A Thousand Vultures by Christopher Ananias

The sun is sunny—not thoroughly unpleasant—but not a sun for picnics with Mary Lou down on the Potomac. Mary Lou is dead and buried by some Godless creek in Kansas. Her cross will rot away. A weak hastily made thing of silver birch branches and binder twine. In a year, a month, a week? She will have no marker unless I can find it again. Find her under the creeks torrents of land-grabbing muddy currents and sulking floods. Find her under the black silt and plants rotting white and stinking. Carp flopping on her grave. Then the water washes over again- recedes- and pulls the entire bank and her into it. Best to leave the past in the past.

I told the blacksmith Barker it was too damn close to the creek to bury someone, but the other two, the worthless coachmen drunk on Rye whiskey and power, and unwilling to shovel. Put a stop to it. Garland said, “Dig right there tenderfoot, or we’ll leave ya.”

Barker’s wife, Beth a Christian lady, hastily said the Lord’s prayer through tears over Mary Lou’s grave. Then Brandt, the other coachman, smashed an empty whiskey bottle on a big rock. Smashing glass in the air—gnashing of teeth—to come.

Barker’s wife Beth was killed when the drunken coachman Garland wrecked us on the only boulder in sight on the sweeping prairie. The coach door with its faulty latch opened like a saloon’s bat-wings and sprung Beth out head first in the stiff grass and hard scrabble. She apparently had no ability to tumbleweed. No acrobatic prowess at all and snapped her fragile long white church lady’s neck. The silver cross glimmering like something a crow would pick. The other coachman Brandt also died after the coach landed on the coachman. Both horses ended up with broken front legs like Siamese twins entwined in the dig of leather rigging, lying on their sides screaming. Horse screams are something you don’t want to hear. You may never un-hear them.

Barker went to Beth and saw she was dead, and without a tear went to the horses and saw their condition. His hand went to the Navy Colt dragoon in its holster. Only a blacksmith could wield such a massive weapon in such an effortless way. He cocked the single-action gun. Something in this made me think of medieval catapults. Before I could say goodbye to the big gray, Flowers. The shot rang out then another. He turned the gun on the negligent Mr. Garland. Who hadn’t a scratch from his drunken horse driving—without a word Barker blew the instantly sobered Garland off his feet landing somewhere in hell! This I liked. 

When I found a moment in the aftermath that lasted all day whatever day it was. I wrote in my journal. Excuse the prose. It is sun-drenched and thirsty, perhaps insane:

Two of us left, out four passengers and two worthless coachmen. The blacksmith Barker, and me Josiah Greene. Don’t I sound like a puritan—well I’m not—but I’m not Barker either. My hands are used for digging. I’m the excavator of the earth. I buried my wife in a low spot along a nameless creek. Now I dig more with an executioner at my hip.

There are horses, and then there are no horses. There is the sky forever and a vast green void of waving grass. People died. A stagecoach with a broken axle. It still offers a dry place—sheltering rain. The rain has stopped for a long while now. The water hole we found is drying. Summer has come. Smells of dusty soapy pollen send me into a constant sneezing fits, weeping eyes and a runny nose. The wildflowers are wilting and curling like singed eyelashes. The prairie grass is long and yellowing. Hell’s door has flung open Its fiery girth and squatted its red coals upon us. Barker has a crazy look in his faded blue eyes.

“I’m gettin tired of horse meat. What say, sum-bitch? Let’s find some shade?” said Barker, the loud-mouthed Hoosier.

The horses were picked clean by a thousand vultures. Their bones waited to be scattered and made into the savage’s tomahawk handle or a bone knife. We walked for three days. We’re walking the horse fat off our bodies. The last of the water skins fell behind us. A stand of trees over the rise. We have reached a wood. Not that it helped us much.

Walking through the weary woods like a couple of starving troubadours. Fore we had walked for another two days getting lost and with no food for the last five days. We both wished for horse meat. We discovered in the leafy darkness impaled in the flicks of light, a corruption beyond the sweet sickening senses.

