Raider

Exhausted and unable to trust his own perceptions, a former bushwhacker wanders the plains of a wounded country, haunted by both past and present horrors as he tries to flee that which cannot be escaped.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of warfare and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.***

Thank you for listening! If you have any feedback or inquiries regarding the show, please feel free to drop me a line at darkerpasturespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

As humans, we define ourselves by the stories we tell: about the cosmos and our place within it, about our respective tribes and nations, about our individual lives. And more often than not, these stories are just stories, holding only as much truth or wisdom as the tellers imbue them with.

So it is with our histories. We spin grand and glorious narratives about the past, often to obscure both the dully mundane and the sordidly shameful. These stories can be as much weapon as mask, and mostly, those we wound through them are our neighbors, friends, family, and ourselves.

But no amount of dubious storytelling can forever forestall that inevitable moment when we truly see ourselves, stripped bare of all illusion and fabrication. There is no telling when that moment will come, but one can always find it in the darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Eight: Raider.

(Sounds of screech-owl call)

NARRATOR

The dead autumn grass is a ghostly silver under the full moon. Wallace’s bleary eyes can no longer focus, so that the grassland looks like an infinite sea of mist to his sleep-deprived eyes, and he lets his buckskin mare set her own course over the empty plains.

At times, Wallace almost manages to sleep in the saddle. But every time that sweet restorative oblivion begins to wash over him, he sees the woman again behind his eyelids, and he starts awake once more. When he sees her, she is not as she was that one brief, so very brief, time that he saw her living, but as he always sees her now: in a black dress and veil, her hands greyed and skeletal, the arms and fingers too long and too sharp.

He wishes, once more, that he had never seen her, never touched her.

And as the wish drifts through his addled mind, so too do all the old justifications: he was fighting for his family, his people, for principles. War is a dreadful mistress and no man touched by her walks away with his soul unsullied, or even intact. He is no worse than any of the others, be they bushwhackers, Red Legs or Jayhawkers, Union troops or Confederate militiamen.

These old thoughts are worn and threadbare, and he is as sick of them as he is of wandering, of restlessness, of memory.

He longs for sleep, deep and long and dreamless, yearns for it more than he ever knew a man could. Even during the war, he had never been so bone-weary, so desperately deprived of even a moment’s rest—not even during that long race toward Lawrence, lashed to his saddle and thirsty for bloody vengeance. Not during the bitter and lawless years after, after Quantrill’s band had shivered into fractious factions, after their peacock leader succumbed to his wounds and the Confederacy was dissolved.

His thoughts suddenly disperse and skitter away into the dark, like frightened rats. It is so every time the war drifts up in his mind, because he cannot think of it without thinking of her, and he cannot think of her without seeing her.

She was neither the first nor the last, but for some reason, she is the one who follows him. He pulls from his coat the pewter flask, nearly empty and stolen far back on his trail, and swallows the last mouthful of whiskey, hissing in grim satisfaction as it burns its way down his gullet, muddles his slumbrous mind further and softens the sharp edges of his thoughts.

And, as he scans the plains once more with his impaired eyes, he sees her atop the crest of a low hill. So far away and in such poor light, he should not be able to tell who it is, or even if it is a human figure, but he feels it with the same certainty that he knows the exhaustion of his flesh.

I am justice, he hears her whisper, impossibly, across the distance.

Blood frozen in his veins, it takes all his strength to summon up his voice and scream at her to begone, to leave him in peace. His voice comes out harsh and thin, more croak than shout, and seems to be swallowed by the whispering of the tall grass in the night breeze.

He blinks, and the woman is no longer there. Wallace offers up a quick prayer of thanks, even though he has long stopped praying. He can never decide if what he saw when Kansas first started its long hemorrhaging, has seen in the years since, killed his belief, or if it has only convinced him that he is a damned soul beyond all hope of redemption, and that prayer is therefore futile.

Once more, he urges the buckskin onward with his knees, not daring to hope the woman is truly gone even though he does not believe she was truly there, either. He has long suspected that she is a phantasm of his tortured mind and nothing more, that what he flees from is wholly within him, and therefore inescapable. And he knows that this makes his flight toward the southern border utterly in vain, as neither phantoms nor conscience respect the boundaries that men draw upon maps or gouge upon the earth.

But then he remembers the man he killed in Kansas, the lawful owner of the mare he rides now. The man, and then his wife, and then the child that surprised him as he led the horse off of the pathetic little homestead. It is the last that he regrets most of all, it being more accident than act of malice or desperation. He has never, since Lee surrendered, killed a child.

And yet, he thinks, it is but one more mark in a long and ink-stained manuscript. There was a time when he took pleasure in killing, hungered for it with twisted appetite. And perhaps, somewhere within him, that ravening thing still snaps and snarls; perhaps that is why his hand is always so quick to draw one of the twin Colt Navy revolvers in his belt with lethal consequence.

