Western Short Story
Fourth of July Homecoming
Tom Sheehan
Western Short Story
Old
Scott’s Mill had given off odd sounds since the day it closed down.
Now it gave off a sense of passage.
All
the way back to the last Fourth of July the boys had saved a cache of
fireworks, the three pals, Snag and Chris and Charlie B, all twelve
years old within three days of each other. "Pals to the end,"
they had said, squirreling away the fireworks in Snag's Aunt Lil's
barn leaning away from one century and into another. And many times
those same hidden articles promised to smoke and explode from their
secret hideaway, the boys' want for noise and excitement so strong at
times, at times like hunger tantrums. But they had saved them for a
special occasion. "Promise made is promise kept," Snag had
said on Veterans' Day, his voice hard as wire, though the tantrum
pummeled alive in his gut.
So
Snag and Chris and Charlie B came together on the specially appointed
night, the national holiday, and crept up on the backside of Scott's
Mill, closed tight as an angry man's fist, sitting there beside the
slow Saugus River. It was a mill as marked as time itself, whose
existence seemed to transcend the town and its beginnings. Now and
then it became a shell of nacre the way an early bronze moon could
make it eerie and distant and out of this world. It was a piece of
another time, another dimension, for none of them could begin to
imagine the gallons of workers' sweat that had seeped into the floors
of the structure for parts of two centuries.
One
box and two bags of choice explosives, stashed away for ninety
slow-as-snails days, figured in their arms as something Fort Sumter
or another historic battle site might have loosed. Tonight there'd be
a new war on the silence gripping the mill, on the monstrous darkness
that moonless nights allowed to cling to the mill, and on whatever
lurked in it or around it.
Lighting
their sticks of punk they stood on the bank of the river and the
smell coasted thickly in the night as if an old barn had been turned
inside out. Once, earlier, Chris had explained that his grandfather
affirmed that punk was made from camel dung. Each of them inhaled the
acrid and known and nostalgic smell as it fingered memories of past
celebrations filled with "oohs,' and "ahs," and "ohs."
All
their memories said time was eternal, spilled on a level coming to
them and moving away from them, but tonight disruption was their
game. Disruption and noise and affirmation of the minor manhood
working its endless way down in their genes.
The
Saugus River ran away at the foot of the huge red brick building, the
calm waters swishing slowly against the cluttered rock dam site at
the foot of the red brick building. Above them, ranging out of the
trees, darkness still came plodding on, the near silence moving
across their skins asking to be known. Snag's Aunt Lil once had said
darkness came on like a beggar man to close the end of day.
"It's
only brick," Snag said, his natural spirit bucking up his
current assessment. His hand touched the side of the mill, its doors
now closed for as long as they had been alive; a monolithic, ghostly
creature of a building, windows boarded up, doors frozen in place
with huge spikes; eyes that could not see, mouths that could not
speak. There was, however, something else in the touch of that stone,
something mossy, something growing, something without a voice, but
threatening.
They
had known forever that it was there.
Snag,
as fearsome as any boy they knew, could feel the presence of
something if only in the touch of the stone. Creatured, but not quite
visible; it might not breathe, but it was there. Yet no one, none of
their friends or neighbors, had ever been hurt. It was what they had
counted on, in its own perilous argument.
"Yuh,"
Chris said, feeling the fuzz on the back of his neck with a threat of
electricity in it, “so how come they see a glow of flames every
Fourth of July. At midnight. From the only window that's not boarded
up. The one way up in the peak out front? Tell me how that gets done.
All the floors have been taken out. The whole place is nothing but a
shell. So how come so many people have seen a red glow in that window
way up there? Even my father said he saw it, Expected the place was
about to burn down." His twelve-year-old face was squeezed into
his own questions, his mouth still pursed, his chin and that pursed
mouth still asking for an explanation. The three of them were always
blue-eyed; now, at this juncture, they were dark-eyed.
Snag
bristled as only Snag could be bristled, the tooth of his name
prominent, his jaw prominent, his eyes steely, his breath measured.
"How should I know?" he said. "I ain't been in there.
I ain't seen anybody go in or come out, ever. Maybe it's like a
captured Aurora Borealis, like it was caught in there the very first
time it was locked up. Something crazy, like that. Or a bum gets in
there every year to play tricks on us. Like having his own routine.
But we promised we'd light it up one way or another. And I'm all for
getting inside somehow, anyhow. Maybe plopping off one of the plywood
boards over the windows. We all promised." He was standing tall,
asserting some kind of authority that prior bravery and recklessness
had granted him.
"I
didn't say anything about not doing it. I'm not yellow!" Chris
was breathing heavy as he spoke. And the darkness deepened and a
small breath of a wind stirred in the near leafless trees and Charlie
B froze straight up as he heard a soft moan come out of that small
breath of air. It rode over the thick smell of the burning punk.
"We're
not alone," he said, his hand gripping Snag's arm so hard his
fingernails dug into the camouflaged material of Snag's fatigue
jacket.
"It's
the wind, Charlie," Snag said. "Nothing to it. Just the
wind. It's a midnight wind. Aunt Lil says every the wind around here
has its own voice."
And
then, right then on that night, at or near the stroke of midnight, as
if commanded by a presence, an omnipotence, the plywood cover over a
peaked window high above their heads pulled away from the window
frame with the shriek of nails being yanked. It fell and smashed on
the rocks below.
The
boys froze in place, their breaths caught between sound and no sound.
And the yearly and eerie light came at last from that high window, a
red moving glow the way flames lick at campfire wood. Slow. Sultry.