The obscenity came from the entangled gloom to gloat and eat up our last reserves of sanity. The putrid wetlands beyond were also no comfort to our disintegrating selves of stark rib cages, and protruding eyes, in the long mossy shadows came ratcheting bugs of the black and green scum of an endless swamp, full of vipers.

To see such a sight was like the horses screaming. The corpse was nailed to a tree. His hands were stretched out on branches going east and west. The more I looked I realized the obvious. They had crucified him.

The head looked upward with a dying wish on his face in the halo of light that even now was pulling back and the shroud of darkness was falling. The long straight slice up the corpse’s middle left no doubt of its evisceration, blushing bluish intestines crawling with flies.

Gleaning from the ebb and flow of the trickling light pushed us to a different course. To get on with our bony freight. Perhaps a murderer ran the ridge-line of the wood. Is there any doubt!

As if to mock this thought amongst the corpse and sallow eyeless crawl of the white worms, teaming with a loud industrious buzz of black and green blow flies, swarming the pale bloat, came an unearthed cry of lunacy! As if it were yanked from the roots of the forest.

Pierced to flee but not to the swamp or the screaming ridge-line. Flat-footed backward steps incarcerated by fear but found fleet. We ran hiccuping over the sticks and leaping over dead logs like frail deer. The maudlin and garrets of terror warbled and waned from the bloated surprise, and the screaming wilderness. I thought, “Why us?” Answered with a “Why not you,” scream by our murderous tracker, scales dropping from its nocturnal eyes adjusting perfectly to the darkness.

If open fields of prairie grass were approaching, they hid their emptiness for all we saw was fewer shafts of light and deeper divisions of the trees. The pace ensued and thirst increased and my troubadour of somewhat loose companionship unraveled with angry protestations of, “No this way, Greene!”

As I left the commission of this loose friendship, I hoped in the leer of the now moonless black smears of vision perhaps he would be less fleet than I. This Emmett Barker the boasting blacksmith of blood.

Barker crashed somewhere through the meander of brush, and I thought, good, be the noisemaker, be the peace-breaker, and I heard the splash of feet. Then more commotions of turbulence as if alligators flopped and wrestled, from a swamp that I thought was back but was now forward.

My companion in the loose bounds of affiliation as only travelers find in the confines of stagecoaches that break down and horses die on the frontier, seemed doomed to the inexplicable approach of our bloodthirsty pursuer. His black powdered monster had gotten wet and there was no clothesline to hang it.

The corpse again crucified like a topographical marker of a hellish map still looking up. The gloom greets me as if to aspire to the nighthawk and cross the sky, or to ridicule. Small animals, some bigger than I care to imagine, dissembled off the ravaged bloat and dragged full stomachs to the brush and waited. Then came the piercing scream of my affiliate, perhaps once a friend, ole Barker, drinking cowboy coffee on the prairie singing Christian hymns with a foul mouth, but now surely dead.

I had no time to intervene or mourn. I, the storekeeper and the dude from the east, as the rough coachmen, spat. Vowed to outlive them all and had thus far. To walk a straight line became my covenant with myself and God, over the decayed leaves and black silted roots, teeming with white grubs, and bisect the wilderness in a perpendicular course, straight as a sales ledger to the prairie. Where in the green grass I will lie down this skin full of sweaty dirt, thirst, starvation, and exhaustion, and snooze into the other side. And meet Mary Lou on the Potomac.

After an endless slog, with the welts of the mosquitoes, like a new bumpy derma, I came to realize. My linear course must lay not in the straight geometrical proof, but proven to be circuitous.

The crucified figure no longer looked up at the stars. He looked at me and smiled.

Christopher Ananias

Image by Jevgeni Fil from Pixabay – A couple of really scary looking vultures. Brown feathers, grey powerful hooked beaks and beady beady eyes.