The Lion and the Dead
The Tracking Board’s 2016 Launch Pad Manuscript Competition
Life pulled at him in his grave. The pinching started in his toes, more of an irritation at first than some posthumous call back to nature, but the tingling and towing sensation crept up his toes into his ankles— searing deeply into his calves, bleeding up his thighs— shifting his hips to a more comfortable position in his rather shallow grave. It seeped through him, growing in strength as it filled his lungs, puffing them up until his ribcage strained against the rusty-damp ground bearing down upon him. His mind flickered on, humming at a disjointed click like a fever dream, but he was, mercifully, not yet conscious.
***
Walt showed up at 6:48 pm, early for his graveyard shift at the graveyard, always convinced he needed to leave his little Craftsman house with time to spare for traffic, detours, flat tires... life happens, after all. Except, it rarely ever happened in Wide Oaks, South Carolina, much less to Walt Wallace, and he’d been there long enough to know that. He had short, thick legs that bowed inward at the ankle, like his growing weight was becoming too much. His hair had gone gray by 30 and at 40 began abandoning him altogether. Certainly never called handsome with any sincerity, Walt nonetheless had a face people liked: it was doughy and kind, given character by the waves of wrinkles across his forehead.
Lukewarm coffee in one hand, frozen burrito in the other, Walt ambled along the uneven asphalt walkway, pushed around by tree roots like legs under a blanket. It was a historic cemetery, representing centuries of life and the tragedy of death during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Union and Confederate dead lay still divided, each in their own area of the grounds. Only the anonymous fallen came together with a single limestone memorial, which happened to be Walt’s favorite. They got a prostrate lion, his head cocked to the side with an expression that in less skilled hands could easily have been a yawn, but the sculptor had such gifts that the alabaster-like beast radiated anguish. Moss covered him from talon to tail, some bushy and soft, like patches of mange, others speckling the stone like flecks of pale green and blue paint. Shrouding the memorial of the Unknown Soldier always felt fitting to Walt. Each night he took the long way around to the guardhouse just to acknowledge the lion and the dead.
This particular night was a beautiful, early fall evening. The sun was still warming up the western horizon with vain watercolor hues, desperate to compete with the monochromatic stars growing in strength. Autumn leaves, more brilliant in death than they had been in life, confettied the ground, swirling around in the cool-edged breeze, scratching the asphalt like record needles. Somewhere a fire was burning, baseball wasn’t quite over, and the world smelled cozy so, Walt felt as though he fit thoroughly in his skin.
But this particular night was different: this night as Walt passed the anonymous lion, he glanced toward the patch of Rebs and saw one of the thin, selfsame markers lay cracked in half. The sight stopped him in his tracks, right on top of a tiny speed bump of a root under the pavement. Shit. He rocked his feet back and forth over the root: toe down, heel down, toe down, heel down-- thinking.
Screwing up his courage, he made his way off the pavement onto the squishy grass that had recently been mowed and even more recently rained upon. He hated getting off the path: ever since he was a child it had been drilled into him: never, never walk on top of a grave. And he could count on one hand the number of times he had, a source of pride for him having worked in the cemetery for 31 years, but he had to tonight. This grave was in a back corner, smack against the red brick wall. No path to whatever misguided Southerner the plot belonged to. Apparently no thought that future generations might want to visit him.
Walt hopped gingerly over Confederate casualties, trying to lunge across graves but thanks to his stiff hip and even stiffer muscles he always ended up jumping onto the middle of the plot. Coffee sloshed out of the Styrofoam onto his hand, chilling his skin. His belly jiggled with each landing, harshly reminding him that he was not as trim as he convinced himself he was when he sucked in and stood in profile.
The top two-thirds of the headstone lay face down on the ground, the earth above the grave gently rounded... It was almost time. It wasn’t as though this was Walt’s first time doing this, but it never got easier. He figured he had a few more hours to wait, but he could at least learn the guy’s name. Hiking up his jeans, he squatted down and strained to flip the broken headstone over next to the grave, but the shallow engraving was almost flush with the stone, weathered and beaten. Walt dragged his plushy index finger through the name, but he couldn’t figure the letters. He’d have to get tracing paper from the guardhouse—he glanced back over the sea of dead, sighed, and resumed his ineffectual hopscotching: it’s the thought that counts.
The sky had wrung out the last dripping colors of day when Walt returned graveside, winded, hungry, and uncaffeinated. Headlamp on, he hunkered down and battled the wind to tape a delicate sheet of tracing paper over the stone. His brick of charcoal tripped across the uneven surface, and soon ghostly white spaces appeared in the growing chalky black:
Captain Benjamin Whitland James
39th South Carolina Infantry
Born October 8th, 1837
Died May 6, 1864
Once finished, Walt leaned back against the oak, resting his wrists on the tops of his sore knees. The charcoal made his fingers and palms feel dry and gritty, the fine powder sending a shiver down his spine, so he wiped his hands on the dewy grass, but that only seemed to tattoo the dust to his skin.
