Chapter 26 In the smoking dawn they looked like less victors than some ruined army retreating across the meridians, and they rode on like humble petitioners at the skirts of some tribal and irate God. They rode past the plain where lay the abandoned ruins of Santa Rita del Cobre, the horses dropping as silent as martyrs, and still there swam the pale dust of the enemy who were to hound them to the gates of the city. When even the bones are gone in the desert the dreams still will speak, and there can be no way to wake up forever. Desert darkness where there are constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man there ever was. *** They rode on through the day. A dispatch box tumbled in the sand and letters penned for any locality but here scattered and drifted away. A large and vicious black dog stepped through of the waves of heat in the desert. Jacobs halted the company when he saw it and dismounted. A man shook his head. “You can’t man that thing,” he said. “I can break anything that breaths,” Jacobs said. He held up a piece of jerky, and the dog watched it. When they rode west out of the canyon the dog was tethered with a rope in front of Jacob’s horse and it trotted with a limp. At night the fires were made, and the cry of the coyotes called out, and the dog moaned while scampering between the shifting legs of the horses. When Jacobs woke he saw that the dog had run away. He studied the stream. *** Among the agriculture there was a small hierarchy of forager-hunter gatherers from threatened landscapes. A priest in his black clothes near by them stood beckoning for their charity. Hartford approached the priest, a large bore single shot rifle slung to his shoulder. “Would you rather be no god-server but God himself?” The priest looked back at Hartford. “I would gladly die in their stead.” “Step away from them.” “I disobey if I obey you.” “You side with the mongrels over your own kind?” “They are the last. The last.” “Very well, priest.” Hartford strode away. He took up lodging in a small wooden shack by the side of the road. The squad grazed their horses in the field nearby. The priest stepped slowly across the dust road a bit. The natives quietly took up their rifles that were concealed in a small wooden hut constructed of dry boards that hid under the dust. Soon they were horseback and to the other side of the field, about to be well ahead of the alien riders. Hartford burst out of the wooden door of the shack, walking fast and carrying a repeating rifle, and with a slant breech carbine rifle slung to his back. “The last, priest, the last. They’re becoming the first.” Hartford gathered two men and scrutinized them, then rode with them in pursuit. When the shots fired at them they could not tell where they were coming from. Then the shots simply stopped. The natives were completely out of sight, as if they had dissolved somewhere between the sky and the land. Unseen by the search party they had ridden back the side they had come straight away and single file, then crisscrossed to the other side of the road, and took up again their position behind. *** Hartford stalked back toward the company leading his wounded horse by the reigns. The horse had been shot in the hip. The other two scalpers had committed themselves to that terrain until finally they quit the place. Hartford rejoined the company and asked who among them would hold his horse by the reigns. The boy looked away. Then he looked back. Hartford had been looking directly at him and he held his gaze form a moment. Then he looked away. He looked slightly around. “Who?” he said. The boy came forward. Hartford held up the reigns of his horse and the child took them. The boy followed Hartford, and was Hartford was there, making his down the way in a wake of split twigs, and broken branches twixt his steps in the thicket, snapping the thistles. Hartford spoke. The boy nodded and spat as he hazed the horse ahead. The horse had commenced to trot and it flicked its ears. Hartford stopped and motioned for the boy to stand where he was, then he walked away. When he came back he carried an enormous and heavy stone. He held it high. He stood before the horse and held the stone above it, then let go of it, and it crushed the horse’s skull, and the horse dropped down immediately, and the stone dug into the land. There was no scream, the head had just vanished. Hartford began to walk back toward the scalp-hunters. *** In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rock would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. The western land crimson red and smoking. This plain upon which so many have been broken was vast but it was also ultimately empty. They passed the azimuth in the rising heat. They rode through the waves shimmering off the rock and through the greatest desert any of them had ever seen, barren stone quaking in the heat of that hallucinatory void, life-forms that seemed meant for mediums other than the earth. Midmorning they watered at a stagnant pothole. *** The skies seemed drained of stars. The shape of the heavens changed forever but all was as before. The sun ascended over the cusp of the earth and contained therein one final flame. They journeyed across the enflamed mountains among the windblown sand, the desperados each riding in this universal tragedy of blood, apprentice to the order divided up that separated them among those who fought and those who did not, having taking up decisions of what will be and what will not.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 03:14:22 +0000
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