Cormac Mccarthy - The Blood Meridian.pdf

BLOOD MERIDIAN OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST CORMAC McCARTHY Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author wishes to t...

BLOOD MERIDIAN OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST CORMAC McCARTHY Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author wishes to thank the Lyndhurst Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also wishes to express his appreciation to Albert Erskine, his editor of twenty years. Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irre춖istible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time. paul?valery It is not to be thought that the life of dark춏ess is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow춊ng. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness. JACOB젨?BOEHME Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 3OO,ooo-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped. THE?YUMA?DAILY?SUN June 13,1982 I Childhood in Tennessee - Runs away - New Orleans - Fights - Is shot - To Galveston - Nacogdoches - The Reverend Green - Judge Holden - An affray - Toadvine - Burning of the hotel - Escape. See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him. Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove. The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night. A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated. On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After a while he sits in the floor. He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas. Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall. Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells. They disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low coastline, the thin bight of sand and scrub pine swimming in the haze. He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat. Earthen causeways across the marsh춍and. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles among the moss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leaves lope by the roadside and skelter on in the night fields. He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope while urine darkens his trousers. He works in a sawmill, he works in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and forty-nine he rides up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches. The Reverend Green had been playing to a full house daily as long as the rain had been falling and the rain had been falling for two weeks. When the kid ducked into the ratty canvas tent there was standing room along the walls, a place or two, and such a heady reek of the wet and bathless that they themselves would sally forth into the downpour now and again for fresh air before the rain drove them in again. He stood with others of his kind along the back wall. The only thing that might have distinguished him in that crowd was that he was not armed. Neighbors, said the reverend, he couldnt stay out of these here hell, hell, hellholes right here in Nacogdoches. I said to him, said: You goin to take the son of God in there with ye? And he said: Oh no. No I aint. And I said: Dont you know that he said I will foller ye always even unto the end of the road? Well, he said, I aint askin nobody to go nowheres. And I said: Neighbor, you dont need to ask. He's a goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye dont. I said: Neigh춂or, you caint get shed of him. Now. Are you going to drag him, him, into that hellhole yonder? You ever see such a place for rain? The kid had been watching the reverend. He turned to the man who spoke. He wore long moustaches after the fashion of teamsters and he wore a widebrim hat with a low round crown. He was slightly walleyed and he was watching the kid earnestly as if he'd know his opinion about the rain. I just got here, said the kid. Well it beats all I ever seen. The kid nodded. An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again. The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound in the tent. All watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the reverend's congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were small. He held them out. Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible. On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years뾋 said eleven뾵ho had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God. A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees. This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands. Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear. Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat. Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistol from his boot he leveled it and fired. The young teamster instantly produced a knife from his cloth춊ng and unseamed the tent and stepped outside into the rain. The kid followed. They ducked low and ran across the mud toward the hotel. Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud. The kid and his friend reached the hotel gallery and wiped the water from their eyes and turned to watch. As they did so the tent began to sway and buckle and like a huge and wounded medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes over the ground. The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered. On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and nodded. These here is on the judge, he said. They drank. The teamster set his glass down and looked at the kid or he seemed to, you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood. The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came just to the judge's waist and he stood with his hands placed flatwise on the wood, leaning slightly, as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse was being drawn to pursue the preacher. Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account? Goods? said the judge. When was you in Fort Smith? Fort Smith? Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him? You mean the Reverend Green? Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here. I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was. They looked from one to the other. Well where was it you run up on him? I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank. There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink. It had been raining for sixteen days when he met Toadvine and it was raining yet. He was still standing in the same saloon and he had drunk up all his money save two dollars. The teamster had gone, the room was all but empty. The door stood open and you could see the rain falling in the empty lot behind the hotel. He drained his glass and went out. There were boards laid across the mud and he followed the paling band of doorlight down toward the batboard jakes at the bottom of the lot. Another man was coming up from the jakes and they met halfway on the narrow planks. The man before him swayed slightly. His wet hatbrim fell to his shoulders save in the front where it was pinned back. He held a bottle loosely in one hand. You better get out of my way, he said. The kid wasnt going to do that and he saw no use in discuss춊ng it. He kicked the man in the jaw. The man went down and got up again. He said: I'm goin to kill you. He swung with the bottle and the kid ducked and he swung again and the kid stepped back. When the kid hit him the man shattered the bottle against the side of his head. He went off the boards into the mud and the man lunged after him with the jagged bottleneck and tried to stick it in his eye. The kid was fending with his hands and they were slick with blood. He kept trying to reach into his boot for his knife. Kill your ass, the man said. They slogged about in the dark of the lot, coming out of their boots. The kid had his knife now and they circled crabwise and when the man lurched at him he cut the man's shirt open. The man threw down the bottleneck and unsheathed an immense bowieknife from behind his neck. His hat had come off and his black and ropy locks swung about his head and he had codified his threats to the one word kill like a crazed chant. That'ns cut, said one of several men standing along the walk춛ay watching. Kill kill slobbered the man wading forward. But someone else was coming down the lot, great steady suck춊ng sounds like a cow. He was carrying a huge shellalegh. He reached the kid first and when he swung with the club the kid went face down in the mud. He'd have died if someone hadn't turned him over. When he woke it was daylight and the rain had stopped and he was looking up into the face of a man with long hair who was completely covered in mud. The man was saying something to him. What? said the kid. I said are you quits? Quits? Quits. Cause if you want some more of me you sure as hell goin to get it. He looked at the sky. Very high, very small, a buzzard. He looked at the man. Is my neck broke? he said. The man looked out over the lot and spat and looked at the boy again. Can you not get up? I dont know. I aint tried. I never meant to break your neck. No. I meant to kill ye. They aint nobody done it yet. He clawed at the mud and pushed himself up. The man was sitting on the planks with his boots alongside him. They aint nothin wrong with you, he said. The kid looked about stiffly at