A Singing Bird

　

　

Herman’s wife loathed Christmas, and, so, after twenty-five embattled years, Herman had come to dislike the holiday as well. On the day before Christmas, Herman sat at his desk in his law office studying an abstract that was unfurled before him. A bottle of Courvoisier that an old client had delivered to him the day before rested next to the abstract so that Herman could pour cognac over the ice in his coffee cup. When the bottle had arrived in his office, it was adorned with a red bow that now imparted a dash of glamor to the crumpled paper and discarded mail in the wastebasket under his credenza. Earlier, Herman had sorted through nuisance correspondence heaped on the corner of his desk – most of it pleas for year-end charitable donations – sweeping those envelopes together with the stacked and unread legal magazines and newsletters that he had accumulated over the past half-year into the trash. Then, he returned statute books that had lingered for many weeks on his desk to his law library, his peregrinations through the still and empty law office accompanied by the chirping of a mechanical bird. Herman carried a dozen yellow wood pencils to a pencil-sharpener and meticulously sculpted the points of each of them into a pyramidal lead spike. These tasks accomplished, Herman opened the cognac, packed his pipe with tobacco so that he could smoke, a pleasure forbidden to him when his secretary and staff were present, and, then, began to read the abstracts of title awaiting him at his desk.

In recent years, Herman’s wife took refuge from the season with her sister in Phoenix. Herman’s law-partner, Hyde, the silver-tongued advocate, was vacationing in the Barbados or Belize – Herman couldn’t remember which tropical paradise Hyde had flown to this December and, in any event, it didn’t matter to him since he had never been in either place. Herman had released his secretary and the receptionist at noon – Hyde’s secretary didn’t work when her boss was absent -- and so he was alone in the office. The phone had stopped ringing and the front door was locked and Herman felt a pleasant sense of solitude.

The cognac burned on his tongue, impossible to reconcile the harsh taste with the warm and serene sensation that suffused him. Smoke rolled from between his lips and the old abstracts with their first entries handwritten in an elegant script that no one could accomplish today were as companionable to Herman as an old and faithful hound, pages of numbered entries that led inexorably and without hiatus to the present moment. The logic of conveyancing and title to real estate abhorred a vacuum – to Herman it was the embodiment of reason, a subdivided grid imposed on the land wholly continuous both in space and time and he thought of the law pleasantly blanketing the town now receding into twilight, webs of title extending out past the farms and the snowy, fallow fields, beyond the crossroads where the darkness was already apparent and the tiny villages, each organized around a railroad siding and a grain elevator and, thence, by metes and bounds, to the horizon where groves of barren trees marked the silent, meandering courses of this world’s rivers. Reading a title and ascertaining ownership was like petting a dog to Herman – it was an occupation that calmed the mind and lowered blood pressure and, even, abetted digestion, no greater pleasure than doing something useful, tedious, and tranquil. Herman drank more cognac and his warmth increased. Everything was in its place – the succession of fee-title holders passed by him like a parade: first the patent from Abraham Lincoln on yellow parchment and, then, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans with names like barked commands, the unpronounceable Bohemians, names always short a vowel or two it seemed, the developments and subdivisions platted after the Great War with covenants against Jews and Catholics and Negroes, the grants of land for churches and schools, then, the Mexicans, the families from the Sudan, the Burmese, the immigrants from Laos, Bosnia and Croatia and Rwanda, a solemn procession that Herman imagined passing interminably, some of the landowners on horseback bearing the emblems of their lenders on banners, others on foot staggering forward under the heavy burden of debt that they carried in sacks on their shoulders the way that Saint Nicholas carried gifts, the contracts for deed and the warranty deeds and mortgages, the quit claim deeds and the property passing by bequest or pursuant to divorce decree: it was all orderly to Herman, an intelligible progress that led to him and his analysis of title and the legal opinions that he dictated after first penciling the succession of title onto his yellow pad of paper, pleasant to think of the all the tides and chaos in human affairs, the disorderly passions and the crimes and extravagant sacrifices, all reduced to the continuous transfer of fee title from generation to generation, a simple gesture repeated again and again.

Herman looked out the two windows in his office. One showed him a pile of snow, cleft and riven by the equipment that had shoved it into the alleyway beside his building. The other window opened onto the quiet street, a string of colored lights leaking down and away from the dark threshold of a business across the way that never seemed to be open. At intervals, cars passed, but the twilight was cooling and dimming and travelers were hurrying to their destinations. The crevasses in the snowbanks became deeper blue, almost indigo, and, looming over the walkway on an unlit sidestreet, Herman saw the apparition of a great fat man with a white beard, red-clad, bobbing a little like a balloon with another trickle of lights red, green, blue, and yellow cascading from the facade of silent house behind him.

A couple of times, Herman rose to go to the toilet. As he passed his souvenirs on the bookshelf by the door to his office, his mechanical bird took notice and chirped at him. The bird sat atop a Shriner’s fez, next to a small statue of an enthroned and impassive Abraham Lincoln, a commemorative plate showing a castle in Germany, sunglasses, and five or six postcards in black frames: snow-capped mountains, a ruined temple, Herman’s wife on the steps of the Vatican, lions and elephants glimpsed once on a safari in Tanzania. The little bird perched atop the red velvet fez was three-inches tall and made of red plastic in the shape of a cardinal and, when a person walked by the figurine, somehow, it sensed motion and made a sound: soo-eee soo-eee, chirp, chirp, tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet.

The little red bird was a gag gift acquired at a family gathering a week earlier. Herman’s aunt was confined to a nursing home and, each year, the weekend before Christmas, her surviving sisters with her children and grandchildren hosted a holiday party for her. Guests gathered in a party room at the nursing home, an alcove screened from the dining area by a sliding partition made from beige plastic. In the alcove, there were pictures of Jesus and the Grand Tetons, an old upright piano that no one ever touched except sometimes to stack casseroles on its straight black back, and a fireplace that was cold and exhaled its sooty wintry breath into the room. In other parts of the dining room, people sang carols and listened to recorded Christmas music, laughing or weeping as the spirit moved them: several holiday parties underway simultaneously. It was the only Christmas event tolerated by Herman’s wife, mostly because it was short and stilted because of its somewhat dire milieu: the old lady wheeled into the group of well-wishers groped for the hands of those greeting her, smiling with cheerful bemusement and no one could understand what she mumbled to them and, then, neatly wrapped gifts were exchanged as various nieces and nephews ate hot dish and fudge from red plastic plates. A rule had been imposed: no gift could exceed ten dollars in value and anything received was subject to confiscation in a game of "dirty" bingo that followed the exchange of the parcels and their unwrapping. Although the red plastic cardinal, affixed by feet to the sarcophagus of a cardboard box, had been unwrapped by another, Herman traded his Prairie Home Companion "pretty good" joke book for the bird. He was intrigued by the label on the box proclaiming that the cardinal was "motion-activated" so as to emit a mechanical song.

Herman brought the bird to his office and, carefully, removed the little plastic figure from its box. A tiny nylon tab extruded from beneath the cardinal’s tail. When Herman pulled out the tab, the bird immediately chirped at him. Nothing visible moved and the bird was inert as an empty plastic soda pop bottle, but it sang loudly, a single phrase: Soo-ee, Soo-ee, chirp, chirp, tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet. Then, the cardinal lapsed into sullen silence, its little black eyes in its red pyramidal head looking out at Herman with a belligerent challenge. If he waved his hand before the bird’s black beak, or turned it upside down, the mechanical cardinal chirped at him, always the same phrase. The final tweets sounded in machine-gun succession and, it occurred to Herman that, perhaps, the sound would not be identifiable as bird song if it were merely heard in the dark or, at a distance, without its source being known. But emitted by the small plastic figure, the chirping sound was persuasively avian – Herman wasn’t sure whether the sound was cheerful or menacing.

After toying with the bird for a few minutes, Herman put the cardinal on his souvenir shelf. The bird was unsteady on its feet and Herman had to balance it very carefully to persuade the little creature to perch atop the red velvet Shriner’s fez in the bookcase. At that location, the bird was chest-high and, whenever someone entered his room, the cardinal greeted that person, emitting its rote cry in piercing tones that could be heard all the way down the hall. Herman’s secretary, Sheila was very short and she learned to duck her head when she came into his office, slipping below the area sensed by the bird and so defeating its singing mechanism. "I don’t like that thing," she proclaimed. Hyde, the silver-tongued advocate, glared at the cardinal when it chirped at him. "What is this?" Hyde demanded. "A toy," Herman said. "It’s motion-activated. Now, you can’t sneak up on me." Hyde looked puzzled. He stood facing the bird as if it were evidence of Herman’s negligence or some other failure. When he moved to face, Herman, the bird reproached him with another iteration of its chirping. "Why would I want to sneak up on you?" Hyde, the silver-tongued advocate asked, a question that Herman could not answer.

So, now, Herman rose, setting aside his silver dictation device, and, rising unsteadily, ambled away from his desk and past the bookshelf at the threshold of his office. The bird saluted him with its cries. Herman nodded to the cardinal and went to the toilet, noticing that he was a little bit dizzy and short of breath. It was as if the walk to the men’s room down the dark hall past the empty offices clogged with old books had been accomplished at a very high altitude, among snow fields beneath a brooding black basalt cliff. Herman couldn’t quite catch his breath and he leaned forward at the urinal, cooling his head against the plaster wall. Finishing, he ran warm water over his hands and lurched back down the hallway to his office. The bird scolded him again as he passed by the bookcase standing sentinel by his open door. Herman dropped back into his seat at the desk and, when he rewound the dictation device to find the place where he had stopped speaking, he discovered that he must have left the machine in "record" mode – after rewinding, Herman heard his slight groan as he rose from the desk, the click of the dictaphone put down on the table, then, his labored breathing interrupted by the shrill cries of the bird. He reversed the dictation several time to listen to the bird’s song surprised at how clearly it had recorded, the little stutter of tweets and chirps resounding against the silence of the old law office.

Herman finished the cognac in his cup and, then, docked his dictaphone to transfer the dictation into his office’s computer system. He gazed with satisfaction at the stack of abstracts that he had read – it was good work, the same thing over and over again, but comforting in its way. As he left his office, his red cardinal bade him farewell. The stillness in the law office was mirrored by the strange silence outside – the cold air had been emptied of all sounds and, even, the freeway at the edge of town that always vibrated with truck sounds like a tuning fork, had gone mute. The ice on the streets glittered with malice although the dark drifts of snow around the sidewalks seemed pillow-soft. Herman fumbled with his keys, but found the one that fit in the cold lock. He started his car and let the engine idle for a moment, cuing windshield wipers to slap across the glass at the frost accumulated there. Then, he put the car in gear and cautiously edged onto the still street.

Herman drove six or seven blocks, then, a purplish fog overcame him and he felt the blood draining out of his eyes. He shouted a Christmas carol to keep himself upright: "Hark, the herald –" Then, he slumped sideways and his car rolled to a stop, a front tire nudging the curb and, then, gently overriding it.

Some lights hung in front of his eyes. The bright colored bulbs drooped downward in the darkness: red, green, yellow, blue. The pattern repeated. The way that the colors followed one another in a predictable order – red, green, yellow, blue – reminded him of the rote cries of the plastic cardinal. Icy sweat bathed Herman’s cheeks and forehead and he was trembling as if half-frozen. Was the car still in gear? Herman reached to touch the gearshift and it was cold as a glacier. He supposed that he was drunk, perhaps, very drunk and that it would not be prudent to remain in the car nestled up against the curb, the right side of the vehicle very noticeably elevated – what if the police were to come? And, yet, he was hypnotized by the colored lights hanging somewhere in space in front of him, the bright predictable succession of colors like a coded message.

