Chapter 41 Going back through the streets the boy passed glass windows softly lit within and he went into a bar. He sat in a corner and watched the groups. None asked him what he wanted. He seemed to be waiting for some other party to arrive. After a while four soldiers came in and arrested him. In his cell his jailers spoke to him. “The last one in that place hung himself.” “Why?” “You know why.” One morning the boy woke to see Hartford standing before the bars, hat in hand. He was dressed in a gray suit and new boots. “They wanted to know from me if you were crazy,” he said. “Do they know what I done?” “Yes. Their intention is to hang you.” “What did you tell them?” “That you were the one who sold out our endeavor to the savage with whom you harbored clemency.” “Lies, lies.” “Means and ends are little here.” “You’re crazy.” Hartford smiled. “Come here,” he said. “There is something you must know.” The boy looked at the wall. “Come here,” said Hartford. He looked down the hallway. Then he looked back. “It is only for your ears.” He reached through the bars. “Come here,” he said. “Let me touch you. You have not the heart of an assassin. I know that you would not hide. Why did you not show yourself? You are not a coward, boy. In the desert I had walked before your sites twice and did so a third time. There is a flawed place in your heart. Do you think that I could not know? You thought that it was you alone. Yet you alone were mutinous.” The boy kept looking at the wall. When he looked back Hartford had gone. That night by candle-light the boy told the corporal about the diamonds and the gold in the mountains. The corporal listened then took the candle away. That next day the boy was released. When he went out the back door he saw a man who had been sent to the gallows where he hung and where he died. When the boy came closer he saw that it was the old-ex-cave-dweller. *** The kid came to the latter-day Republic of Tejas. Others regarded him as though he had fallen onto ways of life beyond which his years could account for. He came to a town. He strolled the dusty streets and passed wooden shop-signs with inaccurate paintings of whales on them creaking waywardly in the wind. A quiet youth in a suit too large. He heard no news and he stopped asking. He left a partisan senseless in a backroom. Going back to his lodging one morning in the rain he saw a face in a window and he climbed the stair-well and rapped on the door. A woman in a silk kimono opened the door and looked at him. Past her in the candle-light was a cat. When she asked him what he wanted he turned without speaking and went down the stair-well into the rain. With his last two dollars he bought from a solider a necklace of ears. He was wearing them that next morning and he was wearing them when he set out. If people had any curiosity about it they kept it to themselves. He left everyplace he went without any notice. He was treated with a certain difference. He had come upon an outfit. He followed no histories as if they were perhaps too trivial. He saw steam-boats through the night like cities adrift. He saw a public hanging one morning after the crowd had already gathered and talked and passed bottles and then two figures rose to the top of the gallows among their fellows and they were hung and then they died and the talking stopped and everyone went away and there was no one there at all. The kid came back later, and he stepped closer, but the hanged men he did not know. He saw birds like plovers and he saw buildings burn and burn again and fall into the black waters of the sea where dolphins reeled through the flames. Everything covered with ash. A child’s room with a stuffed toy by the windowsill. He saw ships from the land of China in small harbors and crates of tea and silks and spices broken open by swords. On that lonely shore where the steep rock cradled a dark and whispering sea he saw the eagles screaming. He bivouacked in a barren place and that night the desert wind was all but silent, for there was nothing to resonate among the rocks. He saw a tribe. They were Dieguenos. They were armed with bows and they knelt about the traveler and gave him water from a gorge. In the dawn he stood watching the light commence in the east, then he went down a broken trail where he found in the darkness the cool stones, and he fetched water. He went on with the land to the north and the ridges to the south clattering behind him.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 04:50:43 +0000
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