Long ago there were bad times. The Kiowas were hungry and there was no food. There was a man who heard his children cry from hunger, and he began to search for food. He walked four days and became very weak. On the fourth day he came to a great canyon. Suddenly there was thunder and lightning. A Voice spoke to him and said, “Why are you following me? What do you want?” The man was afraid. The thing standing before him had the feet of a deer, and its body was covered with feathers. The man answered that the Kiowas were hungry. “Take me with you,” the Voice said, “and I will give you whatever you want.” From that day Tai-me has belonged to the Kiowas.
“Do you see? There, far off in the darkness, something happened. Do you see? Far, far away in the nothingness something happened. There was a voice, a sound, a word—and everything began. The story of the coming of Tai-me has existed for hundreds of years by word of mouth. It represents the oldest and best idea that man has of himself. It represents a very rich literature, which, because it was never written down, was always but one generation from extinction. But for the same reason it was cherished and revered. I could see that reverence in my grandmother’s eyes, and I could hear it in her voice. It was that, I think, that old Saint John had in mind when he said, ‘In the beginning was the Word….’ But he went on. He went on to lay a scheme about the Word. He could find no satisfaction in the simple fact that the Word was; he had to account for it, not in terms of that sudden and profound insight, which must have devastated him at once, but in terms of the moment afterward, which was irrelevant and remote; not in terms of his imagination, but only in terms of his prejudice.
“Say this: ‘In the beginning was the Word….’ There was nothing. There was nothing! Darkness. There was darkness, and there was no end to it. You look up sometimes in the night and there are stars; you can see all the way to the stars. And you begin to know the universe, how awful and great it is. The stars lie out against the sky and do not fill it. A single star, flickering out in the universe, is enough to fill the mind, but it is nothing in the night sky. The darkness looms around it. The darkness flows among the stars, and beyond them forever. In the beginning that is how it was, but there were no stars. There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.
“Old John caught sight of something terrible. The thing standing before him said, ‘Why are you following me? What do you want?’ And from that day the Word has belonged to us, who have heard it for what it is, who have lived in fear and awe of it. In the Word was the beginning; ‘In the beginning was the Word….’”
The Priest of the Sun appeared to have spent himself. He stepped back from the lectern and hung his head, smiling. In his mind the earth was spinning and the stars rattled around in the heavens. The sun shone, and the moon. Smiling in a kind of transport, the Priest of the Sun stood silent for a time while the congregation waited to be dismissed.
“Good night,” he said, at last, “and get yours.”
Why should Abel think of the fishes? He could not understand the sea; it was not of his world. It was an enchanted thing, too, for it lay under the spell of the moon. It bent to the moon, and the moon made a bright, shimmering course upon it, a broad track breaking apart and yet forever whole and infinite, undulating, melting away into furtive islands of light in the great gray, black, and silver sea. “Beautyway,” “Bright Path,” “Path of Pollen”—his friend Benally talked of these things. But Ben could not have been thinking of the moonlit sea. No, not the sea, not this. The sea…and small silversided fishes spawned mindlessly in correlation to the phase of the moon and the rise and fall of the tides. The thought of it made him sad, filled him with sad, unnamable longing and wonder.
It was cold. It was dark and cold and damp, and he could not open his eyes. He was in pain. He had fallen down; that was it. He was lying face down on the ground, and it was cold and there was a roaring of the sea in his brain and there was a fog rolling in from the sea. The pain was very great, and his body throbbed with it; his mind rattled and shook, wobbling now out of a spin, and he could not place the center of the pain. And he could not see. He could not open his eyes to see. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. When he awoke, he tried to move; he was numb with cold, but the effort to move brought new pain, sharp, then massive pain. It was so great that he fainted, and the next time he knew better than to move suddenly. The effect of the alcohol was wearing off. In another moment he began to retch, his whole body contracting, quaking involuntarily, and again the pain mounted and his mind was slipping away. He wanted to die. An hour passed in which he lay still and mindless in the cold. Beyond the steady crashing of the sea there were sounds of the city at night, ticking on like a clock toward the dawn. He could hear foghorns away in the distance, and he did not know what they were. Out in the immense gray silence of the sea, ships were steaming in from the Orient.
After a while he could open one of his eyes a little, enough to see. He was lying in a shallow depression in which there were weeds and small white stones and tufts of long gray grass. There was a fence on the bank before him; at his back there was a broad rocky beach, tilting to the sea. The fence was made of heavy wire mesh, and on the other side there were tractors and trailers, the long line of a roof. There were trademarks and lines of letters on the trailers—and on some of the cabs as well—but he could not make out the words. The yard was dark except for a single light on the wall of the warehouse, above the loading dock; but the light was across the yard, and it was dim and fuzzy in the fog. There were cans and bits of paper and broken glass against the fence; he was close to the fence; he could almost touch it. He raised himself to reach for the fence and the pain struck him again. He slumped, his body stiffening and folding over the pain, as if to crush it out. But the pain was too great, and the contraction only made it worse. Gradually he relaxed, and the pain ran to his hands. It concentrated there. His hands were broken, and he could not move them. Some of his fingers were stuck together with blood, and the blood was dry and black. The sight of his hands made him sick. His mind boggled and withdrew…and it came around again to the fishes.