He remembered a toboggan run down a steep hill that he wished would never end, then, the jolt against his knees as the toboggan hit bottom and skidded sideways across the frozen pond to embed itself among the snowy cattails. Then, he recalled his exhilaration at the end of his first and only jury trial, his savage joy and relief at the verdict and his resolution that he must never experience these feelings again, they were too potent and all-encompassing and, then, Herman looked down the long and dusty arcade of abstracts that he had read, an endless colonnade that led to this present moment with his car tilted cock-eyed and light, falling snow shimmering in his headlights. Herman remembered the birth of his baby son and, when he first held the child in the radiance of the hospital among glittering surfaces, incubators and stainless steel trays bearing stainless steel instruments, the child’s mouth forming a perfect pink arch as he began to cry in a thin, high-pitched voice that was more like a bird chirping than a human sound. Herman recalled all that disorderly flood of emotion – a fall that he had taken on his basement steps while his son and his friends were seated at a round table drinking beer and how no one had come to assist him, all the boys laughing, then, his first girl-friend, her face obscured by darkness, but her breasts and belly illumined by the dashboard light, lightning striking soundlessly beyond a black lake, a waterfall pouring suavely through crumpled, dark rocks, a campsite on a promontory in the mist, everything soaked by rain, one of his dogs playing in the snow, a cornfield sweltering in the humidity with a coil of road-killed fur and entrails cast onto the side of the road, meteors swarming down between the fixed stars, a foot-race that he had won and for which he was awarded a ribbon, something frightening in a closet and an African mask on the wall that he feared as well – fear, it seemed, had been his constant companion when he was little – and, then, his mother cutting his hair as he sat on the toilet, a Chinese restaurant in a great city clogged with snow during a blizzard with ice falling in lethal sheets from the skyscrapers and the tops of the skyscrapers hidden in the clouds from which the sleet and snow were falling and the great lake torrential and fierce against the jetties and everyone gathered around the dining room table, for once no one crying or sullen, everyone happy even the dog beneath their feet gnawing on a rawhide bone and the breeze trembling in the curtains as it passed through the screen windows – all of these memories not really remembered, but simply present to his mind, vivid and distinct as a column of numbers...yes, these thoughts were integers, numbers, except that they could not be tallied to a sum.

Herman shook the bright string of Christmas tree lights out of his mind. He blinked and thought that his present situation was more than a little perilous. He was probably legally intoxicated and, if the police came, he would be disgraced and, so, he unlatched his seat belt and set foot in the snow beside his car and, then, taking his keys and locking the vehicle behind him, set off along the snowy byways to his home four blocks away. The house was still and its familiar shadows calmed him a bit. He boiled a couple wieners and ate them on toast with catsup and mustard. Then, he went to bed. He expected that the police would sight his car, write down the license number, and, then, perhaps, pay him a visit in the middle of the night, but this did not happen. It was Christmas Eve, after all, and the police were functioning on a skeleton crew and the next morning, bright and clear and, even, a bit warm, Herman walked back to his car and, looking around nervously, got behind the wheel, rocked the vehicle off the curb, and, then, returned home.

At the office, the little red cardinal began to sing without ceasing. When Herman came to work a couple days later, his secretary had set the small scarlet bird next to the keyboard of his computer. On a sheet of yellow pad paper, she had written these words: "Help! Help me! I can’t stop singing." The bird repeated its song insistently, as if demanding something. Herman held the bird upside down but it continued to sing. He put the bird in his desk drawer hoping that darkness would silence the cardinal but the bird continued to cry out lustily. After a few minutes, Herman took the bird and put it in the men’s toilet, poised on the cold, white porcelain of the urinal. From that perch, the bird sang loudly all morning, its melody amplified by the tiles on the floor and wall. Hyde, the silver-tongued advocate, told Herman to throw the bird in the garbage outside. "I can’t do that," Herman replied. "But it is annoying," Hyde said. "It just does the same thing over and over again." He picked up the plastic cardinal as if it were a dead mouse and put it inside the medicine cabinet in the men’s room. Undeterred, the cardinal continued to sing to an old toothbrush, a bottle of expired baby aspirin, and a stick of deodorant.

After lunch, silver-tongued Hyde removed the plastic bird from the medicine cabinet. As if indignant, the bird continued to sing. Hyde carried the cardinal into the basement room where closed files were kept, marched along the shelves packed with numbered red-ropes and folders fat with paper, and came to an ancient filing cabinet at the end of the corridor. The filing cabinet looked as if it had come from some military installation – it was khaki-colored and heavy and its drawers squealed in protest as they were opened. Hyde, the silver-tongued advocate, put the cardinal in the empty top drawer. Then, he closed the drawer tightly and went to his office upstairs. Herman’s secretary, who had followed Hyde into the morgue of dead files, reported the whereabouts of the bird to her boss. At the end of the day, Herman went into the basement room and, brushing by the ranks of closed files, went to the khaki filing cabinet. Cocking his head, he could hear the bird still singing, but there was a note of desperation in its cries and the rat-a-tat-tat tweeting at the end of the cadence had slowed perceptibly. Herman pulled the top file drawer open and saw the bird lying on its side on the cold metal – there was something pathetic about the red cardinal imprisoned in that place. He took the cardinal from the file cabinet and cradled it in the palm of his hand. The bird responded with a half-dozen lusty iterations of its song and, then, the notes soured, lost shape, and the final four tweets decomposed into a sordid, metallic tapping. The bird was clearly dying. Herman didn’t have the heart to witness the cardinal’s demise. He gently set the bird on its side back in the metal file cabinet and went home.

A couple weeks later, Herman went alone to eat at the Chinese buffet. His wife’s sister had been diagnosed with a serious illness and, so, she had returned to Jacksonville to nurse the sick woman. After eating, Herman collapsed in the toilet. Purple fog filled his eyes and, as he fell to the floor, Herman thought that it was fortunate that he had paid in advance for his supper since, now, it would be difficult for him to manage the bill. Hyde came back for the funeral, suntanned from either the Barbados or Belize. Everyone agreed that his eulogy was beautiful although no one could remember what he had said a half-hour later in the church basement where ham sandwiches, potato salad, and jello dessert were served.

One day, Hyde, the silver-tongued barrister, needed a file that had been closed and sent to the basement. His secretary was ill and, so, he went downstairs to retrieve the file. As he was looking for those papers, Hyde heard a faint cry from the filing cabinet at the end of the aisle. He approached the cabinet and slid its top drawer open. The red cardinal rested on its side in the drawer. Someone had made a bed for the bird from crumpled pink and white tissue paper. The bird was silent. Hyde picked it up, shaking the cardinal like a rattle. It made no sounds of any kind. Then, Hyde, the silver-tongued attorney-at-law, carefully set the bird back on its kleenex catafalque and slid the file cabinet drawer shut.

A Live Story

　

I was against hiring an intern. I won’t deny that. Live news reporting involves things like fires and car crashes, the aftermath of shootings and explosions – it’s intrinsically hazardous and you have to make decisions on the fly and, sometimes, simple things, like telling people where to stand or when to duck to avoid bullets or shrapnel are hard to communicate. Often, there is a lot of noise, background static, people gawking while they chatter on the phone. Sometimes, a civilian gets mad that the camera crew is exploiting a tragedy and people get pushed or punches are thrown. So I didn’t think it was prudent to assign an intern to the live news crew. The job requires experience. I said: "I’m not going to babysit that girl." "No one expects that," the News Director replied, overruling my objections.

The intern, Malena, was the police chief’s daughter, just graduated from Oberlin and a nice enough girl as well. The news director told me that hiring her for the season would pay off in access. "We’ll get closer to the action," the news director said. "She’s got law enforcement connections. The girl will turn out to be an asset." I disagreed: "The police chief will want to keep her a long wayfrom the bad stuff." "We’ll see," the News Director said.

The first couple months nothing really bad happened. We covered a landslide in the suburbs, but it was really just a property damage gig, no deaths or injuries – I assigned Malena crowd control: she stood a couple dozen feet from the camera and on-air talent, gently steering rubber-neckers away from our shoot. She had a nice smile and a tactful manner and was good in persuading curious locals not to invade our space. There were a couple of fires and an oil spill on the freeway. A man threatened to jump from a construction crane downtown. People were rowdy at that scene, but Malena quieted them down, suggesting, I think, that one or two of the interlopers might get some on-screen time with Jessica Norman, our glamor-girl action news reporter, if they would zip their lips. The man didn’t jump but the interlopers did get a few minutes interview with Jessica, B-roll footage that didn’t make the cut for the evening news. There was a chain collision in the fog where the freeway went over the mountain. Fatalities were reported but I kept Malena away from the casualties – some camera crews think it’s amusing to take pictures of mutilated dead bodies, but, of course, that sort of thing is, more or less, useless: you can’t air the footage both because of standards and practices, as well as privacy concerns, and I had seen enough fragmentary corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan to have lost any interest in taking pictures of them – it’s just bad road kill with clothing over some parts of the carcass. No big deal and, certainly, not the least bit informative.

A gas pipeline ruptured and an explosion shook down some houses and a freeway overpass in the foothills. We rushed to the scene and set up on a cul-de-sac overlooking the calamity. Malena did traffic control while Jessica Norman pointed out various features in the fiery panorama below our vantage. The midday light was harsh and the blades of sharp looking little shadows made everything look mean and angular. I carry a reflector to smooth things out and I had Malena hold it for fill on Jessica’s face. "You make me look good," Jessica said, "and I make you look good." Malena smiled and pointed the reflector and I locked down my camera for another shot and, then, the ground shook underfoot. Tongues of blue flames flickered through the grating in the curbside gutters. Natural gas had seeped into the storm sewers and flash fires roared through the tunnels. One of the explosions lifted a manhole cover about sixty feet from where we were shooting and flung it skyward like a discus. Malena was dropped the reflector and, as a reflex, I threw myself over her as we dived for cover. The manhole clattered against the concrete, spalling it into a shower of shards and pebbles. The wind changed direction and the smoke rolled over our position and, for a few moments, we were lost in the choking fog.

Back at the van, Malena’s face was wet with tears from the smoke in her eyes. We re-shot the footage interrupted by the flying manhole cover and, then, drove back to the studio. Malena said that she would buy me a drink because I had saved her life. I told her that I had done no such thing, but she insisted. We went to a sports bar for a couple of hours. It was a place frequented by Latinos and the TV sets were all tuned to soccer games. It’s surprising how easy it is to ignore a television screen, even a huge one, when you don’t know much about the sport being played and the commentary is in a language you can’t understand. After a few drinks, I told Malena that I sometimes saw dead people. She asked me what I meant. "It’s not a Sixth Sense kind of thing," I told her. "I just have vivid memories about people that I knew who died in war zones." She asked me if it was post-traumatic stress. "Nothing like that," I said. "Just very clear and precise memories." "Does this happen a lot?" she asked. "Not really," I said. "When that manhole cover popped up in the air, I had a flashback – the sound was like an IED. I still have the muscle-memory," I told her.

You resist temptation by avoiding it. I went home before anyone got too drunk. Malena offered to drive me to my place but I declined. "You’re just as drunk as me," I said. "I don’t want the Police Chief’s daughter getting in trouble." She laughed at the idea.

