The Last 100 Years

1936

Silas Buchanan’s seventieth birthday passed unnoticeably on a cold and lonely February morning. Regarded as one of the top American historians of his time, Silas lived a life consumed with documenting the past. The circumstances around his life propelled him into the field. His father had died during the last known battle of the Civil War days after his conception, and, as fate would have it, his grandfather had died defending the Alamo a mere fifteen days after his father had been conceived. Life comprised many coincidences, but even Silas could not ignore that these two events pre-determined his path in life.

After his wife, Alicia, and their twin boys had passed away in a railway accident nearly two decades prior, Silas resigned himself to living alone, focusing solely on his work. Day after day, he toiled at the typewriter, hammering out prose that captured not only the well-known American history but also the histories of unsung heroes like his father and grandfather. The paper wrapped around the typewriter’s roller stood half completed and would be the finishing touches on his family’s biography.

The words didn’t flow from his mind to his fingers quite as easily as they had once done. A combination of age, declining mental acuity, and a touch of the winter flu had severely hampered Silas’ progress. The perfect finish to the book remained locked away in the recesses of his mind.

Unable to coerce the finishing touches out, Silas leaned back in his high-backed leather desk chair and stared out the window. A bitter winter wind gusted hard against the eaves, and a stinging frost crept along the windowpanes. He watched as the retired swing set swayed back and forth in the yard like a couple of unseen children were at play. Rubbing a finger along the cut of his chin, Silas thought long and hard about how he would like the tale to end. He often waxed poetically on the topic, wondering just how life could have been different had his grandfather could have grasped just how desperate the situation had been in 1836.

Would his grandfather stay and fight, knowing the outcome?

Would any of the men that had gallantly graced the walls of the old Spanish mission?

Those questions often haunted Silas. Throughout his adult life, he would often daydream about the possibility of being able to go back in time and warn his grandfather to convince him to flee. Oh, how life could have been different for an impressionable young man progressing through formidable years if the two male role models that should have been there were.

Could saving his grandfather from demise have altered life’s-chartered course?

Silas feared he could never know that answer until he passed on and met his maker. Even now, Silas could feel the paw of death starting to reach up from the floor and take root with a firm grip. For weeks he felt the heart begin to skip and slow. Yes, death decided to take him naturally, albeit slowly. As another decade wrote itself into the book of life, Silas felt that another passing year would be one too many.

A thought of how to finish the book flashed to the forefront of his mind. He placed his hands on the typewriter’s keys and began to type the phrases that spoke aloud inside his head. Closing his eyes allowed him to listen to them intently; he no longer needed to see the keys or words he typed; instead, they flowed through his fingertips in perfect precision.

At first, the words flew in flurries onto the page, and the typewriter’s end-of-line bell dinged like clockwork. A couple of paragraphs in Silas began to slow. He could feel the heart inside his chest flutter and stumble. An electric shock rippled out through the left side of his chest and down his arm. The pain was intense at first but then settled into a mild irritation. Death did not feel anything as he had imagined.

The heart attack fought a quick and dirty fight. In a matter of less than a minute, Silas pitched forward, his head slamming at an awkward angle against the typewriter – the last few characters written were gibberish.

Silas Buchanan’s spirit stood behind the collapsed corpse. In that instant, everything felt the same as it had just moments before, except he knew that he would never be waking up again.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Buchanan,” a deep voice said from behind Silas.

Whipping around, Silas noticed a man dressed in a suit of clothes not all that different from the styles of the American 1930s, leaning against the bookcase near the study's door.

“Who are you,” Silas questioned without a trace of trepidation in his voice, for he knew he was dead, so there was nothing left to fear.

Standing at an impressive height – well over six and half feet – the stranger tipped his hat at the ease of recognition. Often, in his line of work, the spirits he encountered were less than reluctant to want to see him, much less acknowledge his presence.

“Let’s just say I’m a friend. And I’m here to help you on your way,” the man continued through a slight smile and quick flash of teeth.

“Does this mean that I’m moving on to heaven,” Silas quickly asked?

The man shrugged his shoulder and gave a subtle look that spoke the infamous words – it depends.

“Surely, I can’t be….”

