Chapter 8 Through the woods where there lay enormous stones weathered and grown, like fallen monoliths amid the trees and ivy like relics of an older race of man. He moved on, a figure of wretched arrogance. His father slept in his only memory of him. He crouched in the grass and listened for sound. There was much mud deeply marked with hoof prints. Beyond he could see deer in the meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood to their joints. One hawk soared on the wind above the mountainside, angling itself in the sun, a form turning whitely in the sun. *** The weather changed overnight. With the falling of the leaves the sky became bluer than he had ever known. Or could recall. He would store the warmth of the sun against the coming winter. The trees on the mountainside turned to an orange flame and to ultimate night. An early rain fell, a cold wind sucked among the black branches. Alone in the emptiness he walked. A bone colored moon came cradling up over the black bark on the hillside, ink trees sketched against the dimmer dark of the night heavens. The stars kept him. His eyes found the cold slosh of stars that lay in the puddles of the field. *** The boychild went on, an exile from men’s fires, seeking out his own conjectural destiny through the night of his becoming of something for a dawn that would not be. He had a Bible that he’d been given, and he carried this book with him no word of which could he read. In his dark clothes some took him for a kind of preacher, but he was no witness to them, neither of things which are nor things to come, he least of all. He had no word of vengeance or compassion alike, or of the weighing of any deed so as to make it seem that all cries for an accounting for or a destruction of such ledgers must evoke only the same silence. He quit numerous places and he posted no witnesses there to report of the continued existence of those places after he’d quit them. There were remote places that he traveled, and in those uncertain times men toasted the ascension of rulers who were quickly killed and the rise of faraway kings murdered and in their graves. Of such histories even as these he bore no tidings, and he avoided the company of men, and he spoke to none, yet in the deepest fastness of these rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide the silence of the world. Each man met with on the plain by another seemed already to know every man’s opinion of the world, yet his complaint that a man’s life was no bargain masked simply that things would not go as he wished them to, and he did become mired down in difficulty, and was little more than a walking hovel, hardly fit to house a human spirit at all. It was custom in such places to stop with any traveler and exchange the news, yet he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to hold with. He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with bottles and with rope, and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at a dollar, and he saw vultures at their soaring whose wingspans dwarfed all lesser birds, and he saw piles of gold that a hat could not have covered and he saw it lost on the turn of a card, and he was twice in the city and twice he saw it burn, all night the shape of the burning city on the skyline, fire on the lake, the fall of burning timbers and of men and the cries of the lost. *** In those days and in days to follow he fought in taverns and in the streets. There were days of rain, of scorching sun. He had sold the shotgun. Many people looked at the child’s eyes for the first time. Blue as lazuli. Like wet stones. His face was fresh and innocent. All of them brawl with broken bottles, with boots and palms. Every race. Every ethnicity. All breeds. They talk with slurred speech. They come from lands so far away and so bizarre that standing over them where they lay bleeding the child feels that humanity itself is vindicated. There was drover and miner and hunter and soldier and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief. The boy’s face showed that something had gone that could not be made right again. He went away to the west and would himself become a killer of men.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 03:14:39 +0000
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