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Reverend Swanson had not always been a reverend, in the same way he had not always been old. Youth had filled him with the veracity and confidence of the young everywhere; that he would defeat death and live forever. He had not been the type of boy wishing to be older and was distraught when the years gathered around him all the same, in the way it did of immortal boys everywhere. Nothing good happened to any adult he knew, particularly not his father, who drank heavier with each passing year.
He went to church every Sunday, as was expected of any good Tennessee family, and on Wednesdays, too. His mother, made hard by the old mountains, and strict from years of neglect by a man who loved his drink more than he loved her, ensured her large brood of children was well educated in the Word. Orville learned to read from the Bible. It was the only book they kept in the house; his mother was wary of any other crossing the threshold. But she believed in education, and ensured her children knew the basics of reading and writing. Orville, the eldest of an eventual eight siblings, was well familiar with the Word. Whenever he failed his mother, he was forced to copy a new verse.
On the day he had taken a pair of shoes left at the schoolhouse it was for his younger sister, Maryann, who had no shoes at all. Damp air gathered around the deciduous mountain stands, the leaves bright with color, and the ground hard with the first frost. The schoolmate that had left the pair behind had two--two--shoes, and Maryann had none. He had thought the shoes left behind were left in Providence. Neither the owner, Miss Omie, nor Orville's mother felt the same. Maryann was left barefoot, wearing old canvas pants sewed into a rough approximation of shoes until Christmas, when she received a pair of used shoes from her mother, which could be stuffed with newspaper until she was big enough to fit.
Orville had filled the chalkboard with a hundred written and erased phrases of, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. Ephesians 4:28”
There was not much work for a boy of twelve beyond hunting and trapping, and there wasn’t much to be gained for small game hide, so a year later when news of the Civil War reached Harrison with the promise of a monthly stipend, Orville marched into town. For a boy who had never wished to be older, he claimed himself 18. The recruiter, a tired looking man with one sleeve pinned up in a place where an arm should’ve been, barely glanced at the boy of 13.
“What’s your name?”
“Orville Swanson,” said Orville, whose voice was only beginning to change, and cracked at the most inopportune times. It cracked now.
The older man, who seemed ancient at the time, but was probably not much older than 20, glanced up sharply at Orville.
“How old are you?”
“18.”
“Are you sure, son? What year were you born?”
And Orville, who was nearly as quick with numbers as he was with reading said, “1843.”
The recruiter used his fingers to do the math. He looked down at the place where his right hand should’ve been, but there was only air. When he looked back up at Orville, his face was stricken.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Orville. He had been born in 1848, and it was a secret he would keep for so many years that by the time opium and alcohol addled his brain, he couldn’t quite remember his own age rightly anymore.
Reluctantly, the recruiter wrote Orville’s name down on the ledger in the unwieldy scrawl of a nondominant hand. He nodded down towards where Supply was handing out uniforms.
“Welcome to the Union, Orville.”
Orville’s first impression of the army was that it wasn’t a bad affair. He had a new pair of boots; the first ones in his life. He had a new uniform, too, and the wool was of better quality than his father’s hand-me downs. His bright golden buttons shone in the sun, and he polished them nearly every day. He puffed out his chest and thought that if this was what being a man was about, it wasn’t half as bad as he thought.
What he quickly found out was that the boots were ill fitting, and prone to blisters on marches, and he marched a lot. The wool itched, and smelled like old sheep when it was wet, and Appalachian winters were nearly always damp.
Sergeant Burwell, another young man that Orville thought ancient at the time, but that he had now outlived by several lifetimes, was quick to shout instructions and kept a tight unit. He was a broad chested man man with curly blonde hair that was unmanageable unless he kept it cropped close, which he often did. Even then, it would curl around the edges of his cap. Already a war veteran, his young blue eyes were bright with determination and hollow with loss. He taught them how to march and how to pack their tents and had them rest once an hour to switch out sodden socks with a pair of slightly less sodden socks. He came abreast of Orville, still short for his age.
“How old are you son?” Asked Sergeant Burwell who probably wasn’t older than 19, and had grown up on a farm where his mornings were structured by the sun and not the bugle.
“18,” Orville said, and his voice did not crack.
“The hell you are,” said the Sergeant. “You’ll be in the drummer core.”