A week later, we were at a scene where a Cessna was shredded against a stony hillside when our scanner picked up the call: Active Shooter at the Transfer Station. We abandoned the Cessna and the forlorn corpses slumped in the underbrush for our van. The navigation system showed us maps and intoned directions. "It’s my Dad’s jurisdiction," Malena said. She took out her cell-phone and called one of the dispatchers. We raced along the boulevards toward the transfer station. Sirens sounded all around us and I could see helicopters converging over a place at the edge of town.

At the first police roadblock, Malena got out of the car and spoke with one of the deputies. He went to his squad car, signaling that we should follow closely behind him. The squad car shot like an arrow along the divided boulevard, running the red lights. We tailed the vehicle at a dozen feet off the cop car’s rear bumper, and, then, came to a second police barricade. The vehicle ahead slowed. A man in a suit, presumably a detective, waved the car forward and we followed, moving in a tight formation down the deserted lane to the police perimeter.

We stopped the van and unloaded our gear on the side of the vehicle opposite the cordon of ambulances and police cars. "Keep out of sight as long as possible," I said as I set up my camera. The sun was bright and the sky clear and the trees along the street reached upward with gestures like ballet dancers. Neat, precise shadows fell across the sidewalk. Other than the sound of police radios muttering back and forth, it was mostly silent and we spoke in whispers. Overhead, helicopters circled like vultures – their rotors made a sultry sound like a ceiling fan. When I peeked around the edge of the van, I saw police tactical squads setting up sniper rifles on tripods and nervously checking tear-gas mortars. The massacre had occurred on the other side of a nondescript warehouse building with vacant loading docks sticking their tongues out at the bright afternoon. Beyond the loading dock, a parking lot glittered with a scatter of cars, probably owned by people who were now dead or dying and, then, there was a low cement wall, a chainlink fence, and the windowless bunker of the transfer station. Some mobile homes dotted the hills above the station and one of them displayed an American flag next to its door.

Jessica Norman stooped to adjust her make-up in the side-mirror on the van. She said that I should not use the tripod and shoot handheld. "It’s more urgent that way," she told me. "This is plenty urgent as it is," I said, twisting the camera onto the tripod.

"Is it a jihadist?" Jessica asked.

"We don’t know," the sound man said.

"Get on the scanner and find out," she demanded.

"I don’t think they know," the sound man said.

"Just call it an ‘active shooter’," I said. Malena was looking intently at a tangle of brush next to the road. A drainage culvert opened out of a retaining wall on the side of a wooded knoll next where we were parked. Beneath the drainage, a little green jungle had sprouted, shrubs and vines and small thorny trees all intertwined.

"There is something moving in there," Malena said.

"A mountain lion?" I asked.

A string of popping sounds came from the Transfer Station. Then, there was a low, gutteral boom. A couple of police from the tactical squad ran forward crouching. For the time being, it seemed as if we were invisible. I supposed that each cop thought that some other police officer had approved our presence.

"I need fill," Jessica Norman said as I locked-down the tripod. "Get the reflector. Otherwise I’ll look like Pinnochio or like I’m sixty years old." She nervously squinted into the sunlight.

Malena was still looking at the ragged-looking little bramble patch under the black socket of the culvert.

"Get the reflector, Malena," Jessica said. "I’m not doing this stand-up without the reflector."

Malena said: "It’s a man."

I looked away from my viewfinder. A man was standing next to Malena. He was wearing dark sunglasses and had a beard that fell like a brown curtain from his chin and his lips. The beard dropped onto the man’s breast and the tips of his whiskers were jagged and silver-colored, making lightning patterns against the blue work-shirt covering his chest. The man’s beard had a sculptural quality, immobile and heavy as if cast in bronze. He reached out his hand toward Malena.

Malena coaxed him forward as if he were some kind of exotic wild animal. She took his extended hand. The man’s hand was grey and waxy and, when she touched him, I felt a kind of instinctual revulsion.

"I was inside, inside..." the man said. His lips moved but not his beard and his eyes were invisible behind the black panes of his sunglasses.

"He says he was inside," Malena told me. "Inside the transfer station."

"I was," the man insisted.

"How did he get out?" Jessica Norman said.

"We were having a retirement party – there was meat and cheese tray," the man said. "There was this guy that none of us knew very well. He was a loner. Stuck to himself and stayed in his own office really most of the time. Something got him mad and he came into the break-room where we were gathered and, then..."

"He started shooting," Malena said.

Another fusillade of shots, as ineffectual, it seemed, as someone popping birthday balloons echoed across the parking lot and loading docks at the nearby warehouse.

"I see him. My god, he’s shooting everyone. He has a gun and he’s very calmly pointing it and firing. And there’s people all around, people falling and screaming and blood, puddles of blood."

A kind of armored car flying a little flag like a pennant crept up the street. A volley of very loud shouts sounded, then, a deep, hollow roar.

The man with the long beard said: "I knew I had to get out. I had to escape. I’ve got a wife and kids and so much reason to stay alive. I said to myself that I was going to escape no matter what, that I would get out of the transfer station, that I would survive regardless of what happened, I kept telling myself that I was going to get out like I was praying..."

"Praying?" Malena asked.

"Praying except maybe just to myself. I don’t know. (He paused). I said that I had to make it out and I did..."

"What is the name of the shooter?" Jessica Norman said.

"He is just some guy. Employed a couple years. Kept to himself."

"A Jihadist, a Muslim or something?"

"I don’t know," the man said. "I never knew his last name."

"But you got out, you survived?" Jessica Norman asked.

I thought I had been filming but, in the excitement, I hadn’t pressed down on the right button to engage the camera.

"Let me redo this," I said.

"How did you get out?" Jessica Norman asked.

"I told myself I had to get out, that I had to make it. Then, I went to the door. But, after that, I’m confused. I don’t recall. I just don’t know. But, suddenly, I’m outside, right here."

Some heavy weapon fired from within the armored personnel carrier and the heavy vehicle rocked from the recoil on its axles. Cops wearing body armor ran up to take shelter behind the armored car. One of the men tripped and fell sideways. Then, there was a very bright flash followed by a concussion.

Without thinking, I flung the camera in the direction of the charging police and the armored car. Through my viewfinder, I saw a small car rolling forward, hidden some of the time behind the pickup trucks and SUV’s in the parking lot. Fountains of glass billowed off the parked cars and, then, the moving vehicle pancaked, dropping down heavily as all of its tires flattened so that its hubcaps spurted off their rims Fire gushed from the vehicle and it slid sideways, bits of metal and chrome skinned off the side of the car and skittering across the concrete.

The gunfire continued for a half-minute and, then, it was silent.

"Did you get that? Did you get that?" Jessica Norman said.

"I got it," I said.

"Let me do my stand-up with the smoke behind me," she said.

The sound man signaled that he was ready for the shot. A thick, serpentine coil of oily black smoke rolled along the lane next to the warehouse. Several police were running toward us, arms extended as if they wanted to seize with their own hands the images that we were shooting.

"They’re going to shut us down," I said.

"Stay on me, stay on me," Jessica Norman said. "Stay on me, until they boot us out of here."

I watched through the viewfinder: Jessica made a grim face and described what we had just seen, stammering a little and the smoke spilled across the background like a great scroll opening and, then, the police manhandled her and knocked me down, dragging us away to a place two-hundred yards to the rear, between a waiting ambulance and a firetruck, a dull corner where nothing much could be seen.

"What happened to the survivor?" Jessica Norman asked.

"I don’t know," Malena said. "I think he got scared and ran away."

"I didn’t see him run away," the sound man said.

"Maybe the police have him in custody," I said.

For a while our vehicle was impounded. The News Director sent another van to retrieve us so that we could get the footage back to the studio. I checked the playback – I had a very clear shot of the shoot-out in the parking lot, images of Jessica Norman flinching a little as the smoke curled around her, then, the cops pushing through the haze and dragging her to the side, thick fists and forearms reaching up to knock my picture out of commission.

"Did you get anything of the survivor?" Malena asked.

"Nothing," I said. "I didn’t have the camera running."

"Bummer," Malena said.

"It happens," I replied.

That night, my hands began to shake. They shook so much that I had to hold my glass of scotch between both palms. I recalled all of the corpses I had seen in war zones. I thought of the faces of the reporters and correspondents that I had known who had been killed doing their jobs. My hands shook so bad that I spilled booze all over my chin and chest.

The next morning, my hangover kept me from going to work. Around midday, Malena called me.

"Did you get my text?" she asked.

"No," I said. "I haven’t looked at my phone."

"Look at your phone," she said. "I’m really freaked-out."

I said that I would call her back.

It took me a while to find my cell-phone. When I lifted the phone, I noticed that the tremor in my hands had gone. On the phone, there was a text-message from Malena: "Look at this video off the news stream on my computer. I don’t know what to say."

I tapped on the screen. The video was a news report about the shooting at the transfer station. The gunman had died in the parking lot, riddled with bullets in his car. I recognized the footage as the pictures that I had taken the previous afternoon. A man in a uniform listed the names of the dead – the gunman had killed eight people. One of the victims looked familiar to me. The dead man grinning at the camera wore black sunglasses and had a long beard drooping down to the middle of his chest. The edges of his beard were silver-grey and frizzy.

I called Malena: "So we interviewed one of the victims."

"How is that possible?" she asked. "He’s dead now."

"He must have been wounded. He must have been badly wounded when we talked to him."

"I didn’t see where he came from," Malena said. "It’s like he just appeared in that brush."

"He must have been shot and left for dead and, somehow, got outside and taken cover in those weeds."

"It’s not like that," Malena said. "I talked to my dad."

"And?"

"They found the guy with sunglasses and beard inside the transfer station. He had gone to a door that was locked from the outside. He was clawing at the door when the gunman shot him a half-dozen times. He broke his fingernails trying to rip the door open but he couldn’t. It was locked."

Malena paused.

"He said he wanted to get outside." She said.

"He must have got outside," I said. "He got outside and found us and, then..."

"And, then, ran back through the police line to get into the transfer station and, then, go to the corridor with the locked door so that he could die there?"

"It doesn’t sound plausible," I said.

"And with a half-dozen wounds, any one of which would have killed him?"

"I agree that it doesn’t sound plausible."

"Will you check your footage to see if there is any evidence of that man in the stuff we shot?" Malena asked.

"I’ll do that," I said.

That afternoon, I went to the studio and checked all of the raw footage from the reporting that we had done the previous afternoon. There were no pictures of the man with the long beard. In the excitement, I had forgotten to engage the camera. It’s a rookie mistake, but it happens.

Infestation (Title page)

INFESTATION

a novella in three parts

John S. Beckmann



September - November 2015

　

"The Knife Point Glacier is on the eastern side of the continental divide in the Wind River range of mountains in the U. S. State of Wyoming. The glacier is in the Fitzpatrick National Forest in the Shoshone Wilderness among the largest grouping of glaciers in the American Rocky Mountains. Knife Point Glacier flows to the north below the summit of Knife Point Mountain (13,001 feet).

