I TUK THE BAKUN, AND I SHUDNT HAVE DUN THAT.
IM SORY AND WONT DO IT NO MOR.
The boy had learned a sight more of his letters now than he had known when he first came to him a few weeks ago. He still had ways to go, but despite his foolish manner, the boy was a fairly quick study. He also seemed the more Merle talked with him, to have an almost supernatural sense for reading people. He knew Caleb was a genuine son of a bitch, but then again, anybody in a room with the man for more than a few seconds knew that. Percy, though, knew more.
“I reckon he feels all conflicted,” Percy said just this morning watching Caleb storm from the Caring Lion to the Ardiss’ office and back. It was a beautiful morning, so Merle had suggested they take their lesson outside instead of the stuffy office. From there, they had a clear view of both buildings, indeed the whole of the main street.
“Conflicted about what?” Merle said, only half listening as he tried to find the place in the New Testament for today’s reading lesson.
“Well,” Percy rubbed his mouth and chin, “he loves Ardiss like his own blood, but I think he’s also jealous of him.”
At this Merle put the bible on the floor and leaned in towards Percy. “Jealous why?”
“I mean, look at him. He’s what? Five, ten years older than Ardiss?”
“Seven, I believe,”
“Right, and what has he done? He’s Ardiss’ lead deputy, sure, but Ardiss pretty much runs the town. And he only made Caleb that after Lancaster left.”
“How do you know this?”
“I clean up afternoons in the bar. People talk all kinds of things when they think ain’t nobody listening. So there’s Caleb, who got the second most important job like a hand-me-down, and it ain’t even that much of a job as far as I can tell.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, unless there’s a bank robbery or something, Caleb doesn’t really have anything to do. And since you all don’t have no bank that means he ain’t really nobody, just the manager of the Caring Lion, which Ardiss owns. I bet he thinks if Ardiss weren't around, he’d be more important.”
Merle leaned back in his folding chair and rubbed his chin. His eyes never left Percy.
“He probably also thinks his pa’s more proud of Ardiss than he is of his own flesh and blood son, too. I mean, who wouldn’t be? I bet sometimes, he wished he didn’t love the man so much. But he does. He worships the man just like everybody does. But he resents his foster brother something awful.
Percy stopped abruptly as if so much talking wore him out. He took a breath. “It’s why he’s so mean to everybody else,” Percy finished a second later, “conflicted.”
Merle licked his lips and rubbed them dry again. The boy had insight, that was for damned sure. The parson reached down for the Bible, opened it to today’s passage, and handed it to the boy. “I guess we really should do some studying before you go to lunch. Read me Matthew 17.”
Percy took the book and scanned the page. “This is the one where I gotta believe I’m a mustard seed? Ma used to read it to me a good deal on Sundays.”
“Well, now you can read it to me.”
II.
Merle folded the paper and put it in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He paused to listen to the sounds of the laughing schoolchildren next door, let out for their lunch and instead playing tag. He began to gather up the bible in one hand and the two folding chairs in the other.
“Unless you have a third arm hidden somewhere, Reverend,” a female voice came from behind him, “you’ll have a devil’s time opening that door.”
Merle turned around to see a young woman with bunned auburn hair leaning against one of the portico columns smiling at him. On her arm, she carried a picnic basket.
“Oh, g-good morning, Miss Nimmons,” Merle stuttered. “Y-you startled me.” He tried futilely to look her in the eyes while steadfastly avoiding her gaze. This meant, of course, that he found himself staring at her bosom.
“I’ve asked you before to call me Vivian,” She leaned down to set the basket on the floor. This made Merle more uncomfortable, and he found himself flushed. If Vivian noticed, though, she made no indication other than a thin smile. As she rose, she reached for one of the chairs and with her free hand, opened the narthex door allowing Merle to precede her into the church.
Merle led her down the aisle between the pews towards the altar. “W-what can I do for you this m-morning, Miss Nim—Vivian?” He asked over his shoulder as he turned right just before the altar rail and approached the vestry.
“I brought you lunch, Reverend,” Vivian smiled more broadly at him as she passed him when he held open the vestry door for her. “I don’t imagine you generally have more than cold coffee and stale toast for your dinner, so I thought to rectify that. Shall I put these here?” She motioned to the near wall where other chairs were leaned.
“Y-yes, ma’am,” Merle stammered. “I appreciate your offer, but I’m not really hungry. I generally don’t even have the coffee and toast.”
“Pish-posh, Reverend.” Vivian placed her folding chair with the others and reached for Merle’s. “That is the silliest thing I have heard all day, and I have spent the entire morning with seven-year-olds.” She placed the second chair with the first and strode purposefully out into the nave again. “I have prepared lunch for you, so lunch you will have, sir, whether you will find it or not.” She looked back over her shoulder, and her smile broadened. “You wouldn’t have all my trouble, not to mention my food, go to waste, now would you?”