The drummer core was meant to keep beat for the men as they marched muddy roads. There was always some place to march, and song and drums kept them motivated just enough to forget the blisters and sickness that sunk around them like a shadow. Orville fell in among a mass of boys, all 18, and none of them older than he. They took pride in their job, rapping out a beat on their snare drums as the men sang Camptown Races and Sweet Betsy from Pike and a personal favorite, Battle Cry of Freedom. Orville didn’t have much grasp on what they were fighting for, but one of his fellow volunteers, a boy named Hiram with auburn hair and a family almost as big as Orville’s was quick to fill him in.
Hiram’s own stories of his family were filled with more love than Orville’s, so he let the other boy regale him with tales of his home and all his brothers and sisters, and a father who had taught him how to farm and to believe in the cause they were fighting for.
Orville had never met the particular people in need of freeing, but the Bible had a whole lot to say about slavery, so he thought he was probably on the right side when it came to this particular war. As far as he was concerned, he was being beaten less than he had at home, and he was better clothed, ill-fitting boots aside, so he couldn’t find himself particularly cross with the Union and what it had to offer.
His thoughts on the matter changed the day Hiram was caught with a cannonball to the chest, halving his friend in two. Orville stared at the place where his friend had been. His drum, nearly unmarred, fell to the ground with a hollow sound, its straps torn free from his owner.
“Hiram?” Orville said, staring at the body of his friend. He could hardly make sense of the pieces that, broken apart, barely resembled the previously fully capable body that had made up his friend.
“Get out of the way!” Yelled Tom, another drummer boy, grabbing Orville by his shoulder and yanking him out of the way as another cannon ball filled the space Orville had been. He fell onto the body of Tom. A bullet had torn through his head, leaving a gaping hole where his eye should’ve been. Brain, thick and viscous, leaked into the loamy soil beneath. Orville stared down at the boy, and couldn’t remember if his eyes had been green or brown.
A primordial fear clawed its way into his soul, and he couldn’t decide if he should move or if he should run. He’d been safe so far, and bullets whizzed above him. His stomach lodged in his throat.
He threw up.
His body urged him to run, and so he got up and tore across the field. Men fell around him with seeming abandon, and Orville prayed to God with a ferocity he had never felt when writing scripture a hundred times on the old chalkboard of home.
He wanted to go home.
There was a blast and searing pain and Orville Swanson collapsed.
When he came to, he found himself in a tent full of moaning men. A doctor passed by as Orville struggled to consciousness. He looked down at the boy in the manner of a man used to death. A bandage was wrapped around Orville’s head, and he could only see out of one eye. He stared up at the man.
“I don’t want to die,” he told the doctor with scant facial hair and a graying receding hairline. He was 25, and war had made him old.
“I don’t expect you will,” said the doctor, whose name was Carter, but if it was his personal name or family name, Orville never knew. Dr. Carter paused at Orville’s cot. “You’ve made it through the worst part.” The man shifted his weight, and as he did so, it was as if the weight of the world was shifted from one leg to the next. “How old are you, son?”
“I want to go home,” Orville said, his one free eye welling with tears. He would take his father’s belt over war.
“So do I, son,” the doctor sighed. He sat down on Orville’s cot heavily. “But we’re both here now.”
“I don’t want to be here any longer,” said Orville.
“I have something for the pain, if it helps. Laudanum.”
Orville took the proffered vial. He fell back asleep, and for the first time in weeks, his sleep was not tortured with the dying screams of boys.
Orville was promoted to infantry before the Battle of Shiloh. It was a dubious promotion, but they were short on men and long on need. His drum was traded for a 1861 Springfield, which was a hell of a lot better than the old musket he’d used to hunt squirrels in Tennessee. He looked up at the Sergeant whose eyes were less bright and more hollow.
“I’m meant to kill someone with this?” He asked, staring down at a weapon he’d previously turned on rabbits and raccoons.
“It’s a war, boy.” And he taught Orville how to use it, but Orville already knew how to use a gun. He had just never used it on another man before. He wondered if the Rebel army was filled with young boys like him. He wondered how many had holes in their heads and auburn hair and large families that would never see their sons and brothers again. He stared at the gun in his hands, and tried to remind himself he was serving a greater purpose. There were men, somewhere, needing freeing, and President Lincoln had called on his army to keep the country whole. His father, who had never been particularly proud of Orville, sent brief letters to his eldest son. Orville couldn’t quite grasp the gravity of the war or its calling, but for the first time his father wrote about the conflicts he’d been in on the frontier. It didn’t justify the beatings, but it explained the drinking.
Sergeant Burwell was shot at the battle of Shiloh. It was a gut shot, and took hours to die from. Orville found him, collapsed in the field, holding his stomach in as his guts spilled out around the jagged hole. He stared at Orville with hollow eyes, and for the first time, the boy appreciated just how young the other man was.