the day. Where's my boots? he said. The man squinted at him. Flakes of dried mud fell from his face. I'm goin to have to kill some son of a bitch if they got my boots. Yonder looks like one of em. The kid labored off through the mud and fetched up one boot. He slogged about in the yard feeling likely lumps of mud. This your knife? he said. The man squinted at him. Looks like it, he said. The kid pitched it to him and he bent and picked it up and wiped the huge blade on his trouserleg. Thought somebody'd done stole you, he told the knife. The kid found his other boot and came and sat on the boards. His hands were huge with mud and he wiped one of them briefly at his knee and let it fall again. They sat there side by side looking out across the barren lot. There was a picket fence at the edge of the lot and beyond the fence a boy was drawing water at a well and there were chickens in the yard there. A man came from the dramshop door down the walk toward the outhouse. He stopped where they sat and looked at them and then stepped off into the mud. After a while he came back and stepped off into the mud again and went around and on up the walk. The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears. He stood up and sheathed the knife and started up the walk with the boots in his hand and the kid rose and followed. Halfway to the hotel the man stopped and looked out at the mud and then sat down on the planks and pulled on the boots mud and all. Then he rose and slogged off through the lot to pick something up. I want you to look here, he said. At my goddamned hat. You couldnt tell what it was, something dead. He flapped it about and pulled it over his head and went on and the kid followed. The dramhouse was a long narrow hall wainscotted with varnished boards. There were tables by the wall and spittoons on the floor. There were no patrons. The barman looked up when they entered and a nigger that had been sweeping the floor stood the broom against the wall and went out. Where's Sidney? said the man in his suit of mud. In the bed I reckon. They went on. Toadvine, called the barman. The kid looked back. The barman had come from behind the bar and was looking after them. They crossed from the door through the lobby of the hotel toward the stairs leaving varied forms of mud behind them on the floor. As they started up the stairs the clerk at the desk leaned and called to them. Toadvine. He stopped and looked back. He'll shoot you. Old Sidney? Old Sidney. They went on up the stairs. At the top of the landing was a long hall with a windowlight at the end. There were varnished doors down the walls set so close they might have been closets. Toadvine went on until he came to the end of the hall. He listened at the last door and he eyed the kid. You got a match? The kid searched his pockets and came up with a crushed and stained wooden box. The man took it from him. Need a little tinder here, he said. He was crumbling the box and stacking the bits against the door. He struck a match and set the pieces alight. He pushed the little pile of burning wood under the door and added more matches. Is he in there? said the boy. That's what we're fixin to see. A dark curl of smoke rose, a blue flame of burning varnish. They squatted in the hallway and watched. Thin flames began to run up over the panels and dart back again. The watchers looked like forms excavated from a bog. Tap on the door now, said Toadvine. The kid rose. Toadvine stood up and waited. They could hear the flames crackling inside the room. The kid tapped. You better tap louder than that. This man drinks some. He balled his fist and lambasted the door about five times. Hell fire, said a voice. Here he comes. They waited. You hot son of a bitch, said the voice. Then the knob turned and the door opened. He stood in his underwear holding in one hand the towel he'd used to turn the doorknob with. When he saw them he turned and started back into the room but Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it. Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it. The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face. Toadvine held his head back by the hair. Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey. He kicked. Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door was com춑letely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time. Toadvine you son of a bitch, he said. Toadvine was four steps above him and when he kicked him he caught him in the throat. The clerk sat down on the stairs. When the kid came past he hit him in the side of the head and the clerk slumped over and began to slide toward the landing. The kid stepped over him and went down to the lobby and crossed to the front door and out. Toadvine was running down the street, waving his fists above his head crazily and laughing. He looked like a great clay voodoo doll made animate and the kid looked like another. Behind them flames were licking at the top corner of the hotel and clouds of dark smoke rose into the warm Texas morning. He'd left the mule with a Mexican family that boarded animals at the edge of town and he arrived there wildlooking and out of breath. The woman opened the door and looked at him. Need to get my mule, he wheezed. She looked at him some more, then she called toward the back of the house. He walked around. There were horses tethered in the lot and there was a flatbed wagon against the fence with some turkeys sitting on the edge looking out. The old lady had come to the back door. Nito, she called. Venga. Hay un caballero aquf. Venga. He went down the shed to the tackroom and got his wretched saddle and his blanketroll and brought them back. He found the mule and unstalled it and bridled it with the rawhide hacka-more and led it to the fence. He leaned against the animal with his shoulder and got the saddle over it and got it cinched, the mule starting and shying and running its head along the fence. He led it across the lot. The mule kept shaking its head sideways as if it had something in its ear. He led it out to the road. As he passed the house the woman came padding out after him. When she saw him put his foot in the stirrup she began to run. He swung up into the broken saddle and chucked the mule forward. She stopped at the gate and watched him go. He didnt look back. When he passed back through the town the hotel was burning and men were standing around watching it, some holding empty buckets. A few men sat horseback watching the flames and one of these was the judge. As the kid rode past the judge turned and watched him. He turned the horse, as if he'd have the animal watch too. When the kid looked back the judge smiled. The kid touched up the mule and they went sucking out past the old stone fort along the road west. II Across the prairie - A hermit - A nigger's heart - A stormy night - Westward again - Cattle drovers - Their kindness - On the trail again - The deadcart - San Antonio de Bexar - A Mexican cantina - Another fight - The abandoned church - The dead in the sacristy - At the ford - Bathing in the river. Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him be춞 ond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. He keeps from off the king's road for fear of citizenry. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in a grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him. He wears on his head a hat he's made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he'd used to frighten birds. Come evening he tracks a spire of smoke rising oblique from among the low hills and before dark he hails up at the doorway of an old anchorite nested away in the sod like a groundsloth. Solitary, half mad, his eyes redrimmed as if locked in their cages with hot wires. But a ponderable body for that. He watched wordless while the kid eased down stiffly from the mule. A rough wind was blowing and his rags flapped about him. Seen ye smoke, said the kid. Thought you might spare a man a sup of water. The old hermit scratched in his filthy hair and looked at the ground. He turned and entered the hut and the kid followed. Inside darkness and a smell of earth. A small fire burned on the dirt floor and the only furnishings were a pile of hides in one corner. The old man shuffled through the gloom, his head bent to clear the low ceiling of woven limbs and mud. He pointed down to where a bucket stood in the dirt. The kid bent and took up the gourd floating there and dipped and drank. The water was salty, sulphurous. He drank on. You reckon I could water my old mule out there? The old man began to beat his palm with one fist and dart his eyes about. Be proud to fetch in some fresh. Just tell me where it's at. What ye aim to water him with? The kid looked at the bucket and he looked around in the dim hut. I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin? No, cried the hermit. No. I aint. He was clapping the heels of his clenched fists together at his chest. The kid rose and looked toward the door. Ill find somethin, he said. Where's the well at? Up the hill, foller the path. It's nigh too dark to see out here. It's a deep path. Foller ye feet. Foller ye mule. I caint go. He stepped out into the wind and looked about for the mule but the mule wasnt there. Far to the south