Felix Culpa
Page 7
Every day I tried another path.
Across the hillocks and vales.
Up fells and screes.
Down into the oaks.
Sometimes a shepherd’s hut or a distant man walking.
Grey roofs of the farmsteadings.
Most of the time I was alone.
Air was thick.
Stones crack in the frosty night.
On the pond swims a membrane of ice.
Whispering snow.
Fell all night and the next day.
Nothing to do but sleep.
Glass of mild and bitter and sit down by a table near the fire.
Smoke if you had anything to smoke and think if you had anything to think about.
Sky slowly grew lighter.
Broke new.
Walked up the hill.
Snow which had not yet felt the foot of man.
Looks out over the snowy rooftops of the town to the snowy moor.
White and grey of the mountains.
Them rocks somewhere.
Body had been found.
Shepherd cried out in amazement.
Way from his cabin to the sheepfold.
Crook in his hand.
Final step.
Visit the scene.
Confront the shepherd.
32
Sunset the trail arrives at the hill village.
Low public house.
Tap room in the rear of the premises.
Several rough men in smock frocks, drinking and smoking.
Looked at him as if he were something rare.
Sat down in the farthest corner.
Ordered some dinner.
Pieces of meat.
Loaf of coarse bread.
Conversation of the men assembled here turned upon the neighbouring land and farmers.
Tired with the walk, and getting up so early, he dozed a little.
Had almost dropped asleep when he was half wakened by the noisy entrance of a newcomer.
Signal for various homely jokes with the countrymen.
Eyed him from time to time.
Finally the man asked.
Who are you sir and why exactly are you here?
Here on a mission.
Secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown.
Fate of Felix.
How and why the kid died.
Many months this has been my task.
Man nodded.
Smoking a cigarette and he raised it to his lips.
Spoke in a high clear voice.
All these writers snooping around to find out what they can.
Aiming to conconct a story.
Books what turning out to be best sellers.
How are people to know that it’s all lies.
Something grown out of the snow.
Pale skin of words.
Man could tell his true history.
Was not words.
Finished his cigarette and let fall the stub of it.
Hands folded one across the other before him as if there were no more to be said.
First flush of the morning.
Village road.
Sheep pen at the foot of the hills.
Man came out and leaned on a manure fork.
Winter in his grey eyes.
What can I do for you?
Understand you found the body.
Thought you could give me some details.
Nodded at me gravely.
Spoke with great circumspection and courtesy.
Life was spent among bleak mountains.
Looking after lost sheep.
Nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most.
All his years.
Never to this day seen a stout manchild laid out.
Save one.
Cold and stiff.
Buried in drifts of snow.
No wound or bruise upon his person to show how he had met his dreadful end.
No more’n a scratch.
Covered the boy with his slicker.
Wouldn’t become carrion for the birds of prey.
Eyes picked out by the crows.
Walked down.
Call the police.
Carried his small body off to the morgue.
Frail burden of bones and skin.
Gaze ride high.
Northward slope of the hill.
Shading his eyes with his hand.
Ask you a few questions.
Told you know the mountains as well as any man.
What happened in the middle of that stormy night?
How did he pass the last moments of his life?
What is your theory?
What you think?
Tell the police.
Come beyond the limits of his world.
No man could cross those mountains in the darkness.
Teeth of a snowstorm.
Come a long way.
To this place today to find you.
Wish to hear your real, real opinion.
To understand.
Moment’s pause of hesitation.
Head came up slowly.
Tell you a story they used to tell around here.
Quick dark shape that hid behind the rocks.
Small hunched figure.
Steal bread under the cover of darkness.
Running monkey-like, bent double, over fences and through bushes.
Mud flying from his feet.
You see him?
Once he saw a wolf loping along a ridge.
Something that wasn’t there.
Looked toward him with her yellow eyes.
Where he come from?
Go to sleep?
Lifting his hand he pointed.
Bandits’ lairs, untrodden spots.
Cave or a crack which could never be suspected from below.
Only when some nanny goat wandered or got stranded here might a shepherd risk his life to climb up.
Summer the cave was better than a house.
Have a stream and it cool.
