until it bent south. Went westering approx two miles straight up, and two miles straight down. Spied an amazingly large woodpecker. Hills not as gentle as they look.”

  “Eighteenth. Sorrow fills camp. Last night each man woke. Ephriam had watch. We lay in silence for rest of night, and dog tired all day. Silence of sorrow worse than sorrow….”

  And, of course, I do not understand the meaning of all that I wrote. How can the silence of sorrow be worse than sorrow? Yet, it was true when written.

  We only knew that we trekked, made camp, slept, and sometimes woke with throats raw from moans or choking. September sun could not defeat chill breezes that began to blow from hollows and valleys. Days grew shorter. My record of the trek shows that we walked through most of September, but none of us remember the passage. I do not even remember making entries. My record shows that I spent some days thinking only of warm kitchens and cherry pies.

  Then we returned to sanity because it seems that time twisted. At any rate, it gave us something we could lay a hand on. I know now that Ephriam, wiser than the rest, brought us out of that fog of memory. He did not order events, but his awareness that we were trapped in memory somehow altered time.

  We crossed the side of a low mountain where massive trees blocked sunlight from the forest floor. In parts of these hills pine forests are impenetrable, but in the presence of these giant poplar and oak the forest lay open as a tended grove.

  From the morning mist we heard the crack of a rifle. A shot exploded in a tree beside Bester, and Bester fell and rolled for cover. A weapon began to chatter like a gossip telling tales.

  “Two of them, anyway.” Bester hunkered behind a giant poplar. “An outpost, maybe.”

  The weapon searched through the forest and we watched, stunned and voiceless as the thing cut down smaller trees. It hammered, fell to silence, hammered. We had huge trees for cover, but not enough under-growth to move without being seen. We were held in place by a weapon that chattered like a devil with ague.

  Worse, we had the low ground. From somewhere at our backs, and above, came a roar and not a buzzing. A silver machine flashed above the forest, and an oblong-shaped object fell in the direction of the chattering weapon. Light bloomed in the forest and trees exploded. A bit of bark, flung like shot, caught Ephriam alongside the cheek as he peered around a tree and looked for a target. He brushed away small bleeding, the injury minor but real. Ephriam actually seemed glad. He cocked his weapon and searched the forest. The enemy out there was corporeal, and could harm. And, it could be harmed.

  At our backs shouts came from the forest. Then came a second rushing above our heads, and something exploded in the forest. The chattering stopped.

  “Got the dumb-shit,” a voice yelled from somewhere behind us. We turned.

  “They’re not shooting at us,” Bester said. “They’re shooting at each other. Stay low.” Good advice, but not needed.

  “Okay for the gold-brickin’ Air Corps.” We heard the rapid approach of many men. We saw the first one just as the voice said, “Boys, we’ve got infiltrators or hillbillies. Three medium size and a big’un.” The voice now sounded almost conversational. To us it said, “Drop the popguns. Do you bastards speak English?”

  The man who appeared from the forest was lean, spare, and clothed in brown uniform. He wore a large helmet and carried an odd-looking rifle. The chevrons on his sleeve were small, where the Union’s had been large, but they spoke the same thing. The man was a sergeant.

  “Fan out,” he told the men with him. How often I got to tell you yardbirds not to bunch up? Two of you cover these guys, the rest cover the perimeter.”

  “Be cautious,” Ephriam said softly, “about who you’re calling a bastard. I don’t take kindly.” He chuckled. Two men had their rifles pointed at him, but they stepped backward.

  “Three whites and a nig,” one of the men said to the sergeant. “They brought their minstrel with ’em.”

  “You are overmatched and about to get scalded,” Bester said, and his voice
was even more quiet than Ephriam’s. “You get one chance to leave before I act. Good advice says, ‘take it.’” From somewhere in the forest sounded the crashing of a heavy body.

  “There ain’t nothin’ more common than bullshit,” the sergeant said. “Swing away.”

  Wind rose from the west. It started small but grew quickly. Darkness stood like a great cloud behind the wind. In the darkness green glows appeared, then began to strike like green lightning. Lightning flashed above the forest, striking through the wind, although it seemed not to strike trees. It crashed against the ground, and the familiar smell of scorched soil sailed on the wind.

