Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “I can see you,” Preston said more loudly, and Napoleon told him to shut up, but he wouldn’t. He kept saying it until the one with the lost eye came up behind him and kicked out his legs, knocking him to his knees. Then he held the barrel of the pistol to the temple of his head and without pause pulled the trigger and fired a bullet across Preston’s face. When Preston fell forward he thought him dead, but he wasn’t. The aimed bullet had not entered his skull but crossed his face in front of his brain, shattering the bones that rimmed his eye sockets, the fragile bones contained within his eye sockets, and destroying his nose bridge and his blue eyes.

  The side of Preston’s face was blackened where the muzzle flash burned his skin. There were shards of bones and pulverized bone floating in his head. He started bleeding again from the holes where his eyes used to be, as if the blood of a man was infinite.

  Preston went silent for a long time. He lay on the ground and did not move. He thought him perhaps dead and gone, whatever light left inside him cold and extinguished. Then he could hear a whimpering sound and then words.

  “I can still see you,” he said.

  “No,” he said softly. “It’s time for you to go.”

  The one who carried the knife with a white jigged-bone handle and nickel silver bolsters came again from the darkness to where they lay. He was eating an apple and the little boy was with him. He looked down at Preston, gibbering incoherently on the ground, and then he held the apple he was eating by his teeth while he unsheathed the knife and took Preston by the hair.

  “Please kill me,” Preston cried. “Please kill me.”

  The apple still held in his teeth he took Preston’s face in his hands and when his hands came away he threw Preston’s tongue on the ground. Then he sheathed the knife and went back to eating his apple and Preston never made another word.

  As the night wore on the people walked out to look at the work that’d been done to them, the old women, the women nursing infants, the children. They came in twos and threes and they looked and then they turned away and walked back to the fires.

  Napoleon did not know his fate, but he knew he was witnessing the destruction of the handsome man. For what seemed hours he could hear Preston suffering in the darkness. Something inside the man demanded an epic life and now he’d found it.

  Then there came a stirring from around the fires. They brought forward a skittish mustang, hobbled and blindfolded, and a man stood at his head soothing it and whispering into its flicking ear. They dragged Preston from the ground and held him erect as they knotted his hands into the mustang’s long tail. When this work was done the man with the lost eye signaled with a nod of his head and the hobbles were quickly removed, the blindfold pulled away.

  The mustang tossed its head, sending a strand of slobber into the air. It shivered its body, as if an act of collection and self-determination and then it exploded, its hooves shearing into the man tied to its tail. The first kick was to the groin, him being so tall, and it crushed into him and before he could crumple the second kick was similarly placed and it tore away his privates. He cried out with a tongueless mouth. His cry was strangled and silent, as if the last desperate prehistoric cry. He’d not had time to fold between kicks, but now he folded and groaned and his mouth gaped silently. Both of his legs were broken and splayed from beneath him at cruel angles. The next kicks planted the hooves in his chest. They crushed his sternum and destroyed his heart and broke open his skull.

  For Preston it was now over, but the mustang continued its kicking until what was tied to its tail finally tore away and then, exhausted, it settled and they led it away.

  Walking on his knees, in the moonlight, Napoleon found the body of Preston, shot and whipped and stogged and kicked to death, and lay beside it.

  His was a dirty death, but in the end it was his own death and no one else’s and it’d been waiting here for him all these years and now he’d walked into its chain and it’d taken him in its embrace. He’d died long and hard in the unlikeliest of places. In America, he was someone, but in Mexico, he wasn’t anybody. He’d cried and blubbered and tried to ransom himself with a wad of new folded greenbacks. He’d pissed himself and shat himself and his skin was saturated with runnels of blood and greasy sweat.

  On the whole he’d been a vital young man of action who thought it was better to do something than nothing and to act wrongly was preferable to not acting at all. He wanted adventure. He yearned for a challenge. He desired risk. He’d been faithfully judged by the laws of war and it was determined he cross the threshold between life and death with no return.

  Napoleon was so cold he began to crawl in the direction of the fires obscured by the shadows. The little boy walked along beside him lugging the shotgun. He reached the outer ring of warmth and when he felt this first heat he stopped and lay back. He stretched his neck and turned his face to the breathing warmth. The women were cooking frijoles. There was a crying baby. Then they began to let the fires go out. There was the sound of tack and tin pans and wooden boxes slapping shut as they broke camp in preparation for a night move.

  They came to him and dragged him to beside the corpse. Weak and disoriented he’d never felt his body so old in motion.

  “Your man is dead,” the boy said to him.

  “He weren’t nothing to me,” he said.

  “She wants you will tell the others what happened here so they will know. She says you’re only a soldier and you want nothing. You ain’t got no other reason to be here and nothing to prove.”

  “Tell her she can go to hell.”

  “It would probably be best if I didn’t.”

  They draped him over a hollow-backed bay, bound and trussed him at the wrists and ankles. He felt the horse’s hindquarters flex and adjust to sustain his weight. Someone hit the horse across the crupper and they rode him away from that place for how long he did not know. He was as if baggage, and the walking steps of the horse entered him and dulled what little bit was left of him and his mind emptied.