The grave had rounded more while he was gone: now the edges of grass had begun to pull from the ground. Still, Walt bet there was some time. Captain James had been dead some 150 years, he wouldn’t mind a few more minutes. He’d eat his burrito and then start shoveling. Shame though, Walt thought, this poor kid almost made it through the war before he’d died. If he’d survived it, Walt wouldn’t be waiting on him now.
After his plastic-tasting dinner, Walt Googled the captain’s name, checking to see if he had any living descendants, especially in the area; digging up the bodies is always the tricky part since some passerby or family member on a remembrance day could get the wrong idea. He’d been lucky so far, but it remained a risk. This guy—Captain James—didn’t look like he had much in the way of living family.
Walt pocketed the phone, struggling up to his feet with a chorus of cracks and snaps from reluctant joints. He slipped on leather gardening gloves and stabbed the supple earth with the point of his shovel: it pierced the ground with the satisfying snap of grass. Swoosh! He tosses aside a shovel full. The air became clouded with the heady scent of earth: metallic and sweet. Unable to use the backhoe normally used to dig graves without attracting attention he had to do it the old fashioned way. Plus, that old Cat would probably terrify these poor devils. At least they’d all seen shovels before they’d bought the eternal farm. He dug on, careful to pile the dirt neatly so he could fill the hole again before daybreak; he’d then tack down some AstroTurf until grass grew back instead of having to buy sod. It was worth risking this time since this guy was in such a lonely back corner.
THWONK! At just past six a.m. shovel finally hit wood plank. Overjoyed to be nearly done, Walt dropped down to his stomach, leaning over the edge of the hole to sweep aside dirt. It was a simple coffin, just pine and a few nails, but had lasted well. Damn it. He’d have to pry the lid off unlike the ones that just crumpled apart to release the occupant. He assembled the winch to pull the box out of the ground and winced at each groan and clank of the machine, terrified it would attract attention.
Finally, the coffin rested on the ground next the hole. Yellowish pine stained with dirt and time to an ugly patina. Walt was sitting on the lid, wheezing and sweaty, clothes sticking to his fleshier parts; his throat was dry, crying out for water, but he didn’t have time to stop. In his mind, Walt imagined standing and getting back to work for a full two minutes before his body actually acted on the thought.
The lid gave up quickly, clattering to the ground to reveal the captain. Walt looked down at the young man, illuminating him with the harsh LED of his headlamp; according to the headstone he was 26, but Walt thought he looked a little older than that. Captain James’ chest rose and fell with short, shallow breaths, his skin sallow and blue-pale, like ice when water courses beneath it. His nails were a little overgrown and his hair rumpled and greasy: all that was normal for this stage. His wool Confederate uniform had endured the decades quite well, no tarnish on the buttons, only a few places moth-eaten. Walt was no judge of manly beauty, but he figured this fellow had an all right face: it was oval, showcasing a sturdy aquiline nose that while perfectly proportionate, still gave the appearance of self-importance. His mouth was thin and set, encased in a thick ginger-tinted beard that looked at odds to his cow-licked brown hair. The smell, given the circumstances, wasn’t so bad: Walt, sympathetic to its cause, still breathed out of his mouth to avoid it.
“Captain James?” Walt’s voice was barely above a whisper. A live person would have a hard time hearing it, much less a recently-dead one. Walt cleared his throat and tried again. “Captain James? Can you hear my voice?”
The captain’s right hand twitched a little. Each breath became deeper and more steady. Eyes still closed, James’ head turned toward the other side revealing a century’s flattened patch of hair, which made Walt chuckle. Walt straightened up, trying to make himself a little more presentable, after all he was the 21st century’s ambassador, but there wasn’t much he could do since just then the captain struggled for consciousness.
Flashes of hazel appeared as the captain’s eyelids fluttered drunkenly.
“That’s it, Captain James. Open your eyes. Focus on my voice.” Walt coaxed. He said it every time even though he wasn’t sure if it helped. Was ‘focus on my voice’ a useful and accurate direction for them at this point? Nevertheless, he said it. It let him feel useful. He clasped his hands behind his back, sucked in, and smiled benignly down at the man. At home he practiced the least terrifying expression and position, not that it made too much difference.
A few moments later and Captain James’ eyes were open, squinted against the unrelenting, harsh light emanating from Walt’s forehead, shielding his face with his unyielding forearm as he tried to sit up. His limbs wouldn’t obey well; they were all tingling and light, as if they’d been asleep.
“Just relax now-—”
“Are you a doctor?” James croaked from under his arm, unable to make out the world around the blinding light. His voice was harsh and small, the words scraping his throat as he dragged them out. Waves of sharp, deep penetrating pain assaulted his brain, ebbing to a dull throb encasing his skull. His bones ached through to their marrow, feeling insubstantial against the growing weight of the muscle and flesh surrounding them as it came back to sensation.
“Not as such, no. But you just gotta relax for now.” Walt said with a warmth more often heard when soothing children that he mixed in for just these occasions.
“Are you an officer?”
“Not a bit.”
“Then you will address me as ‘sir’.” Captain James was overjoyed to have a legitimate reason to take out his irritation on whatever hapless medical attendant this was. The world around them was quiet, but he assumed based on the great pain he was in that he was in a hospital. “You will also remove that blinding lantern strapped to your head.”