Along with other glaciers in the Wind River Range, the glacier’s rapid retreat after the Little Ice Age of the 1850's has exposed many specimens of the extinct Rocky Mountain locust (melanoplus spretus). The Rocky Mountain locust ranged through the western United States and some parts of western and southern Canada during the 19^th century. Sightings placed their numbers far greater than those of other locusts. One swarm observed in 1875 covered 198,000 square miles, an area larger than the State of California and was thought to consist 12.5 trillion insects. Less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct. The last recorded sighting of a live specimen occurred southern Canada in 1902. Because a species so abundant and ubiquitous was never expected to become extinct, almost no specimens of the insect were collected. However, recently expeditions have gathered some examples of Melanoplus spretus from the Knife Point Glacier in Wyoming and the Grasshopper Glacier in Montana – at these locations, swarms of locusts were caught in snowstorms and frozen into glaciers. North American is the only continent without a major locust species, apart from Antarctica."

Adapted from Wikipedia and citing Jeff Lockwood, et. al. "Preserved Grasshopper Fauna at Knife Point Glacier, Fremont County, Wyoming" in Arctic and Alpine Research, Vol. 23, p. 1.

Infestation (Part One)

　

I.

　

1.

Silky laid her final egg beside the bed, in a tangle of bad-smelling sick-room rags. Anders’ father lifted the bird from the floor and held Silky against his belly. Then, he left the cabin and went outside.

Anders told his mother that it was a harsh thing to punish Silky for laying her eggs in odd places. Anders’ mother blinked her red, moist eyes at her son and mouthed the word "no" by which Anders understood that his father was not killing Silky for that reason.

Anders father came back into the cabin and sat by the bed. Anders looked at him and was about to ask a question. "We have to eat," Anders’ father said before his son could speak. "Despite everything, we have to eat."

　

2.

For as long as anyone remembered, the people coming on the soldier’s road traveled westward. Whole villages of white men with their women and children and dogs walked toward the setting sun, wagons creaking and canopies on their great-wheeled carts made from white cloth billowing overhead like clouds fallen to the earth. Sometimes, soldiers marched beside them or rode horses, their mounts ill-favored and inferior to our animals – escorts for the people who were migrating across the plains. Cattle came in herds and wandered far and wide and we could take those animals for beef as we wished since they were very tame. Sometimes, the travelers fired their rifles in our direction and we shot back at them, but from long-range so that no one was hurt except by accident. The white people were unreliable and unpredictable – sometimes, they were friendly and generous, but, other times, harsh and cruel. We knew that a great restlessness troubled their hearts and made them wander, always west toward the mountains and deserts where their tent cities were swallowed-up in the immense distances. Along the way, the moving columns cast off human debris, dropped travelers like dung along the roadside and where these people stayed, they built up houses from wooden sticks after living for several seasons in muddy graves that they dug in the prairie. Then, the iron rails came, cutting through the dead lands that the White people had made around their towns, and engines thundered through the night. And still the restlessness afflicted them and on their roads they went westward, driven like their beef-cattle by some invisible herdsman.

But, then, suddenly, it was different. The farmers and townspeople came back from the west. At first, it was only a few – ragged people who moved erratically as if their minds were deranged. Then, more came – whole troops of white people dragging their belongings on carts, too poor to even own oxen, miserable clans who looked like warriors that had gone on a raid in the winter and been ambushed themselves and cut down in great numbers, wounded and afraid as they limped through the mud on their road cut into the buffalo-grass. Now, they were retreating eastward, toward the rising sun, the restlessness gone from their eyes and replaced with something like terror and panic. It would have been an easy thing to attack them and seize those possessions that they had brought with them on the road, but there was nothing that they carried that was of any value to us and their horses were ruined, all dying of starvation, and fear had made them crazy. It is bad medicine to fight with crazy people and since they were emptying the land, fleeing from it as if the clods of dirt and the woods in the stream beds and the distant hills themselves had risen up to repel them, we took counsel among ourselves and said that it was best to leave them alone as they fled from the country that they had once taken on their own. As they walked, we saw that they looked over their shoulders into the sky, as if there were something borne on the winds hounding them along their way.

　

　

3.

The Preacher stopped to freshen the mules drawing his buckboard at a well on an homestead. The farm was abandoned, a door left half-open, and some dead livestock colossal with bloat and black as night in the trampled-down pasture between strands of wire on which there were knots like steel thorns. The Preacher had never seen wire made in that way and, when he accidentally, brushed against the taut strand, it ripped his pants next to his knee. He cursed: the strange wire made the deserted homestead seem hazardous to him and there was something wrong with the water that the preacher drew from the well – it was soupy with brownish-green particles and smelled foul and the mules recoiled when he set the bucket under their noses. A glaze of insect wings and tiny crooked legs floated on the surface of the brothy water that he had pulled out of the ground.

A blighted apple tree cast a little shade on a knoll overlooking the wrecked cabin. The Preacher led his mules up the hill, dragging the wagon behind, so that they could rest for a time under the tree while he puzzled over the hand-drawn map that a merchant had made for him in town. Although it was late September and too early for the apple tree to have lost its leaves, the limbs and boughs overhead were as barren as in frosty November. The grass under the tree had been grazed to stubble that the mules nuzzled with their snouts but couldn’t really eat. His map showed the northern part of the county, the east-west road to the fort, and the location of some of the ranch-houses said to be in this area. The Preacher tried to orient himself to the map, rotating it several times in his hands. Some stony hills rose above a ravine filled with dusty-looking skeletons of trees, also blighted and leafless. The merchant had told the Preacher that there was a wooden cross, tall as a tree on one of the hills, a sign marking the way to the church that the Dutchmen had been built, Pilgrim Holiness, the townsman called it, although the Preacher knew the congregation by the words Pilger Heiligkait, the spelling on the penny postcard that he had received calling him to the place. He rummaged in his satchel and found the postcard, examining it in rays of light that seemed embrittled by passing through the naked branches above him. Heiligkait was low-German, an ugly spelling, and the Preacher frowned. He looked away from where he sat with his back to the denuded tree, scanning the ridges for the monument, but there was no sign of it.

The mules snorted, signaling that they were unsatisfied with the short, close-cropped grass around the tree. The Preacher climbed onto the wagon and snapped his reins to make the mules move. As the wagon began to roll, its wheel caught on something that bucked a little under him and, then, snapped. Fearful that his wheel had broken, the Preacher stepped down from the wagon and inspected the undercarriage and running gear – the wheel had crushed a wooden grave-marker, splintering the little lathe sign implanted in the grass. The farmer who had homesteaded this empty hollow had buried a child under the apple tree. The Preacher read the child’s name from the broken wood, bowed his head, and, then, looked up into the sky. In the west, the sun struggled to cast its rays around a lofty greenish-grey pillar of darkness, a column that stood against the horizon glinting with sullen, oppressive menace. The Preacher stared at the huge, dark pillar to see if he could detect lightning churning in its bowels, but the pillar seemed inert, glittering as if made of mineral. The deluge was coming. He would need to find the church and its congregation soon.

　

　

4.

The fort had no walls. Two barracks buildings, each with three fireplaces and, therefore, three field-stone chimneys, flanked the parade-ground. The commander lived in a frame house with a verandah and flower-garden and there were some cabins for the officers scattered at intervals on the grassy hillside behind the two-story structure. Cooking was done in a kitchen with a zinc-roof dug-into the slope at the end of the parade-ground nearest the commander’s house. On the opposite side of the parade-ground, there was a bee-hive shaped cairn of stone heaped up over the magazine where the black powder was stored. Fences made from piled thorn enclosed some ponies and a dozen government mules. Since the Indians traded at the sutler’s warehouse, that building stood on a rounded hillock almost a quarter of a mile away, a windowless granary with a couple shacks at its side. Inside the fort, there were three privies: one of the commander and his family, a vine of flowering rose coiled around its frame, one for the officers located equidistant from their cabins, and one for the enlisted men behind one of the barracks.

The absence of a palisade around the fort made the place seem vulnerable. A year after the fort was established, when the officer’s cabins were sod-huts and the enlisted men slept in tents, the commander sent a Ponca scout north, across the river, to invite the Sioux to visit. When the Indian deputation approached, the commander had his artillery sergeant send a round of two-pound shot into their midst, discharging the post’s sole howitzer at the horsemen as they crossed the open prairie. A half-dozen Indians were hurt, some of them badly, and the aggrieved Sioux, who blamed the incident on the Ponca scout, cut off his hands and feet before beheading him. The point had been made, however, and, after that incident, the Sioux gave the fort a wide berth and didn’t even molest the woodcutters sent out for fuel, expeditions that sometimes took several days and traveled as far as the river valley where there were trees in abundance.

Since there had been no hostilities for a half-dozen years or more, Quartermaster Biggens was puzzled that several steers within his purview were missing, apparently rustled from the livestock pens under the cover of night. Quartermaster Biggens was suspicious of the camp sutler, a Welsh trader named Berwyn. Berwyn had a Ponca wife by the custom of the country and his in-laws often pitched their tents near the trader’s warehouse, committing, it was alleged, minor thefts and making a nuisance of themselves when they were drunk. When Quartermaster Biggens learned of the missing steers, either two or three (his accounts were not exact to his embarrassment), he walked to the sutler’s post, adopting a long and aggressive military stance and rigid posture in order to shame Welshman who was a slovenly fellow, nothing soldierly about him. Quartermaster Biggens’ parade-quality strut to Berwyn’s cabin was impaired by several yellow dogs from the Ponca camp. The dogs bayed at Biggens and nipped at his heels so that he lost his composure and kicked wildly at them just as Berwyn emerged from the shadows of his hut, running his dirty fingers through his moustache and shaggy beard.

Berwyn cursed at the dogs and a woman shouted something in Ponca and the animals retreated, slinking away toward the encampment a few hundred feet away. A wagon was drawn up by the warehouse and Quartermaster Biggens saw some miserable-looking, ragged people haggling with one of the sutler’s sons, metis it seemed, half-breeds from the north. Biggens asked if the Ponca had been light-fingered recently to which Berwyn replied with an air of aggrieved indignation that all was well with the camp’s "Indian allies." Biggens said that some steers had gone missing. Berwyn replied that they had probably wandered away since the fence enclosing them was not of the soundest quality and, even, prone to breach in squally weather. "I am quite certain that the animals have been misappropriated," Quartermaster Biggens said. Berwyn replied: "About that, sir, I know nothing."

One of the wretched looking people by the wagon approached Berwyn and Quartermaster Biggens. As he came closer, Quartermaster Biggens saw that the miserable fellow was some sort of a white man, a beggar, perhaps, or one of the drifters, sometimes, encountered on plains. The man looked terribly thin and his eyes were yellow around the edges, a deep almost crimson color that seemed to seep into the wrinkles around his eye-sockets. He was wearing a ragged buffalo-skin coat and Biggens wondered if the fellow had been a bison-hunter, now deprived of his occupation by the extinction of the animals that had previously roamed the land around the fort.

Berwyn waved that the man should return to the transaction, apparently at an impasse, with his son. Quartermaster Biggens looked more carefully and saw that one of the tattered scarecrows leaning against the wagon was a woman and that a small child was groveling in the dirt beneath her. The oxen that had drawn the wagon to the sutler’s post were emaciated, their ribs showing under hides that were ulcerated with sores.

"Those are the most miserable white people that I have ever seen," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"They are ruined," Berwyn replied. "They have lost just about everything."

"If they can’t trade with you," Quartermaster Biggens said, "they should come to the fort and, perhaps, I can help them to some surplus provisions."

"That would be a crime," Berwyn said. "Those provisions are held in trust for the soldiers and the federal government of the United States."

"What’s the benefit to you?" Biggens asked. "If they have nothing to trade."

"There is always something to trade," Berwyn replied.

