Ma Cloud pauses again, and Charlie hangs his head. Charlie hadn't been there; he had been with his regiment on the far side of Turkey Creek. Lord only knows what ill-conceived plan he and his comrades thought they were accomplishing, but he was there in his Union blues while his father lay dead with a cut up gunny sack on his chest. Charlie had fished with Alf Bolin when they were boys and hunted beside him and played mumbly-peg. Once when he and Alf were hunting, Charlie had grown careless and stepped somewhat heavy on a branch. Alf wheeled around and put the end of his muzzle right up against Charlie's forehead and said, "If you're gonna be so goddam loud maybe I oughta just pull this trigger. Maybe then you'll learn to watch where you step." But that was an anomaly, and though this interaction was troubling, still Alf had a point. You can't kill game you scare off. But of course Charlie never forgot it. Nor would he forget the killing of his father.
Then Ma Cloud began ticking off the other killings: verbally stacking corpses like cord wood, so that the actors, the forgotten faces of the hills, had no time to assume the features of the loved and living. There was old man Neddy, fishing in Bull Creek with a little fire burning on the gravel bar and a pan resting on a rock. And so Alf and his men rode up and shot him dead and let the water carry him away. They didn't even take the pan. There were the two Union soldiers sharing a flask beneath what is now called Murder Rocks, both shot from above and behind. There was Mr. Teeters who came out onto his porch, hitching his coveralls and deliberating whether he should saddle his horse and check his fence or pick out a plump chicken for lunch. He opted to ride, and after he was shot, the horse ran a short distance with the man's foot caught in the stirrup. But most tragically—irrationally—demonically, there was Billy Willis, who was carrying a pail filled with dried corn to feed his pony. Twelve-year-old Billy who was climbing over the split-rail fence when a shot thundered, and he pitched forward, one foot snagged on the top rail and the corn poured out in the fescue.
Not all of Alf's killings were what you would call completely senseless. Some coaches were shot to splinters and the corpses inside stripped of their valuables. And as has already been alluded to, any Union man was shot on sight. On these occasions, you could discern the contours of motives, and if you studied Ma Cloud closely as she receded into the deepening shadows, you could tell she had pondered these motives in her heart. Finally, she says, "I think it was the war what turned him bad."
Charlie says, "I think he was always bad."
"Maybe. But war does something to a man, to a people. The first thing a war does is turn someone from a neighbor or a friend or another man into an idear. Does that make sense? I can't think of how else to say it; one day a man's a flesh and blood feller trying to feed his family and then war breaks out, and then he ain't nothing except a bad idear. When Alf went southern, Calvin wasn't his pa no more; he was a disagreement, a kind of contrary ghost. And ghosts can be killed without nary guilt. I've thought long about this. It seems almost any belief or conviction can put one man up on a stump and drive another man to his knees. War just does outright what folks are doing to each other all the time.
"And when I come to understand war then I began to understand the Holy Bible, leastways the Gospels. The Lord Jesus spent all his time, all his teachings changing folks from idears back into flesh and blood. The tax-gatherers and the whores and the lepers with their dog-licked sores—he turned 'em all from being bad idears back into people. And that's the glory of the Kingdom of God—it sure ain't church where people pretend to be good or act giddy about dying. Nossir, the Kingdom is that fine place where the Lord Jesus has turned everybody back into people. It's the exact opposite to what the war done to Alf and Alf done to us. Don't never say to me that God and war is on the same side or that he is tramping out the vineyards or bearing a terrible swift sword."
Ma Cloud falls silent except for the rhythm of her rocker, thumping back and forth with inarticulate anger. She spits into the can, but otherwise holds her tongue concerning the rising bitterness that presses against her heart. She can speak the truth; she knows it and possesses the words. She simply realizes that most people struggle mightily to hold their fears and desires in check, and so it's generally better to let them ride along head high in the pride of their doctrines. She will not say that it damn near drives her crazy when preachers use the teachings of the same Lord Jesus to turn decent people into bad ideas. She murmurs in her heart that such prideful preachers create hell for people who are crying out for heaven, and that's when she thanks the Lord for strong liquor to recover her bearings and restore her balance.
The listeners begin to shift uneasily on the stump and chairs and adze-hewn bench. Ma Cloud's narrative has drifted from the outrage and indignation of random criminality—the fascination with violence that seems to make time irrelevant—toward something that implicates them all, to the attenuated Alf within that every human loathes, fears, and struggles to repudiate. For in Ma Cloud's meditation, time returns and makes the listeners uncomfortable in various ways. The listeners and the faceless actors and Ma Cloud and the Lord Jesus and Alf Bolin all bleed together in a phantasmagoria of human consciousness, and so an overwhelming desire for holiness and justice rises like the moon appearing over the ridge behind Ma Cloud's cabin.