  They followed a steep trail through the pines and then began a long descent. For how long he had no memory. He was lost and upside down and seeing in the darkness of his own mind. He had no need to think foolish incantations. He’d already crossed over to the other side of thinking. He’d already released himself.

  He remembered, that night, traversing a precipitous bluff cut by a deep arroyo running well back into the upper plain. Then they descended the bluff, crossed a dry river and pushed on through the darkness. At some point in the night they stopped and for a few moments he was conscious before passing out again.

  Then his wrists were cut free from his ankles and with a shrug the horse shed him onto the hard desert floor where he lay naked on his back. His body was too sore to endure. When the horse moved on again it was pulling a long rope and Preston’s body was dragging behind and then was a column of pack animals and then nothing.

  14

  THE NIGHT WAS STILL as a wing. There were traces of silent birds in the sky silhouetted against the halide moon, the full buck moon when back home the new antlers of the buck deer were in velvet. He lay on the hard stony plain beneath their overpassing flight. He was alone and cold lying so near to freezing on the ground, the Milky Way’s white light stretching from one horizon to another. Out here he knew his entire welfare depended on the condition of his horse and to be without one was near fatal. He could die in this place, he surely could.

  His mind went to the remembering place. He remembered home, his greenest days, waking up warm and hungry, the rooster nagging at the sun, the cow braying for relief from her engorged udder, a coal black horse stamping in a wooden stall. His mattress was smooth as a coated animal, the floor cold to his feet, and his hunger flaring inside him like an open hand.

  His mother, Rachel, the morning her hair caught afire in the great kitchen when she leaned into the fireplace to retrieve a kettle. He and his brother were little boys eating their breakfasts, their spoons halfway to their mouths w
hen she caught afire and before their eyes, she became a stalk of killing light.

  Every remembered thing left behind by the years but not that. It was not possible to leave that behind, no, not ever.

  He wondered, Who left him here? He did not know. He knew there was a song they sang, the words “green as the sea were her eyes.” One of the little boys who guarded him wore his color-tinted goggles, the little boy who followed him to the outer heat of the fires. He thought of the round-shouldered women sitting cross-legged on the ground, nursing their infants slung to their breasts, the women rising up with their babies and the women’s spines bent back and the babies rising from their hips.

  He saw again the horses, his brother would want to know: the golden duns with tiger eyes, the grullos, tobianos, and overos, a blue-eyed cremello, the majestic Andalusian the woman rode. The horses were as if from the distant and isolated kingdom of the circus where they were bred to be as illusory as the circus itself.

  He thought of the fallen lying in last contortion, their dead eyes as they glutted the earth with their bright blood. He remembered a man dismounting his horse. He threw his leg across the pommel and jumped down with a pair of alligator pliers. He’d stay behind to unclinch the nails and pull the shoes from dead horses. Man animals and horse animals, the hard beasts of the earth come to the place of the place of consequence and certitude. Whoever they were, they’d disappeared as if sewn into darkness and they left him where he was to fend for himself and he knew he would never see them again.

  He knew the absolute silence of deserts, knew they were never really so, but this night was the most silent tent he’d ever experienced. The vault of the night sky curved overhead and was vast and empty as if a great hall where music used to play. The night was desolate, piercingly cold and made thin and transparent and he could see the stars and the stars behind the stars. The peace and beauty he felt he could not avoid, but it did not confuse him.

  If it was pain that barred the door to death, then he’d had enough and he was ready. He closed his eyes and opened them as if to change the page of thought and find another scene, but he could not. He was in the time and place where he was and could fall no further than he’d already fallen and yet inside he could still feel something.

  He thought, Extra Billy was an awfully good man and Bandy, with time, might have worked out too. His heart emptied at the losses he’d sustained and there on the desert floor he grieved over the so many fallen men of both sides in the battle and for a time all feeling he’d buried deep inside came to the world. He wept and his body was racked.

  The night darkened, a dim invisible veil fallen across the scene and soon was a ghostly blue topography, as if a great understanding of his grief. He searched through the tenebrous darkness for the heartening light of the far bright star. He wished to lift a hand, to locate, but he could not.

  Something was telling him this stony place where he lay would not be his deathbed. He wondered if perhaps Bandy made it too and was following the compass home.

  What of the Rattler horse that saved his life? Would he ever know?

  It was an immense dark night on earth and he felt to have been washed up on a high shore of the world. Whatever dim veil fallen across the heavens was lifted and again there were infinite stars spangling the blue night. The stars were faint and flickered gently as if alive.

  How frail is the force that holds one on earth, he thought. How fragile the essence called life. In this cold starry place he was the only flicker of what is named human.

  “Feeling bad?” he asked himself.

  “I’ve felt better,” he replied.

  It was now the brightest heaven he looked into, as if the moon had impossibly increased. The silence was warm and deep and as if left by a sweeping hand. They liked the men to ride at night because they could not see their horses and it made them sit upright. The darkness also made the horses careful. At night they lowered their heads and released their back muscles. They became more alert, sure footed and obedient. On nights like this he would stop the horse and lay back and look at the stars, the haunches moving under his back. It is so like humans to think there is more out there than there is here. They are greedy for the water to be more and for the land to be more and even greedy for the sky to be more.