"Indeed," Biggens said. He repeated his question to the sutler about the steers gone missing.

"I didn’t hear exactly how many beef cows have vanished," Berwyn said. Quartermaster Biggens knew that the Welshman kept the most minute accounts.

"We will have to perform an audit," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"Who do you suspect?"

"It would not be gallant for me to suggest that, perhaps, there has been an misunderstanding involving some of your kinsmen," Quartermaster Biggens said, glancing at Berwyn’s wife now standing disheveled in the doorway of their cabin.

"My kinsmen are across the sea," Berwyn said, emphasizing his Welsh brogue. He waved his hand toward the decrepit-looking encampment on the hill, some smoke leaking from cook-fires and some fly-blown ribbons of meat parching on racks watched by starving dogs. "Those folk are blameless," Berwyn said. "You have my word on it."

"I will have to ask Major Goodweather to deputize a search party," Biggens said.

"That would be prudent," Berwyn replied. "Perhaps, the Sioux have been skulking about here."

"I don’t think that is the case," Biggens said.

"Well, then, they say that Morgan’s herd has increased remarkably," Berwyn said. "The misery of others makes him wealthy. Perhaps, your cows are with him."

"If that’s true, we’ll take them from his ranch," Biggens replied.

Berwyn shrugged.

"In any event, there will be a search party," Biggens said.

Before he turned to return to the fort, Quartermaster Biggens said loudly: "Any honest man in need is welcome to come to the fort for aid." He hoped that the ragged White people bargaining with Berwyn’s son would hear his words and, in fact, the scrawny child scratching in the dirt cocked an ear, but the adults didn’t seem to attend to what the Quartermaster had said.

"I can help just as well," Berwyn said. "And there is always a little profit to be made."

　

　

　

5.

Two enlisted men and a Ponca scout named George were dispatched to locate and retrieve the missing steers, said by Quartermaster Berwyn to "number about three." Major Goodweather told them to ride toward the river, interrogate the Indians and settlers in the region, and travel as far as Morgan’s ranch.

The men rode from the Fort north toward the Malpais and buttes around the river. On a height of land, they paused to survey the terrain. Crumpled-looking ridges spiked with small pine trees rose above ravines where exposed faces of gravel and sand were eroding into dry, pebble-clogged watercourses. Some table land suitable for farming spread toward the eastern horizon but seemed to have been burned. The landscape was speckled with places where something like fire had raged, dark brown, scuffed zones dozens of acres in extant where the grass was ravaged and the small trees charred to skeletal and barren scaffolds of branch and bough. On the western horizon, a butte was hunkered down with the profile of huge caterpillar grazing on the prairie and a dark column stood in the sky, slowly rotating under heavy and ornate clouds.

"Mighty big place to have to search," Private Anderson said.



"And a storm coming," Lieutenant Williams replied.

George had walked a half-dozen paces from them to make water.

Anderson called out to George: "You sure this ain’t got something to do with your cousins."

George spit. "My cousins got nothing to do with this. It’s the Sioux."

"I don’t like the look of that cloud," Lieutenant Williams said.

They climbed back onto their mounts and sauntered down the hill.

　

　

6.

It is a hard thing to have raised a child from the dead and, then, to be sent forth in the world to preach the gospel and care for the sick and clothe the naked and visit those who are confined in prisons. A hard thing to have a resurrection looming over you, a great turbulent miracle always at your back and pressing you forward and whispering in your ears that you must continue this ministry and its great works even if the flesh is weak and the spirit sore and afraid. The Preacher hesitated, surveying the wilderness before him and, then, as his wagon jolted forward, made certain resolutions, imposing on himself these decrees – this time, he would take no money in exchange for his prayer and he would make no promises and his supplication to God would be framed from perfects words of power and might. He would be disinterested and not seek any personal profit in the misdeeds or misfortunes of others. He would be guided solely by the Holy Spirit and not by any spirit of envy or lust or greed. But it is a hard thing to have once performed a miracle and, then, to lose the power and feel the weariness within and the desolation, the spiritual aridity that is like a mountain of burning gravel in the breast.

Pilgrim Holiness was somewhere in this maze of rock ridges and shallow dusty ravines, midway between the villages of Weeping Water and Tecumseh according to the railroad prospectus. The railroad ran to the north cutting through the badlands and crossing the great windy basins where hunters riding in their Pullman cars behind the locomotives once could shoot buffalo from their windows as well as grouse and pronghorn antelope. This territory, according to the real estate speculators and the railroad advertisements, was a land flowing with milk and honey, dry to be sure, but only because the sod had never been cut by plow, a vast empire of great latent wealth, soil so rich that when the bare, naked telegraph poles were inserted into the prairie after a year or two they had sprouted branches green with leaf and cast shade all around them. The absence of rivers and lakes could be readily explained by two phenomenon: first, rain follows the plow and, when the earth is harrowed and cut, great clouds of moisture locked in the grass-covered soil are released and rise upward to form clouds and those clouds bless the terrain with rain so that growing things flourish. And, second, the heat of the sun has driven the glacial snow-pack accumulated each winter underground, into the protective womb of the earth to be preserved and distilled, and no sooner is the ground slit open to a depth of eight or nine feet than at the sandpoint water froths forth sweet as wine. This was the nature of the land, according to the real estate speculators and the railroad company whose trains now brought immigrants into this new territory and with only a little labor, any one could make the desert flower and bring abundance to the fields so that what seemed a desert would one day be a vast granary. The Preacher shaded his eyes against the sun and looked anxiously over his shoulder at the black column standing rooted between earth and sky, like a lady’s black leather patent boot stabbed into the prairie, and he thought that if the railroads and the real estate agents had been so completely wrong about the land and its attributes, then, probably, Tecumseh and Weeping Water were also fictional, fraudulent titles for platted pieces of desert where no one lived, and, even, the church built to serve the multitude of immigrants into the territory, even that place didn’t exist, but was merely someone’s notion of what should exist. But the Preacher had the penny postcard and it told him about the plight of the congregation and the author of the writing said that he (it was a man’s harsh angular script) had known the clergyman in the camps above the treeline in the Sierra Nevada and at Creede where the Preacher had raised a child from the dead and, therefore, was convinced that he could cast a miracle over their present plight and save them from the plague that had beset them. Surely, the postcard was not a hoax on the order of the railroad’s assertion that this wilderness was a place of bounty and abundance and, so, the Preacher forged on, following the hand-drawn map, really just a sketch, that the rancher had given him at the station, scanning the tops of hillsides for the pilgrim cross.

Of course, the child wasn’t really dead at Creede and he wasn’t really a preacher, then, either, just a man known to read his Bible from time to time, something that was a rarity in the booming silver camp and, when people died, mangled in the mines or blue and frozen among the high peaks or crushed flat from tuberculosis, he could be counted on to say a few words at their obsequies, something dignified and suitable and, even, ornamented with verse from Holy Scripture and a prayer. No one said that he was a preacher, then, but, rather, just an useful person, capable of speaking in both English and German, an attendant at funerals who could be relied upon as, more or less, sober and unlikely to say something true, if scandalous, about the deceased. And, it was in this capacity, that the Preacher, who was not then a preacher, was asked to speak some scripture and, perhaps, pray over the corpse of a child, a small girl, who was either the sister or daughter of a young prostitute come to the silver camp to ply her trade. The child rested on a bier of furs and ladies’ underwear, kimonos and a velvet-lined smoking jacket that one of the older whores affected, and the mother (or sister, perhaps) said that the little girl had just died and that she needed the preacher to say some words of solace over her tiny corpse. A bouquet of prostitutes were weeping floridly in one corner of the dirt and stone dug-out, lamenting loudly as if to proclaim that grief and sorrow were the only true and dependable things in life and a couple of miners who had fortified themselves with gin were also sobbing and muttering vague threats that couldn’t be said to be against any specific person or place or thing but were simply expressions of rage, and snow was flickering in the cold skies over Creede, like the tails of bunny rabbits fleeing upward, big, feathery flakes sliding down across the great, split escarpment looming above the camp. The preacher stood over the child, searching his memory for some suitable thing to say, and, as he looked down at the girl, he saw that her cheeks were still flushed, hectic. Some force was still infusing blood into her cheeks and the Preacher said to one of the drunk miners that he had never seen a corpse with so pink and fresh a color, most corpses were yellow or pale as candle-tallow. So the preacher put his hand on the child’s forehead and felt the warmth gathering there under his palm, an indisputable warmth that he knew meant life, and, so, instead of reciting Bible verses about death and the heavenly city of Jerusalem where weeping is no more, on impulse, he said: "Tabitha, arise!" And no sooner were those words spoken, then, the child coughed and stirred and, then, sat upright and the people all around shrieked with joy. The miners took the preacher across the muddy street to a shack where spirits were available and, when he was good and drunk, three of the whores led him to their wagon and warmed him up for the night and, in the morning, the mud and horse dung and disorderly mounds of spoil were all covered with snow and it was silent and the great stone faces of the mountain were like the ramparts of a mighty cathedral.

From that time, he had gone about dressed as a preacher, with a tattered black frock coat with double tails, a black hat, and a clerical collar. After all, he was a man who had raised a child from the dead at the mining camp of Creede in the State of Colorado and there were people who were willing to pay him for words of comfort and words of might. The Preacher was willing to oblige and he, even, attempted a few miracles from time to time, but, always, just before leaving town so that any disappointment arising from failures in those endeavor would remain behind him, or, at worst, pursue him only to the county line.

The trail was rocky and led between abandoned farmsteads set in the shelter of the hills folded around the dry riverbed. He had passed four farms, all of them deserted and ruinous, and wondered if these decrepit cabins and breached thorn and briar corrals together constituted the hamlet of Weeping Waters or, perhaps, Tecumseh, a settlement spread out across a mile in the narrow valley. Perhaps, the waters were said to "weep" because they no longer flowed in the streambed, the ghost of a creek inscribed in channels of braided pebbles and sand. The track was intricate and his mules kept stumbling and the Preacher had his eyes fixed on the way ahead of him when he heard something like a thunder, a sullen booming noise that was more of a heavy thud than anything else. Instinctively, the Preacher looked up in the sky to where the black snout of cloud had reached down to the earth but there was no lightning flashing there, just a greyish-green darkness diffused around the pillar of the storm. The booming sound had come from another direction, toward the head of the valley. The noise sounded again, a hard crash like a heavy door being swung shut. It didn’t sound like a bell, nothing at all like a bell, but surely Pilgrim Holiness was near this place and who knew what kinds of bells had been forged to sound over this wilderness.

"I will do better," the Preacher told himself. "I will take no money in specie and accept payment only in the hospitality of those who I have come to assist."

He had made that vow before, unsuccessfully, but it didn’t hurt to repeat those words to himself as something crashed loudly a third time somewhere in the involuted bluffs ahead of him.

　

7.

