Chapter 7 The boy launched himself down the slope, wading through the wheat, wandering in the drifts. He journeyed through the fields among the gray trees and plants. Thinner now than he had been. Late that day he halted on the dirt road. He looked out over the fields in the dark below him where the water that ran in the streams shone in the evening light, like metal flowing away in the distance. As though it were the horizon to some lost empire fallen beyond the pines, the nighttime singing birds. *** This night he fell into a bad sleep. He woke in the night, looked at the fire, yet the fire lay cold. He saw only darkness and the stars. He moved the ashes with a stick. In the black heart of the fire the few coals overturned like the eyes of things best left undisturbed, a beast who should be left asleep. He stood and walked down the hill and looked at the stars in the stream. The wind had vanished and the water was still. Like a hole in the world where the stars were sinking. He thought that someone had seen his fire from the road in the night. Then he thought perhaps that his father had come to the fire and stood over him where he slept, and he remembered the rain and the taste of it, then remembered that there had been no rain, and he remembered the dream. In the dream he was in a land that was not this one, and his father stood before him, and he could not see his face and he could not say his name. *** He walked all the way out across the road then across the field. A strange dog passed him in the field. When the boychild looked back the dog was watching him, there was a message, but no way to receive it. And the dog watched him walk away, as if it might better understand him in the way in which he was set forth upon the shadow-land an orphan, the approaching twilight. That next day those people he passed in the fields and in the towns knew him well enough, this orphan in his passing, somehow already dead in the blood and violence all his prayers seemed powerless to satisfy. *** He sat in the road and so ceaseless fell the rain that he could have been some stone-age child washed up out of an atavistic dream, and he called for the dog and howled and howled in that inexplicable darkness where there was no sound anywhere save only his heart’s despair, and a cold wind sheared the slopes of the continent and it crossed among the poles, and it swept out across the plain where there was no sun and there was no dawn. *** In the night when he slept his father came to him in a dream. In the dream he knew that his father was dead and that his ever having been was a subject of discretion, as all things that were circumference in life were more so in death, and this child had no way to know what movement or word may subtract this father away into the nothing from where he had originated, and he tried not to wake from the dream, but the ghost faded, and he woke and lay staring up at the stars, and he wondered where his father had gone. And he cried alone in that field where no one ever knew. Such was this child’s life. In death and tears. The wind died like a child’s flute over the horizon and the wheat fell silent. *** It snowed faintly and out of season. Berry stains upon the snow like blood. The child slept and dreamed and he knew that his dreams would be paid for in blood. The snows vanished. Giant trees in the forest he passed at such upheaval. The woods very dense. New paths needed, he made them. The air was humid again. It was humid for three days and when he went down the mountain again it took him the most part of morning to cross another bridge. The falling leaves were yellow and green and orange and red against the gray sky, soft on his lashes. Sometimes they fell without a sound. Every leaf that touched his face made greater depth to his sadness. Each leaf he passed he would not ever pass again. He had a day-dream, and from the day-dream there was no waking, and in it he had resolved himself to go on for he could not turn back, and the day that day was as any day there ever was and he was going to his death. *** One child, driven to the land. He lost who he was, something took who he was. He was alone and he was baffled. The road climbed into the rocks and clay, damp, formed in the rain. In the graveyard clay on the coffin, God’s clay. And songs were sang in a day when songs were sad. Child of clay, his beginning has vanished as has his identity, and never again in all the ellipses of the world should there be landscapes so ferocious and barbaric, so that one may strive to tell if creation itself might be shaped by man alone, or if this was to be, and to try if a person’s life was shaped by the world about, or if they might shape the clay of their life into what they wished for it to be. Or if it could never be. Or whether or not his own heart were not clay. To try to tell if it were or can never be. Can for anyone be? Why couldn’t they let anyone be? And evening fell, lost, cast away. And yet the child went on, to perhaps tell as to whether life is experienced in the flesh or as to whether this time he would break, to see if whether or not the break had come at last.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 08:41:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015