He had loved his body. It had been hard and quick and beautiful; it had been useful, quickly and surely responsive to his mind and will. He was thick in the chest and shoulders, not so powerful as his grandfather, but longer of reach and more agile. And his hands were slender and strong. His legs were lean and tapered, long-muscled, too thin for a white man’s legs: the legs of an Indian. Once he could have run all day, really run, not jogging but moving fast over distances, without ruining his feet or burning himself out. He had never been sick until he was sick with alcohol. The disease which killed his mother and Vidal never even touched him, as far as he knew. But once he had fallen from a horse, and for days afterward there was a sharp, recurrent pain in the small of his back. Francisco chanted and prayed; the old man applied herbs and powders and potions and salves, and nothing worked. And at last Abel went to fat Josie. She was getting on in years by then—and he was almost a grown man—but she picked him up from behind as if he were a sack full of straw and drew him close against her so that he was sitting on the great hump of her belly, and her mighty arms tightened under his ribs until he could not breathe. And then she shook him—not much, gently—until he was loose in his arms and legs. She put him down with a wink and a grunt, and he was all right again. Fat Josie. His body was mangled and racked with pain. His body, like his mind, had turned on him; it was his enemy.
Angela put her white hands to his body.
Abel put his hands to her white body.
Forever is the sea. Away in the fog there was a crashing of the sea. He thought of the trial, six years before. After six years he could remember the white man’s body, how it lay limp and lifeless in the night rain, bright like phosphorus almost; the angle of
the body and its limb; the white shining hand, open and obscene. But he could remember very little about the trial. There were charges, questions, and answers; it was ceremonial, orderly, civilized, and it had almost nothing to do with him.
“I mean,” said Father Olguin, “that in his own mind it was not a man he killed. It was something else.”
“An evil spirit.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Can you be more precise, Father?”
The priest wanted to affect great humility and say, “Ah no, my son,” but instead he said: “We are dealing with a psychology about which we know very little. I see the manifestations of it every day, but I have no real sense of it—not any longer. I relinquished my claim to the psychology of witchcraft when I left home and became a priest. Anyway, there is no way to be objective or precise about such a thing. What shall I say? I believe that this man was moved to do what he did by an act of the imagination so compelling as to be inconceivable to us.”
“Yes, yes, yes. But these are the facts: he killed a man—took the life of another human being. He did so of his own volition—he has admitted that—he was armed for no other reason. He committed a brutal and premeditated act which we have no choice but to call by its right name.”
“Homicide is a legal term, but the law is not my context; and certainly it isn’t his—”
“Murder is a moral term. Death is a universal human term.”
When he had told his story once, simply, Abel refused to speak. He sat like a rock in his chair, and after a while no one expected or even wanted him to speak. That was good, for he should not have known what more to say. Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it. They were strangely uneasy, full of hesitation, reluctance. He wanted to help them. He could understand, however imperfectly, what they were doing to him, but he could not understand what they were doing to each other. When it was finished, he took the hand which was held out to him. There was such pain in the priest’s eyes that he could not bear to look into them. He was embarrassed, humiliated; he hated the priest for suffering so.
He had killed the white man. It was not a complicated thing, after all; it was very simple. It was the most natural thing in the world. Surely they could see that, these men who meant to dispose of him in words. They must know that he would kill the white man again, if he had the chance, that there could be no hesitation whatsoever. For he would know what the white man was, and he would kill him if he could. A man kills such an enemy if he can.
He awoke coughing; there was blood in his throat and mouth. He was shuddering with cold and pain. He had been moaning softly until he choked; now he was gasping for breath. There was a faint vibration under him. Be quiet! He had to be quiet; something was going on. He peered into the night: all around the black land against the star-bright, moon-bright sky. So far had his vision reached that the owl, when he saw it, seemed to fly in his face and break apart, torrential, ghostly, silent as a dream. He was delirious now and gasping for breath; he hurried on in his mind, holding the owl away in the corner of his eye. The owl watched him without meaning, and something was going on. There was the faintest tremor at his feet. The night was infinite and serene, and there was an owl in the darkness and a tremor in the earth. He got down on his knees and put his ear to the ground. Men were running toward him. He left the road and hid away in the brush, and soon he could see them in the distance, the old men running after evil, their white leggings holding in motion like smoke above the ground. They passed in the night, full of tranquillity, certitude. There was no sound of breathing or sign of effort about them. They ran as water runs.
