XV

Jesus Christ forgives, but you never forget. That is a truth they never teach you in the Bible about your worst sins. Brother Pruitt never forgot that truth no matter how hard he drank. That was a sin too, he thought morosely. He thought about hanging himself every night, the feeling stronger on some days, less on others. By the grace of God. By the grace of God. One day at a time. God had called him to go forth into Nineveh. How could he look away from the countenance of the Lord and refuse? Besides, it kept him alive. It kept him ahead of his demons. God had a plan for him he repeated to himself.

When he was alone in his tent in the evenings, he would be visited by ghosts. All of them started in Missouri where the war had swept across the vast backcountry like a brushfire. A young St. Louis abolitionist full of piss and fire, he enrolled as a Jayhawk partisan. They fought Confederate Bushwhackers in a vicious and fluid guerilla war where the most savage depredations were perpetuated. Thousands of refugees were on the move in a countryside that was depopulated by terror. Farmsteads were torched, women were raped, boys of military-age were being shot.

 
A settlement of German immigrants was in distress. So the Jayhawks promised to defend it until they could move the corn harvest out to feed the federal army. They dug rifle pits and split log barricades and waited for the Bushwhackers to come. They came in through a steady rain. As Evander ducked low in his muddy pit he raised his rifle slowly and drew a bead on the shape of a horse and rider. The ambush was loosed. Firing exploded. He pulled the trigger and the man toppled, hit in the side. Fighting continued for two hours in a pitched firefight through driving rain where the smoke hung evenly, so they all moved in close with pistols and knives. It was bloody business.

 
When the firing petered out, Evander crept low through the brush, rifle ready looking for the first Bushwhacker he had winged. He found him behind a wild forsythia bright as the sun where the man had crawled into for cover. The rain had ceased and the rebel's wound was smirched with mud. A pool of blood collected on the earth. Along the rebel's shoulder belt hung a string of scalps. Evander saw red. Without a word he knelt down and pressed his knee into the rebel's neck. With one determined motion he had carved the man's scalp off with his Bowie knife. The man screamed and writhed. And when he had finished this, he silenced him by cutting open his throat. The earth around was soaked with blood and rain.

 
That ghost came often. Maw Possum called them boo hags. A lot of soldiers were visited by them. She prescribed all sorts of hudu remedies Evander thought pagan, but most veterans stayed with drinking. Its all they knew. Its all he knew. Beside Madame de Smet's cathouse in Strangetown grew a forsythia within sight of where he would preach, bright as the sun. And the Word of God would come to him, and he would be tortured by the uncertainty of its conscience or divine provenance.

 
"But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile, though shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die." - Leviticus 21:14

 
With all these ghosts - boo hags - he had nothing left but Jesus Christ. He surrendered his soul to Him. It was all he had left. Everything else was a phantasm of chaos denuded of any meaning, and that was worse than hell to Evander Pruitt. It was as though his soul needed some choice towards daily sanctification, or it would wither into the void and nothingness. If he were an Apostle, he'd be a Thomas.

As Evander Pruitt rested down into his cot in the tent he pitched in Strangetown's bottoms, he drank the numbing elixir. The boo hags came again. The man he scalped. He was wounded in the side like Christ, lanced by Evander's trigger. The blood from his scalp pooled. Christ's blood washes. This blood is befouling. While he felt saved today, he wondered if suddenly he were not tomorrow. He receded into a fitful sleep, and hoped he would never wake up again.