Far Bright Star Read online

  I am the lion in your blood—his father’s words appearing in his mind and telling themselves to him and then vanishing and he could not remember them, but he knew it was his father.

  He craned his neck and stared blindly into the sun. He remembered a spring in the pine timber country and another one that rose from the stony ground in little pools. How white and relentless the sky furnace. Sweating, panting, shivering out his life in the violent light he kept on.

  He began talking to his mind and gently chastising it as if it were a recalcitrant child. His grandmother told him the blue darners were called the devil’s needle because they sewed shut the eyes and nose and mouth of disobedient children. He wondered how much of the mind was only memory?

  Then it was a seep he found, a dry rock wall he came to with a seam of water. From the seep a thin stream trickled into a calciformed stone that overbrimmed and lipped and disappeared. The water soothed his parched mouth and cooled his blood when he mopped his neck. He could not believe he found it and was on the verge of tears. At ease, he thought as he rested in shadow under the veil of rock where he’d found water like an angel.

  At dusk the full moon began its rise in the crepuscular light and its glowing would last the entire of that night until it set at dawn. Tonight would be a moonshining night, the moon’s light like cast fabric and so tonight maybe he would be found.

  He let himself lie back, the .45 at his right hand. The heavens were on fire this night. The wide vessel of the universe was as if a land aflame with torches. There were stabs of fire in the sky, as if windblown, and he wondered what they were, each in their candlelike moment spectacularly magnificent. It was the kind of thing he’d have commented upon if he’d been with someone. He wondered if anyone else on earth saw them. He’d try to remember them to ask when he was found if anyone else saw the stabs of fire.

  Then for a time the night was a belt of total darkness and a womb and there was infinite silence and the world took on the blackness of hell. Figures, indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in his vision. There came a period of thunderless lightning in the sky. At first the lightning meandered and striated and then broke to horizontal in fractured structure. The lightning beaded and pearled in long crackling chains that curled and whipped. The strokes dissolved into countless luminous segments and long lines of bright strands or exploded like rockets with splays of innumerable fingers. Then there would be a leader and another leader and leaders followed leaders. The leaders stepped and by return stroke in the opposite direction they established a channel that seemed to simultaneously pour down into the earth and return to the heavens.

  Then what was happening up there stopped and the night returned to itself.

  Perhaps there’d been a short war in heaven. A revolt of the saved and ascended and they wanted to come back down to earth and be men and women again and were sick of being God’s angels. He wondered, Is it possible to capture some kind of truth before you die? To learn what is behind the surface and to learn the secret of everything that matters?

  He held to the slender thread he was hanging by. He’d found water and now he’d live to be found by his brother. They say a man must have something to live for. Is being saved from death enough of a reason? Watch for a falling star. Make a wish it happens soon.

  If I get that lucky I’ll drink until I drown, he told himself. He thought about God and how he had exercised his overwhelming advantage and yet, he was still alive. This was the time for God to cut a deal if he was so inclined.

  “Make me an offer,” he throat-whispered. “If you want me, make me an offer, you son of a bitch.”

  That night he dreamed it was a very cold day and he remembered how much chilblains hurt after staying out too long, riding the toboggan with his brother.

  Together they careened down the Copperhead Road, as if riding a thin margin of the world. The snow was blank white and banked in turns and when the road dropped they caught the air and flew and whumped down and he bit his lip, but it was so cold the blood froze on his chin. When they hit the bridge floor the rough slivered planks dragged them to a stop. Running beneath them were the white tails of fast moving water. They were looking at each other and seeing each other and without separateness, as if between them was the same miraculous power that holds water together. No two people can occupy the same space, the same event, the same moment, yet they did, and he remembered how beautiful the cast light in his brother’s face.

  Then they trudged back up the mountain and did it all over again until there was nothing left in their young bodies and they tramped home and curled up by the copper flames.

  They were their father’s boys and their mother’s awkward animals. Cast in the parlor stove were lions’ heads and there was a long wooden pipe that carried water to the kitchen from the hot spring. The water smelled of sulfur.

  Their father said, “The cold is good for you,” and their chilblains throbbing in their feet and hands and thin ankles, they fell asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace.

  His memories were vague and gray. He heard a tap on a window blurred with rain. He saw the photo of a woman’s oval face and a shocking abundance of black hair. His mother.

  “I have had such awful dreams,” his mother said. She was holding a biscuit cutter.

  “People should be left alone,” she said.

  That spring the enchanted weather was wind running with banks of mist that rose in the hollows. Spring was a necklace of leaves and in summer he liked to feel the grass under his feet when he walked the plashy meadows and rambled the sun-swept hillsides, the coal black horses an otherness on the land.

  They had two pet geese and the geese were blind. In the fall they set the blind geese in the upland pond where they swam and the geese called in the hour before daylight. They waited in a place in the trees called a blind, their faces bathed by a delicate mist, and when the wild geese flew in they rose up and shot them and that same night they ate them.

  When he woke up it was still dark. He could feel a growing intimacy for the place he occupied. A scroll of traveling lightning wavered in the darkness.

