Chapter 17 Their ruined march and their ruined hearts. They sang of what they had done. Land, fire all of the trees. The light at a slant on the bloody thick-skulled dead. A report from the New World. Says the citizen. The ash of far away on the eve of the morrow with the acre of foliage. Keep these for future huntsman high in the hills past the boundary, O. They rode on. The meridian was at once the darkness and the dusk of the day. Some amid their number would have taken a stand but there was no stand to take. They had no argument because there was none. *** “What kind of Indians was them?” asked the boy as they rode that next day. A man answered him, saying: “Them was a kind I’ve never seen ‘afore. But I seen some other kind down towards the border. Wasn’t nothing to it. They was a cave there, had been a Lipan burial. Must have been a thousand Indians in there all settin’ together. Had on robes and blankets. Beads, whatever. We carried ‘em all off. Took everything. Stripped ‘em naked, carried off whole Indians to our homes and set ‘em in the corner, all dressed up. But they began to come apart when they got out of that cave air. They stood or sat there in our homes staring at us with faces that fell off with just the skulls looking out at you and they had chests that come off so that we could see their heart and their lungs. We couldn’t live like that. They had to be thrown out. We hired the Mexicans to do that, but before that we scalped ‘em, and we saw what we could get for those but from that there wasn’t nary a thing.” There was among them an old hunter, and he said: “They was Cherokee. Before I fought ‘em I seen ‘em on the plain. Nine years ago. Eight or nine ox teams on the grounds. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many reached the railyard. Then the last hunt. We ransacked the country. Ten weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed ‘em. They’re gone. Ever single one of ‘em ever made is gone.” *** They rode across the desert. The sun burned on the plain and horse and rider both were painted upon the land across which they rode. Far away to the west a dust storm emerged and beat about the earth and it is so that sometimes pioneers in their wagons on their way to a brand new life were sucked aloft in those winds, suspended in sacrifice and torment, to be dropped broken and limp upon the desert again and there to watch the winds that had ruined them twirl on like some kind of engine of ruin. Out of that wind there came no meaning nor thought and the only survivor of that family lying in his broken bones may shriek out and in his agony he may explode in fury, but fury at what? For the mechanism of his demolition had already resolved itself once more into the environment from whence it came. *** That day following they rode on the range and they saw stray bulls, some of them so old they bore Spanish brands on their hips. These beasts seemed passive to the company until one came forward, a bull straying alone, upon its crown horns, an irate bull with a ferocity that the weathers of the world were powerless to erase. It pounded forth in the dust against the red sunset like an animal in sacrifice. It buried its horns into the side of a horse to the ribs in a bloody impact and the horse, ridden by a Delaware, let out a wretched scream and kicked and reared, but the bull planted its hooves firm, wild in the sun, bronzed with infamy, and it lifted the animal, rider and all, clear off the earth, outlandish and mechanical in the sun. Then the bull as it stood again on all fours kicked its rear hooves and broke the man’s back and he fell down in a wreckage as this brutal assembly reared on then collapsed bucking. The other riders had stopped to watch this haphazard and the last of the spare horses shied forward and ran across the plain and quit them. The other riders offered the broken man no help and rode on. *** In the infertile severity of that landscape all phantasm were bestowed a bizarre egalitarianism and no single thing nor fly nor rock nor leaf could give requisition to antecedence. The very accuracy of these things did confute their acquaintance, as sight anticipates completion on some characteristic or element and here not a thing was more illuminated than any other thing and nothing more bedim and in the optic equality of such terrain all favoritism is turned wayward and men and stone become united with unthinkable brotherhood.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 09:57:45 +0000
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