Delivering Virtue

by Brian Kindall

  I then let my body slither and slump sideways down the embankment so that I was at a horizontal aspect to the earth. Then I sat up.

  The girl, it turned out, was Virtue. She came to me, kneeling in the sand beside the stream. It struck me as truly peculiar how one sees things differently after being inadvertently inverted. It shakes things up. It reorganizes the parts, giving one a new perspective, as if examining a painting turned over and so being offered greater insight into the truer nuances of its composition. Now that I was upright, I was greatly impressed with the maturity and grace of my young charge. She had grown so much, and so fast. She was so ladylike. Her wrists were delicate and thin. Her eyes flashed with the same hue as of those butterflies.

  A damp spot had seeped through the lower leg of my trousers, and when she saw it, Virtue gently rolled up the cuff, revealing that my wound had popped a couple of its stitches, and was oozing a thin pink liquid.

  “Does it hurt much?” she asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “Only when I sit down, or stand up, or blink, or breathe.”

  She grinned at my joke, and all my troubles magically fluttered away. Virtue had that effect on me.

  “And how are you holding up, young lady?”

  “I’m fine. It’s nice here.”

  I looked around. I spied the trickling stream, the very one with whom I had been so angry and put out just a few minutes prior. Virtue was correct – it was nice here. Unexpectedly, that stream was among the loveliest little rivulets I had ever beheld. It made a joyful and animated descant. I felt ashamed for my recent behavior, and nodded toward the water in apology. Surely it could not help that its contents were so conducive to malodorous intestinal wind. After all, we all have our faults. One would hope that that is exactly what makes us each one so endearing.

  “I suppose our respite must soon come to an end,” I said. “We have many miles left to travel before we get you to your …”

  I paused. I could not say that word – husband. It just would not come out of my mouth. It seemed too absurd. Inappropriate. But I could not think what else to call this enigmatic Nehi person toward whom we had been progressing. For the first time on this journey, I felt a niggling suspicion of wrongness in my assignment.

  Virtue looked west, but she said nothing.

  I sensed a trepidation in her demeanor.

  “It will all work out,” I assured her. “I make you that promise.”

  She looked back at me, rested her hand on my boot, and smiled.

  And although I greatly wanted to mean what I said, I felt like a fool for ever saying it. I had lived too long in this world to ever give much credence to such guarantees of a fairytale ending.

  PEOPLE WANT BEAUTY; THEY want that splendorous quality in their lives and in their streams and mountains, all the way up to the realm of the stars and moon and then back down to the deep blue seas. They want it in the melodious words they speak and read and hear directed at them from the lips of others. They want the beautiful country – the exquisite wild frontier tamed and made beautifully civilized according to their idealized standards. They want beauty in their homes and tea cozies and cotton nightshirts. They want it in their Holy Book covers, and in the doctrines and parables snugly packaged within those selfsame covers. They want it in the paintings they hang on their walls, the songbirds they have caged in their parlors, and in the bright flowers they keep in vases by the window. They want beauty in the various masks they choose to wear when going out into the day. They want it in their bobbles and accessories. People want the beautiful weather – the small rain coming down, and then the dripping hopeful sunny daybreak after that same small rain is finished. They want it in their drinking water. They want hallowed beauty in their stained glass churches and fortified towns and virtuous mates. They long so secretly, so silently, and so wholeheartedly for that exquisite fairytale moment when, like a perfectly discovered rhyme, everything in their lives comes together just so – that orgasmotic and magical blink of an eye when an anapestic happenchance works out beautifully to the rhythm of the poem of their dreams. They want beautiful love to sweep in beautifully and lift them beautifully up to their beautiful castles in the beautiful sky. They want beautiful Jesus, and beautiful salvation, and the elusive beautiful paradise. Oh, that sweet, sweet paradise! We seek it out in every moment of every day, and behind every pair of eyes. Surely it is as basic a need as food and water.

  Beauty.

  Here you are.

  There you go.

  Oh! To whither hast thou flown?

  *****

  Such were the random workings of my mind that day as I sat alone on the bluff overlooking our little late summer camp. My head was grinding with thought. Below me was a scene, to my eyes, of ineffable beauty.

  The horses were at the edge of camp, beyond the trees, grazing in a picturesque configuration in the tall grass. There was a subliminal rightness in the variations of their postures and the assorted colors of their coats. It is difficult to explain such an abstract aspect of aesthetics, but had an artist painted the scene, he would have been sorely pressed to come up with a more telling combination of parts to express the underlying mix of wildness and docility contained within the combined personalities of those four beasts.

  At the center of the composition was the camp itself, and like a strategically placed hue – a caesura of color – was Virtue. She was still wearing her blue dress, and she appeared like a singular forget-me-not on the edge of the stream. She was too far away to be seen with any exactitude, but one could tell, even with the distance, that she was engaged in a meditative interaction with Nature. Perhaps she was whispering with the butterflies; perhaps she was humming a tune in the language of angels or Syatapis; perhaps she was having a parley with God himself. Although ambiguous, her posture and elegance gave one to know that she represented a purity too seldom found in this terrestrial sphere.