Expectant. Then it came a sudden blue glow, then a red glow and a
green glow. And the moan came again, and faint and distant music
trooped in with it as if drums and fifes were playing on the side of
Vinegar Hill and were bouncing off the mill's walls, and firelight
swept against the high window like a new fire banked in a furnace. It
was music and it was but a step up from silence, and it was so light,
so distant, so feathery, so winged, it might not have been. Now, it
said in an unspoken voice. The boys were not sure of anything.
Charlie
B dropped his bag of fireworks, his in-taken breath merely a small
echo riding his body. Right down to his new sneakers he shook. Chris
held his box as if it were his last bullet. Some thing was standing
against them in the night and they must protect themselves. Snag,
jawboned Snag, expeditionary leader, his nerves cut and frayed only a
bit, from his glowing punk lit and heaved a long-wicked 2-inch salute
at the nearest plywood window.
"There!"
he said. "There!" The enemy to be accosted and surmounted.
The
explosion ripped into the silence, and the sudden flare of light lit
the hooded window and disappeared just as quickly as it had come. The
overhead light leaped again, the window suddenly alive in red and
blue and then an orange glow. Drums, old drums, beat somewhere, an
aged tattoo of drums, a line of drums in a long forgotten parade, a
rolling echo from a lost or glorious battle. At first they believed
the drums came from Vinegar Hill, and then they realized that they
came from inside the mill itself, off the walls, and fifes came
slowly with the drums, and the flames glowed brighter in the high
window. And a discipline, each one noticed, seemed to come with the
drums and the fifes, a unity, regulated though faint, as if under
orders.
And
then, with a sudden and profound silence, the light went out.
Darkness fell again, more than a beggar this time; a dense darkness
full of time and lineal pursuits, a darkness of summonses and
declarations from an insurmountable place, a darkness that reached
out to touch the three boys. They shivered in anticipation more than
fear. They were present at something unknown but pronounceable,
ghostly but real. From Vinegar Hill again it seemed to come, the
faint and distant call of mystic notes riding an unknowing wind,
riding a brief thermal the eye never sees; intelligent notes, bugle
notes, timeless notes.
Snag
leaped from his kneeling position. "Listen!" he commanded,
his voice stern, demanding, the barking voice of an infantry line
sergeant. "Listen!"
Overhead
the red glow came back in the high round window near the peak of the
mill. And the notes sounded clear and distinct. And they came from
inside the mill, not from the outside, but from inside Scott's Mill.
Those
were timeless notes coming at them.
With
messages in them.
Charlie
B and Chris reached for minute recognition of the notes, but it was
Snag who knew them. "That's Assembly
that's playing. I heard it on Tim's web site. That's Assembly.
I heard it on a web site. I downloaded a whole mess of them, but
that's Assembly."
In his voice was heard a definite change, as though he might have
snapped to attention in the ranks.
Mesmerized,
they heard more bugle calls, some Snag knew and some he didn't. He
was not flustered. "Call
to Arms,"
he said proudly, listening again, nodding his head, "and Boots
and Saddles"
a few moments later, and then, still distant notes coming to them,
"First
Call,"
and "Call
to Quarters,"
and finally, the sounds now down inside them, touching at their
souls, standing at attention in the dark, he said in that deepening
voice, "To
the Colors."
Their
blood froze. They were rapt and enraptured, transplanted but in
place, something crying to get out of them, to have a voice of its
own. Each of them felt it in their own way, yet somehow acknowledged
the sharing.
The
door of Scott's Mill popped open right beside them, and the faint and
still far-reaching notes came to them, and horse hooves tromping on
hard ground and the clumping of hundreds and hundreds of boots on
packed gravel. The boys looked inside, amazed, frightened, and a line
of horse troops, gray and blue cavalry, passed in review,
eyes-righting them, moving past them in formation. Others came
clothed in a dozen or so different uniforms, Johnny Reb gray, Yankee
blue, Army O.D., airman's blue and sailor blue, dress Marine and
fatigue Marine, war on top of endless war, time on top of immemorial
time. They were an illustration of all wars, and all losses, and the
ranks were thick and heavy and dense with the souls of innumerable
warriors.
From
a post in the ranks, well back in the ranks, a deep and resonant
voice came to them. "We're coming home, boys. We're coming home
and we don't have to go off anywhere anymore. Not this night. Not
ever. We're all the ones who never came home, but we've been waiting
for you. We've tried every Fourth of July for years. It's only on the
Fourth that we can come home."
From
a limitless distance, evoked and called at one side of the mill's
interior, they came, a long endless march of men, shoulders back,
heads up, coming home after their own eternity; Gettysburg, Stone
Mountain, San Juan, Chateau Thierry, Omaha Beach, Kwajalein, Chosin
Reservoir, Heartbreak Ridge, Dak To, deserts and jungles too numerous
to mention, all the odd points of the fiery Earth, and all the harsh
graves of that eternity.
"Eyes
right," the deep voice said, commanding, and then, as if stating
a memorial of their own kind, added, "We did it for the young
un's and for the old-timers, too."
Snag
stood as tall as he'd ever stand. He motioned his comrades to
attention as new notes came on the thin, cool air. "Retreat,"
he whispered, the huskiness suddenly at home in his voice, arrived
manhood in his voice, spine upright, nerves in place. "That's
Retreat,"
he said again, his voice still deeper, resonant. The sombre notes
carried for long moments and the line of troops and horsemen stood at
attention, just the way Snag and his pals stood.
And
then, more distant than any call ever heard before or ever afterward,
out of a summer darkness, the smell of burning punk as acrid as spent
gunpowder crawling in the air, a lone bugle's notes came riding
another feathery and light thermal from the very ends of time.
"You'll
not forget this night, will you, boys?" And the deep voice was
gone and the troopers were gone and the horsemen were gone, and the
lights drifted off to night again, and a single and momentary note
from a still more distant bugle hung itself on the pinnacle of air as
Taps
ended the most memorable holiday of all time.