lightning flared sound춍essly. He went up the path among the thrashing weeds and found the mule standing at the well. A hole in the sand with rocks piled about it. A piece of dry hide for a cover and a stone to weight it down. There was a rawhide bucket with a rawhide bail and a rope of greasy leather. The bucket had a rock tied to the bail to help it tip and fill and he lowered it until the rope in his hand went slack while the mule watched over his shoulder. He drew up three bucketfuls and held them so the mule would not spill them and then he put the cover back over the well and led the mule back down the path to the hut. I thank ye for the water, he called. The hermit appeared darkly in the door. Just stay with me, he said. That's all right. Best stay. It's fixin to storm. You reckon? I reckon and I reckon right. Well. Bring ye bed. Bring ye possibles. He uncinched and threw down the saddle and hobbled the mule foreleg to rear and took his bedroll in. There was no light save the fire and the old man was squatting by it tailorwise. Anywheres, anywheres, he said. Where's ye saddle at? The kid gestured with his chin. Dont leave it out yonder somethinll eat it. This is a hungry country. He went out and ran into the mule in the dark. It had been standing looking in at the fire. Get away, fool, he said. He took up the saddle and went back in. Now pull that door to fore we blow away, said the old man. The door was a mass of planks on leather hinges. He dragged it across the dirt and fastened it by its leather latch. I take it ye lost your way, said the hermit. No, I went right to it. He waved quickly with his hand, the old man. No, no, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here. Was they a sandstorm? Did ye drift off the road in the night? Did thieves beset ye? The kid pondered this. Yes, he said젨 We got off the road someways or another. Knowed ye did. How long you been out here? Out where? The kid was sitting on his blanketroll across the fire from the old man. Here, he said. In this place. The old man didnt answer. He turned his head suddenly aside and seized his nose between his thumb and forefinger and blew twin strings of snot onto the floor and wiped his fingers on the seam of his jeans. I come from Mississippi. I was a slaver, dont care to tell it. Made good money. I never did get caught. Just got sick of it. Sick of niggers. Wait till I show ye somethin. He turned and rummaged among the hides and handed through the flames a small dark thing. The kid turned it in his hand. Some man's heart, dried and blackened. He passed it back and the old man cradled it in his palm as if he'd weigh it. They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers. They sat in silence. The wind moaned in the section of stove춑ipe that was run through the roof above them to quit the place of smoke. After a while the old man put the heart away. That thing costed me two hundred dollars, he said. You give two hundred dollars for it? I did, for that was the price they put on the black son of a bitch it hung inside of. He stirred about in the corner and came up with an old dark brass kettle, lifted the cover and poked inside with one finger. The remains of one of the lank prairie hares interred in cold grease and furred with a light blue mold. He clamped the lid back on the kettle and set it in the flames. Aint much but we'll go shares, he said. I thank ye. Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didnt answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he? I dont believe he much had me in mind. Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better? I can think of better places and better ways. Can ye make it be? No. No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that? I dont know. Believe that. When the old man's mess was warmed he doled it out and they ate in silence. Thunder was moving north and before long it was booming overhead and starting bits of rust in a thin trickle down the stovepipe. They hunkered over their plates and wiped the grease up with their fingers and drank from the gourd. The kid went out and scoured his cup and plate in the sand and came back banging the tins together as if to fend away some drygulch phantom out there in the dark. Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again. The old man sat with one ear cocked to the howling waste without. The kid shut the door. Dont have no bacca with ye do ye? No I aint, said the kid. Didnt allow ye did. You reckon it'll rain? It's got ever opportunity. Likely it wont. The kid watched the fire. Already he was nodding. Finally he raised up and shook his head. The hermit watched him over the dying flames. Just go on and fix ye bed, he said. He did. Spreading his blankets on the packed mud and pulling off his stinking boots. The fluepipe moaned and he heard the mule stamp and snuffle outside and in his sleep he struggled and muttered like a dreaming dog. He woke sometime in the night with the hut in almost total darkness and the hermit bent over him and all but in his bed. What do you want? he said. But the hermit crawled away and in the morning when he woke the hut was empty and he got his things and left. All that day he watched to the north a thin line of dust. It seemed not to move at all and it was late evening before he could see that it was headed his way. He passed through a forest of live oak and he watered at a stream and moved on in the dusk and made a fireless camp. Birds woke him where he lay in a dry and dusty wood. By noon he was on the prairie again and the dust to the north was stretched out along the edge of the earth. By evening the first of a drove of cattle came into view. Rangy vicious beasts with enormous hornspreads. That night he sat in the herders' camp and ate beans and pilotbread and heard of life on the trail. They were coming down from Abilene, forty days out, headed for the markets in Louisiana. Followed by packs of wolves, coyotes, indians. Cattle groaned about them for miles in the dark. They asked him no questions, a ragged lot themselves. Cross춂reeds some, free niggers, an indian or two. I had my outfit stole, he said. They nodded in the firelight. They got everthing I had. I aint even got a knife. You might could sign on with us. We lost two men. Turned back to go to Californy. I'm headed yon way. I guess you might be goin to Californy ye own self. I might. I aint decided. Them boys was with us fell in with a bunch from Arkansas. They was headed down for Bexar. Goin to pull for Mexico and the west. I'll bet them old boys is in Bexar drinkin they brains out. I'll bet old Lonnie's done topped ever whore in town. How far is it to Bexar? It's about two days. It's furthern that. More like four I'd say. How would a man go if he'd a mind to? You cut straight south you ought to hit the road about half a day. You going to Bexar? I might do. You see old Lonnie down there you tell him get a piece for me. Tell him old Oren. He'll buy ye a drink if he aint blowed all his money in. In the morning they ate flapjacks with molasses and the herders saddled up and moved on. When he found his mule there was a small fibre bag tied to the animal's rope and inside the bag there was a cupful of dried beans and some peppers and an old greenriver knife with a handle made of string. He saddled up the mule, the mule's back galled and balding, the hooves cracked. The ribs like fishbones. They hobbled on across the endless plain. He came upon Bexar in the evening of the fourth day and he sat the tattered mule on a low rise and looked down at the town, the quiet adobe houses, the line of green oaks and cottonwoods that marked the course of the river, the plaza filled with wagons with their osnaburg covers and the whitewashed public buildings and the Moorish churchdome rising from the trees and the garrison and the tall stone powderhouse in the distance. A light breeze stirred the fronds of his hat, his matted greasy hair. His eyes lay dark and tunneled in a caved and haunted face and a foul stench rose from the wells of his boot tops. The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end. He spat a dry white spit and clumped the cracked wooden stirrups against the mule's ribs and they staggered into motion again. He went down a narrow sandy road and as he went he met a deadcart bound out with a load of corpses, a small bell tolling the way and a lantern swinging from the gate. Three men sat on the box not unlike the dead themselves or spirit folk so white they were with lime and nearly phosphorescent in the dusk. A pair of horses drew the cart and they went on up the road in a faint miasma of carbolic and passed from sight. He turned and watched them go. The naked feet of the dead jostled stiffly from side to side. It was dark when he entered the town, attended by barking dogs, faces parting the curtains in the lamplit windows. The light clatter of the mule's hooves echoing in the little empty streets. The mule sniffed the air and swung down an alleyway into a square where there stood in the starlight a well, a trough, a hitchingrail. The kid eased himself down and took the bucket from the stone coping and lowered it into the well. A light splash echoed. He drew the bucket, water dripping in the dark. He dipped the gourd and drank and the