  The trees shimmered in the warm breeze, their leaves turning and quivering to show their silvery undersides in the afternoon sunlight.

  And then, on the other side of the grove, came the third panel in the triptych – the pool. Turtle Dove’s brown arms flashed in the water. The blurred outline of her naked body moved just under the rippling surface. Something there was just right in how she was both visible and obscured at once. It was as if she were known, and not known, all in the same instant. It was as if a dream were coming to life by way of her physical presence, not yet fully born from the depths, or complete with a soul, and so was filled with an implication that the dream world was reluctant or unable to divulge.

  Anyway, I was mystified.

  I was suffering all of that giddy and miserable sensation of revelatory arrest experienced when one is confronted with an object – manmade or otherwise – which offers up a fleeting and timeless beauty. And yet there I was, up on my lonesome hillock, observing that beauty as if through a window, or in a museum where it is forbidden to touch. I fairly pined to be a part of the picture below me, to stroke its parts.

  But then I smirked at the thought. “Who are you fooling, Rain?”

  With my patched, hand-me-down clothes, and uglified head – my masculine earnestness and clumsy manner – what would I have contributed to the scene but a note of ominous and muddled buffoonery?

  “Just enjoy it from afar,” I told myself. “Today, my friend, you are most surely on the outside.”

  It was a lonely thought to have, one that instantly filled me up with a deep and personal sadness.

  “Anyway,” I said. “The problem with beauty is that it is so damn evanescent.”

  I sat there with myself, watching, until the sun dropped so low on the western horizon that it blinded me with its celestial light.

  Then I went down.

  OVER SUPPER, I MADE the announcement.

  “We have dawdled here long enough,” I said, “like a bunch of holiday makers without a worry or care. It has been an enjoyable time.” I glanced in the direction of the pool. “But i
f we mean to get to the City of Rocks before first snowfall, our dilly-dallying must come to its end.”

  I took a big gulp of water from my tin cup, broke wind with furtive skill, and nodded decisively.

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” I concluded, “we will be on our way.”

  No one seemed disapproving, nonplussed, disappointed or otherwise moved by my address. I do not know what I expected. No one seemed emotional at all – neither the geldings nor the ladies – and I wondered if I was the only member of the contingent whom the decision had effected. Had this entire vacation been for my benefit alone? Apparently mine was the only soul made glum by the prospect of leaving this camp behind. I peeked sideways at Turtle Dove, searching for some suggestion of remorse or nostalgia. After all, our courtship had begun here. Someday, with the gods willing, I hoped we would look back together upon this site as the place where our love’s latent seed was first planted and watered and made to grow into the beautiful thing it was destined to become. Perhaps we would even return some years hence for an anniversary visit. I might even compose a villanelle in commemoration. But Turtle Dove appeared impassive in the firelight, not exhibiting any obvious display of emotion as she spooned a bit of steaming root broth between her parted lips.

  “Well,” I sighed, and quietly solaced myself. “At least I know that I personally will always hold a fondness in my heart for this little haven on the prairie.”

  The stream plinked and prattled in the darkness.

  An owl hooted amidst the stars – first here – then over there.

  *****

  My shinbone hurt.

  And my ribs.

  It seemed that my tumble down the embankment earlier in the day had served me poorly in my physicality. I wanted Turtle Dove to work her magic, maybe re-stitch my broken wound, or at least apply one of her hot-coal tincture treatments to my forelimb. I longed for that intimate torture, that feminine attention. It placated my manly afflictions, and kept my more base intentions at bay. But I was being cursed with an abnormally pungent and magniloquent case of intestinal turgidity, and I did not dare get too close to my affianced, as I could not bear another of her giggle-ridden spurnings.

  I sat on the opposite side of the fire, safely back from the flames, gurgling with discomfort, secretly questioning the Almighty’s design for the gut-works of a man.

  Virtue caught my eye.

  What an angel.

  Her beatific smile alone was almost enough to ease any man’s ailment.

  Even in my distress, she made me think of blue butterflies.

  I stood carefully, and then walked over to our makeshift livery, preparing for the next day’s journey. I synched and braided a loose strap on Puck’s sawbuck, making it more secure for the rigors of a rough ride. I turned my own saddle over in the near darkness, plucking the horsehairs that had worked between the seams in the leather, and then rolling them into a ball. Busy work, to be sure, but it served to keep me away from the girls. I looked over at the fire. Turtle Dove and Virtue were up to their usual business, laughing in a pidgin mix of Blackfoot and French (what I had come to call Frenchfoot), gabbing, I supposed, about girl stuff. I carelessly flopped my saddle over on the log, and when I did the stirrup swung down and whapped me directly on my injured shin.

  I did not call out, but held my cry of pain inside of me. My eyes watered and I clenched my jaw, bending over with both hands gripping my knees. It hurt terribly, but damned if I would let on like some namby-pamby. For the benefit of the group, I had to make a show of strength that might be undermined by such a pusillanimous display of physical anguish. My worth as a leader had been compromised enough these last days, what with my humorous apparel and battered face and body, and now I needed every edge I could get if I were to reinstate my aptitude as the Blessed Deliverer.