“I want to go home,” Sergeant Burwell said through pale lips. Orville folded Sergeant’s arms over his chest, trying to ignore the gaping hole where his stomach should be.
“Where’s home?”
“Maryland. Tell my mother I love her.”
And Orville, who did not know where they were, and only had the scantest idea where Maryland was, said, “I will.” But he never did.
Sergeant, satisfied, struggled through death.
That night, the battlefield of Shiloh was alight with a glow Orville had not seen before or since. Men, sick with infection, were lit brightly with an unearthly glow that filled their wounds. In the days that passed, the men that had glowed survived, and the men who hadn’t, succumbed to sickness. The tents were ripe with gangrene. Orville would smell it again years later when tending to Arthur Morgan, trying to save his arm as he ordered Miss Grimshaw to boil rags and for Charles Smith to mix poultices of yarrow and honey. He had not prayed to God for many years, but he prayed for Arthur Morgan, and for the glow that had saved the men at Shiloh. Arthur had not glowed, but he survived all the same, and Orville felt the faint whisper of God in his soul, in a way he had not heard for many years. That Arthur was to apparently die months later never made much sense to Orville, until he heard about people Arthur had interacted with in his last few months. He had lived long enough to redeem himself, and while Arthur Morgan was a better man than Orville Swanson, Orville learned that any man could redeem himself given the opportunity.
“What was it?” Orville asked Dr. Carter, who had become an expert with a bone saw and left piles of limbs nearly as high as the operation table. He sawed through an arm mangled by a cannonball with such precision that he was able to glance up at Orville before he moved to his next patient as his orderlies swapped one body for the next.
“It was God,” said Reverend Mr. Black, standing at the doctor’s side. Orville looked up at a man in black carved in hard planes, his shoulders as broad as any mountain man. He carried his Bible in a canvas sack. When he pulled it free, the leather was worn and tattered and the pages creased and well read.
The doctor hummed in agreement but without the conviction of a man who believed in God, not with the bodies piled up around him and the sweet smell of gangrene filling the tent and the moans of the dead and dying filling his ears. He found not much sense in any of it at all and thought it better to not believe in anything, than to believe in a deity that was complacent with the horror the doctor was living through.
In the days that passed, Orville followed the young doctor and the reverend that ghosted through the tents with such speed that he often had to rely on mass last rites when the numbers of the dying grew too great. Reverend Mr. Black would pass through the tents singing in a deep baritone.
“You got to walk this lonesome valley, You got to walk it by yourself. Oh nobody else can walk it for yourself.”
Orville had never met a man like Reverend Mr. Black. His hair was a tawny yellow, his eyes a muted blue. He had the shoulders of a lumberjack and he delivered prayers and Last Rites with a confidence that reminded the boy of his mother.
“Are you sure it was God?” Orville stared up at Reverend Mr. Black, when the sun was low and the song of autumn crickets were drowned out by dying men.
The reverend looked down at Orville. “War is terrible, but it is a corrupted world we walk in. Men have decided to enslave other men based solely on the color of the skin. It is our duty to free God’s children. We fight on the righteous side. He saved those men in Shiloh, and He’ll ensure we win this war. My job is to ensure the dying men are ready for Paradise. God will bring them home.”
Orville trailed after the Reverend Mr. Black. He learned how to heal from the doctor, and how to pray from the Reverend. Orville found his calling as a healer and as a man of God-- not from the weight of writing a verse with a hundred repetitions, but with the burgeoning knowledge of a man who Believed. He had seen God’s work in Shiloh, and he would carry it forward.
He carried laudanum forward. He didn’t mean to; didn’t mean for it to carry a stronger weight than God’s word. But in Antietam, he took a bullet to the leg and found he couldn’t support his weight and could not crawl out of the fog as rows of dying men cried for salvation and found none as fog gathered around. When the mist finally rolled away, Orville spent the night staring at the stars, distant and cold. He was found the next morning, nearly confused for one of the dead before he cried out to a passing private. He was hauled into a cart and carried into a field hospital converted from a farmer’s home. The young doctor had died over the summer, and an older man with gray whiskers and slumped shoulders had taken his place. Orville stared at the cheery yellow walls and wondered why he had ever left Tennessee.
He was only 15, and still not old enough for war. He was given crutches and sent home, a war veteran.