They moved suddenly and without warning like a flock of starlings flinging themselves from their roosts skyward all at one time on some secret impulse. Anders did not understand why they moved and had no words sufficient to question anyone about breaking camp. It might happen at any time, even during the dead of night, men setting out in advance of the other people as if to scout the way for them except that sometimes the women and children and old folks went in a direction opposite to the horsemen and met them a day, or, sometimes, two days later. No one seemed to know how long they would walk – an hour or two, or, perhaps, half a day or, sometimes, both a day and a night without respite, endlessly trudging until someone collapsed or a halt had to be called for a woman to give birth or an old man to die. On the march, Anders pushed a small wheelbarrow that his father had given him. Around his neck and over his shoulder, he carried a feed-bag heavy with a kind of meal from which the women sometimes made a bland porridge that smelled like old, spilt beer. The feed-bag was heavy and the strap cut into his skin and rubbed places on his shoulder and collar-bone raw. If he fell behind, an old woman came with a stick and thumped him hard across the buttocks and thighs. Anders was afraid that if he became separated from the band, the hungry dogs that skittered around the marching people would harass him with bites to the ankles and calves. He was also afraid of losing his way in the gloomy dry creek beds or the sandy hills spiny with yucca plant and slippery with loose pebbles. As he walked, Anders sometimes unknotted a rag that he had tied around the prayer book that his mother had given him, a small brown volume that he could hold in the palm of his hand, its battered cover marked with a simple yellow cross. Also wrapped in the rag, a bit of cloth torn from one of his mother’s dresses, was a locket made from brass and shaped like an acorn. Inside the locket was a filament of his mother’s hair, pale and greyish and braided like a whip. When Anders tried to remember his mother’s face, he could only recall the way that she looked when she was dying and this was not something that he wished to bring to mind and so, it was best, to not think about her at all. Instead, Anders thought of her hen, a fluffy, fat Cochin, called Silky. The hen was very tame and laid her eggs in the most comical places: in an old shoe or coffee cup or shovel. Anders recalled holding the warm hen in his lap and stroking her bright feathers and, then, he thought of her eggs with their perfectly round yokes as bright and yellow as the sun. It seemed to odd to him that he could recall Silky better than his own mother.

When the band made camp, the horsemen would put their ponies in a corral made from thorns and everyone would eat beside fires that oozed stinging smoke from burning manure and tarry brush that grew in the river beds. The dogs would fight and yelp and, then, the boys would also fight, wrestling with one another and trying to topple their opponents into the embers from the fires to burn their backs and shoulders. Anders was not as strong as the other boys and when they grappled with him, he was always thrown into the cinders and held down until burns covered his back from his neck to waist. He screamed with pain but no one paid any more attention to him than they paid to the dogs wounded in the fights always underway in the darkness outside the flicker of the red light from the campfires.

Sunrise meant nothing to the people in the encampment. Often no one stirred from their lodges until noon or mid-afternoon when the men took their ponies from the enclosure and raced them along the ridge-tops yipping at one another like coyotes. Sometimes, there was greasy meat to eat, roasted on sharpened sticks, and the women and girls seemed always bent double under loads of twigs and thorny brush or carrying buckets of water from the stream. It was good not to rise early in the morning because at this time of year the mornings were cold and steam came from the muzzles of the ponies in their thorn corral and steam rose as well from their manure and urine. In camp, people moved slowly, limping as if wounded by the treks that they had made to reach their bivouac, and young men and girls held hands and walked among the trees by the river-banks, many of them mutilated by the swarms that had come from the sky, and the old men sat on the hilltops alone, singing to themselves and looking steadily into the sun as if for inspiration, still as stone statues on the bluff-tops. Anders was mostly left alone except by the older boys who beat him and threw pebbles at his eyes and tried to knock him over into the cinder beds of fires that had been extinguished to blacken his torso and burn his shoulders. But, once, when this was happening, and an older boy was rolling Anders back and forth in the soot and ash, a young woman emerged from her lodge and shouted at the older boy, saying something to him that made the boy blush and, to show her that he was not afraid of pain himself, the older boy took a sliver of wood, lit it in another campfire, and burned the back of his wrist while singing a song to taunt her. The young woman ignored him and took Anders into her lodge. Although he could not understand most of what she said, the woman explained that her first-born son had drowned while crossing a river. The woman’s daughter spoke a few words of English and she named her dead brother, but this was confusing because the boy had been called "First Born" but that was also his status in the family, and so, Anders didn’t know whether the dead child was being referred to by his name or his rank in the family or both at the same time. This sort of thing baffled him and made his head hurt.

The young woman gave Anders a blanket and the little girl said that they would take care of him because he reminded her mother, whose name was "Like the Dew," of her son who had drowned. After that time, things were easier for Anders and he learned the names of dogs that accompanied the band and made friends with the boys who had previously tried to hurt him by burning his back and shoulders in the campfires and, gradually, without knowing that he understood, he heard words spoken by the people and knew what they meant. He no longer feared the marches between encampments but liked to walk ahead of the old women and men, trampling down the grass for them, and, once, a warrior took him on horseback and they rode swift as the wind to a high place and looked back upon the land that they had crossed and Anders felt very light and free as if he had been flying on the wings of an eagle.

　

　

8.

Morgan’s black cattle were spilled across a gold-brown hillside. Three ranch-hands were stretching wire between posts, fingers and fists protected by fat leather mittens. It was the new wire with knotted barbs to simulate thorns and George rode up to the taut steel strand, sliding his finger along the wire to test the sharpness of the points woven into the fence. The ranch-hands looked up from their task nervously – they had the wire under tension and seemed to be afraid that it might spring away from them and coil itself again on a wooden spool that their mule had dragged into the ravine.

Lieutenant Williams shouted a greeting to the ranch-hands and asked if they had seen any new cattle in the hills. "Sometimes, a runaway steer will just join another man’s herd," Lieutenant Williams said. Private Anderson held a spy-glass to his eye, inspecting the animals scattered across the sloping terrain.

"Don’t know," one of the ranch-hands said. He brushed a fly away from his nose with the clumsy leather mittens.

"You can go on up to the house if you got questions of that nature," another man said. There was a slight edge of anger in his voice.

"I’m just wondering if you’ve detected any cattle of unknown origin around these parts," Lieutenant Williams said.

"Your man’s eyeballing our herd," the ranch-hand said. The other two men stood apart, squinting as if they didn’t understand English.

"No offense," Private Anderson said. "Mighty fine beef-cattle."

"None taken," the ranch-hand replied. "Why don’t you just go on up to the house and get yourself something to eat? There’s a storm coming."

He pointed at the black column in the sky.

"The Indians took the cattle," Lieutenant Williams said. "At least that’s what we think. So we’re inclined to push-on, at least to the river or the train-tracks."

"You cut yourself to pieces on that wire," George said contemplatively, more or less to himself.

"Do you know of any hostiles in the area?" Lieutenant William asked.

The ranch-hand shook his head. "None, that I seen," he replied. "But I met a trapper near the river. He was checking his lines and told me that he met some Sioux, maybe a raiding party, up by White Clay. He kept his distance. Some cut-hairs on the reservation told him that the Indians had a white boy, or, maybe, a girl with them."

"Poor bastard," Private Anderson said.

"Were they driving any cattle with them?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"All I know is what I done told you," the ranch-hand said.

Williams tipped his hat. "Much obliged," he said.

They rode along the edge of the ranch, skirting the strand of wire and new fence-posts still smelling of the adze and sap and sweet woodshavings.

"We should go up to the house for supper," Private Anderson said.

"No," Lieutenant Williams replied. "Didn’t you hear? We have a chance to achieve something noteworthy."

"What is that?’

"The rescue of a white prisoner from his savage captors," Lieutenant Williams said. "That would be a most impressive enterprise."

"The two of us and a Ponca scout?" Private Anderson asked.

"The fewer the company, the more praiseworthy the endeavour."

"The house is miles away anyhow," George said. "This ranch keeps growing. When the farmers move out, Morgan buys their land. It would take us an hour to get there."

"Hopper sales at hopper prices," Private Anderson said.

"Someone always profits," Lieutenant Williams remarked. "It’s the way of the world."

They rode in silence, Private Anderson ticking off the number of fence-posts, counting them silently, lips only slightly moving as his horse jolted forward. After a few minutes, they came to deep crater, black with cinders and ash. At the center of the crater, there was a sort of wigwam of smashed lathe and joists. The wigwam smelled strongly of kerosene and, next to it, a couple of cracked barrels were bedded in the soot, leaking a green foul-smelling mucous.

"They had smudge fires here," Williams said. "Kept off the pests. See, they’re ready to set it ablaze right now, at a moment’s notice, if the plague returns. The fire burns on carcasses collected from the swarm. That’s what’s in the barrels and the smoke produced is so foul that it takes your breath away, it poisons the sky."

"Does that work?" Private Anderson asked.

"Seems to," Lieutenant Williams said.

The hills rose more steeply beyond the ranch. George went ahead of them, sweeping back and forth on his tough, little pony, crossing the path of their plodding march a half-dozen times as he searched for signs of the missing cattle or the raiding party. George’s horse scrambled up tilted clay slopes, heaps of reddish-blue earth, streaked with parallel gouges made by the rain, and, then, in a puff of dust, dropped down into shallow trenches and sandy pits. In this way, they proceeded through the difficult country, breathing heavily with the exertion of picking a path forward, until they came to a kind of cross-roads, ruts running down from the table-land toward a bowl-shaped marsh with tall cattails and a little lagoon of open water. Some moors rose against the sky where wheatfields had once been.

"This is the lane down to the church," Lieutenant Williams said.

"I attended a wedding at that church," Private Anderson said. "A year ago. There was a village and some nice farms."

"It’s all ruined now," Williams said.

"They had a bell smelted from cannons captured in the Battle of Sedan. Sent from Prussia after one of those European wars," Private Anderson said. "It was very heavy and I helped them hoist it into the steeple. We had a winch and a pulley and levers, but it was still terribly heavy and I was afraid that the scaffolding wasn’t sufficient, that it would collapse under the weight of the bell."

"Did it collapse?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"No," Private Anderson said. "But we were afraid to ring it at first. Once we had the bell up on high, in that wood tower, the steeple, the preacher said we should ring the bell but we were afraid that the vibrations would tear the tower down and drop the bell and crack it. That bell was a gift from Bismarck and the Prussians and so it was special."

"What good is a bell that you can’t ring?"

"Exactly," Private Anderson said. "So we made it chime. We tolled that bell and swung it back and forth so that the clapper pounded on the iron from those melted cannons and it boomed, it boomed just like artillery. I heard cannons at Cold Spring and Richmond and this bell made a sound just like those cannons, boom! boom! boom! The whole church shuddered like in a gale."

George reappeared, his horse cantering toward them, and, then, as if to announce, his arrival, there was a sound like thunder rolling across the marsh and lagoon and the flat-lands where wheat had once been grown.



　

9.

The preacher wondered whether the booming sound that he heard was a great bell tolling, somewhere far away in the wilderness. He wondered if the wind and the hollow country had molded the sound of the bell into something like the noise of a subterranean explosion, the sort of dismal underground thud that you heard in the gold or silver fields when the miners were blasting for ore in their deep shafts.

The country was complex with narrow twisting ravines and slender ribs of high ground brooding over terraces where there had once been small farms with wheat fields and orchards. The earth was denuded, grass razored down to a seedless seared-looking stubble too ravaged to feed a sparrow and the trees were raw diagrams of branch and trunk, bark scuffed away and a raw, pulpy fiber extruding from boughs where the leaves had once been. The prospect was the same in all directions, a dreary, featureless place, wasteland without any trace of green, nothing growing, a place salted into desolation by the sky. In every seam of the terrain, a pulp of dead insects seethed and oozed, as if the rotting winged shells were extruded from within the earth. The dead land made the mules skittish and they balked and would not pass over the sour-smelling windrows of dead locusts. From somewhere within the wilderness, an intermittent hollow roar sounded.

"Is that a bell?" the Preacher said to his mules.

