Chapter 22 In the smoking dawn they looked like less victors than some ruined army retreating across the meridians, and they rode on like humble petitioners at the skirts of some tribal and irate God. The squad rode past the plain where lay the abandoned ruins of Santa Rita del Cobre, and they rode on like some tatterdemalion of honor, the horses dropping as silent as martyrs, and still there swam the pale dust of the enemy who were to hound them to the gates of the city. When even the bones are vanished in the desert the dreams still will speak, and there can be no way to wake up forever. Desert darkness where there are structures of such singular vision as to justify all the fears of man there ever were. *** They rode through the providence of night and then through the inordinate day. A dispatch box tumbled in the sand, and letters penned for any locality but here scattered and drifted away. A large and vicious black dog stepped through the waves of heat in the desert. Jacobs halted the company when he saw it, and dismounted. A man shook his head. “You can’t man that thing,” he said. “I can break anything that breaths,” Jacobs said. He held up a piece of jerky, and the dog watched it. When the squadron rode west out of the canyon the dog was tethered with a rope in front of Jacob’s horse, and it trotted with a limp. At night the fires were made, and the cry of the coyotes called out, and the dog moaned, and scampered between the shifting legs of the horses. When Jacobs woke, he saw that the dog had run away, and he still could not ventilate himself. He studied the stream. *** Among the agriculture there was a small hierarchy of forager-hunter gatherers, from threatened landscapes. The ex-priest amid the scalpers in his black clothes like a storybook crow stood watching them. Hartford approached him, a large bore single shot rifle slung to his shoulder. “Would you rather be no god-server but God himself?” The ex-priest looked at Hartford. “They are the last,” he said. “The last.” “Very well, priest” said Hartford. “But outlaw priest, or traveler priest, God fearing men and men of this trade have our common path. Keep your powder dry.” Hartford strode away. He took up lodging in a small wooden shack by the side of the road. The squad grazed their horses in the nearby field. The ex-priest stepped slowly across the dust road. The natives quietly took up their rifles that were concealed in a small wooden hut, constructed of dry boards that were concealed under the dust. Soon they were horseback, and to the other side of the field, about to be ahead of the alien riders. Hartford burst out of the wooden door of the shack, walking fast and carrying a repeating rifle, and with a slant breech carbine rifle slung to his back. “The last, priest,” he said. “The last. They’re becoming the first.” He gathered two men and scrutinized them, then rode with them in pursuit. When the shots fired at them they could not tell where they were coming from. Then the shots vanished in the silence. The natives were completely out of sight, as if they had dissolved somewhere between the sky and land. Unseen by the search party they had ridden back the way they had come straight away and single file, then crisscrossed to the other side of the road, and taken up again their position behind. These natives had enough blood for the mountains before them as that is where they had grown up, and they knew that as blood carries the shape and breath of a body it carries also an inner being of a certain design and none other, and the wilder their lives became in the mountains the more they would be at war with their own hearts. *** Hartford stalked back toward the company leading his wounded horse by the reigns. The horse had been shot in the hip. The other two scalpers had committed themselves to that terrain until finally they quit the place. Hartford rejoined the company and asked who among them would hold his horse by the reigns. The boy looked at him. He looked away. Then he looked back. Hartford had been looking directly at him and he held his gaze for a moment. Then he looked away. He looked slightly around. “Who?” he said. The boy came forward. Hartford held up the reigns of his horse and the child took them. The boy followed Hartford, and was Hartford was there, making his down the way in a wake of split twigs, and broken branches twixt his steps in the thicket snapping the thistles. The stones were set across the landscape and their axis pointed motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth. The figuring required for stone laying was not in the mind but passed down through the blood. Like those vestibular reckonings for standing upright. Hartford spoke. The boy listened and nodded and spat as he hazed the horse ahead. The horse had commenced to trot and it flicked its ears. Hartford stopped and motioned for the boy to stand where he was, then he walked away. When he came back he carried an enormous and heavy stone. The stone was of perfect circumference. He held it high. He stood before the horse and held it above the head of the animal and then let go of it and it fell and crushed the horse’s skull. The head had simply vanished. The stone had dug into the land. Hartford began to walk back toward the scalp-hunters. They rode across the shifting desert sands, across the mountains all in flames, and so on in an endless complexity of vitality to the uttermost edge of the world. That night they halted over the smoldering ruins and the moon ascended and grew small over the rocks in the valley floor. When they camped a Delaware asked Hartford what he meant with those sketches and notes in his book, and Hartford smiled, and said that it was his intention to obliterate them from the memory of man. The Delaware said that the drawings in the book were skilled and looked enough like the things themselves. But to spare his face from it. For he did not want in that book. But others had began calling his arrogance, and who would want to see his portrait anyway, and perhaps they could tar and feather him, lacking the article itself. Hartford held up his hand and called for reprieve. The men fell silent. The water of the stream entwined over the burning ruins and the sands shone like woven alloy and except for the sound it made there was no sound other.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 08:36:35 +0000
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