His mother welcomed him with open arms and sobs enough that she wet his shoulder. Maryann showed him the shoes she’d bought with the money he sent home, and although he agreed they were very pretty, Orville, thinking of Hiram and Sergeant Burwell, and Doctor Carter, and all the men who he had known who had died for those shoes, thought she looked better in the old canvas pair that had not been earned with blood.
His youngest brother, a baby when he left, was now a toddler. He tumbled across the soil floor with excitement. Orville knelt beside him with difficulty, his leg still prone to giving out. Max, who had few words beyond giggles, stared at him with wide brown eyes and chubby cheeks.
“Never grow old,” he told his brother. He tried to pick him, but couldn’t support the weight with his bad leg. “Never.”
Max giggled, and raged off towards the outdoors, chasing motes of dust in the early evening sunlight. Susie gave chase. It was April, and the beech trees were first to spring with bright green, the birds singing their mating songs.
The mountains settled into the complacency of summer, but Orville found himself haunted by the men he’d left behind. He found it hard to talk to the girls of his town with their blue ribbons and matching eyes. Miss Omie, who had intimidated him with her two pair of shoes now gravitated towards him, but he found her tiresome and young. She chittered about gossip around the schoolyard, but Orville found he could not find himself invested in her concerns. He told her as much.
“Orville Swanson, you’ve changed!” She declared as she flounced away.
And Orville supposed she was right.
Tennessee was no longer home, if it had ever been. He declared he was going to Seminary school, and his mother sobbed with pride. His father nodded his approval. An understanding had settled between them, both men of war. He left the ancient mountains of Appalachia and never returned, not even when he received word that Max had died from croup. He thought of his brother sometimes, with his bright eyes and chubby cheeks, and wondered if he was a bad man for thinking his brother was better off than Orville had been for dying when he did. He wondered if when he told his brother to never grow old, it was the only prayer God had heard and granted.
He realized the only way to stay young was to die, and he was too much of a coward to do anything about it.
He fell in love at 20, the same age Sergeant had been when he’d died with his guts spilling onto the fields. That she was married was immaterial, except in every way that mattered. It was a transgression in the eyes of the law, and of God, and of her husband, a stately man with a proud mustache and sideburns. Orville left Missouri with his Bible and laudanum, and little else as a posse of men chased him down.
He tried to turn to the Bible, but found laudanum and alcohol to be better companions as he took overland coaches and trains west. He found veterans of both sides in Kansas, and was not surprised to find they were men, just like him. There was an unspoken bitterness of the friends who had been lost and their youth that had died even as they lived. But they came to Orville’s sermons as a flock, and for his part, Orville tried to mostly be sober, except when his leg bothered him, which was a lot, and worse in the spring and the fall with the storms that raged with electricity crossed the plains with willful abandon.
He was too young to know when storms came, just from the ache in his bones. It was a past time meant for old men in rocking chairs as they sat upon their porches.
He was growing old.
He built a flock of tortured men and hopeful women, their faces hardening from the wind and the relentless sun. His mother had died several years earlier; had just collapsed for no reason at all. Susie, now married to Omie’s brother, wrote to him. He didn’t respond, and he didn’t respond years later when she wrote to tell him, finally, of his father’s death. The man had lived longer than he had any right to, but Orville supposed that the most cantankerous had that way about them. He suspected his father was headed for Hell, and he would see him again there.
He missed his mother.
He stumbled across Dutch and Hosea and their sons when he was more sober than usual, but not as sober as they. Alcohol had made him heady enough to know they were talking, and the words were immaterial. Men, he knew, talked a lot, and rarely said anything of import. In this instance, the older man, with graying hair and slim shoulders and an easy face was trying to talk himself out of a case of accused cheating. Orville had seen him cheat, and knew the accusation was valid. But something about the man’s blue eyes reminded him of Sergeant Burwell, and Orville was older than both this man and Sergeant. He pulled his worn Bible from his canvas sack and stood beside the table and said,
“He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him.” He raised his piercing blue eyes to the men at the table, who tried not to meet his eyes in return, staring down at their cards.
The man with the graying hair and blue eyes peered at Orville carefully. Emboldened, Orville continued,
“I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. Acts 20:35.” He looked up at the men.
“Get out of here, Reverend” said Edwin Flail, “You’re drunk.”
Orville, who was not as drunk as usual, puffed out his chest. He tried to summon the Reverend Mr. Black who had been killed at Gettysburg and had not been, Orville supposed, a man prone to drink and married women. That Orville was a failure as a reverend and as a man was not lost on him. But something about the blue eyes of the graying stranger and a younger man, his son, Orville assumed, in the corner with eyes to match and a hand on his pistol reminded Orville of something important, from when he was younger.