The mules pricked up their ears. They would go no farther.

He called them by their names: "Balaam" and "Methuselah."

The mules nodded to him, and twitched their leathery ears, but would not continue. Instead, they leaned sidways, pawing the naked, grey earth.

When the wagon turned, the Preacher saw that the column in the sky standing behind him had changed. It seemed to be sending out tentacles in all directions and the high black spine of the storm was collapsing. Puffs of hot wind full of some element that tingled and burned in the nose came from the clouds. He jumped from wagon and led the mules, walking ahead of them and avoiding the pits and ditches full of rotting insects, greyish pools that seemed to exude a faint sulphur mist like hot springs.

A rider came toward him, mouth open in a kind of howl, but the wind ripped away the man’s words. The rider circled the mules and wagon and, then, shouted that it was coming and that they should seek shelter and that the ranch-house was a quarter-mile away, cupped in the hills. The preacher followed the rider as the wind began to whip though the ravines. They passed a fence-line and, then, a trench that smelled of kerosene and the land was green again and the trees bright with leaves fluttering in the wind gusting from the storm. The ranch-house was large with a two-story gallery porch and people were standing on that verandah as if it were the prow of a ship looking toward the storm that was now toppling forward over the land. The Preacher glimpsed a bunkhouse and zigzagging wood corral where the horses were diving and plunging, wild in the face of the winds now sweeping up the valley. The rancher with his head in a halo of white whiskers stepped down from his porch and, in the gathering darkness, the inside of the big house seemed to flicker with candle-light.

"Say a prayer for us, Reverend," the rancher said, extending his hand.

A man came and took the mules and wagon aside, into a stable that was painted red as a fire engine.

The storm came with wind flinging dust and sand but without thunder or lightning. In the other direction, the bell continued its sullen cannonade.



10.

Sometimes, before dawn, the wind poured from the stony turrets and steeples of eroded earth, a gale coming from the badlands that shook the lodges and caused their poles to flex like a bow about to fire an arrow and made the buffalo hide chatter and flap. This awoke Anders and, as he waited in the darkness, bad thoughts came to him and, sometimes, made him cry, although he was careful to clamp his teeth shut so that no one would hear him whimper. Anders recalled the stinging, clinging swarm from the sky, the millions of eyes and the tiny feet and legs that were like infinitely small saw-blades cutting into your flesh – the creatures clung to you like thistles, like cockle-burrs, and were impossible to dislodge. And, then, he remembered being sick all the time and the chickens dying after laying eggs that were green and foul inside, the hens perishing until only Silky remained, and, then, his sisters crying out as if suffering nightmares except the nightmares did not cease and, then, they were dead and he recalled his father shoveling dirt into their eyes – was it possible that their eyes were wide open when they were buried or was this merely something that he had dreamed? He remembered the rotten potatoes, skins like sacks holding black, wizened filth that was inedible, the spoiled milk and the hard cured meat that was so salty that if you ate it, thirst kept you up all night, and, then, his mother was sick and she said that she was dying and wanted to bless Anders but Anders told her that she would not die, that she would soon be better, but there was no food for her, nothing but soup that his father made from roots and bark that he collected outside, and, then, he recalled rocking back and forth on his knees until he was so sore that he could pray no longer and, so, went outside and looked at the stars and the moon and heard the coyotes crying and, even, packs of wolves in the hills and he wondered if the wolves would come down from the wilderness to steal the bodies of his sisters buried in their shallow graves behind the cabin...

Then, the wind stopped and it was still and he heard the whole band of people sleeping peacefully, could pick out the snoring of different men and old women and children, people that he knew by name, heard old men farting peacefully in their lodges, listened to the ponies snorting in their thorn pen, and it was not yet time to arise, this was a lazy day in camp with nothing much to do, and so Anders closed his eyes and wiped the tears off his cheeks and, then, he was asleep like everyone else and dreaming...

　

11.

The darkness boiled over the land. A day before, the Preacher had come to a high place overlooking a great river. Then, broken clouds dappled the landscape and the river flowed through places where the stream had cut its banks into mud cliffs perforated with holes in which small birds nested. All the colors in the world seemed very vivid to him and, even, the burned places running in swaths toward the horizon were smeared with the faint green of new and early growth.

In his vest pocket, the Preacher carried the Gospel and Habermann’s prayers both printed in German. He halted his wagon and sat on the turf, leaning against the wheel, the battered stub of a pencil in his hand. The spine of Habermann’s prayer manual was damaged and half detached from the yellow pages in the small book, a volume not much larger than a pack of playing cards.

He found the prayer for comfort in a thunderstorm, and began to rewrite it in English:


Most Mighty God! All the powers of the earth shall honor thy holy name and worship thee in the beauty of holiness. For thou art the Lord who reigneth over all. Thou showest thy might and power throughout the universe and thy voice is upon the waters. The Lord of glory thundereth. The earth shook and trembled and the foundations of the hills moved and were shaken. There went up smoke out of thy nostrils and fire out of thy mouth and the heavens are kindled with it and, by thy command, there cometh the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust and they have harkened to thy decree and become a scourge to us. For out of the smoke has come locusts upon the earth and power given unto them as the scorpions of the earth have power. And all of this is thy judgement executed upon us for our sins and to wrest from our stubborn hearts repentance to please thou. But the Lord will give strength unto His people. The Lord will bless his people if they are truly contrite and humble before Him. O merciful god, preserve us from thy wrath and from the devastation of the caterpillar and locust and stretch out thy hand and deliver them unto us for thou has given them to us to eat in all their kinds, the devastating locust and the cricket and the grasshopper. And thou shall spread out thy hands and devour them up as did John in his garments of camel’s hair and his leather belt upon his waist in the wilderness when he did sup upon locusts and wild honey . Forgive us our sins! Make thy face shine upon us. Protect us in body and soul, our house and home and our fields and orchards. Keep the fruits of the fields from the jaws of destruction and the inundation by the swarms of the sky. O Holy God preserve us from an evil death and protect us so that no disaster befall thy people. Amen.
He read the words to himself and was satisfied with them. In the proper place, in circumstances of desperation, men would pay silver and gold for those words. But he was resolved that he would not commit simony and that he would pour the words out freely when the time came and that he would pour himself out with them like a canteen that is emptied into the desiccated dirt of the desert.

He heard a babble of voices commenting on the storm as it approached. Behind him, on the gallery in the front of the ranch house people were gathering. The rancher repeated his words: "Pastor, will you say a prayer for us?"

The Preacher walked away from the two-story verandah of the ranch house, his face turned upward to the tumult in the sky. The rancher, white hair rippling in the sudden gusts of cold hair, accompanied him into the teeth of the wind.

"I was called to Pilgrim Holiness," the Preacher said. "But I couldn’t find the church."

"No church to be found," Morgan said. "The third or fourth time, the swarm descended on them, they ripped the church down and burnt it in bonfires to drive off the locusts."

"What happened to the congregation?"

"Starved out, busted flat, the women went mad and the babies died – the men sent their families back East by train and lit out themselves for the gold fields."

"You’re still here?"

Morgan looked at the Preacher and squinted through his little red and wind-burned eyes. His face was all wrinkled and cracked around them.

"Ain’t been touched yet and I don’t mean to be touched now," Morgan said.

The wind bucked in some laundry hanging on a line between two stick-built sheds. Smoke boiled out of one of the sheds and a laundress emerged, squat with wet, steam-laden hair and cock-eyed. The laundress grinned at the Preacher, showing her teeth which were small and regular and yellow as corn.

Darkness dropped down to gouge the prairie and the distant hills vanished under the approaching storm, a blue-green shadow that seemed filled with whirling pale particles. A woman’s voice sounded in one of the upper rooms of the ranchhouse, keening as if over a dead child. At the edges of the property, the hands had lit fires and the Preacher smelled kerosene and saw pillars of greasy fire ascending into the sky

"If you have a prayer, you should say it," Morgan told him, turning toward the two-story veranda of his home where people stood – children and girls, an Indian woman with a red blanket draped over her shoulders, dapper young men, apparently brothers, an Irish maid in a white bonnet, all gathered as if on the prow of a boat advancing into dark and stormy waters. The people watching the clouds plunging toward them were like an audience in a theater and, so, the Preacher took from his vest pocket the scrap of paper on which he had written the prayer and held it before his eyes and, then, raising his right hand above his head, began to recite.

The laundress rushed from the shed and fell to her knees gripping him around his hips. She smelled of sweat and lye and tallow soap. The wind dragged the Preachers word’s from out of his mouth and he couldn’t hear himself speaking.

　

12.

For two weeks, they moved every other day, skirting a maze of eroded ravines full of rattlesnakes and slippery gravel between knife-edge ridges where the wind unfurled red and green-grey banners of blowing dust. They followed trails made by deer and antelope to bowl-shaped hollows in the badlands and camped there as if hiding. An old man died and was wrapped in his blankets and put in the fork of a tree and, after they went away from that place, Anders turned to look over his shoulder and he could see somber, black-winged birds gathering to circle overhead and this caused him to imagine his mother, and, even, say her name, but he could not bring to mind her face or the way that she moved or any of her gestures and, when he tried to recall her voice, he heard only the dogs barking along the trail and the sounds of the horses and the children babbling as if half-asleep and the iron pots and knives and the men’s weapons clinking as they marched across the barren country. Then, one morning, because he had misunderstood a word spoken the night before, he woke up and went from the lodge expecting that the people would rise and move once more, but no one was stirring, the dogs curled up next to the embers of the fires from the night before, and the horses sleeping where they stood, a most amazing thing he thought, to sleep standing upright, a couple coyotes barking on a hilltop far away and the moon still slumbering also, pitched in the pale blue sky like a teepee made from bison skin dipped in lime. Then, unsought, Anders recalled his mother and could see her very vividly in his mind’s eye – she was lying by the smoky hearth in their cabin, motionless, her lips cracked and dry and her eyes sunken, and Anders’ father was kneeling at her side, muttering something like a prayer under his breath or, perhaps, cursing, and she had soiled herself so that there was a strong, foul smell in the cabin and her face was inert and round as a drain through which what little remained of her life was fast flowing away and Anders asked: "Is she alive?" and his father merely turned to him and shrugged and this made Anders think that his mother was sleeping although, certainly, she seemed very still and there was a not a flicker of any kind under her eyelids when he called out to her. Anders was afraid that his father would put his mother into the ground before she was truly dead and, so, he thought that he should hold a vigil beside the bed and the hearth that was smoking so as to burn his eyes because the twigs and grass burning there were of poor quality, the locusts having devoured most everything else that could be used for fuel... But, despite his resolve to remain awake, Anders closed his eyes because the sour smoke was stinging in them and, then, fell asleep because he was so terribly hungry and the hunger went away only when he was sleeping. Then, he opened his eyes and saw his father washing his mother’s body, but, now, she seemed quite alive, moving as if to assist him and he saw that her eyes had flopped open but they were motionless and glazed and this was a puzzling since her hands and legs seemed to be moving of their own accord.