Live like an animal.
Voice slowed down.
Look an old man gets when he’s telling a story he’s thought about but never told before.
Something very strange.
Didn’t tell the coppers.
No one would believe.
Studying the tracks for some sign.
Marks of his footsteps in the snow.
Barefoot human prints.
Prints of a second animal.
Hooves of sheep.
Strange wild story seemed to have come to us from amid the mad elements.
Wild snow fall.
So thick a man couldn’t be seen two paces away.
Wandering lost.
Shivering in every limb.
Grazing my knees, hitting my shoulder against a stone wall.
Sheep that had strayed.
Approached me in the semi-darkness bleating at me.
Come up and nosed me.
Cuddling against me as if I could offer a solution.
Provided me with a warmth.
Reek of udder balm.
Immersion in pure sheepness.
Fell asleep alongside.
Hummock where I lie.
Daggy sheep.
Some time during the night it had drifted off.
Saw where the snow had been pawed away.
Eyes from one print to the next.
Quarter mile straight to a rock outcrop.
Makest thy flock.
Left Felix to his fate.
Go to the land of souls.
33
Sunshine like a day in spring.
Brown bracken sticks to the ground.
Patches of snow.
Followed a narrow, sinuous track cut into the hill.
Shepherd had come the same way.
Climbing steadily.
Narrow path worn deep into the stone ledges.
Sheep paths.
Trudge and pant and climb and slip and climb and gasp.
Came to an outcrop of rock.
Inquired of the shepherd.
Hollow in which the body had been found.
Not find a more lonely tract.
High moor where the wind hissed through the heather.
Queer small crows of the high places.
Skeleton of a sheep.
Stood for a while.
Silver breaths.
Sore and heavy laden.
Bird screech.
Overhead the great lammergeier turns and turns.
Old buzzard knows something.
All tales are one.
All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end.
Well, kid, I thought, you can have yourself a long rest now.
Resumed his trudge.
Climb took energy from his thoughts and sent it to his legs and hips.
Weariness came over the face of the sun.
Brows of the broken cliffs.
Peculiar formation in the rocks; two rounded ledges, one directly over the other, with a mouth-like opening between.
Crawl up.
Clambering over ice.
Orifice into the throat of the cave.
Smelled stale and damp.
Boot kicked something that clattered on the stones.
Had been a fire there.
Floor was smooth and the walls and roof would protect him from the night’s wet chill.
Drew together a mess of fire leavings.
Charred stubs.
Log ends not consumed.
Started a blaze.
Breath of the cavern carried the smoke outside.
Roof of the cave was red and brown.
Sat leaning forward studying the flames.
Peace among these looming rocks.
Thought that maybe he could live the rest of his life like this.
Cave of his own ken.
Peed near the entrance to let animals know.
Bed on the rocks.
Curled up asleep like a bear.
Heart of the earth silence.
Unexpectedly I find myself near tears.
Hope died within Felix.
Stepped over the edge while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
Sign that I must entrust myself to life.
Stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending, but they flickered in the half light, wound round themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment.
Like these rocks and sky and snow.
Tree will not deny its roots.
What man be free from the air him breathe or set a-loose from the ground what’s under his two feets?
Must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world.
Fit himself back among people.
Huddled close to the small fire.
Drifted off into grey sleep.
Awoke not long after dawn.
Circle of daylight.
Buried the embers of the fire.
Saw something.
Behind the corner of stone.
Bent down.
Jacket threadbare.
Old curled up boots.
Sat in the hollow of the rock.
Felt the wrinkled, slightly moist touch of cloth.
Smell of thy garments.
Tells all and it tells nothing.
Said that god offers man the choice between repose and truth.
Storyteller’s task.
Live in the midst of the incomprehensible.
Set the cloth on the ground.
Broken boots.
Crawled out through the stone lips.
Sun came up upon the left.
Picked a path.
Sliding and tumbling.
Down the mountain in long bounds.
Reaching the road.
Set loose once more into the world to see what I would make of it.
End is not yet told.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The great majority of the lines in this novel are sourced word for word from the hundred or so books, by some eighty authors, listed below. Fourteen of the chapters, including the last nine, are made up entirely of sourced lines.
