He’d little money and then he’d none but he was in every dramhouse and gamingroom, every cockpit and doggery. A quiet youth in a suit too large and the same broken boots he’d come off the desert in. Standing just within the door of a foul saloon with his eyes shifting under the brim of the hat he wore and the light from a wallsconce on the side of his face he was taken for a male whore and set up to drinks and then shown to the rear of the premises. He left his patron senseless in a mudroom there where there was no light. Other men found him on their own sordid missions and other men took his purse and watch. Later still someone took his shoes.
He heard no news of the priest and he’d quit asking. Returning to his lodging one morning at daybreak in a gray rain he saw a face slobbering in an upper window and he climbed the stairwell and rapped at the door. A woman in a silk kimono opened the door and looked out at him. Behind her in the room a candle burned at a table and in the pale light at the window a halfwit sat in a pen with a cat. It turned to look at him, not the judge’s fool but just some other fool. When the woman asked him what he wanted he turned without speaking and descended the stairwell into the rain and the mud in the street.
With his last two dollars he bought from a soldier the scapular of heathen ears that Brown had worn to the scaffold. He was wearing them the next morning when he hired out to an independent conductor from the state of Missouri and he was wearing them when they set out for Fremont on the Sacramento River with a train of wagons and packanimals. If the conductor had any curiosity about the necklace he kept it to himself.
He was at this employment for some months and he left it without notice. He traveled about from place to place. He did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for. By now he’d come by a horse and a revolver, the rudiments of an outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a bible that he’d found at the mining camps and he carried this book with him no word of which could he read. In his dark and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher but he was no witness to them, neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. They were remote places for news that he traveled in and in those uncertain times men toasted the ascension of rulers already deposed and hailed the coronation of kings murdered and in their graves. Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial.
He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from the land of China chained in the small harbors and bales of tea and silks and spices broken open with swords by small yellow men with speech like cats. On that lonely coast where the steep rocks cradled a dark and muttersome sea he saw vultures at their soaring whose wingspan so dwarfed all lesser birds that the eagles shrieking underneath were more like terns or plovers. He saw piles of gold a hat would scarcely have covered wagered on the turn of a card and lost and he saw bears and lions turned loose in pits to fight wild bulls to the death and he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice saw it burn and never went back, riding out on horseback along the road to the south where all night the shape of the city burned against the sky and burned again in the black waters of the sea where dolphins rolled through the flames, fire in the lake, through the fall of burning timbers and the cries of the lost. He never saw the expriest again. Of the judge he heard rumor everywhere.
In the spring of his twenty-eighth year he set out with others upon the desert to the east, he one of five at hire to see a party through the wilderness to their homes halfway across the continent. Seven days from the coast at a desert well he left them. They were just a band of pilgrims returning to their homes, men and women, already dusty and travelworn.
He set the horse’s face north toward the stone mountains running thinly under the edge of the sky and he rode the stars down and the sun up. It was no country he had ever seen and there was no track to follow into those mountains and there was no track out. Yet in the deepest fastness of those rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide the silence of the world.
He first saw them laboring over the plain in the dusk among flowering ocotillo that burned in the final light like horned candelabra. They were led by a pitero piping a reed and then in procession a clanging of tambourines and matracas and men naked to the waist in black capes and hoods who flailed themselves with whips of braided yucca and men who bore on their naked backs great loads of cholla and a man tied to a rope who was pulled this way and that by his companions and a hooded man in a white robe who bore a heavy wooden cross on his shoulders. They were all of them barefoot and they left a trail of blood across the rocks and they were followed by a rude carreta in which sat a carved wooden skeleton who rattled along stiffly holding before him a bow and arrow. He shared his cart with a load of stones and they went trundling over the rocks drawn by ropes tied to the heads and ankles of the bearers and accompanied by a deputation of women who carried small desert flowers in their folded hands or torches of sotol or primitive lanterns of pierced tin.
This troubled sect traversed slowly the ground under the bluff where the watcher stood and made their way over the broken scree of a fan washed out of the draw above them and wailing and piping and clanging they passed between the granite walls into the upper valley and disappeared in the coming darkness like heralds of some unspeakable calamity leaving only bloody footprints on the stone.