But the killing is a reason, a concrete one, for his flight, and he rides onward.

His mare’s pace gradually slows and then stops. Wallace doesn’t notice this at once. He has not fallen into true sleep, but his mind has gone soft and empty, as dark and nebulous as the high cirrus clouds that from time to time obscure the moon.

When he feels himself sliding in the saddle and his eyes snap open, she is there again, on a different hilltop, just a little closer than the last one. Her hands have drifted up toward her veil, as if to pull it away, but have frozen at the last moment so that her unnaturally long, sharp fingers splay over her unseen face.

I am vengeance, he hears the whisper that tingles like beetles crawling up his neck and into his ears.

This time, his voice too hoarse to scream, he croaks into the dark that he is sorry, that he would undo it if he could. The ghostly figure remains impassive, the only movement being the fluttering of her black veil and gown in the wind. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Wallace marvels that a hallucination could be so complete in its detail.

He blinks, but this time, she does not disappear.

Clicking his tongue, he shifts the mare’s course so that he can no longer see the dark shadow that looks down upon him, urges the weary beast to greater speed. He knows it is foolish to ride in strange prairies in the dark, especially at speed, knows that he risks breaking the horse’s leg in an unseen prairie dog’s burrow or other such hazard, but he cannot rest.

Masochistically, he asks himself when he will ever be able to take even a moment’s respite again, if he deserves one.

He thinks of that night of death and fire, when he and his comrades, under the direction of Bill Anderson, reddened the streets of Lawrence with the blood of both men and beardless boys, left the town behind them choked with smoke and ringing with the wails of women and small children. He remembers the flight to Texas, over the very plains he now rides, the growing enmity between Quantrill and Anderson, leaving with the latter to return to Missouri. He recalls the German women of Concordia, the looting and killings at Centralia, the mutilations and scalping of the dead Union men. And he remembers that night in Glasgow, the night that left him damned.

He sees once more the fine house of the prominent Union sympathizer he and his comrades broke into, the woman and daughter and the Black servant girl they found within, their cries and then their whimpers of terror and shame. He remembers the daughter’s weeping, the mother’s dead-eyed stare, the servant’s silent to her thankless chores as the men left them.

Reaching once more for the finely worked pewter flask, he raises it to his lips before he remembers that it is now empty. Cursing, he instead takes a meager pull of water from his canteen. It, too, is near empty, and he will have to find a trustworthy source of water soon to refill it.

Almost as though summoned by the thought, the faint sound of running water reaches his ears. For a while he listens, half-suspecting he has only imagined it, but then it becomes too clear for him to doubt it any longer, and he urges the mare onward in its direction.

And when he crests a small rise and looks down upon the wide, glittering waters, he recognizes it as the Canadian River that he crossed long ago with Anderson, on their withdrawal into Texas.

He dismounts and leads the mare to the riverside, waits to see if she drinks from it. She does, long and deeply, and, not knowing when he will next have the chance, he refills his canteen and takes a long drink, washes his face and neck.

Looking down into the clear, moonlit water, he stares a moment at his shadowy reflection. He cannot see the features or details, but the silhouette looks haggard, frail, and far too stiff. Trying consciously to relax his tensed muscles, his eyes drift further away and that is when he sees the other reflection, the one of the thing that stands behind him, reaching a long grey hand with fingers like willow branches toward him.

Wallace spins with a strangled cry, loses his footing in the sand and smooth pebbles and tumbles back painfully onto his tailbone. There is nothing behind him, only the empty night. He grunts in frustration at his discomposure and discomfort, sits and listens to the water and the distant call of some night bird he does not know. A gust of wind rises, shrilling over the rocks of the river gorge.

I am truth, he hears, mingled in the draft.

When he looks back toward the river, she looks up at him from beneath the water.

Please, he whispers. Please let me be.

She is still, staring at him without moving in the slightest. Her black gown and veil ripple in the water.

Then, slowly, she raises that unnatural hand and beckons him forward. Wallace does not move, could not if he wanted to. She beckons three more times, and then she recedes into the water, disappearing into its deeper murk.

Rising to a crouch, he inches forward, ready to stand and run, to leap upon the mare and gallop away should anything seem amiss. But when he returns to the water’s edge, it is only water, and he sees nothing but his reflection, clearer now than it was before.

He does not recognize himself. His hair has thinned, turned grey and brittle, his body grown thin and his skin pallid. Surprising himself, a bitter chuckle swells in his chest and spills out of his throat, echoing off the surface of the river.

Of course, he thinks, he does not know himself by sight. Likewise, when he thinks of the things he has done, he cannot connect that person to the boy he once was, or to the shadow of a man he has now become. And yet, he feels still the weight of that burden, the awful and implacable crushing force of irredeemable sin.