  They left him in the center of a vast nothingness and still he could not understand why. He could not piece it out with his thoughts and his mind into a thousand parts was divided. They came at his heels as whispering crooked figures. Why had they left him wildered and not dead? Why had they not killed him? Tell the others, she told him. Tell the others what happened here.

  When they rode out, they rode over him, the pack animals in column stepping gingerly and their hooves passing to either side of his body, or carelessly stepping on his back and legs and arms folded over his head. Behind them they dragged the body of Preston, the last of their killed.

  His mind had left his body and fled somewhere it might be safe until it could return and now it was returning. He was above the plain, as if hovering, his back to the earth. He tried to remember how he got there in case he had a chance to get back so he could tell his brother, but he had no way of knowing and could not remember.

  He thought, I cannot bear what I have experienced, and then he thought, I can bear what I have experienced. He thought of the General. Not long ago the General lost his wife and his three little girls in a fire. Where before he had been a spare, alert, and jaunty man, he was now a caved and silent man, suffering insomnia and melancholia, living the lonely isolation of his personal grief.

  He tried to remember how long he and his brother had been with the General, but he could not.

  After that he slept for a while, or rather, there were long intervals in the night when he was not conscious. When he did awake, something doglike was standing over him and was sniffing him, its breath hot and sour.

  “Go away,” he whispered. “Shoo.” He tried to lift a hand to wave it off, but he could not.

  Then it went away but not too far. It went away to the edge of a circle where it joined other animals that he understood were watching him. Whether true or not, this was the impression he had.

  He knew most snakes avoided the daylight and the heat of the sun by prowling at night. He had the passing thought they’d be coming for him and already he was residing in a sea of rattlesnakes. From behind a stone a scorpion was looking at him, its spiked poisonous tail arched over its back. He could not help but feel this was all a dreadful mistake and maybe did not even happen.

  He tried to move his body, but he could not. In the moonlight ancient trails would reveal themselves and on these he would follow to water in the morning. There were thorns about his head and his body and every time he moved they stung his skin. This was okay, the sensation of pain, because he felt it throughout his body and so was not broken or paralyzed. There would be time to move later, but for now he needed not to move.

  He finally found sleep and in the secret whispers of memory dreamed himself home and was walking in cool sparkles of wet sunlight. The song of a wood thrush came to him from deep in the forest. His mother wore her white muslin morning dress and button shoes. She carried a parasol and a wide-brimmed straw hat, a daisy flower in her hair. She had packed a picnic basket in which she placed chicken salad, a jar of lemonade, hard-boiled eggs, pickles. There was a profusion of grapevine, dry and brittle, where they followed a short path and the wild roses were still wet with the morning dew, even though it was approaching noon.

  As he walked the narrow path, she slipped in behind him, her hand up to fend off any branch he might let go, but he held each for her to pass by. There was a faint breeze on the air and pale yellow sunlight dappled the thin worn path they followed into the woods, but for all the light they found themselves surrounded with an indescribable aura of haunting loneliness. At the water’s edge was a host of ruby-spotted damselflies. He slid his hand into the cool current until it was wrist deep. Above them a flat sheening water
fall fell from the rocks and tangled and the scattering water was dazzling in the sunlight.

  His mother touched her hand to his smooth cheek. A tiger swallowtail lighted in her hair. There was an emotion he could feel that he’d never felt before and not since. He took off his shoes and socks and trousers. He wore his shirt to the water’s edge as if shy and then discarded it at the last moment before plunging in. He swam to the bottom of the pool and looked up at the sky where sunlight was flashing its gold and silver on the water surface above his head.

  15

  WHEN HE AWOKE were pink traces of morning. The sun was breeching the horizon. A thin aqueous light was appearing in the east. The vein of light expanded and then was a snap of light and the sun risen and he lay in a parlor of sun, the shining tracks of virga filling the sky, lifting and decorating the sunlight, the magnificent structure of light all around him.

  He was lying naked in the center of a vast playa, a dry flat lake bed. He was wrecked in a godforsaken place. This was not the land of humidity and decomposition, but the place of the sun shriveled and the dried-up. It was the vast dusty hollow of a bowl-like valley where he lay and surrounding him were endless miles of sand and windswept earth, high blue mountains, and deep ravines. He knew this land like the palm of his hand, but this day he had no idea where he was. He tried in vain to roll over, to stretch his hand beyond his body, but he could not.

  His years on earth became dreamlike to him, a flash of moments experienced and without chains of interlocking experiences. When he remembered he did not see himself, but saw what was before him when it was before his eyes. For all that he’d experienced he was not there but was here and was the watcher and seeing it in his mind and placing it in his memory without remembering all the way to now and now was the only time that mattered.

  And, for now, he had to keep what small life he possessed inside himself. He could not let it leave his being. He knew he would be found. His brother would travel in violence to find him. His brother would not give up, not ever, and for that reason he had an obligation to be found or his brother would search the desert until he died.