Walt’s hands flew to his forehead, reminding him of the headlamp sitting there. “Shit.” He quickly pulled it off, leaving it on the ground so it formed a white column of light next to them.
The world through his eyelids suddenly went dark so Captain James hazarded a peek, relieved to be able to still not be able to see but this time because of darkness. He couldn’t make out much of Walt, but he seemed to be smiling, so perhaps his own injuries weren’t so grave. Then again, he’d smiled and laughed with a dying man in an attempt to relieve him of knowing it. “How bad is it?” James asked, shutting his eyes against the wild, raging pain in his head.
“You’ll live.” Walt replied with a laugh. It usually took a good hour before they could talk or move. This guy was already irritated. A great sign.
“What hospital am I in?”
“You’re not.”
James opened his eyes again. A tree with spiky fingers, bare of leaves, cut the starry sky into jigsaw pieces. That’s odd-- Autumn? It was summer-- His eyes slid to his left: A short pine wall. His eyes slid to the right: another pine wall of equal size. His eyes slid down past his booted feet of dulled leather: another pine wall. Rather like a coffin... In a panic James pulled himself up, pouring his unbendable body over the side.“What in God’s name was I doing in a coffin? What’re you up to?”
“Well, I actually had nothin’ to do with it—”
James rested the weight of his torso on the heels of his palms. His toes just stared back at him uselessly. “I’ll be damned if I’m interested in your excuses!”
Not all of them yelled. Most were elated to be back (at first), some even tried to hug Walt, but he hated the ones that yelled. He backed up a few paces, twisting the gloves in his hands. “You don’t get it--”
“Who is your commanding officer...” Captain James trailed off as the world around him took shape. Graves. A sea of headstones. The shock of it pushed James unsteadily to his dull feet. He turned slowly: as far as he could see in any direction graves. Streetlights stood high above on posts, giving out a strange, harsh light he’d never seen any candle create. Suddenly he realized he knew this cemetery—but it hadn’t anywhere near this full the last time he’d been here. Where did all these graves come from? Who lies beneath them? He looked down to see the hole he’d been pulled from, the mud-stained coffin, and the cracked headstone next to them. Disbelieving his eyes, he leaned down to read the rubbing of the stone, his eyes too bleary to make it out from standing.
Walt shifted his weight, unsure of what to do. Understanding this was an incredible shock. Nothing would prepare the captain for this.
James’ pounding heart flooded with ice and stopped a moment when he saw his name, stark white against the suffocating black of the charcoal. He’s eyes flew to Walt: his dirty clothes looked strange, reminiscent of his own, they were just pants and a shirt, but somehow cheap looking. Simple and futuristic all at the same time. The headlamp drew his eyes next: he reached out to feel the heat, but there was none. Just this strange illumination with no source.
“Try not to panic now,” Walt took a small, easy step toward the terrified captain.
As if by command, fear was replaced with a bubbling mixture of hope and determination. “India.” Captain James murmured.
“No, it’s the United States again...” Walt corrected, but he wasn’t sure James heard him. The Captain was hobbling as fast as he could toward the cemetery gate, his legs straining to run, but his muscles felt like tight rubber bands requiring exhausting force to stretch into a stride only to snap back drained of energy. The ground beneath him gave little cushioning; it was a hard jar to his tense spine when boot hit asphalt. He ran through it, his stride slowly lengthening until he was running at full speed, his eyes not seeing the gray-yellow lines dividing the road, not seeing the reflective blocks spread out along the lane lines. All he saw in his mind’s eye was India.
Last he could remember was fire.
The tide of the war had finally turned definitively in favor of the Union and they weren’t missing an opportunity to cement it. Fields of crops turned to seas of blinding flames, thickening the humid air until men choked on their own breath. Homes, some built before Americans rebelled against King George, reduced to rubble. James remembered General Sherman had been heading for Charleston, leaving a path of ash and embers in his path; the memory reignited the constant panic lying heavy in his stomach. India lived in Sherman’s path.
Morning was just beginning to break through the horizon when Captain James reached the drive leading to her house. He jumped the rusted metal gate thrown unevenly across the opening, new to him, but perhaps in an effort to hold back Yankees and thieves. The avenue of thick-fat oaks laced their fingers tiredly over his head, as if they need to lean on each other to stay upright. Patchy beards of Spanish Moss clung to branches. At the bottom of the drive would be the white Greek Revival house, decorated in black shutters with double porches.
His lungs filled and deflated without feeling: two useless paper bags in his chest. He felt as if he were suffocating, but she’d be in the house at the end. She was mere steps from him now. He could hold her tightly against him and inhale her: the smell that meant contentment. That smell entirely hers of jasmine, muslin, sweat, and flour. He could see her eyes, soft and gray, brightened by her happy tears. Those eyes that turned his bones to cold butter. He’d feel her breath rising and falling beneath her stiff corset within his iron arms. And he’d know she was safe. He’d finally able to breathe himself.