He bivouacked in a barren swale and he and the horse lay down together and all night the dry wind blew down the desert and the wind was all but silent for there was nothing of resonance among those rocks. In the dawn he and the horse stood watching the east where the light commenced and then he saddled the horse and led it down a scrabbled trail through a canyon where he found a tank deep under a pitch of boulders. The water lay in darkness and the stones were cool and he drank and fetched water for the horse in his hat. Then he led the animal up onto the ridge and they went on, the man watching the tableland to the south and the mountains to the north and the horse clattering along behind.
By and by the horse began to toss its head and soon it would not go. He stood holding the hackamore and studying the country. Then he saw the pilgrims. They were scattered about below him in a stone coulee dead in their blood. He took down his rifle and squatted and listened. He led the horse under the shade of the rock wall and hobbled it and moved along the rock and down the slope.
The company of penitents lay hacked and butchered among the stones in every attitude. Many lay about the fallen cross and some were mutilated and some were without heads. Perhaps they’d gathered under the cross for shelter but the hole into which it had been set and the cairn of rocks about its base showed how it had been pushed over and how the hooded alterchrist had been cut down and disemboweled who now lay with the scraps of rope by which he had been bound still tied about his wrists and ankles.
The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down.
He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. She was very old and her face was gray and leathery and sand had collected in the folds of her clothing. She did not look up. The shawl that covered her head was much faded of its color yet it bore like a patent woven into the fabric the figures of stars and quartermoons and other insignia of a provenance unknown to him. He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she s
hould join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.
He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No puedes escúcharme?
He reached into the little cove and touched her arm. She moved slightly, her whole body, light and rigid. She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years.
XXIII
On the north Texas plains – An old buffalo hunter – The millennial herds – The bonepickers – Night on the prairie – The callers – Apache ears – Elrod takes a stand – A killing – Bearing off the dead – Fort Griffin – The Beehive – A stageshow – The judge – Killing a bear – The judge speaks of old times – In preparation for the dance – The judge on war, destiny, the supremacy of man – The dancehall – The whore – The jakes and what was encountered there – Sie müssen schlafen aber Ich muss tanzen.
In the late winter of eighteen seventy-eight he was on the plains of north Texas. He crossed the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River on a morning when skim ice lay along the sandy shore and he rode through a dark dwarf forest of black and twisted mesquite trees. He made his camp that night on a piece of high ground where there was a windbreak formed of a tree felled by lightning. He’d no sooner got his fire to burn than he saw across the prairie in the darkness another fire. Like his it twisted in the wind, like his it warmed one man alone.
It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the ton and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion.
I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not haulin a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many hides reached the railhead. Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all.
The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
When he came upon the bonepickers he’d been riding three days in a country he’d never seen. The plains were sere and burntlooking and the small trees black and misshapen and haunted by ravens and everywhere the ragged packs of jackal wolves and the crazed and sunchalked bones of the vanished herds. He dismounted and led the horse. Here and there within the arc of ribs a few flat discs of darkened lead like old medallions of some order of the hunt. In the distance teams of oxen bore along slowly and the heavy wagons creaked dryly. Into these barrows the pickers tossed the bones, kicking down the calcined architecture, breaking apart the great frames with axes. The bones clattered in the wagons, they plowed on in a pale dust. He watched them pass, ragged, filthy, the oxen galled and mad-looking. None spoke to him. In the distance he could see a train of wagons moving off to the northeast with great tottering loads of bones and further to the north other teams of pickers at their work.
He mounted and rode on. The bones had been gathered into windrows ten feet high and hundreds long or into great conical hills topped with the signs or brands of their owners. He overtook one of the lumbering carts, a boy riding the near wheel ox and driving with a jerkline and a jockeystick. Two youths squatting atop a mound of skulls and pelvic bones leered down at him.