  “Bastardly weather.” Bester had to yell to be heard. “Name-callin’ weather.” He turned his back on the rifles and looked into the forest where broken tree limbs rained to the ground.

  Wind hit and we staggered. We found that we could not stand, but had to hunker down. Wind put us on all fours and it seemed there was no lee. When we moved behind a tree, wind followed. I knelt and wind ripped at my clothes. I thought the fabric would tear, and I closed my eyes against the wind. Then I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered between fingers. All of us were down, my companions and the soldiers. All except Bester.

  He stood, although in such wind it was mortally impossible to stand. He watched the forest, then motioned to us by placing his fingers in his ears. We knew that Thunder would soon arrive. The sergeant and his men did not know.

  It came rolling out of the west, and it carried the sound of all the cannon ever fired in all the history of the world. Thunder held darkness in its maw, and darkness seemed a stage on which green lightning danced. Wind swept the floor of the forest, and we lay flat to keep from being carried away. Pressure in my ears was so great that I screamed into the wind and pounding Thunder. Around me men lay balled up, holding their ears, and open-mouthed, showed that they also screamed. They continued screaming for long moments after Thunder ceased.

  The cloud of darkness still enclosed the forest, and from the darkness the young woman we had met at the fish trap emerged. She walked without hurry, and with the confidence of complete power. Low light, a green glow, surrounded her. It framed her against the darkness.

  Men lay all around, still gasping, and my head ached from the pounding of Thunder. No one reached for a weapon. Our weapons were like toys in the face of such power.

  Bester still stood. “Grandmother,” he said in a normal voice. “If that’s what you want….” He turned to the soldiers. “She just saved your sorry hides. I bid you gents goodbye.”

  The sergeant and his men rose, and stepping forward, must have stepped across time. One moment they were there, and the next moment they seem to have walked between layers of time, like time was an open door. They simply walked through and disappeared.

  “Grandmother,” Bester said to the young woman. “It is good that you are here.” Then he lapsed into a musical language, part Cherokee, and part something else. Vowels sounded liquid as a running stream, warm as sunlight.

  The young woman spoke to Bester. She looked briefly toward us, then turned away. Her look was not unkind. More than anything else, she seemed mildly interested.

  Charles, on the other hand, could hardly restrain from questions. He watched as Bester and the woman made signs as they spoke. Their hands moved casually. Bester sounded more comfortable than he had sounded in quite a while.

  “Grandmother,” Charles whispered. “He called her grandmother, and yet that cannot be.”

  “Take his word for it,” Ephriam snarled. “After all that’s happened, take the man’s word.”

  “And is he a man?” I could not explain how Bester could stand in wind so strong that other men had been forced to ground.

  “I’m blamed sure of one thing,” Ephriam told me. “You can’t lick him and I won’t. If you’re thinking fight, don’t think it.”

  Ephriam had given voice to thoughts I tried to avoid. The war had placed a gulf of fury between us. Anger dwelt deep in all our hearts and bones. We had narrowly avoided a fight when Ephriam asked Bester why a man of his color stood with the Confederates. I remembered when we discovered the foetus ripped from its mother’s womb, and the child crying in its dead grandmother’s arms. We had wisely said nothing to Bester. And, Bester, equally wise, had not said much.

  The gulf was there. We would be fools to pretend it did not exist. We watched as the young woman turned from us without a glance and walked into the forest. She disappeared among the trees.

  For a short space we stood voiceless. Then Bester turned. “She tells that all the time that ever was, or ever will be, is happening all the time. What do we make of that?”

  I looked around. There were no broken trees, no smells of burning soil, no indication that a skirmish had been fought here. The forest towered above us unchanged and silent.

  “She says,” Bester continued, “that the hard part lies ahead.” He began to collect his gear. He glanced west and for the moment seemed exhausted, the way men look after battle. “I kinda regret havin’ tugged you citizens into this.”

  Charles murmured. “Make camp. Puzzle this out. Get the lay of the land. Start tomorrow fresh.” He did not mean to embarrass Bester, but he was clearly trying to regain control of the party.