This was the thought that woke him up every day. That helped him slip off to sleep at night. India would come to him in his dreams, pushing aside the memories of battle: wiping clean his mind of blood and screams and fire. Her specter walked in front of him on march, beckoning him forward when all he wanted to do was collapse from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness. It was her smile, mischievous and coy, pleading and teasing, effervescent and forced that kept the gun in his hands and sword by his side.
The world had gone mad and he’d become glad to see it burn. A small part of him was furiously relieved to see men in blue die-- even to see his own men die. He craved his own vengeful death at the hands of the enemy so it could help appease the ever-growing wound of murder he’d helped create. What were they all, Union and Confederate both, but a plague upon the world? Better off destroyed. After four years of rapacious war, the illusion of innocence had been ripped from him with bits of his flesh.
Yet still, he woke up every morning. He still prayed for the safety of his men by protecting them when he could. Still prayed he might survive the battle by being quick-footed with a sure-shot. He still marched on. Because as long as India was in the world, he’d fight for it.
The house came into view: it still stood. This relief was enough for James to stumble to a stop, sucking down prickling gulps of cool air. He leaned forward on his knees in a circle of light from the streetlamp above him, glancing curiously at it: harsh and painfully bright, like sun striking off a mirror. He had little time to consider the strangeness-- his focus was on the two-story mansion in front of him.
It was dark inside, but the house looked resplendent. Somehow even better than before he’d left. He trudged up the porch steps, trying to lighten the chunky-thump of his boot heels on the boards that reverberated in the still morning air. Rectangular glass framed the black door, but it wouldn’t offer much: warped by heat and years, the glass rippled down, looking like a freeze frame of a waterfall. It was semi-dark in the foyer: no candles lit, but a red exit sign above the door bathed the floor with desaturated crimson. James pulled back from his cupped hands, confused: Why did the furniture seem different and in the wrong places? What was creating the red light? Where was the houseboy? His heart began to race. Nothing seemed right. He tried the doorknob, but it stubbornly refused to move in his hand. In fact, he could barely feel its cool metal; dulled as if he were wearing a glove.
He slammed his fist against the door. “India! Wake up! It’s Benjamin!” He could hear his voice, still harsh and hollow sounding, but his fists made no sound on the door. He stumbled back, feeling an unearthly fear. Running over to the windows looking out onto the porch, he peered in, groaning in fury when the dim interior held its secrets.
“India!” He screamed, looking up at the robin’s egg blue porch ceiling, as if he could see through it to her room. Why was the house seemingly abandoned but so well cared for?
Tears of panic were growing hot in his stinging eyes: everything was just slightly wrong, which made it extraordinarily terrifying. Was this a dream? Was he hallucinating while lying in some field hospital? The medics and soldiers carrying on around him as he shivered and flailed on the ground lost in this nightmare?
The house remained quiet. No one came to the door to see about his ruckus. The captain glanced furtively around for some sign he actually existed in this moment. That he was actually on the porch of Fallen Oaks when suddenly the front door opened.
Benjamin’s tense muscles began to tremble in relief. He smiled, his hazel eyes crinkling up into well-worn folds like an accordion, his laugh-sigh the note they made. He rushed towards the door to see a stranger sweeping great swirls of dust from the foyer onto the porch. The woman was probably in her 70s, dressed in denim suit, embroidered by machine with bright flowers around the collar, capris pants slipped down past her ankles, almost touching her pristine white orthopedic sneakers. She hunched over the broom, happily absorbed in her work. Beverly’s hair was the same as it had been for most of her life, bobbed, teased, curled, and sprayed. Not particularly imaginative or flattering, but comfortable.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” Captain James said, stepping forward slowly so as not to startle the antique woman. He pulled his jacket closed, pushing the top button of his jacket through its hole. He didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t alarm him. Maybe she was some relative of India’s, come to help during the lean times. Or maybe fleeing the conflict and seeking shelter here. Her wardrobe however, was shocking to say the least.
Beverly looked up.
“I am India’s fiancé, Captain Benjamin James--”
But Beverly didn’t look up at him. She was smiling out into the yard.
Through him.
She saw a fox hurry across the misty lawn, glancing over his sinewy shoulder at Captain James, seeing what Beverly did not.
“Ma’am?” He asked again, moving to stand directly in front of her, but still all Beverly saw was the long majestic drive. Benjamin furrowed his brow: why was she ignoring him? Choosing to allow the feelings of offense to take over in lieu of a renewal of panic, Captain James brushed past her, storming in through the front door.
Beverly shivered as he walked by, chalking it up to the stiff autumnal breeze and not enough layers. She resumed her sweeping.
Turning back, Benjamin saw the word “EXIT” glowing over the door. Its luminosity seemed sinister and the suggestion uncouth. Without considering the rudeness of storming up the stairs unannounced and in the early morning to call on one’s fiancée, Benjamin was startled by a faded velvet rope hanging-slack from wall to bannister, blocking off the broad stairs that wound slowly towards the upper levels. What the hell purpose did this serve? It’d keep no one out. Proving his point, Captain James easily swung his leg over it, climbing the gently warped stairs two at a time. The air grew mustier and warmer as he climbed, but it didn’t smell right. He had no names for what it should’ve smelled like and none for what it did smell like, but whatever it was, it was wrong.
