I look at the man dead on the ground, the food flavor still on my tongue. I stare at the blood and brains that have dirtied my brother's farmstead home. As I pause a minute to take a breath a voice comes from behind me.

“So this is how you left everything.”

I turn quickly around to see a man standing in the doorframe of the bedroom. I begin to reach for my pistol as he speaks again.

“Hold on their Nick,” The man says as he puts his arms up to show he had no ill intent “I didn’t come to kill or maim you. I came to talk and understand.”

“Who are you stranger?” I say as I look him up and down, something striking a familiar cord with my memory, like remembering a tune from childhood and being unable to place it. “I feel we have met before and yet I can not place you. You will have to forgive the hostility” I motion to the corpse on the floor, “I am a little on edge due to recent events.”

The strange and yet familiar man sighs a little. “Nick, others who have been in this situation have shown something to help people know who they are. I want to move to unbutton my shirt and show you something. I think you will be able to place me then, may I?”

“Strange request stranger, sure, do it slowly and no quick movements.” I say hand on my pistol. Then as I watched him begin to unbutton his shirt I had a thought pop into my head unbidden. ‘Kill him, he is reaching for his gun’. I kept control of myself as the thought came through my mind. A strange thought, and errant thought, and one that passed by as it conflicted with my observation as I watched him and my perhaps ill-founded confidence in my recently observed invulnerability. ‘No reason to get jumpy and kill someone without good reason especially if someone happens to get the jump on me I apparently have a new found immunity to bullets.’

As I have these thoughts I watch the situation with the stranger. He slowly unbuttons his shirt and then pulls it apart revealing scars of three bullet wounds, center mass. I feel dumb and unobservant as the obvious clicks in my head. These wounds are the ones that Molly described to me when I came into town, ready to see my brother for the first time in a year. I see in the strangers eyes the light, the sparkle that I always saw in the eyes of my brother. That endless optimism that even when I would write to him during the war and update him on what I was going through I would always get back these hopeful and amazing stories of what we should do once I got out. No matter the darkness he would always find the light to set a sight on.

“Eli…” I say, unable to bring a million thoughts running in my head into words. Finally I settled on the simplest thought to speak “how?”

“Normally, most people would not be able to see me or talk to others like me. YOu are special Nick. You are half in and half out. There are others who will seek you out and others who will try to use you. I am here to give you some simple advice. Pray, listen to those who are holy and you will be able to feel that, and finally take care of Molly and my kids. Yes, I was killed unjustly and those who did that did it maliciously but killing them does not bring me back or help out my now widow and fatherless kids.” I see a tear roll down his eye. “ Justice isn’t killing all those responsible, justice is making sure those that are still around after the crime are made sure to be made as whole as they can.” He then looks at the corpse on the floor. “And it would also be nice if you didn’t make a mess of my former home.” He said as he cracked a smile.

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I had an inclination that this was the last time I would see him in this world. I went up and grabbed my brother in a hug. “I am sorry.” I squeezed harder not wanting him to leave, the last living family member. Even after all I had seen, all I had been through, he gave me hope. I always hoped that I could even have a life like more brother, he was the bar to which I aspired to. “I won’t mess up this time. I will find Molly and the kids and make sure they have everything we didn’t and always hoped we would have.”

“I know you will, I always admired you Nick. You are back in this world, you will have temptations, fight them." My brother Elijah West, father of two, husband to Molly West, and simple farmer and homesteader said this to me as he let go of the hug and then walked out the front door and walked towards our families namesake and faded into the dark.

I proceeded to take the man I killed’s body outside, then I rolled up my sleeves and took a broom and gathered dust around the brain splatter and blood. I then swept the dirt that is now soaked with blood and brain juice, and dusted it outside.

Then I located a shovel and dug a grave for my erstwhile assailant. It takes a while however and yet strangely I feel no fatigue. Once done I lay his body inside and I began to cover it up. As I do from behind me I hear “No one was supposed to be in that house, least of all you.”

I turn around and I see the man I am burying looking up at me from the ground. “You are still here?”

“Not for long” he goes deeper into the ground “I feel myself going down, it’s cold and empty, I don’t want to go but what I want to do and what’s happening are two different things, hard to refuse that truth now, I just want to ask you something that’s why I am talking to you one last time.”

I look at the man as he fades and goes deeper into the earth “My family is dead, I never married but there was one girl in town that I spent a lot of time with, there is two double eagles in my pocket, if you could give those to her she is at Marty’s. Say it is from Tom and that he had to move on and he enjoyed the comfort she was able to give him while he was in town.”

‘Don’t, he shot you tried to kill you, how dare he ask something of you like this’ I shake the thought away. “I will Tom, may you find peace.” He fully fades and I take the coins out of his pocket and put them in mine. I finished burying him.

I make a sign of the cross and pray “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death amen. I then go back inside to finish gathering supplies.

As I take my time and change out my clothes, luckily the uniform still fits, I notice the early light of the dawn coming through the shutters of the house. ‘This took all night’ I think and realize that I don’t feel the call of sleep at all. I open the shutters and look outside, by horse the town was about an hour away, by foot probably four counti