  “I got the lay,” Bester told him. “What I don’t have is understandin’ it.” He sounded puzzled. “I think I just stood in a time when no wind was blowin’, and you were in a time when wind was. And take a lesson on what happened to those sojer boys.” He dropped his gear, sat on his pack, and rested.

  “I’d think,” I said, “the woman might have warned us before this.”

  “Listen to the man,” Ephriam told Bester. “He may not be smarter, but he’s bigger.”

  “I reckon she just figured it herself,” Bester told me. “The old people see time like a circle. This ‘all the time that ever was or ever will be is happenin’ all the time’… would be new.”

  “You called her ‘grandmother.’ She can’t be more than twenty-five.” Charles, I remember thinking, was more interested in his damned ethnology than in getting out of this fix. Or, maybe he tried to exercise authority. I also remember thinking that I had completely lost confidence in Charles. And how did the woman know that things were going to get worse?

  “If time is a circle,” Bester said, “then she just steps across the circle. These old people are practical.” He sat head down, and weighed with thought he was not ready to discuss. “If she needs to travel she crosses the circle and steps into her body when it was young. Try traveling when you’re ancient and stove up. What she does ain’t nothin’ but practical.”

  ……

  In the days, then weeks, that followed we walked across a darkening land. We saw fewer battles, but more remains of battles. We saw terrible machines broken and torn. Huge, winged things flashed overhead and screamed, or thundered. Litter of small wires and colorful cylinders became common. They were like the one Bester said had fallen from the sky.

  Bester examined a few of them. “T’ain’t magic. They’re parts of something. Flying machines explain the strikes of light, and I maybe see why we’re wanted here.”

  “Strikes of light must come from lenses, like in a lighthouse,” Ephriam said. “Arrange enough lenses and you can cast lamplight seven leagues.” He looked to Bester. “That doesn’t tell why we’re wanted here?”

  “I reckon war was moving east, and we’re pushing it back. I wonder how far it’s gotta be pushed?”

  We saw corpses that seemed milled into the machines, like grain ground between stones. It became no longer possible to say which was metal and which was bone. We no longer saw the dead as having once lived.

  Overhead, odd looking things flew without wings. They gave sounds of chip, chip, chip and whir above the forest. It was interesting at first. But, we became more and more aware that the final product of war is boredom. We were more concerned with our boots, which were wearing out, than with flight or death.

&nbs
p; By the third day of November the orange glow had completely disappeared. A red horizon rose just beyond the next mountain, and silver machines sailed through the sky like bolts of lightning. Strikes of light came from the machines. Sometimes one of the machines exploded in a gush of fire.

  Finally, Bester halted our trek. We bivouacked beneath a ledge of rock beside a stream. “We’re not robed for winter,” he told us. “I reckoned this job would be done by now, but it ain’t. Get ready to spend a month.”

  “A month?” Charles sounded absolutely disgusted.

  “Takes that long for tanning.”

  “We could press on,” Ephriam said. “Get it over.”

  “I’ve been told what we oughta do.” Bester looked west. “Beyond yon hill we’ll get into the thick of it. We’d need robing, even t’was midsummer.”

  “The old woman told you. You’re under orders?” Charles’ disgust now included the old woman.

  “I’m under good advice,” Bester told him. “If the old woman says robe, we robe. I’ll try to discover beaver, but trust in deer. We’ll build dead-falls if we must.”

  “If a man can build boats,” Ephriam told Bester, “he can build shelter. I’ll put together a pole cabin.” Ephriam actually sounded eager. After the uncertainty of the long trek, he now had a job that fitted.

  “You aim to tan hides?” I knew nothing about tanning, except that it smelled like Satan’s armpit.

  “We got a little salt, lye from wood ashes, and we can use the brains of deer for tanning. Don’t know why that works, but the old folks use it. I’ll bring in the game.”

  “Bear,” Charles said. “Bear is warmer.”

  Bester looked toward the forest and actually grinned. “You wanta try? Better study on it.” To me he said, “Build drying racks and a big circle of fire rings. Weather ain’t with us.” To Charles he said, “Take charge of fish. I’ll show you how to build a fish trap.” Bester spoke most pleasantly.

  Charles, on the other hand, went silent and angry. Charles could walk through the blood of battle, but turned squeamish before the gutting of fish. Either that, or the job was beneath him….