Chapter 4 When the child woke he saw that the shewolf had come free of her muzzle, and she had been studying him. He studied her back. He stood up by the horse. She seemed to be calm. He walked over to the wolf and she remained still as he moved behind her and suddenly put the muzzle back on. He then went back to the horse and mounted and rode back toward the roadway. Then down the way. When he looked back the wolf had freed herself once more and she no longer stepped with a limp. He did not care. He rode by slaves in the cotton field, a shadowed scene of human agony in the garden. *** There seemed to be upon the land a thing that had not yet been there before and that thing was called sadness. The child spotted smoke gliding up among the hills and he rode toward it. Then he saw them. The Natives. Those from that lost nation. They sat before the fire, members of that old nation and its ghost, forsaken by all history and memory like the grail. They had with them their stone-age tools. They were very suspicious of all that they saw, as if they were at truce with the whites. A ragged runaway was simple enough to feed. They paid no attention to the wolf. They had been here thousands of years, and much of the world had passed and had been witnessed. The Spanish and the pioneers and the slaves and the meteor showers and the revolutionary war. And the lost and the dying and the blood that had been spilled upon the earth and had gone back to the earth to come from it once more, so they believed, so it is. The wind was much diminished and it was cold and the sun postured blood red and elliptic under the blood-red cloud where the shadows were long and the ancient road shown and the rose light was like a dream of the past when the ancestors of these Natives had once came from war and had been pledged in blood and were restorable in blood only and when the wind was in the west you could hear them. The boy finished his meal. It seemed almost that somewhere in the counters of his destiny that he had murdered these men, women, children. Was there such a person inside him of whom he was not aware? These people were aliens, from a planet that no longer was, the stories from there not believed in anymore, and one could not tell of the place that was lost without telling of the loss, too, and perhaps the children of these elders were more aware of this than they in this garden of despair. *** The Natives sat around the frolicking fire to which they stared for some hint of their lost ones. They had no photographs. They had no likeness of their loved ones other than that which they carried in their hearts. They said that this reality that appears as something of stone and of flower is not any of these but a shadow within a dream. The experience of the death of loved ones is more than other experiences, and while it is true that time heals all wounds, it does this at the price of the slow demise of those cherished people from our memory that is their only dwelling. The only dwelling that they have ever had, now or back then. Faces vanish. Voices disappear. Call for them. Address them by name. And never let despair perish, for it is akin to memory, just as sleep is death’s brother. *** The boy, unbaptized and unclean, left them and saddled up and rode away. They did not watch him leave, had no interest in him, nor his race. The kid went on, and he did not know that by yourself and yourself alone no one could survive, that he should well have constructed a plausible apparition, nourished it with his breath, lured it into existence with love, and protected it with his own life. He must have slept. He woke and went on. The dust he rose drifted to the road again. If ravens had not risen from the wheat-field he would have never looked there to see the two hanged men sent to the gallows fashioned from the sour-apple tree where they hung like chimes.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 09:29:01 +0000