The second floor hallway was dim, the only light coming from the damp morning sun in the Palladian window. Furniture was clumped oddly against the wall: ballroom chairs sat stacked, looking like huddled, exhausted partygoers; a few tables hosted mildewing cardboard boxes. Paint cans, labels long covered by drips of color, formed an unintentional mosaic against the peeling plaster wall. A carpenter’s box filled with tools lay strewn beneath exposed wall, a circular saw carelessly on its side. But Benjamin barely saw any of this strangeness: he only saw her bedroom door, second on the left at the end--not that he should’ve had such information.
He hurried down the hall, no rug to muffle the hammering of his boot heels against the dark, pockmarked wood floor.
Beverly glanced at the ceiling above her with sharpened eyes: she would swear, on the Bible itself, she’d just heard footsteps...
Benjamin raised a shaking fist and knocked gently on the grayish door, second on the left at the end of the hall. The action made no sound, but he couldn’t tell, the silence masked by the deep throbbing in his ears. He tried again: louder this time. Still, no one stirred from within. Spurred into impropriety by fear, Captain James opened the door, his eyes already filling with the sight he knew would be on the other side: India, lying peacefully in her bed, the braid in her hair pulled and tugged into mess during sleep. A canopy top bed situated between the two eastern windows. A portrait of some great-grandmother or other above the fireplace. Again, not that he should’ve had such information.
But the room was empty except for a desk with a metal front and plywood top. So lacking in craftsmanship and character that the room seemed to reject it. The peeling walls pulled away from it, making the desk look cartoonishly small.
Genuinely panicked now, Benjamin threw open every door on the hall, pushing through the ones that stuck, warped in the centuries of humidity, not that he knew what each room should hold, but they were clearly all inaccurate. Some empty except for cardboard boxes, or discarded furniture, standard lamps with broken shades. One contained nothing but brass posts festooned with the same velvet rope across the stairs, faded into tie-dye light and dark red. One room contained a wall calendar coated in a thick layer of dust and stacks upon stacks of something called the Fallen Oaks Cookbook.
He didn’t recognize many of the items in the rooms, so how could he imagine them in a fever dream? What the hell was happening to him? In a blind panic, fearing not only for India and her family, but also for his sanity, James slammed the last door.
Beverly nearly jumped out of her skin downstairs: she’d definitely heard something that time. That was most certainly a door slamming upstairs. It’s not that Beverly believed in ghosts, it’s mostly that she just didn’t not believe in them. That was her philosophy about most things requiring faith: she’d not not believe in them until something pushed her one way or another. She figured God was benign enough to forgive that-- if h(H)e existed. And in that moment, she was sincerely praying for a ghost.
Broom in hand, Beverly walked slowly towards the stairs, her gait slow not from age, but from an unwillingness to go: her primordial brain urging her toward the “flight” option, pushed aside and overruled by her rational side. Primordial Beverly still got to her bring the broom though. She lifted the velvet rope from its eye and stepped through it, flinching involuntarily at each creak and moan the steps released. She wound her way up, stepping onto the second floor gingerly, her heart racing with adrenaline, that faithful drug. The sight of all the previously-and-always-closed doors standing wide open elicited one, quiet, quivering “Oh,” from Beverly. Only one, the door closest to the stairs that held all the unsold cookbooks, was closed. “Hello?” She ventured, though she was not sure she’d enjoy any response she’d get.
Captain James stood before her, hand still on the doorknob of the only closed door; his shoulder slumped, pulled protectively around him. Heaving breaths beating their way out of his paper bag chest. Tears pooled in his eyes and he felt childlike. “Please.” He whispered. “Please look at me.”
But Beverly saw and heard none of this. She walked right past him to the first opened room, glancing inside for a person. He watched her, the movement of his eyes forcing a few tears down his cheeks. “Madame, I am begging you to acknowledge me.”
Terrified that she wouldn’t-- couldn’t.
Click. Beverly closed the second door. Ignorant of the pleading soldier shadowing her steps down the hall, but feeling an oppressive thickness to the air behind her. “I will not harm you, please just speak to me!” Benjamin’s voice was choked with a thick wad constricting his throat.
Click. Beverly closed the third door. Almost wishing she’d find someone rummaging through the boxes for trinkets to sell to antique shops. She closed the fourth door, heading for India’s old room.
“Tell me what has happened here!” Benjamin finally shouted, flinging India’s door closed with a deafening crack before Beverly could. She’d call that proof. Tossing aside the broom, Beverly hurried down the hall; picking her way down the stairs leaning heavily on the creaking rail that visitors and docents know isn’t supposed to be used, cursing her crumbling body for its sluggishness. She couldn’t hear or see Captain James beside her, yelling, screaming, for her attention, but by god she could feel the hideous air around her, thick against her skin, pulling the hair on her arms and neck upright.
James followed her as Beverly ran out the front door, pulling it closed behind her, but not waiting to hear it shut. Breathlessly she hobbled down the porch steps, and made for her 1994 champagne Buick. Something about the CD player in the car made it feel modern enough to be of protection. She pulled the driver’s side door closed and locked the doors.
