Chapter 1 They lived in a cabin that set near the river and the plain. There the sad birth of the child. He was light of skin and would barely speak at all. 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 nurture in her own bosom the very child who would take her away. The father never said her name. The child will not know it. He had a sister in this world he would not see again. In the country beyond were the bones of the grandfather. The boy was born the day the wind blew the lawn chairs over the cemetery grass and he was the last of his name. When the world turned the rains came. The father cut wood and drew water, he fell those days into a drunken sleep. He greeted the extinct stars each day with words. He quoted anonymous poets whose names were lost and gone for alltime. Year one, a skinny child, malnourished. He grew thin and would never learn to read and within him there was already an urge for senseless killing. He sat in the predawn dark by the stove, the wash-pots. He had western eyes and could decipher more geometric patterns than many others of this time. Child of man, he could not see the reflection of his face. He was dressed with ragged fabric. He stroked the scull fire in the stove, and through the window a lightless dawn was falling past the violet day of the western world. There were two horses in the stable. There was the weed tangled back yard. Fruit trees were there, weathered and black with age, and bent and broken with neglect. The boy walked here and there, he came and went. The leaves buried all winter, creatures running over the dead grass beginning to green, the first scentless cherry trees, returned, the first star seen all at once as it stood shimmering above black water. A dozen white lilies, a coffin of wood. To the south of the cabin the stream ran close to the hill and flowed cold and dark. Fish surged in the stream, sign of faith. Bearing in the western church. The dead would take the living with them if they could, how all things false fall from them. The dead kin sainted. We may rightly pray to them, mother church tells us so. But never if they will speak back, whether in dreams or out of them. Sat in a garden and rabbits came out in the brush to sit in the evening and the deer came to drink in the dark. The glaring disk of the sun soared up and the child went on. Proof? Of his being. There was nothing else. There was a path among the sycamores and among the willows, a path beaten hard and coming down from the fields that were rich with growth, and he went down it. There were many orchards and beyond the plains the mountains. It was dark but the nights were cool. Then there was the bad winter. It would come when the fall was over. *** In the night the boy woke to hear howls in the valley. He crept from the shack out into the night. The moon lay in the sky and the world looked cold and blue. There were wolves, stark in the starlight, running there on the plain, and they dashed like phantoms in the snow. Their breath plumed about them. They moved in silence. They seemed to be from another time, as they were descended from ancient ancestries, running there 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 where he stood. They looked at him. He held his breath. He could not even gasp. Then he trotted away. Back at the cabin his father was not awake. The child never spoke of what he had witnessed. He never told anyone. 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 torn into the beasts of the plain and fed on 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.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 10:31:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015