There was a burning at his eyes.
The runners after evil ran as water runs, deep in the channel, in the way of least resistance, no resistance. His skin crawled with excitement; he was overcome with longing and loneliness, for suddenly he saw the crucial sense in their going, of old men in white leggings running after evil in the night. They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world.
Now, here, the world was open at his back. He had lost his place. He had been long ago at the center, had known where he was, had lost his way, had wandered to the end of the earth, was even now reeling on the edge of the void. The sea reached and leaned, licked after him and withdrew, falling off forever in the abyss. And the fishes…
Age and date of birth:
Sex:
Height:
Weight:
Color hair:
Color eyes:
Married:
Children (ages):
Religious affiliation (optional):
Education (circle appropriate completed years of schooling):
Father’s name (age and occupation if living):
Mother’s name (age and occupation if living):
The walls of his cell were white, or perhaps they were gray or green; he could not remember. After a while he could not imagine anything beyond the walls except the yard outside, the lavatory and the dining hall—or even the walls, really. They were abstractions beyond the reach of his understanding, not in themselves confinement but symbols of confinement. The essential character of the walls consisted not in their substance but in their appearance, the bare one-dimensional surface that was white, perhaps, or gray, or green.
Do you prefer the company of men or of women?
Do you drink alcoholic beverages to excess often, occasionally, not at all?
Which would you prefer to watch, a tennis match or a bullfight?
Do you consider yourself of superior, above average, average, below average intelligence?
He tried to think where the trouble had begun, what the trouble was. There was trouble; he could admit that to himself, but he had no real insight into his own situation. Maybe, certainly, that was the trouble; but he had no way of knowing. He wanted a drink; he wanted to be drunk. The bus leaned and creaked; he felt the surge of motion and the violent shudder of the whole machine on the gravel road. The motion and the sound seized upon him. Then suddenly he was overcome with a desperate loneliness, and he wanted to cry out. He looked toward the fields, but a low rise of the land lay before them. The town had settled away into the earth.
There was a curve and the bus pitched and swung. It made him giddy, and he wanted to laugh. He was wearing a pair of brown-and-white shoes which fat Josie had given to him. They had belonged to a man for whom fat Josie’s daughter had worked as a housekeeper in the city. The man died and his widow gave away his clothes. The shoes were beautiful, almost new, thinsoled, sharply pointed, with angles and whorls of perforation. There were metal taps on the heels, and the leather creaked. They were too large for Abel, but he wore them anyway, had waited a long time for the occasion to wear them. And now and then in the bus he looked at them, would slide the instep and toe of one and then the other along the backs of his legs to remove the dust and bring out the shine, would flex the soles to hear them squeak.
But the shoes were brown and white. They were new, almost, and shiny and beautiful; and they squeaked when he walked. In the only frame of reference he had ever known, they called attention to themselves, simply, honestly. They were brown and white; they were finely crafted and therefore admirable in the way that the work of a good potter or painter or silversmith is admirable: the object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake. But now and beyond his former frame of reference, the shoes called attention to Abel. They were brown and white; they were conspicuously new and too large; they shone; they clattered and creaked. And they were nailed to his f
eet. There were enemies all around, and he knew that he was ridiculous in their eyes.
Please complete each of the following in one or two words. (It is important that you complete this section as quickly as possible, filling in each of the blanks with the first response that comes to mind.)
I would like _____.
I am not _____.
Rich people are _____.
I am afraid of _____.
It is important that I _____.
I believe strongly in _____.
The thing I remember most clearly is _____.
As a child I enjoyed _____.
Someday I shall _____.
People who laugh loudly are _____.
etc.
Milly?
“No test is completely valid,” she said. “Some are more valid than others.”
But Milly believed in tests, questions and answers, words on paper. She was a lot like Ben. She believed in Honor, Industry, the Second Chance, the Brotherhood of Man, the American Dream, and him—Abel; she believed in him. After a while he began to suspect as much, and…
That night—he could not remember how it came about; he had got a little drunk—he made love to her. He had been watching her. She was always coming around when he and Ben were at home. There was no shyness in her. She had looked him squarely in the eye, had spoken up and laughed—she was always laughing—from the very first. Easy laughter was wrong in a woman, dangerous and wrong. She was plain in the face; her eyes were too small and her mouth too large. But she had yellow hair and her body was supple and ripe. He had watched her, how she walked away, her feet close together and her steps swinging not from the knees but from the hips, slowly, easily; and her hips were full and rolling. She had big breasts.
House Made of Dawn Page 9
