Chapter 1 They lived in a cabin that set near the river and the plain. There the sad birth of the child. He is light of skin and dark of hair and can barely speak. Outside there were slumbering fields of turned earth and the shape of stars in the silent river. There were the woods that yet kept the last desperate wolves. The mother dead these twelve years did incubate in her own bosom the very creature who would carry her off. The father never says her name. The child will not know it. He has a sister in this world he shall not see again. In the country beyond lay the bones of the grandfather. The boy was born the day the wind blew the dried leaves over the cemetery grass and he was the last of his name. The father cuts wood and draws water, he falls into a drunken sleep. He greeted the extinct stars each day with words. He quotes anonymous poets whose names are lost and gone. A skinny child, malnourished. He sat in the predawn dark by the stove, the wash-pots. He had western eyes and will never learn to read and within him there is a need for mindless killing. Child of man, his face cannot see the reflection. He dressed with ragged fabric. He strokes the scull fire in the stove. Through the window a lightless dawn falling past the pale day of the western world. *** To the South of this tiny shack the river slopes close to the hill and flows dark and deep. The water is cool. The mountains were veiled by the snow. They appeared newly born from out of the hand of some mysterious God Who had not yet even fashioned a purpose for them. That new. One winters night when the boy was twelve he woke to hear howls in the valley to the west. He crept from the shack out into the moonglow. There were wolves running there on the plain, and they dashed like phantoms in the snow. In the cold glow of the waxing gibbous moon their breath seeped. They moved in a deadly silence, and they moved through the mist and the snow, as if this land were haunted. They seemed to be from another time, as they were descended from ancient ancestries, running here in the snow, the wolves and the ghosts of wolves. Then the child saw them approach. Frolicking and prancing. They were beasts at once of great beauty and vast horror, like flowers that feast on flesh. They crossed within ten feet of him where he lay on his belly in the snow. They looked at him. He held his breath. He could not even gasp. He slowly stood and trotted away. Back at the home the father was not awake. The child never spoke of what he had witnessed. He never told another soul. And he then had cause to wonder of nature. Of wolves and men. *** The boy woke early and dressed and walked out alone. Last night the wolves had tore into the beasts of the plain and feasted upon them and their corpses decayed in the grass. The boy on a tragic quest to find stumbled through them, the inner parts of animals who dream of man, and has so dreamed in frolicking dreams hundreds of thousands of years ago, dreams of God who came naked and foreign to His creation to be tortured by them and nailed to a piece of wood, this humanity, he did not understand them, and yet forgave them, finding still that no measure of blood could appease them, this species dedicated to practices as soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beasts whose very bones fertilize the earth.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 10:20:13 +0000
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