Peripheral Vision: A Supernatural Thriller(46)

Gunshots and smoke added to the chaos and shots were fired aimlessly into the growing group of combatants. The screams and blood cries made it impossible to tell one side from the other, as man after man fell to the ground. Although greatly outnumbered, August Arrow's warriors, with the help of the growing confusion, seemed to be winning the battle. The volunteers were the first to retreat and ran to the river, trying to escape to the other side. The mounted Lakota warriors followed and began to cut down the fleeing enemy, but that's when it turned. A wounded Lt. Wilmington counterattacked, leading his men through the whipping current of the Iktomi.

This is where the story gives way to legend and gets a bit fuzzier. Some say that they all managed to kill each other, and that was that. But the more popular version of the story resembles the supposed verbal account ,given by the lone survivor of the massacre, the before mentioned Mr. Jonathan Bayard. Before he died, a mere seventeen hours after the battle from complications with a gunshot wound to the leg, Mr. Bayard supposedly described the battle to his then fifteen-year-old son, James.

Shortly thereafter Mr. Jonathan Bayard, father to James Eric, husband to Margaret Ann, and failed translator to Douglas Wilmington, died alone in his bed. It was October 17, 1859. The story, however, was only beginning to grow. The legend, birthed only a few hours before the passing of Jonathan, flew across the Territories like wild fire. Within only a few days, the story had jumped the 40th parallel into the Kansas Territory, and by week's end it had followed Manifest Destiny all the way to the west coast and the Pacific Ocean.

The “river ran red” story took on a life of it's own, but for many outsiders the focus began to shift from the mystery of the events to the question of “who was to blame?” So much so, that for the rest of young James' life, which ended prematurely in 1889, he spent much of his time defending his father's story. It was a fruitless campaign however, because many blamed Jonathan's loose translation for instigating the battle turned massacre. A book was later written about the ordeal entitled “A Fool's Quest.” The author, Mr. Karl R. Garner, theorized that both the Bayard men fabricated the “river ran red” story in an attempt to take the attention away from the glaring mistakes of both Jonathan Bayard and the 2nd Lt. Wilmington on that fateful day. The book went on to document the life of James, his quest to clear his father's name, and ultimately, his drowning death in 1889. Garner would be the first, but definitely not the last to ask the question, “Was it the twisting river that was cursed, or the man that survived it?”

The book wasn't widely publicized, or widely read for that matter. The legend of the story became more popular than the analytical version, and by the turn of the century it had been all but forgotten. However, since that day in October when Jonathan first told his son the story, the Bayard family tree seems to have been fed by the cursed waters of the Iktomi River. Not one Bayard man has survived past his forty-ninth birthday. James had one son, Peter, who died in 1900 at the age of 30, from smallpox.

Peter had twin sons, Drake and Marcus, both of whom were killed on the battlefields in 1918, when America joined the Great War. Marcus was never a father, but Drake, before heading to war married his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Young. The two had one child, Eli, who was born in 1917, without ever having the chance to meet his father. The Great War took many young men and the second took even more, but Eli, who fought in North Africa during WWII, was not one of them. He returned home to his wife, Grace and young daughter Elizabeth, as a decorated officer, and began raising cattle on the previously undeveloped Bayard Family land just south of the Berry Crossing.

Eli was even better at ranching than he was at being a soldier, and by 1950, he and Grace were in charge of a very successful cattle ranch. The following year, with the help of his hired men, he built his new family of four, a two story, three bedroom house near the river. A new barn came next. Then the chicken coop, machine shed, and finally they even added a small house for the hired men. It was the “happy” in the life of Eli. Grace gave birth to Elizabeth in 1942, three months after Eli had left for the war. The twins, Michelle, and Jason were born in early 1949, shortly before a massive tornado touched down in Homewood and destroyed three-fourths of the town. Grace was so shaken by the disaster that she insisted that Eli add plans for a deep sub-basement to the blueprints of their new house. Eli went one step further and designed plans for not only the tornado shelter, but for an attached, underground, concrete reinforced escape tunnel as well. The tunnel however, was never finished by Eli, and instead was boarded up to protect against any curious little children from getting inside and hurting themselves. He always planned to finish the tunnel, but once they moved into the house, the tunnel quickly took a backseat to caring for three children, and keeping the ranch going.

For the next fourteen years, life for the Bayard Family was actually somewhat normal and even prosperous. But early in 1965 things began to change...to slip. Elizabeth, having been away at the State College for four years, had returned to Homewood to take a teaching job at the local elementary school. Michelle, now a senior at Homewood High, had taken up an active role in the anti-war movement. Her vocal diatribes against the war in Vietnam didn't sit well with her veteran father, or with many of the conservative pro-LBJ thinking Homewood residents. Although the opposition group that she rallied with was small, they made a lot of noise, traveling from town to town and organizing peace rallies around the state. But unfortunately, sometimes when noise gets too loud, it leads to someone trying to make it stop. That someone came knocking on the screen door of the Bayard's kitchen the night of October 17, 1965. Her father, Eli, died on the cool tile of the kitchen floor from Matthew Miller’s bullet. Elizabeth in return, put a bullet through the skull of the young man who pulled the trigger. She had found a perverse pleasure in the killing, and quickly made her way to the river to wash her sins away.