Gloryland

by Shelton Johnson

  I lost my balance. I couldn’t breathe, and my hands went out by themselves trying to find something to grip, but there was only air. I could see McAllister with his lower jaw dropped, and Bingham staring at me like I was Jesus come back. Since I couldn’t see Bledsoe, I figured it was his arm round my neck, his stinky breath in my face, and his regulation Colt revolver pressed against my head.

  He cocked it. The click was loud, louder than the wind in the trees and the meadow, louder than the creek. Even my heart, which was beginning to pound, was quieter than the cocking of that pistol.

  He didn’t say nothing, I couldn’t get any breath to talk, and McAllister and Bingham were too surprised, I guess. The conversation we’d been having was over, and the next one looked like it would be short. We were way past words anyway. If talk was a country we’d been visiting, we had crossed the border to someplace else. There were only two choices.

  Either Bledsoe’d blow my brains out or he wouldn’t.

  All I heard was breathing and the wind in the grass and the whisper in the red firs, the one that comes from nothing and fades to nothing. There were a few birds singing, not a lot cause it was getting close to twilight. A few clouds were passing over, and I could’ve sworn they slowed down as they passed, as if they were trying to get a better look at what was happening below.

  Except for not getting much air, I wasn’t too bad off. In a way it was just like being back in South Carolina. Every day of my life there, something I could only see part of was squeezing my throat and breathing down my neck. This here was just the feel of an arm round my throat cutting off air. It was a feeling of floating in and out of things. It was the knowledge that a cocked pistol was pressed up against my skull, and that my life could end at any time. I was used to this. Bledsoe was just reminding me that this was my life, days and nights of being out of breath, feeling I had no control of anything round me, and Death always right behind me with a gun to my head and his bony finger on the trigger.

  Yeah, I’d been here before. And I knew without thinking that if I moved, he’d pull the trigger. If Bingham or McAllister moved, he’d pull the trigger. He had all the power, and that’s what all this was about.

  Back at Fort Robinson, we did drills that taught you to act and not think, cause thinking just clouds the issue at moments like this, and you were better off acting from instinct. So I did nothing.

  And that was what saved my life. It was a lifetime of doing nothing, the longest ten or twenty minutes I ever spent. McAllister didn’t move. Bingham didn’t move. No one and nothing moved except the Sierra Nevada and everything else in it.

  We must’ve presented a funny picture. Four colored soldiers standing stock-still at the edge of a meadow, surrounded by bare granite hills. Soldiers who weren’t talking, only staring at each other.

  After a bit, I could feel the muscles in Bledsoe’s arm twitch and then begin to relax. I didn’t know if this meant he was about to let me go or he was just getting tired. Whatever the reason, all of a sudden I could breathe and my head started to clear.

  I still did nothing, but doing nothing was something. Growing up in the South had taught me not to confuse fighting with surviving. Surviving didn’t mean backing down or lowering your head like a dog, it meant holding on like an oak in a flood. You put your roots down deep and gripped and let the water come. That’s surviving, and it’s what I was doing with Bledsoe. It’s what we were all doing. All of us knew about living in a world where we had no power. I’m here on this earth cause my family understood that the best way to fight was just to survive. If you were born with a pistol to your head, the only way to fight was to make it to the next second, and that meant knowing what was in the head of the person whose finger was tightening on the trigger.

  This gave me an advantage with Bledsoe. I knew and all of us knew what was in his head, cause we weren’t any different. The same acid gnawing at his gut was in ours too, we were just holding up better right then. Anyway, we all knew how it would turn out if we did nothing. We’d survive.

  And that’s what happened.

  After a few more minutes, Bledsoe got tired of holding that pistol to my head, and he dropped his arm. I stepped away from him, turned toward him. He was breathing hard, looking at the ground, and then he let the pistol drop. It fell to the ground with a dull thud like a stone.

  He sat down next to it and began to cry. I reached down and picked up the Colt and tossed it to McAllister, who caught it and tucked it carefully under his belt. Then I sat down in front of Bledsoe. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t say anything to him, just sat there inches away, and he knew I was there. He was crying hard now.