Benjamin stared at the car from the porch, afraid to go near it. It looked like some ridiculous carriage, but she’d not get very far without a team. But what lay just beyond the hyperventilating septuagenarian in the Buick held James’ vision and his focus. He knew he had to walk over there. He knew he had to see. But there was nothing he wouldn’t have traded not to know. An iron wrought fence surrounded it now, cloaked in wisteria. Dried and brittle stems wrenched themselves from the grass, clinging to the metal partition. The large oak he’d known to be there had been cut down, its weathered, stocky stump forming its own tombstone.
He counted as he took reluctant steps toward the graveyard: fourteen headstones. There’d only been six before the war. They all looked equally wind and rain beaten, which gave him some small hope that perhaps he’d just miscounted before. Or misremembered. There are few things worse in life than an accurate memory.
The gate stood ajar, wedged against the uneven ground. Benjamin slipped through it, forcing bitter tasting spit down his throat. She won’t be there... She won’t be there...
She won’t.
But she was.
Benjamin bones felt cracked as his knees gave out from under him. He sank clumsily to the ground in front of India’s headstone. Dizzy, choked, and nauseated. The tears poured hot and unchecked down his cheeks. There was a physical pain in his chest that suffocated him. The sobs came out in wretched, scraping sounds, some so drowning they formed no noise. Benjamin’s head fell heavily into his palms, blacking out the world. He rocked forward, his finger slipping through his greasy hair, pulling it as his hands formed fists. But, he felt impossibly light, like his body had been emptied of matter and at any moment he’d float away.
Beverly’s breath evened into her normal emphysema-inhibited rhythm as she went through all the things that could explain what she just experienced: a draft, another docent left the doors open, a handyman. A draft... But for some reason her eyes were continuously pulled back to the little family cemetery near the parking lot. No reason for it, but she smiled pitifully at the graves and wondered about them as real people, not the paper doll shadows conjured by the living of the always-dead.
Benjamin finally lifted his head back up to face the now emptier world. Sunlight stung his bloodshot eyes. The morning birds chirped garishly, the notes sharp to his ear. The air smelled acrid. Blood replaced by lead, he was perfectly content with the idea of never standing again, being taken over by the wisteria. He forced himself to look at the headstone again, hoping the name would somehow be different: that all of this anguish would be washed away by a different arrangement of letters. The engraving blurred through an unshed tear, so he wiped roughly at his eyes. To his shock, her name was different, but not different enough:
India Rivers Addison
Born February 21, 1840
Died October 4, 1881
Another wave of nausea hit him: she’d married? In all the jealous raging wrestling around his gut, it took him a moment to comprehend her death date. 1881. 17 years after the last day Captain James could remember... A year he’d not yet seen, so how could she be dea-- and he still be here?
Benjamin sprang to his feet.
***
Walt kept glancing at the gate looking for Captain James. He wasn’t sure where the soldier had gone off to, but as soon as he saw a 7-11 or a semi, he’d come running back for an explanation. They always did. The toughest challenge to date was explaining to an English infantryman killed during the Revolutionary War why Burger King gave out paper crowns.
Waiting, he sat in his guard shack, watching highlights from the World Series on his phone. A second cup of bad coffee barely taking the edge off his nettled eyes. Sleeping during the day was always tough for him: the sounds of waking life all around him made him anxious, like he was missing the good stuff. Somehow, while lying in bed at 2:30 in the afternoon, clinging to sleep, mowing the lawn seemed like the best thing to do. Feeling the engine rumbling up through your arms, the cut grass clinging to sweaty feet, the perfect rows of cut and long grass forming patterns-- it’s not as though he could mow his lawn at night. His mother, knowing his predicament, suggested he keep a journal: Walt genuinely tried, but he always felt like he was sacrificing journal-worthy adventures to simply write about what had already happened. Now he wished he’d learned the habit. Maybe it would help. His father kept detailed journals of the dead he pulled out of the ground. Names, ranks, conflict resulting in the death, anything he learned about them. It was what kept him sane: hunching over his leather-bound book during the day with crumbling fingers, squeezing line and after line onto a page until it sighed under the weight of the ink, only reluctantly moving to a new page. The Great Depression left unusual scars.
“What the devil year is it?”
Walt startled up from the double play on his phone to see Captain James filling the guard shack door, his eyes wild.
“I tried to tell you before you run off. It’s later than you think--”
“How late? Is the war over?”
“Some 150 years ago.”
James wanted to scream “What?” The word even bubbled up on the anxious bile flooding his throat, but it was drowned before it made it to his mouth. So instead he concentrated on the ringing pain in his head. That was real. That meant he was real. This was real-- somehow.
“I know it seems real strange, but it’s not as strange as you think. You see, you’ve been dead for those intervening years and you’ve just come back to fill the gap. Come back to 2014, that is.”
James just stared at him. For a moment, even the pain in his head ebbed away and he felt literal and blessed nothing.
“Well, I supposed it is real strange. I don’t know why this happens, but the men of my family have been digging y’all up when it’s your time since the first war was fought whenever the hell that was. Long time.”