He was too drunk to remember what it was.
But he knew death when he saw it, and the man in the corner was watching them carefully. Edwin was not a friend, but Orville did not care to see him dead. The younger man wore death around him like a welcomed shroud. He would have no compunctions to kill Edwin and all his companions if he thought his father’s life was at risk.
Orville wondered what it felt like, to be a loyal son.
He continued, “Matthews 6:19. ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.’”
“All right,” Edwin said, pushing himself away from the table with enough force to indicate his irritation. “We get it, Reverend. If you spent more time in the church and less time at the gambling table, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to convince us.”
Orville watched as the table left, leaving behind the man with piercing blue eyes and his son that wore death’s shroud in the corner. Orville looked down at the man.
“You saved a lot of men tonight,” said the older man, younger than Orville.
They both looked over at the broad shouldered man in the corner. Having decided Orville was not a threat, his hand left his side as he picked up a glass of amber. He raised it amicably enough, but the broad plains of his sober face and narrowed eyes indicated Orville was not safe yet.
“That’s Arthur,” the man said. “I’m Hosea. Have a drink, won’t you?”
Orville took a seat. “I think I will. I’m Reverend Swanson.”
He met Hosea’s companion, Dutch, and the leader of the gang a few hours later, after they were well into their cups. Arthur trailed behind them, a looming shadow that promised death if Orville were to misstep. Whatever relationship Dutch and Hosea had was beyond Orville’s judgement, and so he left none.
He did not misstep.
He found himself home in Dutch van der Linde’s gang of ragged misfits. He met Lenny and Miss Tilly, wondrous young people injured by life but unwilling to let it mar their outlook. He probably spent more time than was proper staring at them. That they lived unencumbered by chains was what he had fought for, many years ago. For the first time, he thought the deaths of the men had been worth it, if it meant these young people could live free.
He found they were vivacious and burdened with the worries of the young, and that those burdens were not the same ones he now carried, but had, once. He wondered about his sister, when he was more sober, and in a fit of impulse, sent her home a pair of shoes after the gang robbed a coach and he got his share. He left no return address.
“So you won’t have to wear canvas ever again,” he wrote.
She wrote back. “I love you, Orville. Please come home.” But he never received it, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he did. He had found his family.
Arthur was not Hosea’s son by blood, Orville learned, but he and John had been raised by the two men as sons all the same. Arthur looked after Orville with fond exasperation. In his gentle friendliness and broad shoulders, he reminded Orville of the Reverend Mr. Black and the man Orville could’ve been, had he been a better man.
Arthur saved him from the assured death of an approaching train. To this day, Orville couldn’t remember what he had been thinking when he stumbled into the path of the train, except that he was tired, and it was that fatigue that had pulled him into the tracks. He had not meant to kill himself, not exactly, but he wouldn’t have minded if he did. He hoped that in death the moans of the dead men at Shiloh and again at Antietam would finally leave him in peace as he joined them.
He became Reverend Swanson, a man of the cloth and of laudanum and healthy doses of whiskey, and he enjoyed his time in the van der Linde gang up until the day Arthur came back with half his chest missing. That Dutch never went after him never settled in Orville’s soul right. It was an action better deserving of Orville’s own father, and not Dutch van der Linde, who preached family above all else.
Orville spent more time in Arthur’s tent than Dutch ever did, rummaging through amber tinted memories as he tried to remember what Dr. Carter had taught him. As he healed Arthur, he was reminded of Hiram and Sergeant and the young doctor, dead these many years. He was supposed to be an immortal boy, and he had outlived nearly everyone that had ever meant anything to him.
He outlived Hosea and Lenny, and Kieran and Sean with his lilting brogue and joyous voice that lifted in song. When Javier’s guitar faded, it had been Sean who had sung the half-remembered hymns Orville hummed tonelessly as he helped members of the camp back to their cots. Sean, half drunk, would sing the lyrics in his tenor, and Orville would be transported to the church in the dale that had faded in memory to motes of dust as they’d floated across old glass melting into pewter diamonds. He’d remembered the old lyrics in a way he hadn’t in forty years, and he’d take up song with Sean as he looked after the gang.
He outlived Arthur. He saw him for the last time at Emerald Station, as Orville boarded the train, if not home, then back to the east. The West had offered its refuge for a while but no longer. It turned out, there was nowhere safe from the corruption of man.
Disease had sunken Arthur’s cheeks and taken the vibrance of youth, and Orville wondered why he had lived so long when men better than he had fallen.