With that, Vivian left the nave and returned to the portico. Merle stared blankly after her, wondering if he had enough time to run through his office on the other side of the altar and out the back door before the schoolteacher returned. He had almost decided he did when the narthex door opened again, and Vivian stuck her head in in mock exasperation.
“Well, come on then,” she said with a smile, “this food won’t eat itself, I’m afraid.”
Reluctantly, Merle joined her on the portico where he saw that she had unpacked the basket. She had spread a checkered tablecloth across the floor of the portico, and placed four towel-covered dishes in the center. A stoppered jug sat it in the middle of the four dishes. Vivian had also placed two dinner plates at opposite corners of the tablecloth along with glasses and dessert plates.
On each plate, Merle saw a watercress sandwich, sliced in two, each half placed alongside the edge of the plate with a sizable dollop of potato salad centered between the halves. Two deviled eggs completed the repast. As he sat nervously down opposite Vivian, she leaned over the dishes (causing Merle to blush again and try to find something else to look at), unstoppered the jug, and poured tea into Merle’s glass.
“There now,” she said with a satisfied sigh as she sat back at her own place, “isn’t this nice? Much better, I’m sure than anything you would’ve eaten left to your own devices.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Merle mumbled. “Much better.”
“Well, Reverend,” Vivian again smiled at him, “would like to set us on with a word or two?”
Merle felt his stomach sink a bit at the request, but he couldn’t think of any way out of it, so he bowed his head as Vivian followed suit. “Give us grateful hearts, our Father,” he recited, “for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” Vivian repeated, then looked up. “Well, Reverend, that was short and sweet.”
“I reckon God has more important things pressing on him than listen to me talk about food is all.”
III.
“So, what are you doing with Jim Murratt’s boy?” Vivian asked after they had eaten most of their lunch in relative silence. “Training him for the clergy?”
“I am teaching him his letters,” Merle replied. “Ardiss apparently felt he’d not be a good … fit for your classroom.”
It was Vivian’s turn to be embarrassed. She averted her eyes from Merle and made
a show of serving up lemon teacakes for dessert. “I just told the sheriff that I felt having a boy that old learning with students that young might prove embarrassing for the boy and problematic for me.”
“I understand,” Merle said quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply…that is I agree that that the boy would be better served learning in a more solitary environment. The truth is, I seem to be learning as much from the boy as he is learning from me.”
“How so?”
“I believe the boy has been touched by God,” Merle said without hesitation, then, as if realizing what he had said, he looked away from Vivian and focused his attention on the teacake. “This is very good,” he said. “It tastes very much like Guernica’s recipe.”
“She taught it to me,” Vivian replied, “I’ve added a little black walnut leaf to it. What do you mean touched by God?”
Merle took a bite of the cake and chewed slowly, wondering how to answer her question. He decided to tell the truth. “I believe he had visions in the desert.”
“Well, he was severely dehydrated when he found us,” Vivian took her napkin and wiped a stray crumb from Merle’s chin. “Hallucinations are to be expected I would assume.”
“These were very clear visions, and they apparently left physical evidence.”
He then told her Percy’s tale of the breakfast his dead grandfather had made him. “And this is only one of the many things I find miraculous about his journey. Time and again, circumstances developed to lead him to us: He was starving and happened upon a cabin where he was able to feed himself and his mule. The bacon he took from there, he claims, is what his grandfather cooked. The smoke of that fire is what led Gary Wayne and Boris to him, who then set him on his way. The next time he got hungry, God sent an old Indian man (who looked, apparently, like his grandfather) to feed him, but the next day the tepee was gone without a trace.” Merle stopped, realizing that he was now so animated that his words were falling over each other trying to leave his mouth.
“Reverend…Merle,” Vivian soothed, “all of these things can still be explained by hallucinations brought on by hunger, heat, and exhaustion.”
“You don’t understand,” Merle said. “When Jim Murratt moved his family out of Bretton all those years ago, he had no intention of their coming back. The Muratt Ranch is a good two hundred miles from here. It’d take at least a week to get here if the boy traveled straight, and he got lost. Wandered the desert in circles for days.”
Vivian looked quizzically at Merle. “Okay?”
“That kid can’t cook water, Vivian, so somebody fed that boy in the wilderness. If it was just hunger visions, that child never would have made it here. He would have died out there dreaming that his grandfather and this Indian were taking turns fixing his vittles.”
Vivian stared at Merle’s face thoughtfully, finally understanding. “So you think,” she said finally, “that God led that boy to the Indian and then led him here?”
“It’s so much more than that,” Merle clarified. “I think God was that Indian. And the grandfather, too. I think that every time Percy was in danger, He guided the boy in the right direction. God put that cabin in his path. God brought Gary Wayne and Boris to him. And God fed the boy when he was hungry.” He speaks to this boy, Merle did not add, but He cannot speak to me.
Vivian said nothing to this; she simply began to quietly pack the dishes back into the blanket. “The children will be returning for the afternoon session,” she explained when she was finished and had risen from the floor, brushing her skirt flat.
“I have scared you away,” Merle said quietly.