mule nuzzled his elbow. When he'd done he set the bucket in the street and sat on the coping of the well and watched the mule drink from the bucket. He went on through the town leading the animal. There was no one about. By and by he entered a plaza and he could hear guitars and a horn. At the far end of the square there were lights from a cafe and laughter and highpitched cries. He led the mule into the square and up the far side past a long portico toward the lights. There was a team of dancers in the street and they wore gaudy costumes and called out in Spanish. He and the mule stood at the edge of the lights and watched. Old men sat along the tavern wall and children played in the dust. They wore strange costumes all, the men in dark flatcrowned hats, white nightshirts, trousers that buttoned up the outside leg and the girls with garish painted faces and tortoiseshell combs in their blueblack hair. The kid crossed the street with the mule and tied it and entered the cafe. A number of men were standing at the bar and they quit talking when he entered. He crossed the polished clay floor past a sleeping dog that opened one eye and looked at him and he stood at the bar and placed both hands on the tiles. The barman nodded to him. Digame, he said. I aint got no money but I need a drink. I'll fetch out the slops or mop the floor or whatever. The barman looked across the room to where two men were playing dominoes at a table. Abuelito, he said. The older of the two raised his head. Que dice el muchacho. The old man looked at the kid and turned back to his dominoes. The barman shrugged his shoulders. The kid turned to the old man. You speak american? he said. The old man looked up from his play. He regarded the kid without expression. Tell him I'll work for a drink. I aint got no money. The old man thrust his chin and made a clucking noise with his tongue. The kid looked at the barman. The old man made a fist with the thumb pointing up and the little finger down and tilted his head back and tipped a phantom drink down his throat. Quiere hecharse una copa, he said. Pero no puede pagar. The men at the bar watched. The barman looked at the kid. Quiere trabajo, said the old man. Quien sabe. He turned back to his pieces and made his play without further consultation. Quieres trabajar, said one of the men at the bar. They began to laugh. What are you laughing at? said the boy. They stopped. Some looked at him, some pursed their mouths or shrugged. The boy turned to the bartender. You got something I could do for a couple of drinks I know damn good and well. One of the men at the bar said something in Spanish. The boy glared at them. They winked one to the other, they took up their glasses. He turned to the barman again. His eyes were dark and narrow. Sweep the floor, he said. The barman blinked. The kid stepped back and made sweeping motions, a panto춎ime that bent the drinkers in silent mirth. Sweep, he said, pointing at the floor. No esta sucio, said the barman. He swept again. Sweep, goddamnit, he said. The barman shrugged. He went to the end of the bar and got a broom and brought it back. The boy took it and went on to the back of the room. A great hall of a place. He swept in the corners where potted trees stood silent in the dark. He swept around the spittoons and he swept around the players at the table and he swept around the dog. He swept along the front of the bar and when he reached the place where the drinkers stood he straightened up and leaned on the broom and looked at them. They conferred silently among themselves and at last one took his glass from the bar and stepped away. The others followed. The kid swept past them to the door. The dancers had gone, the music. Across the street sat a man on a bench dimly lit in the doorlight from the cafe. The mule stood where he'd tied it. He tapped the broom on the steps and came back in and took the broom to the corner where the barman had gotten it. Then he came to the bar and stood. The barman ignored him. The kid rapped with his knuckles. The barman turned and put one hand on his hip and pursed his lips. How about that drink now, said the kid. The barman stood. The kid made the drinking motions that the old man had made and the barman flapped his towel idly at him. Andale, he said. He made a shooing motion with the back of his hand. The kid's face clouded. You son of a bitch, he said. He started down the bar. The barman's expression did not change. He brought up from under the bar an oldfashioned military pistol with a flint lock and shoved back the cock with the heel of his hand. A great wooden clicking in the silence. A clicking of glasses all down the bar. Then the scuffling of chairs pushed back by the players at the wall. The kid froze. Old man, he said. The old man didnt answer. There was no sound in the cafe. The kid turned to find him with his eyes. Esta borracho, said the old man. The boy watched the barman's eyes. The barman waved the pistol toward the door. The old man spoke to the room in Spanish. Then he spoke to the barman. Then he put on his hat and went out. The barman's face drained. When he came around the end of the bar he had laid down the pistol and he was carrying a bung-starter in one hand. The kid backed to the center of the room and the barman labored over the floor toward him like a man on his way to some chore. He swung twice at the kid and the kid stepped twice to the right. Then he stepped backward. The barman froze. The kid boosted himself lightly over the bar and picked up the pistol. No one moved. He raked the frizzen open against the bartop and dumped the priming out and laid the pistol down again. Then he selected a pair of full bottles from the shelves behind him and came around the end of the bar with one in each hand. The barman stood in the center of the room. He was breathing heavily and he turned, following the kid's movements. When the kid approached him he raised the bungstarter. The kid crouched lightly with the bottles and feinted and then broke the right one over the man's head. Blood and liquor sprayed and the man's knees buckled and his eyes rolled. The kid had already let go the bottleneck and he pitched the second bottle into his right hand in a roadagent's pass before it even reached the floor and he backhanded the second bottle across the barman's skull and crammed the jagged remnant into his eye as he went down. The kid looked around the room. Some of those men wore pistols in their belts but none moved. The kid vaulted the bar and took another bottle and tucked it under his arm and walked out the door. The dog was gone. The man on the bench was gone too. He untied the mule and led it across the square. He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescos. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel. His head was in torment and his tongue swollen with thirst. He sat up and looked around him. He'd put the bottle under his saddle and he found it and held it up and shook it and drew the cork and drank. He sat with his eyes closed, the sweat beaded on his forehead. Then he opened his eyes and drank again. The buzzards stepped down one by one and trotted off into the sacristy. After a while he rose and went out to look for the mule. It was nowhere in sight. The mission occupied eight or ten ares of enclosed land, a barren purlieu that held a few goats and burros. In the mud walls of the enclosure were cribs inhabited by families of squatters and a few cookfires smoked thinly in the sun. He walked around the side of the church and entered the sacristy. Buzzards shuffled off through the chaff and plaster like enormous yardfowl. The domed vaults overhead were clotted with a dark furred mass that shifted and breathed and chittered. In the room was a wooden table with a few clay pots and along the back wall lay the remains of several bodies, one a child. He went on through the sacristy into the church again and got his saddle. He drank the rest of the bottle and he put the saddle on his shoulder and went out. The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone. The huge carved and paneled doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held in her arms a headless child. He stood blinking in the noon heat. Then he saw the mule's tracks. They were just the palest disturbance of the dust and they came out of the door of the church and crossed the lot to the gate in the east wall. He hiked the saddle higher onto his shoulder and set out after them. A dog in the shade of the portal rose and lurched sullenly out into the sun until he had passed and then lurched back. He took the road down the hill toward the river, a ragged figure enough. He entered a deep wood of pecan and oak and the road took a rise and he could see the river below him. Blacks were washing a carriage in the ford and he went down the hill and stood at the edge of the water and after a while he called out to them. They were sopping water over the black lacquerwork and one of them raised up and turned to look at him. The horses stood to their knees in the current. What? called the black. Have you seen a mule. Mule? I lost a mule. I think he come this way. The black wiped his face with the back of his arm. Somethin come down the road about a hour back. I think