Arthur, Orville knew, was a better man than Orville could ever be. Fate, or maybe God, Orville wasn’t sure, but had begun to think was God, had weighed Arthur down with nearly insurmountable tasks, and Arthur had shouldered them all.
They stared at one another.
“You’re a good man,” Orville said with a conviction he hadn’t felt since he’d seen the glow in Shiloh and Reverend Mr. Black had sworn it was God’s work. Orville had believed at the time, but the intervening years had shed him from the Divine.
Arthur looked at him with sunken blue eyes, fatigue weighing deep lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. “I wish I was, Reverend.”
“You are,” Orville said. “I don’t think I’ll see you again. May you walk with God.” And he meant it, unburdened from the laudanum and the whiskey. His leg still bothered him, but for the first time, he welcomed the pain. It meant he was alive, and so many of his friends weren’t.
He left Arthur on the platform, and he remembered his piercing blue eyes and the shroud of death he wore all the rest of his years.
He read about the van der Linde gang and what remained from his diocese in New York. He read that a man thought to be Dutch’s second had been found on a mountainside, dead.
When Orville prayed that evening, he prayed for Arthur, and that the article might be mistaken, and he might still rise himself off that mountain and stumble into the lush valley below and find his way back west and back home.
He hoped home was Charles. He had seen the way the two men had looked at one another, and it had been well with his soul. After all, the Bible taught love, and what was love, if not what Arthur and Charles shared.
And if not Charles, Orville prayed that Arthur would find himself at God’s side. He had not believed in God in many years, but he hoped in Him now.
He wrote to his sister.
“I have come Home,” he wrote. “Find me in New York.”
She would find him months later as snow gathered around the tree in Central Square, a brood of her own children clustered around her. Orville, who had lost his family more times than any man had any right to, now found himself surrounded in the love of nieces and a nephew, who would never marry. Orville thought it just as well that his line ended with them. It had been a cursed line, and he had learned many years prior that a man was not judged by his name, but by his worth.
Orville who had always found himself wanting, knew he had been surrounded by men better than he all his life, and if did anything right by them for the rest of his years, it was to carry their names forward.
The next morning at sermon, Orville began. “There was a man. He was a good man, and he saved my life.” He paused, the congregation silent. “His name was Sergeant Burwell. It was Reverend Mr. Black. It was Doctor Carter.” He paused. “His name was Arthur Morgan.” He waited as the congregation, well known to the name of Arthur Morgan, muttered among themselves. “It is why I am here today, and to tell you that any man can be redeemed, if they are willing to walk that lonesome valley. Nobody can walk it but yourself.”
He put down the papers of his sermon and stared at his congregation. Their faces, many of them younger than he, stared back at him. He had never meant to grow old.
He was old, and carried the dead with him. If he could tell their stories, their deaths were not in vain. He folded the papers of his sermon and put him into his breast pocket. He stared at the face of Maryann, her husband and children gathered around her, all of them wearing proper shoes. He took a deep breath.
“I am not a good man,” he began. “And I have witnessed many men, better than me, pass into God’s glory. But He left me, a tortured soul, behind. I have struggled with infidelity and with alcohol and with drugs.”
His congregation stared at him wide eyed. Since coming to New York, he had not touched a bottle and briefly, he missed the muddiness of mind and the disregard that came with the exposing of the soul when cast in amber. He steeled himself. He owed it to all the good men to be brave.
And for the first time in fifty years, he told the story of a young Orville Swanson and the men that had died so that he might live.
When he was done, Maryann wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and she smelled of rhododendron and the wind off the mountains. He collapsed, his heart failing from years of alcohol and laudanum.
He walked into the church of his childhood, dust moats floating in the filtered light of the ancient glass. His parents waited for him. His mother, her face young in a way he didn’t remember and unhardened by life, held Max, eternally young, in her arms. The Reverend Mr. Black stood at the altar, and everyone that had ever mattered to Orville waited for him.
Arthur Morgan was not there, and Orville’s heart stuttered. He approached Hosea, who looked much the way he had when Orville saved him from a card game.
He was younger than Orville remembered. He looked down at his own hands. They were not pockmarked by the liver spots of old age. His leg did not bother him. He looked back at the young Hosea.
“Arthur?” He asked, because there was a piece of him worried that Arthur, one of the best men Orville had ever known, may have traveled the other way. It didn’t make much sense, if his father was here, and Arthur wasn’t.
Hosea smiled.
“Not yet,” he said.