Chapter 30 Then there came days of theft, days of fights. Days of riding where there rode no souls save they. They camped in a barren bench of land on the far side of a small creek. The wind had blown the ash from the hills, and the birds flew against the weeping of the dying sun, and the water was black and looked like a path of ash and soot-salt running through the woods. *** In that barren glen beneath a sad sun they wet their lungs on the shafts of steam that rose in the coming night. The light was failing far down in the darkness of the river. The ashes of the old world carried on the temporal and transient winds. The sounds of the river that renounced to run were like sad seas, and there were smells of earth and wet ash in the rain. *** Brimstone fires sprang up. People like victims of some evacuation passing them in the drifting ash where they struggled forever in the cold. The riders pushed into a wagon and brushed the ash from the engineer’s station. A phosphorescent scorpion among the sticks, visions of Pyrro, The Devil, Dante. The fires burned and at night their shifting orange light could be seen in the soot-fall. The sounds of water on the stones. Falls that washed the earth and ash. *** A father had been scalped and stabbed and he knelt bleeding on the stone by his dead child. The light changed in the rain of drifting ash. The father cradled his dead child and washed his brains out of his hair. Then he picked him up and took him to the fire. Perhaps there was another father and another son. Slept but a sea apart in another land among the eternal ashes of the world. *** The squad rode out of the country that was set with the blackened shape of rock jutting out of the ridge of ash, and the blowing of ash climbing up and billowing down-country through the desolation. Before death was these men said they saw the shining breeze. The neglected child amid their ranks still to nurse more to death. *** The Yuma were riding back from the sun in a small unit, their long journey now done. They rode out as traders and traded with the Americans who were well pleased with their exchanges. The chief of the Yuma shook hands with Jacobs. “A pleasure,” Jacobs said. *** None in this squad could remember the rules for childhood games which they seemed to have sought, but Hartford said to them that play is nobler than work, as any child knows. They tried to remember but were mostly wrong, coming up still with some versions of them, and they made up new games and gave them names. Some men would ask Hartford about the way of past lives that were not even a memory. Hartford only asked what they would like? *** Only things to be done. The day providential to itself. There is no bygone. This is bygone. The boy among their number sometimes thought he should have tried to keep her in his life in someway, but he didn’t know how. Maybe at times he wanted to be with his mother. He never said that he was sorry, and he always said that he’d known what he’d done, and he’d done it anyway, and he would say this speaking the truth. Sooner or later he thought that they would kill him. They would rape him and kill him and he would not know how to face it. These men use to talk about death. Then they stopped because it was there. It was coming. To steal their eyes. To seal their mouths with dirt. And there was nothing left to talk about and no other tale to tell. As if all this time without any love they had taken a new lover that could give them what the other could not. What they wanted was eternal nothingness and they wanted it with all their hearts.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 12:02:01 +0000
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