When I was a child my foster father Cecil used to tell stories of forerunners. These were stories in which a local person would see some image of the near future. For instance, old Tyler Roach who complained to his wife that someone was down at his well with a lantern at night was found dead by the well the next day. Somehow Tyler had glimpsed his own death, as if his failing heart sent his mind a message to be ready, a kind of supernatural get your affairs in order.
One of the forerunners that I often come back to was the story of Cecil’s father milking, and seeing a distant neighbour. This takes place some hundred years ago, when transport was limited to slow wagons in the summer and slightly faster sleighs in the winter. Cecil’s milking father, sitting on a three-legged stool cut from a single tree, looked up in time to see a man from the neighbouring village. It was time for the evening milking, so it was not a mere social visit. But rather, given the distance to the man’s home and country custom, he had obviously come by to put up his horses for the night. Cecil’s father said hello, exchanged a few pleasantries and then told him to stable his horses and that he would meet him inside.
This mundane exchange was to become peculiar when he inquired within the house and found that no one had driven into the yard, for the bells from the harness would have been heard. Upon investigation, there was no sleigh outside the barn and no one else’s horses within. The incident might have been dismissed as mere anecdote but a few days later word passed, as people went between the villages to deliver a cow or a baby, that the man who had visited had died at exactly that moment in his own village fifteen miles away. A true forerunner, he’d been seen to visit another village even while he was dying.
What is most evocative about these stories, perhaps, is the ambiguous way in which the message gets delivered from the amorphous future. Like ghouls in traditional ghost stories, who merely mutter cold and dark rather than commit themselves to a real description of the afterlife that the living might get some use out of, the forerunner instead suggests and implies. The missive from the great blankness that is our eventual demise is delivered by a rubber boot awkwardly placed, or three pitchforks falling at once into a perfect and symmetrical configuration.
The one warned scarcely knows what to make of the message enough to heed it, and their friends are left to make claims of meaning after the fact. Like operant conditioning, the cryptic messages work by occasionally being correct, and therefore engaging that part of the human mind that many millions of years ago looked for magic on the savannah when we first left the comfort of the forest. That part of our minds that wants dowsing and faith healing to be true, and that our friends and relatives, instead of composting gently into the earth from which they came, wander about with ambiguous intent, their purposes known only to themselves.