  McAllister and Bingham sat too, on either side of Bledsoe. They were angry and sad cause they knew he had just left the army by doing what he’d done, left the only real kin he had, and his life was about to get a helluva lot worse.

  The last thing that man needed was more words, so we kept on saying nothing. We helped him get up, and to do that we had to put our arms around him. Once he was standing we could’ve let go, but we didn’t, and he didn’t seem to mind. We kept holding him up.

  We should’ve been angry. Bledsoe could’ve killed me. But he didn’t. He was just mad and he couldn’t hold a pistol to the head of everyone who’d hurt him deeply, make them take notice. We were the only ones in reach. His brothers. His family.

  We didn’t let go of him for a long time.

  Patrol report on Yosemite Park stationery, under “Remarks,” Soda Springs, August 3, 1903

  Corpl. Holmes & 1 Man Patrol the Alkali Creek. return the same day, no trespassing whatever.

  Corpl. Holmes,

  K. Troop, 9th Cav.,

  Soda Springs

  leaving anger

  I’d been in rough country before. The kind of country that leaves calluses on the bottom of your feet if you walk through it barefoot. The kind of terrain that’ll chew up a body and spit it out in the sun. I’d been there before.

  But the worst place I’ve been in was Anger. Anger is a country inside, and I lived there so long I thought I’d never get out alive. It’s a place you can wander through asking all sorts of questions and getting very few answers. I built me a house there, and it had windows that looked out to nowhere and doors that wouldn’t swing out but only in. You couldn’t lock anything out, you could only lock yourself in. And my house was right in the middle of Anger.

  Every night while I lived there, I’d lie in bed and pray to God bout why being colored was my fate in this life. I asked God why he was so cruel to do this to a little boy, and I yelled and screamed and cried inside so loud that I got to be like a bell so shaken by its own sound that it decided to never ring again.

  I lived in Anger so long I forgot there were other places you could live. I didn’t notice that I had no neighbors and no friends. I didn’t notice that being alone was a place I’d built with my own hands. When you’re a good citizen of Anger, you’re stuck inside you, feeling sorry for yourself cause there ain’t nobody around to take up the slack. Nobody comes round to visit or see how you are. You don’t get no mail. There’s no newspaper cause there ain’t no news.

  When you put down roots in Anger, you don’t get older but you don’t get any younger. You don’t ever get fat or skinny or sick with a cold. To catch a cold you got to be open a little, but you’re a boarded-up house with doors and windows that don’t work right. Wind can’t get to you and the sun been gone so long you can’t even say “sun.” It’s dark all the time, which means no plants growing or animals to eat them. You’re the only living thing in the country, if you can call it living.

  Kinda looks silly to build a fence round that lone house. Who or what are you keeping out? Or are you just that afraid of something busting down the door you nailed shut and showing you a road out of Anger?

  Now that would be really scary. To bring the walls down. To break the windows into pieces. To shatter the door. To strip yourself naked of all the things you put on when you were
angry and afraid. To walk out to the road without a stitch of clothing on and no need for modesty, cause there ain’t no one around to see you naked. You scared the world away and the sun away and life away, and everyone who ever thought they loved you away, so why not be free of everything and walk out of that country just like it was the day you were born?

  I had this kinda argument with God for a lot of years while I was in Anger. For a long time I was yelling and crying so much I couldn’t hear what he was trying to say. But more and more I had trouble not hearing it. He was always talking about leaving Anger . . .

  Now you’re scared, ain’t you, Elijah? It takes courage to move out of Anger, don’t it, boy? It’s easy living there, right? Cause it’s always someone else’s fault when something goes wrong, it’s never your fault, cause you a victim of a white man’s hate. You didn’t call yourself a nigger, did you? It was always someone else or something else that made you hurt, made you sick, made you want to die. But you were lying to yourself all those days and nights, lying to yourself and calling it prayers or hope or justice, calling it the Ku Klux or bigots or bastards, every curse you could find like stones lying on the ground waiting to be thrown. Lying to yourself, cause it was easier country to walk through than the truth.