He remembers the vain hopes he and his compatriots had cherished, that the war would be a brief and decisive thing, and later, that the raid on Lawrence would be a heavy blow for the Union and its sympathizers, that it might break the enemy’s spirit and turn the tide. And he knows that, even then, they did not really hold much hope for such an outcome, but used it as a justification to unleash all of their resentment and rage upon the unwary and the defenseless. Later, when they were condemned and hunted, they no longer pretended that killing, maiming, and despoiling was anything but an end unto itself. Bill Anderson, known by then by his crimson and dripping moniker, had led their reckless foray toward hell.

And after, when there was no cause to fight for or against, when murder and atrocity had filled them like blood in a silver bowl, there was nothing left for them to return to. Many of their homes had been ransacked and razed during the conflict, sometimes by the enemy, sometimes by their own. And should anyone ever learn of their past, of their participation in the most ignominious of their raids, their lives would be forfeit. More than one of Quantrill’s men had met their end on a knife, or to a bullet, or in a dark and lonely place where hands and tools could break their bones and burst their innards with no one to hear their cries, or to care.

Though he would never admit it to his fellows, those of them that still live, he often wonders what purpose all of the death, hardship, and horror could have possibly served. The Confederacy failed, the South bled dry and impoverished by both war and its aftermath. Families are shattered, divided, never to be truly made whole again. So much devastation, all in the service of ideals that no longer seem coherent to him, all composed in high-minded language that seems hollow after witnessing the mindless brutality and rapine of civil conflict.

And he, he is both the cause and the result of that abomination. He is a walking corpse, useless and forsaken. This is what she wished to show him, what he wished to show himself.

He speaks to her, to the water, tells her she is nothing but the voice of his own conscious, that he doesn’t need her anymore. There is nothing more she can teach him.

That grey hand shoots out of the water, with its fingers that are a foot long and keen as knifepoints, and grasps at him. Wallace almost falls again, but manages to right himself and leap away. He bounds up onto the mare and digs his heels into her sides, turning her away from the river and galloping back up the rise and out of the gorge. He races across the plains he has just traversed, his heartbeat so stark as to make his vision pulse, and he feels more awake and more aware than he has in days, weeks, months.

A wild laugh rises on his lips, half terror and half reckless mirth. Crying out to the night, he roars that he is alive.

The horse’s leg falls into an unseen hole, and the mare twists and falls beneath him.

He lies there a moment, shocked and uncomprehending. The horse whinnies in helpless pain. Wallace’s own leg, the one under the horse’s weight, feels wrong in a distant and unfamiliar way. It is not yet pain, but promises to soon become such. He tries to pull himself out from under the horse, manages only partially. Looking down, he can see that his knee is twisted in an impossible position, and knows that he will likely never walk again.

He closes his eyes and waits for the pain to come. It begins to bleed into his mind, a dull red mist that gradually grows denser and brighter. The mare shifts, and he opens his eyes, manages to drag himself free now. She screams, and, tears gathering at the corner of his eyes, he pulls one of the Navy Colts and puts it behind her wide and rolling eye, fires.

The night splits wide, loud and bright, and then reforms around him. The mare lies still.

He is not weeping for her. Wallace weeps for himself, alone and hopeless in the wide, empty plains.

Then he sees her, drifting over the horizon. He cannot tell, under the gown, if she has feet or if they touch the earth, but her movement is so smooth that it seems more gliding than walking. Her movement seems slow, and yet, in a few heartbeats, she is hovering over him.

Please, he whispers once more.

She makes no answer, but her earlier whisper rises softly in his mind, I am truth.

And now Wallace remembers the thing that he has buried so deeply: seeing in that last instant the nameplate upon the door that, in his frenzied state, he’d missed upon entering, the one bearing his mother’s maiden name. His mind had reeled and he’d felt sick, wondering if the women he and his fellows had left bruised and violated were in fact relations whom he’d never met, of whose existence he’d never been made aware until he came as a destroyer and defiler in the night.

He had never returned to visit his family, never even written to them since then, always afraid of what he might read in any answering letter. It is better for them to believe him a casualty of the war, he tells himself, than to know what he has done, what he has become.

The specter’s hands drift up, slowly, slowly up, and inch by inch they raise that veil under which he has never looked. The face beneath is no longer human, is just close enough to make the difference that much more horrid: her mouth is a perpetual O, ringed with small sharp teeth, her eyes are a deep black and have no whites, her nostrils mere slits between. Her skin is the color of a toad’s underside, the head almost fleshless and far too long.

I am death, he hears her whisper without moving her lipless mouth, as those hands like overgrown cellar spiders reach down toward him.

(Eerie music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, editing, and musical arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]