“Nonsense,” Vivian dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. Merle simply smiled thinly. “I do have one question, though.”
“Of course.”
“You believe God sent that boy to us, correct?” Vivian rose and smoothed her skirts.
“Yes.”
“To what purpose?”
Merle looked up at her, and she could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
“To save us.”
Chapter Eight – Red Marten
I.
Once a fool, twice an idiot, I always say. And Ardiss has been at least twice a fool thrice a week if you ask me. Anybody could have told the idiot his wife bore looking after. I tried to tell him myself, but he would not listen.
“Uncle,” I said in the sheriff’s office days before the trouble came, “I do not want to be the man to tell you this…”
“Then don’t,” he said with his back to me staring out of his office window into the commons, “I know what you are going to say, and I do not want to hear it.”
“But, you must hear it, Uncle. There is something dishonorable between your wife and your friend. Every day you fail to act on this, you lose more of your own honor.”
“I will not act,” Ardiss turned to face me, and I could see a rattlesnake in his eyes, “without more proof than your own fears and jealousy.”
Uncle or not, I fought hard to not cut him for the insult. The entire town could see how Lancaster and Guernica carried on. For Ardiss Drake, the chief of this tribe, to be so willingly blind…
But Michaa Odjig, my grandfather, had told me that life in the white man’s world was different from life among The People. “The English do not believe what you see until they see it themselves,” he said, “and even then, they must see it three times to know it: once to deny it, twice to explain it, and three times to accept it.”
I knew now that Grandfather was correct. Ardiss needed to act and regain his honor, but he would not act until he had seen the betrayal for himself and in such a way that he could not ignore it. He desired proof so I would give him proof.
II.
I was born among the Aticota on the banks of the Little Big River twenty years ago. My grandfather was the chief of our tribe. My mother, Hachi-Mahal, was a priestess for the harvest ceremony and as such she chose a young warrior every year when the nights grew long to be the harvest king. Together they went to the growing fields after the crops had been cut and raised a tepee where they remained for seven risings of the moon. When they returned, the land was fertilized and prepared for the new planting.
During this time, all the warriors and scouts were sent to the four winds seeking the holy artifacts Father Yucca had bequeathed to The People and that Coyote had convinced them to hide. Therefore, no one could know the identity of the warrior chosen to lie with the priestess and sanctify the land.
“You were conceived then, my son,” Mother explained to me from the time I was old enough to understand speech. “Therefore, you are just as much the son of Father Yucca as you are mine. You will be a great warrior, and you will bring peace to The People.”
On the day I was born, a strange looking fox entered our Hogan. Grandfather said that it was a marten.
“The marten comes from the Great White North,” he told me, “and this one traveled many moons to find you. That is why we named you Apistanewj, for like the marten, you, too, will travel far from us and be the harbinger of great events. You will bring an end to the strife with the White Men,” he continued, “for you will be of their world, too.”
When I had passed eighteen summers, Mother and Grandfather presented me with; leggings made of a faded blue fabric, a white tunic, leather vest, and the strangest moccasins I had ever seen. Mother carried them in and laid them on my pallet in our hogan.
“What is this?” I asked eyeing the garments curiously.
“It is time for you to go away from us,” Mother said quietly. “These will be your traveling clothes.”
“You must go and perform the task you were born for,” Grandfather said. “It is time for you to live in the White Man’s world for a while. These are White Man’s clothing.”
I picked through the new garments and saw there were still more underneath footies made of some coarse fabric and a red garment that appeared to cover the entire body.
“Where did you get them?” I asked, for no
one in our tribe had ever dressed so garishly, not even for festivals.
“Many seasons ago, a young white man lived with us for a time. These were his clothes. He was very dear to me,” Grandfather paused, and a shadow seemed to pass over his face, “I took him in as my foster son, and he and your mother were as close as a brother and sister could be.”
“Fighting Bear,” Mother sighed the name as if naming him would bring him back.
“Is he my father?” I asked eyeing mother.
“Yucca is your father,” Grandfather said before Mother could answer. “You came from the joining of the harvest priestess with the harvest king. Fighting Bear is your uncle, and it is among his people that you must go.”
“Why must I go, Grandfather?”
“The White Man comes like a landslide,” he explained. “He came slowly at first, but he gathers force and speed the longer he comes. Also, he breeds like a rabbit. Soon he will bury us underneath his cities and his penned-in cattle and his iron horses. Soon there will be no place for The People.”
“But,” I argued, “The White Man is stupid. He trusts things and not the world. He looks down to tell time instead of at the sun.” I looked at the piled garments on my pallet. “And he wears too many clothes.”
“The landslide is also witless,” Grandfather said patiently, “but it will bury you just the same. You must learn to avoid the landslide, and if you cannot avoid it, you must learn where to stand so that it washes over you without killing you. We cannot avoid the White Man. Besides, he is not so stupid as he seems. There is much for you to learn from him.”
Guns of the Waste Land: Departure: Volumes 1-2 Page 17