Outside a redbrick prison, protestors set up for another day of placards and marches, cries for justice that go unheard by the two Italian anarchists inside—a fishmonger and a shoemaker, seekers of the American dream now appealing their fate in its court while the electric chair bides its time.
The lady in the harbor hoists her torch.
The Gold Mountain twinkles in the early-morning fog hugging the shoreline of California, a pretty mirage.
The atoms vibrate, always on the verge of some new shift.
Shift and the electrons lean toward particle or wave.
Shift and the action requires a reaction.
Shift and the stroke of a typewriter elevates i to I, changes God to god.
Shift and the beast acquires a thumb; the thumb, a weapon.
Shift and rights become wrongs; the wrongs, justification.
It’s all in the perspective.
Dusk approaches now, stealthy.
Their prayers done, the faithful collapse in an exhausted heap. The preacher’s white shirt has gone transparent with sweat. The cicadas raise their collective hymn. Pressed by wind and the weight of unanswered prayers, the trees bend their arms low, brushing the first hope of spring across heads weary with belief.
In another part of town bordering the cotton fields, where three small girls sleep cheek to jowl on a cot at the back of a sharecropper’s shack, a fleet of Model Ts and trucks creep forward with headlights off. Men in hooded white robes unfold themselves from these silent vehicles and lumber forward, lugging their own cross and a can of kerosene. Fathers and brothers, uncles and cousins are dragged from the shacks and down the front steps while the women scream—for mercy, for hope, for naught. The rope is hoisted. The kerosene poured. The match is struck against the cross, setting the night on fire, a false light in the dark, and the screams pitch into keening.
Through the radios of the nation, a lady preacher calls out to the lonely: “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
In a tent at a winter’s fair, smiling nurses ask questions and gather information from volunteering families. They ask, Have you ever demonstrated special abilities? Have you ever seen in your dreams a funny man wearing a stovepipe hat? Would you care to have a simple blood test? No, it won’t hurt—just a small stick, we promise. At the end, after the tears and blood, they bandage the children’s tiny wounds and deliver to the proud parents a bronze medal: Yea, I have a goodly heritage. Something to crow to the neighbors about.
Another boastful crop in the land of plenty.
The dusty road cuts through sleeping fields, which wave golden with corn in the summer. An old farmhouse sits not far from a weathered barn and a lone, gnarled tree. The tractor and plow are idle. Though it is late, the mailman’s truck rattles down the bumpy, mud-swollen road. He parks beside the mailbox, digs inside his pouch, retrieves the letter. After a last check of the address to be sure—number 144—he pushes it inside the mailbox, shuts the door, and lowers the small metal flag.
Night falls on the white-picket fences and red barns. On the Burma Shave signs and billboards for Marlowe Industries reassuring sleepy roadside travelers that all is as it should be. On the searchers, the seekers, the strivers, the dreamers—indefatigable adherents of a can-do spirit. On the unremarkable sedan of the Shadow Men folding into the seams of a night already unfurling its blanket of forgetting across the country as it ushers them into dreams.
The ghosts watch these ministrations. They remember and yearn; some remember and regret. But they remember. They wish they could tell the citizens the secrets they know about the past, about mistakes, about love and desire, hope and choice, about what is important and what is not.
They wish, too, that they could warn them about the gray man in the stovepipe hat, about the King of Crows.
For not all ghosts remember, and the citizens have need of warning.
The Shadow Man walked through the echoing corridor and stopped before the thick steel door bearing the symbol of a radiant eye shedding a lightning-bolt tear. He adjusted his tie, unlocked the door, and entered. The room was simple, rustic in its comforts: A single cot. A nightstand. A toilet and washbasin. The only light came from a ceiling fixture, which was regulated by a man at a switchboard each evening and a different man in the mornings. The right side of the cell was anchored by a simple wooden table and the type of large upholstered chair one might find in any American sitting room. It was the one thing of comfort in the dank room, and the woman sat in it, her eyes closed. The woman was of average height but too thin, and this lack of substance made her nearly into a ghost.
Tonight’s dinner sat untouched on its tray. “Mmm, Salisbury steak. My favorite,” said the man, whose name was either Hamilton or Washington, or, possibly, Madison.
The woman didn’t answer.
“Mashed potatoes. And peas and carrots. Delicious.” He slid the fork through the potatoes and circled the utensil near her face. “Open wide.”
The woman didn’t move. The man dropped the fork back on the tray. “Now, Miriam, if you don’t eat, we’ll be forced to give you a feeding. You remember how unpleasant that was, don’t you?”
The woman’s skin twitched along her jawline, assuring the Shadow Man that she did, in fact, remember.
“What, no smile for me?”
Her expression did not change.
“Wouldn’t you like to see your family again?”