it went down the river yonder. It might of been a mule. It didnt have no tail nor no hair to speak of but it did have long ears. The other two blacks grinned. The kid looked off down the river. He spat and set off along the path through the willows and swales of grass. He found it about a hundred yards downriver. It was wet to its belly and it looked up at him and then lowered its head again into the lush river grass. He threw down the saddle and took up the trailing rope and tied the animal to a limb and kicked it halfheartedly. It shifted slightly to the side and continued to graze. He reached atop his head but he had lost the crazy hat somewhere. He made his way down through the trees and stood looking at the cold swirling waters. Then he waded out into the river like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate. III Sought out to join an army - Interview with Captain White ? His views - The camp - Trades his mule - A cantina in the Laredito - A Mennonite - Companion killed. He was lying naked under the trees with his rags spread across the limbs above him when another rider going down the river reined up and stopped. He turned his head. Through the willows he could see the legs of the horse. He rolled over on his stomach. The man got down and stood beside the horse. He reached and got his twinehandled knife. Howdy there, said the rider. He didnt answer. He moved to the side to see better through, the branches. Howdy there. Where ye at? What do you want? Wanted to talk to ye. What about? Hell fire, come on out. I'm white and Christian. The kid was reaching up through the willows trying to get his breeches. The belt was hanging down and he tugged at it but the breeches were hung on a limb. Goddamn, said the man. You aint up in the tree are ye? Why dont you go on and leave me the hell alone. Just wanted to talk to ye. Didnt intend to get ye all riled up. You done got me riled. Was you the feller knocked in that Mexer's head yesterday evenin? I aint the law. Who wants to know? Captain White. He wants to sign that feller up to join the army. The army? Yessir. What army? Company under Captain White. We goin to whip up on the Mexicans. The war's over. He says it aint over. Where are you at? He rose and hauled the breeches down from where he'd hung them and pulled them on. He pulled on his boots and put the knife in the right bootleg and came out from the willows pulling on his shirt. The man was sitting in the grass with his legs crossed. He was dressed in buckskin and he wore a plug hat of dusty black silk and he had a small Mexican cigar in the corner of his teeth. When he saw what clawed its way out through the willows he shook his head. Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said. I just aint fell on no good ones. You ready to go to Mexico? I aint lost nothin down there. It's a chance for ye to raise ye self in the world. You best make a move someway or another fore ye go plumb in under. What do they give ye? Ever man gets a horse and his ammunition. I reckon we might find some clothes in your case. I aint got no rifle. We'll find ye one. What about wages? Hell fire son, you wont need no wages. You get to keep ever-thing you can raise. We goin to Mexico. Spoils of war. Aint a man in the company wont come out a big landowner. How much land you own now? I dont know nothin about soldierin. The man eyed him. He took the unlit cigar from his teeth and turned his head and spat and put it back again. Where ye from? he said. Tennessee. Tennessee. Well I dont misdoubt but what you can shoot a rifle. The kid squatted in the grass. He looked at the man's horse. The horse was fitted out in tooled leather with worked silver trim. It had a white blaze on its face and four white stockings and it was cropping up great teethfuls of the rich grass. Where you from, said the kid. I been in Texas since thirty-eight. If I'd not run up on Captain White I dont know where I'd be this day. I was a sorrier sight even than what you are and he come along and raised me up like Lazarus. Set my feet in the path of righteousness. I'd done took to drinkin and whorin till hell wouldnt have me. He seen somethin in me worth savin and I see it in you. What do ye say? I dont know. Just come with me and meet the captain. The boy pulled at the halms of grass. He looked at the horse again. Well, he said. Dont reckon it'd hurt nothin. They rode through the town with the recruiter splendid on the stockingfooted horse and the kid behind him on the mule like something he'd captured. They rode through narrow lanes where the wattled huts steamed in the heat. Grass and prickly pear grew on the roofs and goats walked about on them and somewhere off in that squalid kingdom of mud the sound of the little deathbells tolled thinly. They turned up Commerce Street through the Main Plaza among rafts of wagons and they crossed another plaza where boys were selling grapes and figs from little trundlecarts. A few bony dogs slank off before them. They rode through the Military Plaza and they passed the little street where the boy and the mule had drunk the night before and there were clusters of women and girls at the well and many shapes of wickercovered clay jars standing about. They passed a little house where women inside were wailing and the little hearsecart stood at the door with the horses patient and motionless in the heat and the flies. The captain kept quarters in a hotel on a plaza where there were trees and a small green gazebo with benches. An iron gate at the hotel front opened into a passageway with a courtyard at the rear. The walls were whitewashed and set with little ornate colored tiles. The captain's man wore carved boots with tall heels that rang smartly on the tiles and on the stairs ascending from the courtyard to the rooms above. In the courtyard there were green plants growing and they were freshly watered and steam춊ng. The captain's man strode down the long balcony and rapped sharply at the door at the end. A voice said for them to come in. He sat at a wickerwork desk writing letters, the captain. They stood attending, the captain's man with his black hat in his hands. The captain wrote on nor did he look up. Outside the kid could hear a woman speaking in Spanish. Other than that there was just the scratching of the captain's pen. When he had done he laid down the pen and looked up. He looked at his man and then he looked at the kid and then he bent his head to read what he'd written. He nodded to himself and dusted the letter with sand from a little onyx box and folded it. Taking a match from a box of them on the desk he lit it and held it to a stick of sealing wax until a small red medallion had pooled onto the paper. He shook out the match, blew briefly at the paper and knuckled the seal with his ring. Then he stood the letter between two books on his desk and leaned back in his chair and looked at the kid again. He nodded gravely. Take seats, he said. They eased themselves into a kind of settle made from some dark wood. The captain's man had a large revolver at his belt and as he sat he hitched the belt around so that the piece lay cradled between his thighs. He put his hat over it and leaned back. The kid folded his busted boots one behind the other and sat upright. The captain pushed his chair back and rose and came around to the front of the desk. He stood there for a measured minute and then he hitched himself up on the desk and sat with his boots dangling. He had gray in his hair and in the sweeping moustaches that he wore but he was not old. So you're the man, he said. What man? said the kid. What man sir, said the captain's man. How old are you, son? Nineteen. The captain nodded his head. He was looking the kid over. What happened to you? What? Say sir, said the recruiter. Sir? I said what happened to you. The kid looked at the man sitting next to him. He looked down at himself and he looked at the captain again. I was fell on by robbers, he said. Robbers, said the captain. Took everthing I had. Took my watch and everthing. Have you got a rifle? Not no more I aint. Where was it you were robbed. I dont know. They wasnt no name to it. It was just a wilderness. Where were you coming from? I was comin from Naca, Naca... Nacogdoches? Yeah. Yessir. Yessir. How many were there? The kid stared at him. Robbers. How many robbers. Seven or eight, I reckon. I got busted in the head with a scantlin. The captain squinted one eye at him. Were they Mexicans? Some. Mexicans and niggers. They was a white or two with em. They had a bunch of cattle they'd stole. Only thing they left me with was a old piece of knife I had in my boot. The captain nodded. He folded his hands between his knees. What do you think of the treaty? he said. The kid looked at the man on the settle next to him. He had his eyes shut. He looked down at his thumbs. I dont know nothin about it, he said. I'm afraid that's the case with a lot of Americans, said the captain. Where are you from, son? Tennessee. You werent with the Volunteers at Monterrey were you? No sir. Bravest bunch of men under fire I believe I ever saw. I sup춑ose more men from Tennessee bled and died on the field in northern Mexico than from any other state. Did you know that? No sir. They were sold out. Fought and died down