  If Anger is a flat empty land, and you the emptiest thing in it, then Truth is a country of high mountains that knows the feel of God’s feet walking and God’s voice talking and God’s hands feeling everything that’s alive and not alive.

  What was it made me see that I had to walk straight through Anger to the other side? What was it told me to get up and go away from the dark? What was it that reached inside me and pulled me to the outside and said “Live!” I don’t know, but I guess I walked out of Anger to find out.

  Fear is the next town over to Anger, and I spent a lot of time there too, but no longer.

  When I got to Yosemite, I found the country of Truth. I’m not afraid here, cause there ain’t no lies to catch me unawares. There’s only what I can see and hear and smell and feel. God don’t make lies, he only makes truth. He made this his country, and this is the place where I finally built me another house, in the heart of Truth.

  Trees don’t lie bout how they feel bout air. Trees don’t care that you’re colored. A bear or a river or a canyon or a bird don’t care that you’re colored. It don’t even matter to a rattlesnake that you’re colored. I just don’t matter to Yosemite, and that’s Truth. It’s not about hate here or love, it’s only bout how long and how hard you can hold on, and that’s Truth. Though it’s a hard country, Truth is a place you can live in and die in and have some peace.

  There ain’t no niggers allowed in Truth, but all people can move to Truth and settle and live and raise families there, and grow old and go to sleep forever. Truth is the country I patrol, and my job is to keep out lies. If I find them in Yosemite, I am to escort them to the border and push them back over into their own country.

  Mountains can fill your dreams all night long, but they can’t hold a lie for even a minute. Have you ever heard a redtail cry in the Sierra on the bluest day in a country of stone? That cry is picked up by the rock, made louder, and the mountains hold on to it and sound it back longer than the hawk could ever do. These mountains hold snow all year long, they grip the roots of trees and feel the feet of every living thing that walks this country, but most of all they hold something that can’t melt away or rot or die, and that’s Truth.

  I will leave Yosemite one day. I will saddle up my mule and follow an order on a piece of paper that don’t even have my name written on it, but I will do my duty. That day I will not be happy. It will be a hard thing to leave this country, to let go of what holds me so close, to abandon what was so hard to find.

  The long ride back to wherever it says on that paper will be hard enough cause of distance and bad roads, but harder still cause I won’t be going home.

  Of the Spur

  When the troopers employ the spur, the instructor observes that

  they do not bear too much upon the reins, which would counteract

  the effect of the spur. He also observes that the troopers do

  not use the spur unnecessarily.

  from Cavalry Tactics

  hetch hetchy

  Some places you live in, but there’re some that live in you, settle in you the way sediment gathers under a stream that’s slowed down. As long as you ain’t moving too fast, the feel of that place builds up in the dark of you, under your heart while the blood flows over. All you got to do is slow down so it can drop out of the sky and collect.

  Hetch Hetchy is a place like that, a place that slows you down to a speed proper for a human being. When you’ve been in that kind of place for a while, you start moving at the speed of grass coming up or snow falling down, you ain’t going no faster than a leaf budding out in the spring, and it just feels right.

  It happened to me on my first patrol through that valley in the fall of ’03, with Corporal Bingham and Private McAllister. The three of us from Troop K had ridden over on a patrol from the post at Rogers Lake, in the high country north of Mount Hoffman, with orders to check into a report of illegal sheepherders in Hetch Hetchy. As usual, we’d be looking for poachers and other livestock too. It was a long day’s ride from Rogers Lake, and by the time we came over the last ridge before Hetch Hetchy, we weren’t talking much.

  All of us were daydreaming as we rode down from a high ridge on that winding rocky trail, almost as bad as the one into Bloody Canyon, the sort of trail where, when you glance over, you don’t see the ground moving under you. All you see is what’s a long ways below.