“No, Mr. Buchanan. My job is to offer you a deal. One time only. You can have anything on this earthly plane you desire or pass along peacefully with me and leave all this behind.”

Silas Buchanan thought it over for a moment. Even he had to admit there wasn’t much to hold him to life; at his age, he had just about seen and done everything a man could ever wish for. Perhaps, it seemed morbid to resign one’s self to death, but as Silas gazed around his study, he made peace with the idea.

“So, it’s the afterlife for you? Are you certain there is no outstanding business, no desire you wish to leave your mark upon before you go?”

What was the man getting at, Silas wondered.

The tall stranger took steps to close the distance between them. A strange light in the man’s eyes dazzled against the flickering flame of the hurricane lamps that Silas liked to keep on his desk; they reminded him of simpler times. The air in the room changed; it grew colder, like the stinging frost that crept up on the windowpanes had burst through the barrier.

“Are you certain? Like I said, one-time deal.”

A dumbfounded look screwed itself up on Silas’ face, the age lines on his cheeks wrinkling in confusion.

“Why do you keep asking me that,” Silas probed.

The man stopped his approach when he had reached about a foot distance between them. He regarded his charge with a head-to-toe inspection that searched for the answer to the question. He needed to know if Silas Buchanan would accept the gift he was prepared to offer.

“I can sense when someone in your state has some unfinished business or desire. Often, it is a mother wanting to hold her child one last time or a husband wishing to kiss his bride goodbye. But, then, there are others that require more of my specialized skills. Requests that a person, such as yourself, may not have known could even be possible. We’ll call this a do-over.”

The words intrigued Silas. He hung onto them and played them over and over in whatever constituted his spiritual mind.

“A do-over? What exactly does that mean?”

“It means that for one time only, you get a shot at redoing an event in the past, to right a wrong, to put a burning desire for change to rest. Why does that interest you, Mr. Buchanan,” the stranger asked coyly.

Silas flashed a look at his hunkered corpse atop the unfinished work stuck in the typewriter. Yes, a desire, a dream, had long burned within him. But could this man really grant that? Or was all this some sort of final synapse firing before the energy that had animated him dissipated into the ether?

There would be only one way to find out.

“And if I said yes, are there any, let’s say, limits?”

The well-dressed man slowly shook his head. “No, Mr. Buchanan, this is a one-time offer, good for anything your heart desires. Just one caveat, I cannot bring anyone back from the dead. “

Silas felt temporarily deflated. He had hoped that the do-over could alter past events that could have saved his grandfather and his father. But, alas, the spoken caveat crushed those dreams into ash.

“Then, I suppose,” Silas began to speak.

“I said I cannot bring the dead back to life. I did not say you couldn’t save them.”

The possibilities whirled about in Silas’ mind. He could scarcely believe the words the man had spoken. Could this spirit, this devil, this angel bend the reality of time and allow Silas to venture back?

“I sense you may have something to ask of me,” the man continued.

“I do,” Silas Buchanan began to speak again but was hushed when the stranger pressed a finger tightly against his lips.

“Close your eyes, Mr. Buchanan. Picture in your mind what you desire, and I will make it so.”

The wind howled with renewed vigor outside the Buchanan home. The home's walls violently shook, dust and pictures falling from the ceiling and walls. Right before Silas’ eyes, the interior of his home disintegrated into nothingness. Empty fields, the rising sun, and waning moons flowed like a river in reverse. Images of people, carriages, and horses thundered past his line of sight. The smell of gunpowder ignited his senses. The world he had known rewound itself till there was nothing but desert sand, scrub, Ironwood, and the man – still with a finger pressed to his Silas’ lips.

In the distance, Silas could hear Mexican music wafting from a cantina in a small town. Further, as he peered his eyes over the accompanying man’s shoulder, he could make out the edifice of the cottonwood mission and half-completed chapel that would, one day, become world-renowned. But at that moment, the Alamo loomed untouched and ignorant of its fate.

A cold desert wind blew up Silas’ spine as he realized he had been sent back to San Antonio, Texas—in the year – 1836.

One hundred years is not a very long time in the course of human history. It is, however, an eternity when attempting to comprehend how to turn back the hands of time.