Captain Benjamin James felt this was a good time to sit down.
“I wish I could get you something, but it wouldn’t do much good.” Walt lamented. His shift was over and truthfully, he was aching for his bed, but just ‘cause his shift was over didn’t mean his job was. The poor startled soldier still sat by the door staring off across the dead. The excited unintelligible chatter of children floated by on the spiky morning air. Walt glanced up to see a volunteer leading a field trip group of elementary school kids.
“Everyone I know is dead?” James finally looked up at Walt. It was rhetorical, but his eyes still demanded the needless confirmation.
Walt sighed, the corners of his mouth turned up into the suffocated smile of empathy. “I reckon that’s right. Sometimes fellahs come back not too long after they died. All depends, but in your case it’d be hard to say anyone was alive.”
“Everyone I knew...” James corrected himself. Suddenly feeling the horror of the past tense. As far as his eye could see was grave. And as far as he cared, everything was dead. He wanted to be back among them. “Can you send me back?”
Walt’s heart lurched at the fragility of the captain’s tone. He shook his head no.
As far as he could remember, mere hours ago he’d been consumed by the thought of living and now all he craved was death. “Then what do I do?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know that much. Just that when you died in the war, you left your life unfinished. Connections weren’t made as a result. There’s a broken chain now you’ve got to fix.”
“Whose?”
He genuinely tried to think who it could possibly be, but there were too many people on earth to know. Walt reluctantly shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Captain James began picking at his thumb’s fraying cuticle, something Walt took as an excellent sign of progress. The old soldier might even stand up soon. But James was enjoying the irritating pain it caused; it distracted from the nauseating feeling weighing him down that he’d betrayed India. That he’d betrayed everyone he loved.
Allowing himself to focus on the rhythmic pushing and pulling of the small piece of skin helped anchor him to the present moment. “Do I ever get to return?” He looked at Walt calmly for the first time.
“To-- your grave?”
James nodded.
“When you finish the connections.”
The captain lunged to his feet, startling Walt. “A task I am unaware of?Connecting people--abject strangers-- born centuries after myself to one another? Who created this damn system?”
“I wish I knew.” Walt agreed.
“You can furnish me with no additional information?” Walt shook his head no.
Captain James took the expected blow with the stoicism expected of a military man. He nodded curtly in feigned understanding and resignation.
Sensations were muted, but Captain James could feel pinpricks of the fall morning wind as he left the guard shack, entirely unclear where he was headed.
Embarrassed by the fear he felt for the alien world around him as he passed the rambunctious-barely-listening school children on their outing. The mix of white children amongst black, Hispanic and Asian-- neither of which he’d ever personally seen before-- shocked his eyes and sensibilities. And educating girls with the boys? Nothing made sense to him, not even something as mundane as their clothes: almost everyone in baggy trousers, even the girls. He stood motionless in shock, forgetting his own predicament as the group of 30 children bounced by.
“C’mon everyone, stay together! Don’t step off the path--” the young volunteer reminded the children with a cheerful tone seemingly unsuited for the surroundings.
They hurried past, unaware of the mournful, insulted gaze of Captain James has he watched their small parade. Only one child, a young black boy, glanced back. James could barely move. Had that child seen him? Had they truly locked eyes as it seemed?
“You, boy! Do you see me?” James demanded anxiously.
No. He didn’t. And he didn’t hear James either, but the lack of these concrete senses did nothing to diminish the fact the young schoolboy knew the captain was there and it sent a deep, rattling shudder down his little spine. He turned away, racing to the front of the pack where he felt safer.
The world had never felt so wide or indefatigably large than when Captain James had nowhere to go and no one to see. And no one to see him. Well, except Walt apparently. Inwardly, Benjamin felt himself pull back from his skin, shrinking deep within himself. He pulled his memories up around his mind like a shield and the modern world disappeared behind its wall.
***
Home seemed a logical enough place. East out of the cemetery, Captain James walked down the two-lane road someone in the 1930s paved and named Huger Street, a popular avenue even in James’ time. SUVs and luxury sedans sped by him and through him, but neither he nor the drivers were particularly aware of that fact: car radios momentarily fizzled with static as it zipped through his invisible form, and perhaps James felt a slight push forward like a gust of wind, but the modern world stayed veiled from the dead captain’s eyes. Cars and trailer homes became masked behind recollections of thick walls of sappy pines, asphalt was swept beneath dirt and grass.
In his time, the James family farm sat just under ten miles from town. A utilitarian farmhouse, built to withstand Judgment Day not to win architectural prizes, sat on the crest of a loping hill in the center of the 185-acre farm. What he didn’t see was how the land had become developed, carved into small yards of similar middle class ranch houses. The south field was bulldozed into a sad strip mall of Dollar Trees and Laundromats surrounding an oil-stained parking lot. A Kentucky Fried Chicken added the only splash of color in the drab unit.