  “Is this the mystery of death?” he said, looking around, speaking his words into the vacancy and mumbling a reply and not remembering what he was talking about with himself.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Your eyes?” he said, but to these questions he was asking himself he had no answers.

  “Please don’t talk,” he said, feeling stiffness about the eyes.

  “I never used to be afraid of dying.”

  “Me neither.”

  “It’s not your time, I promise.”

  “Please, I just want to lie here and not talk.”

  “Then go back to sleep,” he said.

  However strange his lostness was to him he persisted in knowing he would live to be found.

  Then the night sky spangled with milky light. It seemed to fall from the pallid stars as if poured from glass and all the way down to earth and he again allowed himself the thought he would make it, but with thoughts of the future were attendant memories of what happened in the desert and he could not keep them quiet in his conscience. He felt the weight of a knotted sorrow and however hard he thought it away, this heavy weight he could not lift from his heart.

  He knew there would be more war because he knew by law of nature men would to war. All the young men were on fire to cross the ocean and fight. They were bloodthirsty for the blood that was not their own. Like little boys, they would have it and the old men would let them have it and it would turn out widows and orphans and heartbroken mothers. They would weep and moan for their husbands, fathers, and lovers. After the war was before the war.

  17

  WHEN HE WOKE in the morning the only sound was the husking of the wind. He imagined he was near the end of a dream and presently he’d awaken with a start and see the walls of his tent, hear the snorts of horses.

  H
e lay on a sougan and a tarpaulin shelter rigged to block the sun. A wet cloth lay damping his forehead. He vaguely remembered the palm of a hand tilting his head and water wetting his face and leaking into his mouth, bathing his swollen tongue. His lips were wet and his face burned and cooled at the same time.

  Teddy squatted beside him, his rifle held to his chest pointed at the sky. His back was crossed by bandoleers of ammunition, his one vanity a yellow silk binding his long black hair. A canteen sat in the sand easily within reach. A ways off his brother sat in a canvas chair he’d unfolded beneath a white cotton umbrella. He could see his brother’s black boots. They were knee-high leather boots and he wore them with a woolen insert around the knee so they wouldn’t rub.

  His brother had a rifle across his lap and was eating canned salmon as he read a magazine. When he was finished he tossed the can, licked his spoon clean, and slid it into the top of his boot where he carried it. He wet a finger with his tongue, turned a page of his magazine. He then slipped sunflower seeds into his mouth where he cracked them with his teeth and spit away their husks while he continued his reading. When his mouth was empty he reached into his pocket and took out another handful of seeds and fed them into his mouth.

  However injured Napoleon might be he was not sure, but he was contented and fulfilled and replete in the constancy of his brother’s reading and spitting, in the presence of Teddy squatting beside him. He tried to say something. He was trying to get his thoughts right and fashion them into words, but what do you say when you are born out of death?

  They said nothing to him. They asked him no questions and made not a sound. He later learned they’d ridden seventy hours, day and night, without stopping. They started with a cavvy of the best horses laddered behind them and changed horses frequently, cutting the expended ones loose in the desert. First Sergeant Chicken and Ten Square did the same. Bowman, Goudge, Merrill, Little, Hubert, Fat Mouth, Gauly, Taylor, and Wheeler all with supreme skill in the handling of horses ferried out fresh relays as they sliced off vast reaches of the high desert in search of the missing patrol. There were now dozens of blown horses they’d discarded in their search, dropped dead or still wandering the desert land.

  They maintained a watchful gaze that passed over him and into the beyond and would not presume to look at him for how broken, burned, and undignified his being. His brother and the Apache waited silently for a sign from him, so little of what is called life was left inside him. They would’ve waited the rest of that week if necessary and if he didn’t recover only God knows what his brother might’ve done.

  As far as he could tell, he lay in the middle of nowhere. He was aware of a presence, the wall of stone, the depression where he sheltered, but nothing else except emptiness. He reached with his hand and flailed to find the seep of water that saved his life, but he could not find it. The ground was hard and dusty and only rock and no evidence that it’d ever been otherwise. There was no water where he lay and the water he thought he found was made in the gentle mind that was easing him into his death. His mind was so like a ghost inside his head. He could feel the daggers of sunlight through the tarpaulin, death’s hand still trying to touch him.

  He groaned at the thought, so close it was, and Teddy turned and silently held a canteen to his lips and tipped it forward. The water trickling into his mouth seemed to need itself. He lifted a hand and tipped a guzzle into his mouth until he was choking and water was spiking in his nose. When he began to shake Teddy withheld more until he collected himself. Then he let him have a sip more.

  “What day is it,” he managed to say.

  Teddy shrugged—how should I know? Why would I care to know?

  “How long,” he asked, meaning how many days gone by.

  Teddy flicked three fingers in the air. Three days. That long.

  He closed his eyes and opened them and when he did Teddy had turned away, the yellow silk an extraordinary color at the back of his head.