there in that desert and then they were sold out by their own country. The kid sat silent. The captain leaned forward. We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God's earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. A people so cowardly they've paid tribute a hundred years to tribes of naked savages. Given up their crops and livestock. Mines shut down. Whole villages abandoned. While a heathen horde rides over the land looting and killing with total impunity. Not a hand raised against them. What kind of people are these? The Apaches wont even shoot them. Did you know that? They kill them with rocks. The captain shook his head. He seemed made sad by what he had to tell. Did you know that when Colonel Doniphan took Chihuahua City he inflicted over a thousand casualties on the enemy and lost only one man and him all but a suicide? With an army of unpaid irregulars that called him Bill, were half naked, and had walked to the battlefield from Missouri? No sir. The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them. There are already some fourteen thousand French colonists in the state of Sonora. They're being given free land to settle. They're being given tools and livestock. Enlightened Mexicans encourage this. Paredes is already calling for secession from the Mexican government. They'd rather be ruled by toadeaters than thieves and imbeciles. Colonel Carrasco is asking for American intervention. And he's going to get it. Right now they are forming in Washington a commission to come out here and draw up the boundary lines between our country and Mexico. I dont think there's any question that ultimately Sonora will become a United States territory. Guaymas a U S port. Americans will be able to get to California without having to pass through our benighted sister republic and our citizens will be protected at last from the notorious packs of cut 춗hroats presently infesting the routes which they are obliged to travel. The captain was watching the kid. The kid looked uneasy. Son, said the captain. We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land. That's right. We are to spearhead the drive. We have the tacit support of Governor Burnett of California. He leaned forward and placed his hands on his knees. And we will be the ones who will divide the spoils. There will be a section of land for every man in my company. Fine grassland. Some of the finest in the world. A land rich in minerals, in gold and silver I would say beyond the wildest speculation. You're young. But I dont misread you. I'm seldom mistaken in a man. I think you mean to make your mark in this world. Am I wrong? No sir. No. And I don't think you're the sort of chap to abandon a land that Americans fought and died for to a foreign power. And mark my word. Unless Americans act, people like you and me who take their country seriously while those mollycoddles in Washington sit on their hindsides, unless we act, Mexico뾞nd I mean the whole of the country뾵ill one day fly a European flag. Monroe Doctrine or no. The captain's voice had become soft and intense. He tilted his head to one side and regarded the kid with a sort of benevolence. The kid rubbed the palms of his hands on the knees of his filthy jeans. He glanced at the man beside him but he seemed to be asleep. What about a saddle? he said. Saddle? Yessir. You dont have a saddle? No sir. I thought you had a horse. A mule. I see. I got a old hull on the mule but they aint much left of it. Aint a whole lot left of the mule. He said I was to get a horse and a rifle. Sergeant Trammel did? I never promised him no saddle, said the sergeant. We'll get you a saddle. I did tell him we might find him some clothes, Captain. Right. We may be irregulars but we dont want to look like bobtails, do we? No sir. We aint got no more broke horses neither, said the sergeant. Well break one. That old boy that was so good about breakin em is out of commission. I know that. Get somebody else. Yessir. Maybe this man can break horses. You ever break horses? No sir. Aint no need to sir me. Yessir. Sergeant, said the captain, easing himself down from the desk. Yessir. Sign this man up. The camp was upriver at the edge of the town. A tent patched up from old wagon canvas, a few wickiups made of brush and beyond them a corral in the form of a figure eight likewise made from brush where a few small painted ponies stood sulking in the sun. Corporal, called the sergeant. He aint here. He dismounted and strode toward the tent and threw back the fly. The kid sat on the mule. Three men were lying in the shade of a tree and they studied him. Howdy, said one. Howdy. You a new man? I reckon. Captain say when we leavin this pesthole? He never said. The sergeant came from the tent. Where's he at? he said. Gone to town. Gone to town, said the sergeant. Come here. The man rose from the ground and ambled over to the tent and stood with his hands resting in the small of his back. This here man aint got no outfit, said the sergeant. The man nodded. The captain give him a shirt and some money to get his boots mended. We need to get him somethin he can ride and we need to get him a saddle. A saddle. Ought to be able to sell that mule for enough to get him one of some kind. The man looked at the mule and turned back and squinted at the sergeant. He leaned and spat. That there mule wont bring ten dollars. What it brings it brings. They done killed another beef. I dont want to hear about it. I caint do nothin with em. I aint tellin the captain. He'll roll them eyes around till they come unscrewed and fall out in the ground. The man spat again. Well, that's the gods truth anyway. See to this man now. I got to get. Well. Aint nobody sick is they? No. Thank God for that. He stood up into the saddle and touched the horse's neck lightly with the reins. He looked back and shook his head. In the evening the kid and two other recruits went into town. He'd bathed and shaved himself and he wore a pair of blue cord trousers and the cotton shirt the captain had given him and save for the boots he looked a new man altogether. His friends rode small and colorful horses that forty days ago had been wild animals on the plain and they shied and skittered and snapped like turtles. Wait till you get you one of these, said the second corporal. You aint never had no fun. These horses is all right, said the other. There's one or two in there yet that might make ye a horse. The kid looked down at them from his mule. They rode either side like escorts and the mule trotted with its head up, its eyes shifting nervously. They'll all stick ye head in the ground, said the second corporal. They rode through a plaza thronged with wagons and stock. With immigrants and Texans and Mexicans and with slaves and Lipan Indians and deputations of Karankawas tall and austere, their faces dyed blue and their hands locked about the shafts of their sixfoot spears, all but naked savages who with their painted skins and their whispered taste for human flesh seemed out춓ageous presences even in that fabled company. The recruits rode with their animals close reined and they turned up past the courthouse and along the high walls of the carcel with the broken glass imbedded in the topmost course. In the Main Plaza a band had assembled and were at tuning their instruments. The riders turned down Salinas Street past small gaminghouses and coffee-stands and there were in this street a number of Mexican harness-makers and traders and keepers of gamechickens and cobblers and bootmakers in little stalls or shops of mud. The second corporal was from Texas and spoke a little Spanish and he meant to trade the mule. The other boy was from Missouri. They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans. They traded the mule accoutred as it was for a Texas stock saddle, bare tree with rawhide cover, not new but sound. For a bridle and bit that was new. For a woven wool blanket from Saltillo that was dusty new or not. And lastly for a two and a half dollar gold piece. The Texan looked at this small coin in the kid's palm and demanded more money but the harnessmaker shook his head and held up his hands in utter finality. What about my boots? said the kid. Y sus botas, said the Texan. Botas? Si. He made sewing motions. The harnessmaker looked down at the boots. He cupped his fingers in a little gesture of impatience and the kid took off the boots and stood barefoot in the dust. When all was done they stood in the street and looked at one another. The kid had his new tack slung up on his shoulder. The second corporal looked at the boy from Missouri. You got any money, Earl? Not a copper cent. Well I aint neither. We might's well get our asses back on out to that hole of misery. The kid shifted the weight of the gear on his shoulder. We got this quarter eagle to drink up yet, he said. Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffed away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. The hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed yell not cross it back. Dont aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleep춊ng. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate. IV Setting forth with the filibusters - On alien ground ? Shooting antelope - Pursued by cholera -Wolves - Wagon repairs - A desert waste - Night storms - The ghost manada - A prayer for rain - A desert homestead - The old man - New country - An abandoned village - Herdsmen on the plain - Attacked by Comanches. Five days later on the dead man's horse he followed the riders and wagons through the plaza and out of the town on the road downcountry. They rode through Castroville where coyotes had dug up the dead and scattered their bones and they crossed the Frio River and they crossed the Nueces and they left the Presidio road and turned north with scouts posted ahead and to the rear. They crossed the del Norte by night and waded up out of the shallow sandy ford into a howling wilderness. Dawn saw them deployed in a long file over the plain, the dry wood wagons already moaning, horses snuffling. A dull thump of hooves and clank of gear and the constant light chink of harness. Save for scattered clumps of buckbrush and pricklypear and the little patches of twisted grass the ground was bare and there were low mountains to the south and they were bare too. Westward the horizon lay flat and true as a spirit level. Those first days they saw no game, no birds save buzzards. They saw in the distance herds of sheep or goats moving along the skyline in scarves of dust and they ate the meat of wild asses shot on the plain. The sergeant carried in his saddle scabbard a heavy Wesson rifle that used a false muzzle and paper patch and fired a coneshaped ball. With it he killed the little wild pigs of the desert and later when they began to see herds of antelope he would halt in the dusk with the sun off the land and screwing a bipod into the threaded boss on the underside of the barrel would kill these animals where they stood grazing at distances of half a mile. The rifle carried a vernier sight on the tang and he would eye the distance and gauge the wind and set the sight like a man using a micrometer. The second corporal would lie at his elbow with a glass and call the shots high or low should he miss and the wagon would wait by until he had shot a stand of three or four and then rumble off across the cooling land with the skinners jostling and grinning in the bed. The sergeant never put the rifle up but what he wiped and greased the bore. They rode well armed, each man with a rifle and many with the smallbore fiveshot Colt's revolvers. The captain carried a pair of dragoon pistols in scabbards that mounted across the pommel of the saddle so that they rode at each knee. These guns were United States issue, Colt's patent, and he had bought them from a deserter in a Soledad livery stable and paid eighty dollars in gold for them and the scabbards and the mold and flask they came with. The rifle the kid carried had been sawed down and rebored till it weighed very light indeed and the mold for it was so small he had to patch the balls with buckskin. He had fired it a few times and it carried much where it chose. It rode before him on the saddlebow, he having no scabbard. It had been carried so before, God's years of it, and the forestock was much worn beneath. In the early dark the wagon came back with the meat. The skinners had piled the wagonbed with mesquite brush and stumps they'd drug out of the ground with the horses and they unloaded the firewood and commenced cutting up the gutted ante춍opes in the floor of the wagon with bowieknives and hand-axes, laughing and hacking in a welter of gore, a reeking scene in the light of the handheld lanterns. By full dark the blackened ribracks leaned steaming at the fires and there was a jousting over the coals with shaven sticks whereon were skewered gobs of meat and a clank of canteens and endless raillery. And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange. They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire. The sun rose on a column already ragged these six days out. Among their clothes there was small agreement and among their hats less. The little painted horses stepped shifty and truculent and a vicious snarl of flies fought constantly in the bed of the gamewagon. The dust the party raised was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he's a wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they've gone to hide from God. On this day two men fell sick and one died before dark. In the morning there was another ill to take his place. The two of them were laid among sacks of beans and rice and coffee in the supply-wagon with blankets over them to keep them from the sun and they rode with the slamming and jarring of the wagon half shirring the meat from their bones so that they cried out to be left and then they died. The men turned out in the early morning darkness to dig their graves with the bladebones of antelope and they covered them with stones and rode on again. They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. They rode with their heads down, faceless under their hats, like an army asleep on the march. By midmorning another man had died and they lifted him from the wagon where he'd stained the sacks he'd lain among and buried him also and rode on. Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmer춊ng heat to watch them where they made their noon halt. Moving on again. Loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the ground. In the evening their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the firelight and in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark they could hear the snarling and the pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp for meatscraps. The wagons drew so dry they slouched from side to side like dogs and the sand was grinding them away. The wheels shrank and the spokes reeled in their hubs and clattered like loom-shafts and at night they'd drive false spokes into the mortices and tie them down with strips of green hide and they'd drive wedges between the iron of the tires and the suncracked felloes. They wobbled on, the trace of their untrue labors like sidewinder tracks in the sand. The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. Wheels began to break up. Ten days out with four men dead they started across a plain of pure pumice where there grew no shrub, no weed, far as the eye could see. The captain called a halt and he called up the Mexican who served as guide. They talked and the Mexican gestured and the captain gestured and after a while they moved on again. This looks like the high road to hell to me, said a man from the ranks. What does he reckon for the horses to eat? I believe they're supposed to just grit up on this sand like chickens and be ready for the shelled corn when it does come. In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and black춅ned carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing. All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs. That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. They halted in the dark to recruit the animals and some of the men stowed their arms in the wagons for fear of drawing the lightning and a man named Hayward prayed for rain. He prayed: Almighty God, if it aint too far out of the way of things in your eternal plan do you reckon we could have a little rain down here. Pray it up, some called, and kneeling he cried out among the thunder and the wind: Lord we are dried to jerky down here. Just a few drops for some old boys out here on the prairie and a long ways from home. Amen, they said, and catching up their mounts they rode on. Within the hour the wind cooled and drops of rain the size of grapeshot fell upon them out of that wild darkness. They could smell wet stone and the sweet smell of the wet horses and wet leather. They rode on. They rode through the heat of the day following with the waterkegs empty and the horses perishing and in the evening these elect, shabby and white with dust like a company of armed and mounted millers wandering in dementia, rode up off the desert through a gap in the low stone hills and down upon a solitary jacal, crude hut of mud and wattles and a rudimentary stable and corrals. Bone palings ruled the small and dusty purlieus here and death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape. Strange fences that the sand and wind had scoured and the sun bleached and cracked like old porcelain with dry brown weather cracks and where no life moved. The corrugated forms of the riders passed jingling across the dry bistre land and across the mud facade of the jacal, the horses trembling, smelling water. The captain raised his hand and the sergeant spoke and two men dismounted and advanced upon the hut with rifles. They pushed open a door made of rawhide and entered. In a few minutes they reappeared. Somebody's here somewheres. They's hot coals. The captain surveyed the distance with an air of vigilance. He dismounted with the patience of one used to dealing with incompetence and crossed to the jacal. When he came out he surveyed the terrain again. The horses shifted and clinked and stamped and the men pulled their jaws down and spoke roughly to them. Sergeant. Yessir. These people cant be far. See if you can find them. And see if there's any forage here for the animals. Forage? Forage. The sergeant placed a hand on the cantle and looked about at the place they were in and shook his head