  I was in front when we rounded a bend that brought the valley into proper view. It looked like Yosemite Valley but smaller. You could see high granite cliffs rising up on both sides, and on one side was a rock face that looked like El Capitan, only smaller. I say smaller, but it must’ve been two thousand feet high, with a face God had cut in half, like he’d been using lightning as a saber. On the maps it was called Hetch Hetchy Dome. Opposite, on the southern wall, was Kolana Rock, which on a different map was called Sugar Loaf. I didn’t quite understand that name, except maybe meaning a loaf big enough for angels. Anyway, it was enough to stop your thoughts and leave you gaping.

  That’s what the country was like all over.

  In general, we didn’t talk much on patrols, cause the mountains and valleys and meadows kept shutting us up. It seemed like God was usually talking in a big voice here and over there and round the bend yonder, and when God’s talking, you shut up. So we were quiet as we came down the trail and round the last switchback, into a bit of a draw and then the meadows of Hetch Hetchy.

  Yellow pines were growing round the edges of the meadows, and alder and cottonwood along the banks of the Tuolumne River, but like always it was the oaks that drew my eye, standing tall and strong and black without a hope of bending. Lying under them were broken branches from storms that got the upper hand, making me think of bones all busted up under a body that didn’t care if the sky was trying to break it in two.

  Those oaks reminded me of my daddy. Yeah, Daddy would’ve felt at home in this country.

  Before we even got fully into the meadow, I could already feel that this place had me, like the quiet was a hook and I was a fish dangling from it, grinning, happy to be caught and laid out under the blue of heaven. My mule seemed to like it, too. He kept moving his head from side to side and grabbing mouthfuls of Hetch Hetchy growing on both sides of the trail. After a while there was so much grass hanging from his mouth that Satan looked like he had a long green beard.

  Yeah, my mule was named Satan, but he was all right. He didn’t much care for people, but he had a hunger for meadows, particularly this one in Hetch Hetchy. Sometimes I had the feeling that where I ended up was mostly bout my mule’s appetite, and the fact that we were supposed to be looking for sheepherders or timber thieves or poachers, well, that was secondary.

  We were there cause I was follow
ing orders, and I was on this exact path through the meadow cause I was following my mule. But when I was out on patrol, I was also following my own heart, and most of the time it wanted to be in someplace like Hetch Hetchy. I’d been hearing about this valley since I got to Yosemite. There weren’t any officers around, and who’s to say how long it would take us to do our job here properly? So I gave my men to understand that we wouldn’t be hurrying back. We had supplies enough to camp for a few days, and I already had my eye on a spot by the river near the welcoming shade of some large black oaks.

  I mean, what’s wrong with granite rising up like gray church walls thousands of feet high, a ceiling of blue sky and clouds, and a floor covered with wildflowers? Nothing wrong that I could see, so what if we lingered a bit longer than we should have? Seems to me it should be a crime if you’re in a hurry to get away from a place like this. Sundays back in Spartanburg, I remember how if anyone in the congregation got up too quick after the service ended, the deacon would give that person a meaningful look. God don’t take it too kindly when people he’s spending time with just get up all of a sudden and leave.

  Hetch Hetchy was a church too, and the deacon was the Almighty himself. In Yosemite I was in church every day, and I didn’t want to offend the Creator by being in too much of a hurry. So that was why, three mornings after coming into the Hetch Hetchy meadows, we were still there and had only just gotten packed up to head back, having found no sheepherders. We hadn’t seen another human soul in the valley all that time, but I couldn’t consider the time wasted.

  One thing bout slowing down is you start seeing things you otherwise might’ve missed. Unless we were on an urgent mission where speed was required, I always encouraged my men to move no faster than the country round them. That way they were more likely to see what was there in front of them.

  Maybe that was how I saw those two figures in a distant grove of oaks, south of the river on the other side of the valley. They were so small in the valley’s bigness, at first I wasn’t sure I’d seen them at all. Just two little specks in a big green space with oaks standing alongside them and blackness under the trees, as if shadows that had lost their way in the world had finally found a safe place to rest. Then I thought the specks might be deer, hunched over like they were, until they moved in a way that set them apart from the land round them.