  Teddy continued his vigil. He looked to his front and then left and then right. It wasn’t caution but habit. He was like the wild animal, stalking his prey while at the same time being preyed upon. Teddy held few illusions of innocence and experience, right and wrong. He was here and passing the time and coldly indifferent to both time and place.

  “He murder anyone looking for me?”

  Teddy looked at him and then away. It was a pointless question. We murder them or they murder us.

  He knew he was safe. The Apache held sight beyond the horizon. His brother claimed their sight was 361 degrees and their vision took their sight over the curve of the earth. The Apaches were never found and never discovered. They did the finding. They did the discovering and when called upon they did the silent bloody work that was necessary.

  For Teddy this life was just killing time until he could enter the next life and his paradise in the underworld where he’d live forever and never have to die again. There he would find all good and tasty things to eat and there would be water and there would be an abundance. In the underworld, life would go on much as it did in this life, but it would be a better life than this one because there would be no more meaning to comprehend. There would be no purpose, no reason, no significance, no concern. He’d scout and hunt and fight, but in the underworld these would just be something to do and unnecessary and what a relief that would be.

  After a while he awoke to the sound of a horse riding hard. It was Sergeant Chicken. He rode a paint and behind him dallied another paint, a high-white, blue-black sabino. The horse was white stockinged to above the knees and wore a jagged white pattern on the belly and flank. There were white markings on its face that extended past its eyes. Later he would learn those eyes were blue. The blue-black sabino was a ghostly horse, its markings, as if an afterthought, half conceived, half executed. The horse was bone and wrung-out muscle and still it was a beautiful and, the way it carried its head, an equable horse. It made him think, What a pretty horse.

  Sergeant Chicken leaned down from his saddle. He spoke to his brother and pointed to where he’d come from. Then, leaving the sabino behind, he hied off again in the direction from which he’d appeared.

  The sabino looked down at his brother who’d resumed leafing the pages of his magazine.

  It was a long time after that a wagon pulled by a team of mules, the swingletrees rattling and traces flying, trundled into the place where he lay. In the bed was a pallet of straw between square blocks of ice wrapped in woolen blankets. The many hands were then lifting him over the sideboards and settling him on the cooling pallet of straw. Over this they rigged the tarpaulin to keep him cool and keep out of the burning sunlight. When they lifted him he lost his breath as he felt to fly and only in shade did he catch his breath. How empty he felt the hollows of his bones, as empty as windblown ash.

  His brother reached over the closed tailgate and gently clasped his head in his hands and their faces were so close. He looked up into his brother’s suntouched face. His brother’s eyes were blue and gray and sharp and his face as always was mask to his thoughts. He could smell peppermint.

  With the touch of his brother he felt collapse the last structures inside him. He could still feel death’s weight. It was the only feeling he knew. His eyes watered and he tried to speak but his brother gestured — you shouldn’t talk.

  “Where were you?” he struggled to say.

  “Please forgive me. I am sorry.”

  “You are forgiven,” Napoleon sighed, and then he said, “There was a time I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  “Sometimes you think it’s special because it’s happening to you, but it’s not.”

  Then his brother told him it was waiting to happen and it would have happened to anyone, but it was he who was there when it happened.

  “I am not dead yet, am I?” he said.

  “Someday. But not yet.”

  His brother then told him how he was taking a nap when in his sleep it came to him that something terrible-bad was happen
ing.

  Napoleon opened his mouth to speak, but his jaw cramped and he could not close it.

  “I knew right then,” his brother said, easing closed his mouth, and told him he pulled on his boots and fetched the Apache and they began to ride.

  “I knew you would know,” he said.

  “You’re alive,” his brother said.

  “I don’t know if you could call it that.”

  “I thought I lost you.” His brother smiled.

  His brother told how the meat wagons went to rendezvous and there was nothing there. They waited around and then the storm came and they barely made it back. But by that time he was already in the saddle.

  “I am the only one?”

  “You’ll feel better after a cool bath and long drink,” his brother said, but Napoleon made no response because he was not so sure that would be the case.

  “Bandy?” he said.

  “No sign.”

  “He had a chance,” he said, and his brother shrugged. Maybe.

  Overhead the sky was deep and from where he lay he could see the mountains blued in the distance. Fields of white cloud moved west to east shadowing the land. He put his hands in front of his eyes on the off chance someone should see him weeping for the grief and tranquillity, the stillness and humility he felt inside his mind.

  By this time Sergeants Ten Square and Big Chow had converged on their location and the tarp was lashed secure. His brother stepped away, gave the order and the mule skinner called out. There was the rattle of harness and a jangling lurch and they were moving, and his brother and the Apaches took him away from there as if their business done and they owned all the time there was and every place it occurred.

  In the days to come he’d tell his brother everything that happened. He’d tell him about the sandstorm and how they dismounted and formed a line and then came the blood horse. How Turner was shot in the guts and there was a double-barreled shotgun and that was the end of Turner, and Stableforth shot in the mouth and Extra Billy turning on the machete when a bullet cut him down. He’d learn there was no sign of the old man he’d doctored for gangrene and left to be found waiting by the road for the wagons.