But his house still stood. Battered by the years, white, dimpled paint on the two- story frame gave into a tired gray. The porch roof seemed at more of an angle than it had been before, but it still looked ready to withstand Judgment. It helped James to see his home sitting on its lonely hill, but he didn’t rush toward it. He hesitated, regretting his decision to return. Despite refusing to look at the changed world around him, he still knew he was alone in it. His parents were not in there. His sister would not be fussing out back in the kitchen garden, her baby daughter fidgeting in her swaddling cloth nearby. They were long since dead and he was not prepared to face their shadows.
So, he stood beside the wide oak tree at the base of the driveway, staring forlornly at the house, acutely grieving his family’s deaths as if they had just occurred.
*
Evie swung her rumbling Ford Explorer into the gravel drive of her grandmother’s house. Captain James would’ve taken issue with that title, but it had been Evie’s grandmother’s since she bought it at an auction in 1961. It had been missing part of its roof, sustained considerable fire damage, and become home to a number of wild animals, but Emerald Ozell had loved the old pile since she’d first seen it.
As Evie turned onto the driveway though, something under the oak tree beside the mailbox caught her eye. It was a flash, almost like sunlight bouncing off a steel surface, but it looked exactly like a wire outline of a man with drooped shoulders staring at the house. It caused her to slam on the brakes, but there was nothing there. Her heart beat wildly as her mind and eyes struggled to come to an acceptable answer. Her mind settled on “a flash of sunlight that my brain, programmed to find faces, turned into a human shape.” Her eyes sincerely begged to differ.
She had too much to do to sit around worrying about that optical illusion she told herself as she pressed the gas and finished the drive to the house. But still-- she suddenly didn’t feel at all alone.
***
Evie had heard “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” about as often as she’d heard her own name in the two and half decades she’d been alive. She hated the phrase, not because it felt like an empty platitude, but because it was true. That horrid earned-strength, she felt, had twisted and malformed her, stripping her body of supple fragility and replaced it with knotted muscle that felt too bulky for her form. It rested like chainmail over her skeleton, protective, but heavy. Iron had grown up like a weed around her spine, fusing her vertebrae together, allowing her to stand tall through any storm, but leaving her unable to relax into a peaceful moment or form into another’s arms.
She didn’t see the giantess she felt when she looked in the mirror. Her slender, compact form was reflected back: no hunchback, no exaggeratedly large shoulders, just a softness around her belly and slightly-too-fleshy biceps for a magazine cover’s liking. But Lord, she felt it: huge and ungainly. It was in her voice. She sounded old, thick and self-assured, but somehow brittle as a result, like an echo in a cavernous, empty old cathedral.
This particular morning was identical to the others preceding in the past year: she was dragged awake long before her alarm got to do its job by the relentless ding of her email notification. By 8 a.m. she’d have a minimum of twenty emails all marked urgent from lawyers, county clerks, accountants, and caregivers. She’d answer the ones she knew off the top of her head (“$15 an hour,” “we have not yet found his original will,” “the hearing is Thursday the 16th at 3 pm”) while lying in bed, enjoying the sensation of pulling crusty sleep from her eyes. Only the threat of leaving the harder-to-answer emails neglected got her up. She hated that lumpy old bed, picked out and worn in by another’s body, but it seemed like a far safer, more pleasant place than her life had become since her father’s death.
He’d been a handsome man, full of natural charm and an easy smile. He was smart and compassionate. But he could never pull himself together from some unseen trauma; that devil poured one too many drinks for him and beat him in the end. As if lining up his next customers, that devil also helped pave a path of destruction and despair that would haunt those who loved him.
Her father’s body gave out at 62, and to be frank, Evie was fairly shocked it’d made it that far and yet his death felt abrupt and shocking. He was an expert alcoholic, careful that no one should see him drink, not even his children, but she didn’t have to see his Adam’s Apple bob in the deluge of bourbon to feel its effects. Charm turned to rancor. Age-old rage slipped out of every pore, braiding his voice into a whip. He never once struck her, but always insinuated he could-- and would-- and the constant fear of that possibility was punishment enough.
But truth be told, it’d been so long since she’d seen or talked to him before he died, she’d almost forgotten how her stomach walled up with lead bricks the moment her foot crossed his front doorstep, so on edge that the ungraceful clank of the loose metal door sill caused her to jump every-- damn-- time. Shivering all the more when the wall of refrigerated air hit her sweaty summer skin. Breaking the court-ordered weekend up into small pockets of time, packed full of activities (“walk to bedroom, unpack,” “set the table, ensure the pattern on his plate was set off to a different angle than her own,” “walk down the street and back,”) to distract herself and keep her head down until Monday morning. This brilliant plan of scheduling never held the loneliness or fear at bay, hell, it didn’t even keep her out of trouble with him, but the idea of it was some small comfort in itself.
Evie had been out of the country visiting her older brother when he’d had a withdrawal seizure and was admitted to the hospital for the umteenth time in the past couple of years. But this time he wasn’t coming out after a little routine detox. The hospital was desperate to find a next of kin to help make decisions since his lucidity waxed and waned, but Evie’s phone was off and still in the US. So, for two weeks he was alone in a teaching hospital, jaundiced like a Post-It Note, and declining rapidity as his kidneys and liver finally slipped beneath the surface of his manmade bourbon sea.