  I sat on the log, writhing.

  I peered up into the sky, not as a romantic, but as a tortured sentient creature with a grimace needing a point upon which to focus. I did not even bother to seek out my own blue star. It was surely lost in the soup of stars swirling before my eyes. But then I was fairly astonished to spy a meteor blazing a quick bright path across a distant corner of the heavens. Its appearance served me like a tap on the shoulder, shaking my prudence, gently reminding me of possibilities I had otherwise discounted due to the constraints imposed on me by my distant Mormon employers.

  And that is when I hit upon a suspicious impulse, albeit one cleverly disguised as a good idea.

  *****

  Now the roundabout path of my subsequent logic might have struck an observer as a convoluted and unjustifiable attempt at justifying the unjustifiable. In hindsight, which is always embarrassingly sharp and uninterrupted by the myopic mists that so often plague a person at the end of a trying day, I can plainly see now that it was not necessarily the brilliant conclusion that I took it for in that particular moment. But physical torment can drive a man to lazy and erroneous philosophy, and so that very phenomenon is to what I attribute my ensuing actions.

  *****

  My hand came to rest on my saddlebags, which were hanging over the log as if over the back of a horse. “Hmm!” I reached inside one compartment, groped its contents, and brought out the flask I had hidden there days before. I was well away from the campfire, but yet still close enough for its flickering luminance to show me the wraithlike scene etched into the canister’s side. The woman. The pool. The faun. And perhaps it was only the fire’s wavering glimmer that caused the apparition, but I swear that the faun let down his pipes, looked out from the scene, and, with what sounded like a Greek accent, whispered the imperative – “Take succor.”

  No man I know could argue with such a supernatural encouragement.

  I glanced over my shoulder into the darkness, and then looked back to the flask, chewing at my bottom lip with deliberation. A spontaneous dialogue then commenced between the two halves of my self, each one representing an opposing argument to the subject at hand.

  “Doctors sometimes use such tonic as medicine,” said one sensible half of my conscience. “So if taken as such, where is the sin?”

  “But you signed an agreement back in Independence. You made a promise to Benjamin as an honorable man that you would not let such substances cross your lips.”

  “Independence is a long ways away. And the constraints of that contract did not take into account the grueling and unforeseen circumstances of the trail, not to mention the physical discomfort you are suffering this evening.”

  “But you know how it is your habit to let one harmless nip lead never-endingly to another.”

  “But this journey is changing you. Surely you are no longer that hapless scalawag who once had a weakness for drink and its affiliate vices.”

  “Why take the chance?”

  “Perhaps a chance should be taken, as a trial by firewater, if you will, so that you might prove once and for all that you have improved, and are no longer that reprehensible beast that once you were.”

  “But what if you are still what you were?”

  “Well, nothing is learned through timidity. Take a taste and find out.”

  “Do not!”

  “Do it.”

  “I warn you, it is a Pandora’s Box!”

  And so, on and so forth – blar, blar, blar – until the two voices joined in confusion and became one with the nonsensical babble of the stream.

  Of course, I uncorked the bottle. Where was the harm in doing that?

  The flask seemed to gasp with relief, a little puff of acerbic vapor escaping like a genie from its spout. When it encountered my nostrils, a wellspring of slobber issued forth from the underside of my tongue, causing me to swallow.

  “Medicine,” I whispered. And as if to justify the substance as such, I then tugged up my pant cuff and spilled the tiniest bit of the liquor onto my wound. It sizzled along the edges of the cut, and caused me to grit my teeth. In the smallest way, it was a corresponding experience to the one enacted upon me by my lovely Turtl
e Dove, although minus the feminine interaction. Still, it was somewhat a consolation, and I felt a smidgeon of relief. The liquid slithered like a tiny snake down my foreleg and into my boot.

  I held the flask to my nose, breathing deeply.

  “Just one single sip,” I promised myself. “And then we will most surely put it away for good.”

  BY THE THIRD SIP I was already feeling significantly improved in the areas of my shinbone, my ribs, and even in the tortured twist of entrails packaged within the lower reaches of those ribs. The source of my flatulence seemed dowsed by the magical liquid I had poured down my craw and into its flames. I let out a steamy little belch of licorice mixed with sulfur and juniper, and then ran my tongue over my lips.

  “Well,” I said, and winked at the maiden on the flask. “That was not so bad as all that, was it?”

  She did not reply.

  It was with an impressive self-control that I then took only one or two (at most, three) more sips before reinserting the cork and, without sentiment or ballyhoo, slid the flask back into my panniers.

  I sat on the log for a moment, a comforting warmth spreading to the various corners of my body.

  The owl screeched overhead, and this prompted me to lean back and peer into the stars once more.

  How stunning they were!

  So tranquil and bedazzling!

  How beautiful it all and everything else besides suddenly was!

  I spied the owl’s dark shadow flashing between the heavenly points of light. This seemed dramatic and staged for my benefit in a paranormal, yet not-so-threatening way.