Their fires dotted the plain that night and he sat with his back to the wind and drank from an army canteen and ate a handful of parched corn for his supper. All across those reaches the yammer and yap of the starving wolves relayed and to the north the silent lightning rigged a broken lyre upon the world’s dark rim. The air smelled of rain but no rain fell and the creaking bonecarts passed in the night like darkened ships and he could smell the oxen and hear their breath. The sour smell of the bones was everywhere. Toward midnight a party hailed him as he squatted at his coals.
Come up, he said.
They came up out of the dark, sullen wretches dressed in skins. They carried old military guns save for one who had a buffalo rifle and they had no coats and one of them wore green hide boots peeled whole from the hocks of some animal and the toes gathered shut with leader.
Evenin stranger, called out the eldest child among them.
He looked at them. They were four and a halfgrown boy and they halted at the edge of the light and arranged themselves there.
Come up, he said.
They shuffled forward. Three of them squatted and two stood.
Where’s ye outfit? said one.
He aint out for bones.
You aint got nary chew of tobacca about your clothes have ye?
He shook his head.
Nary drink of whiskey neither I dont reckon.
He aint got no whiskey.
Where ye headed mister?
Are you headed twards Griffin?
He looked them over. I am, he said.
Goin for the whores I’ll bet ye.
He aint goin for the whores.
It’s full of whores, Griffin is.
Hell, he’s probably been there more’n you.
You been to Griffin mister?
Not yet.
Full of whores. Full plumb up.
They say you can get clapped a day’s ride out when the wind is right.
They set in a tree in front of this here place and you can look up and see their bloomers. I’ve counted high as eight in that tree early of a evenin. Set up there like coons and smoke cigarettes and holler down at ye.
It’s set up to be the biggest town for sin in all Texas.
It’s as lively a place for murders as you’d care to visit.
Scrapes with knives. About any kind of meanness you can name.
He looked at them from one to the other. He reached and took up a stick and roused the fire with it and put the stick in the flames. You all like meanness? he said.
We dont hold with it.
Like to drink whiskey?
He’s just talkin. He aint no whiskey drinker.
Hell, you just now seen him drink it not a hour ago.
I seen him puke it back up too. What’s them things around your neck there mister?
He pulled the aged scapular from his shirtfront and looked at it. It’s ears, he said.
It’s what?
Ears.
What kind of ears?
He tugged at the thong and looked down at them. They were perfectly black and hard and dry and of no shape at all. Humans, he said. Human ears. Aint done it, said the one with the rifle.
Dont call him a liar Elrod, he’s liable to shoot ye. Let’s see them things mister if you dont care.
He slipped the scapular over his head and handed it across to the boy who’d spoken. They pressed about and felt the strange dried pendants.
Niggers, aint it? they said.
Docked them niggers’ ears so they’d know em when they run off.
How many is there mister?
I dont know. Used to be near a hundred.
They held the t
hing up and turned it in the firelight.
Nigger ears, by god.
They aint niggers.
They aint?
No.
What are they? Injins.
The hell they are.
Elrod you done been told.
How come them to be so black as that if they aint niggers.
They turned that way. They got blacker till they couldnt black no more.
Where’d you get em at?
Killed them sons of bitches. Didnt ye mister?
You been a scout on the prairies, aint ye?
I bought them ears in California off a soldier in a saloon didnt have no money to drink on.
He reached and took the scapular from them.
Shoot. I bet he’s been a scout on the prairie killed ever one of them sons of bitches.
The one called Elrod followed the trophies with his chin and sniffed the air. I dont see what you want with them things, he said. I wouldnt have em.
The others looked at him uneasily.
You dont know where them ears come from. That old boy you bought em off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals or any other kind of foreign nigger. They tell me you can buy the whole heads in New Orleans. Sailors brings em in and you can buy em for five dollars all day long them heads.
Hush Elrod.
The man sat holding the necklace in his hands. They wasnt cannibals, he said. They was Apaches. I knowed the man that docked em. Knowed him and rode with him and seen him hung.
Elrod looked at the others and grinned. Apaches, he said. I bet them old Apaches would give a watermelon a pure fit, what about you all?
The man looked up wearily. You aint callin me a liar are ye son?
I aint ye son.
How old are you?
That’s some more of your business.
How old are you?
He’s fifteen.
You hush your damn mouth.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) Page 32