Appelfeld, Aharon. The Story of a Life, tr Aloma Halter.
Appelfeld, Aharon. Tzili, tr Dalya Bilu.
Ballard, JG. The Drowned World.
Barker, Pat. Regeneration.
Bellow, Saul. Herzog.
Bolaño, Roberto. Distant Star, tr Chris Andrews.
Böll, Heinrich. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, tr Leila Vennewitz.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, tr William Weaver.
Calvino, Italo. Marcovaldo, tr William Weaver.
Calvino, Italo. The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, tr Archibald Colquhoun.
Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House.
Chandler, Raymond. Farewell, My Lovely.
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep.
Chandler, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake.
Chandler, Raymond. The Long Good-Bye.
Clébert, John-Paul. Paris Vagabond, tr Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Coetzee, JM. The Life and Times of Michael K.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Adventures and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist.
Dickey, James. To the White Sea.
Fitzgerald, F Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Gardner, John. Grendel.
Genet, Jean. The Thief’s Journal, tr Bernard Frechtman.
Giono, Jean. Second Harvest, tr Henri Fluchère and Geoffrey Myers.
Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People.
Gorky, Maxim. My Apprenticeship, tr Ronald Wilks.
Grass, Günter. Cat and Mouse, tr Ralph Manheim.
Greene, Graham. A Burnt-Out Case.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory.
Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage.
Grossman, David. Someone to Run With, tr Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz.
Guthrie, AB. The Big Sky.
Haffner, Ernst. Blood Brothers, tr Michael Hoffman.
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf.
Herzog, Werner. Of Walking in Ice, tr Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg.
Hesse, Herman. Steppenwolf, tr David Horrocks.
Jefferies, Richard. After London.
Johnson, Denis. Train Dreams.
Kapuściński, Ryszard. Another Day of Life, tr William R Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.
Kee, Robert. A Crowd is not Company.
Kelman, James. How Late it Was, How Late.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road.
King James Bible.
Koch, Christopher K. The Year of Living Dangerously.
&nbs
p; Lee, Laurie. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
Levi, Primo. If Not Now, When? tr William Weaver.
Lind, Jakov. Soul of Wood, tr Ralph Mannheim.
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories.
MacGill, Patrick. Children of the Dead End.
Manfred, Frederick. Lord Grizzly.
Manning, Maurice. The Common Man.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses.
McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road.
McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove.
Mitchell, Joseph. Joe Gould’s Secret.
Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel.
Modiano, Patrick. Missing Person, tr Daniel Weissbort, Verba Mundi.
Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant, tr Joanna Kilmartin.
Modiano, Patrick. Suspended Sentences, tr Mark Polizzotti.
Mosley, Walter. A Little Yellow Dog.
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Eye.
Naipaul, VS. A Bend in the River.
Naipaul, VS. Miguel Street.
Neider, Charles. The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones.
Ōe, Kenzaburō. Death by Water, tr Deborah Boliver Boehm.
O’Brien, Tim. Going after Cacciato.
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Oz, Amos. Panther in the Basement, tr Nicholas de Lange.
Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness, tr Nicholas de Lange.
Papadiamantis, Alexandros. The Murderess, tr Peter Levi.
Paton, Alan. Cry, The Beloved Country.
Schaeffer, Jack. Shane.
Schneider, Peter. The Wall Jumper, tr Leigh Hafrey.
Schwartz, Delmore. What Is To Be Given.
Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Tales, tr John Glad.
Sciascia, Leonardo. The Day of the Owl, tr Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver.
Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
Simic, Charles. Dime-Store Alchemy.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: and other tales of terror.
Tolkien, JRR. The Fellowship of the Ring.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Williamson, Henry. Tarka the Otter.
Woodrell, Daniel. Winter’s Bone.
Woodrell, Daniel. Woe to Live On.
Yoshimura, Akira. One Man’s Justice, tr Mark Ealey.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My grateful thanks to the MacDowell Colony, where the earliest version of this story was written. And to my colleagues and students in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, whose inspirational teaching and conversation helped to shape this book.