Cruel Curse

THE GULLY When Jim McBride came to, he was laying flat on his back at the bottom of a washed out gully. He managed to open his right eye with a little effort and then slammed it shut when the afternoon sun shrunk his pupil to a pinpoint. His other eye wouldn't open at all. He rolled onto his elbow to look away from the brightness of the sky then reached up and felt the left side of his face. He winced in pain as his clumsy fingers pushed against the swollen mass above his cheekbone. His throat felt raw when he tried to swallow. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by thirst. “What the hell happened to me?” He tried to open his good eye again; this time slowly, so he could adjust to the sunlight. Sitting up, he lifted his head to get his bearings. For a brief moment he saw something out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't sure if it was real or a product of his delirium. Some distance down the gully in the shimmering heat there was someone standing there, small, just a small figure in tattered clothes, standing and watching him. It looked like…no there were two now, She was there with the Boy just watching him, it couldn't be, not here. “I buried you myself,” he said out loud “Damn it, you ain't real.” He blinked twice to clear his head and looked again. Nothing, they were gone. He was tired of the torment, of never knowing when they would come to him and he spoke to himself as if it were to them. “I told you before I didn't mean it, now leave me be.” He had grown used to it by now. At first they only came to him when the booze made his mind soft. The memory seemed to take on form when the liquor filled his head. Now he couldn't predict when they would come to him. The thought of the accident with the Boy and what he saw the Woman endure never left him from the day he rode away from that plantation outside of Savannah. For the first year the liquor dulled his memory until that morning, before the sun came up, laying there on his face in the dirt behind some saloon after a particularly brutal night of whiskey: another attempt to drive away the ghosts. He saw them standing together in the twilight hour, side by side, just staring at him with a mournful look. He had to close one eye to focus in his drunken stupor, but sure enough, there they were about twenty feet away in the alley with their backs against the side of an adjacent clapboard building. It was still mostly dark but the pale skin of their faces almost glowed as it captured what light was available and their hollow eyes, those deep set hollow eyes, looking at him from shadowed sockets. He was helpless in his inebriation, but felt no need to flee. He knew he could never run from them because they were not of this world. They came to him from a place that made it impossible for him to hide; because that dark place is in the heart of decent people, a place whose construct is shame, where conscience breathes life into the woeful specters of remorse. They were the result of his own mortification, a haunting he did not deserve to escape. He had come to accept that this was his punishment, a curse he must live with for the rest of his life. Shaking the bitter memory from his head, he looked around and began to take inventory of his current situation. Dirt walls extended about eight feet up on either side of him as he sat there in the relentless heat of the day. “This gully must be twenty feet across,” he thought. The sun, directly overhead, beat down like the sky was on fire just above his head, “Noon time…must be about noon.” As his senses began to come back to him, he realized he had to get out of the sun or it would eventually cook him alive. There was some shade under a shelf on one side of the gully. His best bet was to make his way over to it and collect himself a little before getting the hell out of there. He tried to move, and the pain that shot up his leg when he rolled over onto his knees almost made him pass out. He let out a gasp as he rolled onto his back again, his hands clutching the sand beneath him in tightly clenched fists. Mustering his strength after the last wave of pain subsided, he raised himself onto his elbows and looked toward his feet. Taking stock of the situation, he realized his boots were gone, along with his rifle, hat and jacket. Not only that, but his horse was nowhere in sight. He had been stripped of just about everything and left for dead. From his elbows, he pushed himself up to a seated position with his legs straight out. He held himself there for a long minute, trying to figure out what caused that incredible pain. Looking at his bare feet, he thought they looked normal, sun burned but normal. Then he saw the blood stain on the bottom of his pant leg. A shadow passed quickly across the sand in front of him-strange-then another. Tilting his head back and putting his hand to his forehead above his brow to block the sun, he looked up. With his eyelid squinted down to a slit, he stared up into the sky and saw the shadows' source: birds, big ones. They were circling overhead, tracing patterns around the sun just above him. “Sorry to spoil your meal.” he said in a whisper. Then he noticed more of them circling off to his left about half a mile away. They were circling lower and seemed to be dropping out of the sky toward something on the ground. He looked back down again and moved his hands to his right knee. Gently, he began to pull his pant leg up, a little at a time, until he saw the problem. First, he saw the black and blue around his ankle and as the leg was more exposed, the dried blood, torn skin and what looked like…bone. This was not good. Somehow his lower leg was snapped in two just above his ankle.