His father said that he should go to Pilgrim Holiness and have someone there ring the bell. "Your mother wants someone to ring a bell over her," his father said. Anders rubbed the smoke and soot out of his eyes and his father gave him half a potato, the edges of it rotten, and told him to eat the potato and a heel of bread also so that he would have strength to reach the church on the its high hill. Anders went outside and was surprised at the warmth of the sun for it seemed that he had been in a place for a long time where it was very cold. Then, he went quickly across the fields and found the track made by wagon wheels in the sod and hurried along that way until he came to the church, bleached and white as bones on the hillside. There was an old man inside the church praying and Anders said that his mother was very ill and that she desired to hear the church bell sounding in the sky and so the man climbed a ladder until he was out of sight except for his boots and Anders looked up at this boots and saw that they were quite worn and the sole split so that he wondered if the locusts had gnawed on the shoe-leather just like they had gnawed on everything else, and, then, the bell boomed overhead, a brazen voice barking out its command across the land, the rolling thunder of the cannonade – maybe, this was a dream, perhaps, he had not gone to the church at all because it seemed that would have been a long and hard walk over confusing paths and Anders couldn’t recall any incidents along the way either coming or going – maybe, an angel had carried him or he had ridden an Indian pony or traveled by dog-travois, he just couldn’t remember. And, then, he was back at the cabin and his father was standing in dooryard next to the lilac bushes that his mother had so loved and that the grasshoppers had eaten to naked twigs and some Indians were parleying with him. Anders asked about his mother, but his father merely looked at him as if he had gone deaf and could not hear what he said.

"Did you hear the bell tolling?" Anders asked.

His father shook his head, but Anders didn’t know if his gesture meant "yes"or "no." Then, his father said that he was going to the gold and silver camps at Pactola Creek or Deadwood Gulch and that, when he had staked his claim and was on his feet again, he would return to this country and seek out the Indians so that father and son would be reunited. Then, he and the Indians parleyed some more and, one of the Indians gave his father, a sack of meal and a half-dozen apples, and his father handed the Indian his shotgun and let them go into the house so that they returned, blinking in the bright sunlight, with some blankets and the cast-iron cauldron hanging over the ashes in the fireplace. Anders, then, went inside to look for his mother but she wasn’t there. So he came outside and began to cry and one of the Indians took him by the hand and led him away from the house and, when he stood on the high slope overlooking the little valley, Anders could see his father on the hillside opposite to them, leading a mule that one of the Indians had given him and, although Anders waved at his father, the figure on the brown hillside pretended not to see him and, then, turning its back and tugging at the mule went away...

This was something Anders remembered as if it were happening at that very moment and he let out a little cry as he saw his father vanish in the distance and it made his head hurt so much to think about this that he went to the corral where the horses were standing and looked into their kindly eyes for a long time and, then, the dogs began to bark once more and the smoke leaked upward from the lodges and he could smell meat and corn roasting and the girls were going to the creek for water and, although fetching water was not man’s work, he joined them nonetheless so that he would not feel so lonely.

　

　

　

13.

The valley was a sandy cove from which the waters had retreated. The earth was furrowed, scuffed, lacerated, torn to its integument of stones standing exposed in the fields. A mush of dead insects lined the ruts on the track that the soldiers rode through the ruined land. At the head of the valley, the soil spurted upward, black and grey swirling over a tiny orange tongue of flame. The puff of earth thrown into the air made a smooth round dome, then, it crumpled, collapsing back like a balloon that has been deflated or a tent knocked down in a storm. A moment later, the heavy boom of the explosive charge reached them and George’s pony started, rearing up for an instant, ears flattened against its skull and eyes flashing white around their dark edges. Lieutenant Williams and Private Anderson leaned forward on their mounts, bearing down to squeeze their horses between their thighs. There was another flash, a tongue of fire flickering, and the earth flung up in complete silence at this distance, then, the sullen report of the explosion echoing between the barren and stony hills rimming the valley.

Some rude structures were cut into the dirt bank ahead of them, where the valley ended in a palisade of naked, burnt-looking trees. On a slant terrace of exposed rose-colored granite, some ragged people were sitting. Voices sounded, singing, perhaps, an inarticulate sound that was more like the rumor of words, then, words themselves. The troopers saw an odd-looking harrow yoked to a scrawny, bewildered steer. Two other cows were hitched to a wagon that seemed to be in desperate disrepair, its wheels about to fall off into the furrows plowed in the little field that was spread out like a fan in front of the homestead.

George raised his hands in a greeting. A half-naked man was squatting over a fuse. He triggered another explosion and, now, they were close enough to the field that the blast and its roar were, more or less, simultaneous.

The ragged people perched on the tablet of rose-colored stone were children. A girl who seemed to be about ten was singing in a high-pitched voice, off-key but close enough to the tune that troopers recognized the melody. A smaller girl and little boy with a filthy face and hands were struggling to keep up with her, adding their voices to the song. The little boy saw the horseman first and he rose and pointed and, then, his older sister, pausing in the tune for a beat, waved her hand, as well in the direction of the riders. The half-naked man stood up and turned to see the three riders approaching – his face was vivid with strong emotion that made his lips twist this way and that and caused a tic to flutter in his left eye.

"Dynamite?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"Yes sir," the man said. "Left over from the mines at Deadwood Gulch."

"What are you blasting?" Private Anderson asked.

"Egg bed," the man said, squinting at them and, then, flexing his lips in a semblance of a smile.

His breast was bare and his shirt was shredded, hanging in ribbons against his bony torso. One of his legs was bare to the thigh, his pants split over his other knee and hanging down in rags. Bristly cockleburs were caught in the frayed end of the trouser leg danging in shreds over his ankle. Boots without stockings covered his feet and, when he turned around, the horsemen saw that his buttocks were mostly bare.

The man scratched at the earth underfoot and, then, lifted a handful of soil. Lieutenant Williams dismounted and looked at the dirt cupped in the man’s palm. The soil was speckled with pearl-white particles, sleek and glistening clutches of tiny oval eggs. Some of the eggs were entangled in translucent filaments of pale mucous, ruptured tubes with eggs clinging to them like clusters of pale and minute grapes.

"There are a hundred eggs in every tablespoon of soil," the man said. A tremor distorted his lips and made his nose twitch. "When they hatch, the ground will seethe with them. The soil will move like a sea that’s troubled by waves."

"What can you do?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"Dynamite the egg-beds," the man said. "I’m applying high-explosive, very systematically, eradicating the field and, then, what I miss –"

He gestured to the harrow, a plowshare-blade dipped in some kind of adhesive grease. Lieutenant Williams smelled the sulphurous stench of burnt gun-cotton and cordite from the explosions. The harrow had an odor that was hot and medicinal like burning tar.

"We plow them up onto the harrow and, then, sweep them back into the box," the man said.

Private Anderson had also dismounted and was inspecting the peculiarly shaped plowshare and the steel trough behind it, painted with thick gobbets of coal-tar. Eggs were embedded in the coal tar, and the trough glistened moon-white with them. He looked away from the wedge-shaped plow and saw the upturned furrows where the earth had been cut and, kneeling, Private Anderson, groped in the moist soil and smelled the fumes of rot and musk that it exhaled and his fingers came away from the dirt dripping with the egg capsules and their tiny cyclone-shaped mucous sacs. He stood and shuddered, wiping his hands on his trousers, and the earth underfoot seemed to writhe for a moment, seem unsteady so that he staggered a bit as he walked back toward the plow and the miserable-looking steer hitched to that ironmongery.

"Can you get enough of them?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"I don’t know," the man said.

George’s horse whinnied. The storm was approaching and they could see the darkness dragged across the land toward them.

The wind switched directions and came cold and hard from the skirts of black cloud.

"You must be freezing," Lieutenant Williams said to the man.

"I’m like your face in the winter," the man said. "You go out in the blizzard with your face uncovered. Well, now I’m all face." He grinned.

The children sitting on the ledge of pink rock shouted something.

Private Anderson saw that the steer yoked to the locust-harrow had mud caked on its flank, a thick smear of mud as if someone had plastered the side of the animal with wet clay. A few yards away, the two other steers stood exhausted, shoulders scabby with fly-bites and ribs showing through the filth clotting their hide, and Anderson saw that those animals also had a paste of wet clay obscuring their flanks, applied, it seemed, like a kind of paint.

"Ask him where he got the oxen," Private Anderson said to Lieutenant Williams. "They don’t seem quite broke to the yoke yet."

Lieutenant Williams nodded to Anderson. He looked at the man in his clownish rags.

"How can you get them all?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"With God’s help and enough dynamite, I can save my stake," the man said.

"But you’re starving," Lieutenant Williams said. "And the children are starving."

"I’m not gonna be driven from my land by a mob of grasshoppers," the man said. "I will stay here and fight them as long as I have any strength left in my body."

The oldest girl said: "Ask them for some biscuits or flour, pa."

Private Anderson bent over to inspect the smear of dirt on the steers hitched to the wagon. The animals looked at him impassively, too weak to take much notice of him.

George said: "The storm is here." Something white was carried on black wind pouring out of the bruised-colored cloud.

The children commenced to singing again:


The shanghai ran off and the cattle all died,

That morning the last piece of bacon was fried,

Poor Ike was discouraged and Betsy got mad,

The dog drooped his tail and looked wondrous sad.
Then, the children made wordless sounds, like roosters crowing, a strangled singing tight in their throats: it was a refrain in which words were gargled smooth as driftwood on the edge of the sea.

"It’s coming," George cried and he leaped from his horse and knelt beside the animal as if to make himself as small as possible.

The children screamed and spun in circles clutching one another and, then, they fell to the ground, crawling under the old wagon where they huddled together howling. Lieutenant Williams felt ice on his forehead. The air was full of spikes and needles. Anderson’s horse charged away from him and ran in circles, maddened by the clattering chaos in the air. He staggered toward the wagon where the steers were rearing and snorting. If the oxen ran wild, perhaps, they would overturn the wagon or drag it unsteadily forward so that its heavy, iron-rimmed wheels would wound the children. The steer leaned against the harrow and dragged it bouncing over the half-plowed field. The ragged man stood hatless and upright, defying the storm.

The field filled with white. The children’s screams were high-pitched, whistling and piping sounds like dying rabbits. Then, the hail stopped and the rain fell in a great gush from the sky.

"It’s just rain, just rain," the man cried. His forehead was slashed by the hail and a trickle of blood ran down his cheek until it was washed away by the downpour. The gullies above the fields roared with water.

Private Anderson bent forward to examine the flanks of the cows yoked to the wagon. Hailstones caught in the brim of his hat cascaded down before his eyes as he bent to look at the brand marks on the steers, exposed now by the jets of rain bathing the animals.

The children came out from under the wagon to dance in the rain splashing around them. The horses that had fled during the first blast of hail came cautiously back toward the plowed field. The white pellets underfoot were melting, dissolving into the soil already veined with pearly eggs of the locusts.

After a while, the rain stopped. A ray of sun zigzagged down between the frothy storm clouds. The children and their father sat on the pink slab of wet granite. The moisture on the stone glistened in the sunbeams and Lieutenant Williams saw that there were faint marks pecked into the rock, tiny figures with atlatl spears and horseshoe-shaped emblems, concentric circles with arrows chipped into the hard crystal.

The soldiers unloaded from the packs on their horses their remaining provisions and left them for the man and his family.

As they road out of the valley, George said coughed and said: "You see, it wasn’t my kin involved in rustling those cattle."

"Your right," Lieutenant Williams told him.

"George is always right," Private Anderson said.

The horses seemed to know the way back over the open land to the fort.

"The rain washed off the mud and you could see the government brand," Private Anderson said.

"It’s a big country to be looking for three strayed beef-cows," Lieutenant Williams said.

"A mighty big country," Private Anderson repeated.

"Pretty much like looking for a needle in a haystack," Lieutenant Williams said.