and dismounted. They went through the jacal and into the enclosure behind and out to the stable. There were no animals and nothing but a stall half filled with dry sotols in the way of feed. They walked out the back to a sink among the stones where water stood and a thin stream flowed away over the sand. There were hoofprints about the tank and dry manure and some small birds ran mind춍essly along the rim of the little creek. The sergeant had been squatting on his heels and now he rose and spat. Well, he said. Is there any direction you caint see twenty mile in? The recruits studied the emptiness about. I dont believe the folks here is gone that long. They drank and walked back toward the jacal. Horses were being led along the narrow path. The captain was standing with his thumbs in his belt. I caint see where they've got to, said the sergeant. What's in the shed. Some old dry fodder. The captain frowned. They ought to have a goat or a hog. Something. Chickens. In a few minutes two men came dragging an old man from the stable. He was covered with dust and dry chaff and he held one arm across his eyes. He was dragged moaning to the captain's feet where he lay prostrate in what looked like windings of white cotton. He put his hands over his ears and his elbows before his eyes like one called upon to witness some appalling thing. The captain turned away in disgust. The sergeant toed him with his boot. What's wrong with him? he said. He's pissing himself, Sergeant. He's pissing himself. The cap춗ain gestured at the man with his gloves. Yessir. Well get him the hell out of here. You want Candelario to talk to him? He's a halfwit. Get him away from me. They dragged the old man away. He had begun to babble but no one listened and in the morning he was gone. They bivouacked by the tank and the farrier saw to the mules and ponies that had thrown shoes and they worked on the wagons by firelight far into the night. They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space. They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anti춃lines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing. They passed through a village then and now in ruins and they camped in the walls of a tall mud church and burned the fallen timbers of the roof for their fire while owls cried from the arches in the dark. The following day on the skyline to the south they saw clouds of dust that lay across the earth for miles. They rode on, watching the dust until it began to near and the captain raised his hand for a halt and took from his saddlebag his old brass cavalry telescope and uncoupled it and swept it slowly over the land. The sergeant sat his horse beside him and after a while the captain handed him the glass. Hell of a herd of something. I believe it's horses. How far off do you make them? Hard to tell. Call Candelario up here. The sergeant turned and motioned for the Mexican. When he rode up he handed him the glass and the Mexican raised it to his eye and squinted. Then he lowered the glass and watched with his naked eyes and then he raised it and looked again. Then he sat his horse with the glass at his chest like a crucifix. Well? said the captain. He shook his head. What the hell does that mean? They're not buffalo are they? No. I think maybe horses. Let me have the glass. The Mexican handed him the telescope and he glassed the horizon again and collapsed the tube shut with the heel of his hand and replaced it in his bag and raised his hand and they went on. They were cattle, mules, horses. There were several thousand head and they were moving quarterwise toward the company. By late afternoon riders were visible to the bare eye, a handful of ragged indians mending the outer flanks of the herd with their nimble ponies. Others in hats, perhaps Mexicans. The sergeant dropped back to where the captain was riding. What do you make of that, Captain? I make it a parcel of heathen stockthieves is what I make it. What do you? Looks like it to me. The captain watched through the glass. I suppose they've seen us, he said. They've seen us. How many riders do you make it? A dozen maybe. The captain tapped the instrument in his gloved hand. They dont seem concerned, do they? No sir. They dont. The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is out. The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pound춊ng of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes niade from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn back춛ards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brim춖tone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my god, said the sergeant. A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rear춊ng and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances. The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming. V Adrift on the Bolson de Mapimi - Sproule - Tree of dead babies ?Scenes from a massacre -Sopilotes - The murdered in the church - Night among the dead - Wolves - The washers at the ford - Afoot westward - A mirage - An encounter with bandits ?Attacked by a vampire ?Digging a well - A crossroads in the waste - The carreta - Death of Sproule - Under arrest - The captain's head ?Survivors ?On to Chihuahua ? The city - The prison - Toadvine. With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight. The ground where he'd lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself. The savages had moved to higher ground and he could see the light from their fires and hear them singing, a strange and plaintive chanting up there where they'd gone to roast mules. He made his way among the pale and dismembered, among the sprawled and legflung horses, and he took a reckoning by the stars and set off south afoot. The night wore a thousand shapes out there in the brush and he kept his eyes to the ground ahead. Starlight and waning moon made a faint shadow of his wanderings on the dark of the desert and all along the ridges the wolves were howling and moving north toward the slaughter. He walked all night and still he could see the fires behind him. With daylight he made his way toward some outcroppings of rock a mile across the valley floor. He was climbing among the strewn and tumbled boulders when he heard a voice calling somewhere in that vastness. He looked out over the plain but he could see no one. When the voice called again he turned and sat to rest and soon he saw something moving along the slope, a rag of a man clambering toward him over the talus slides. Pick춊ng his way with care, looking behind him. The kid could see that nothing followed. He wore a blanket over his shoulders and his shirtsleeve was ripped and dark with blood and he carried that arm against him with his other hand. His name was Sproule. Eight of them had escaped. His horse had carried off several arrows and it caved under him in the night and the others had gone on, the captain among them. They sat side by side among the rocks and watched the day lengthen on the plain below. Did you not save any of your possibles? Sproule said. The kid spat and shook his head. He looked at Sproule. How bad is your arm? He pulled it to him. I've seen worse, he said. They sat looking out over those reaches of sand and rock and wind. What kind of Indians was them? I dont know. Sproule coughed deeply into his fist. He pulled his bloody arm against him. Damn if they aint about a caution to the Christians, he said. They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape. Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds. It might could be a seep, said Sproule. It's a long ways up there. Well if you see any water closer let's make for that. The kid looked at him and they set off. The site lay up a draw and their way was a jumble of fallen rock and scoria and deadlylooking bayonet plants. Small black and olivecolored shrubs blasted under the sun. They stumbled up the cracked clay floor of a dry watercourse. They rested and moved on. The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small and perilous garden. The water that reached the canyon floor was no more than a trickle and they leaned by turns with pursed lips to the stone like devouts at a shrine. They passed the night in a shallow cave above this spot, an old reliquary of flintknappings and ratchel scattered about on the stone floor with beads of shell and polished bone and the char춃oal of ancient fires. They shared the blanket in the cold and Sproule coughed quietly in the dark and they rose from time to time to descend and drink at the stone. They were gone before sunrise and the dawn found them on the plain again. They followed the trampled ground left by the warparty and in the afternoon they came upon a mule that had failed and been lanced and left dead and then they came upon another. The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being. The castaways hobbled past, they looked back. Nothing moved. In the after춏oon they came upon a village on the plain where smoke still rose from the ruins and all were gone to death. From a distance it looked like a decaying brick kiln. They stood without the walls a long time listening to the silence before they entered. They went slowly through the little mud streets. There were goats and sheep slain in their pens and pigs dead in the mud.