Cities of the Plain (34 page)

So is that the end of the story?

No. The traveler stood at the stone and on the stone visible to see were marks of axe and
sword and the dark oxidations of the blood of those who'd died there and which the
weathers of the world were powerless to erase. Here the traveler had lain down to sleep
with no thought of death and yet when he awoke he'd no thought other. The heavens which he
had been invited to scrutinize by his executioners now wore a different look. The order of
his life seemed altered in midstride. Some haltstitch in the workings of things. Those
heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to
pulse with a reckless energy. As if in their turning things had come uncottered,
uncalendared. He thought that there might even be some timefault in the record. That
henceforth there might be no way to log new sightings. Would that matter?

You're askin me.

Yes.

I think it would matter to you. About him I got no idea. What do you think?

The narrator paused thoughtfully. I think, he said, that the dreamer imagined himself at
some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative.
We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed
of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must
outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For
as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world
lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is
past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his
feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the
death of things. I think he saw a terrible darkness looming.

I need to be gettin on.

The man did not answer. He sat contemplating the roadside vegas and the barren lands
beyond now shimmering in the newest sun.

This desert about us was once a vast sea, he said. Can such a thing vanish? Of what are
seas made? Or I? Or you?

I dont know.

The man stood up and stretched. He stretched mightily, reaching and turning. He looked
down at Billy and smiled.

And that's the end of the story, Billy said.

No.

He squatted and held up his hand, palm out.

Hold up your hand, he said. Like this.

Is this a pledge of some kind?

No. You are pledged already. You always were. Hold up your hand.

He held up his hand as the man had asked.

You see the likeness?

Yes.

Yes. It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for
the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the
world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those
instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a
picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or
time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.

So what happened to the traveler?

Nothing. There is no end to the story. He woke and all was as before. He was free to go.

To other men's dreams.

Perhaps. Of such dreams and of the rituals of them there can also be no end. The thing
that is sought is altogether other. However it may be construed within men's dreams or by
their acts it will never make a fit. These dreams and these acts are driven by a terrible
hunger. They seek to meet a need which they can never satisfy, and for that we must be
grateful.

And you were still asleep.

Yes. At the end of the dream we walked out in the dawn and there was an encampment on the
plains below from which no smoke rose for all that it was cold and we went down to that
place but all was abandoned there. There were huts of skin staked out upon the rocky
ground with slagiron pikes and within these huts were remnants of old meals untouched and
cold upon cold plates of clay. There were standing stores of primitive and antique arms
carved in their metal parts and inlaid with filigree of gold and there were robes sewn up
from skins of northern animals and rawhide trunks with latches and corners of hammered
copper and these were much scarred from their travels and the years of it and inside of
them were old accounts and ledgerbooks and records of the history of that vanished folk,
the path they had followed in the world and their reckonings of the cost of that journey.
And in a place apart a skeleton of old sepia bones sewn up in a leather shroud.

We walked together through all that desolation and all that abandonment and I asked him if
the people were away at some calling but he said that they were not. When I asked him to
tell me what had happened he looked at me and he said: I have been here before. So have
you. Everything is here for the taking. Touch nothing. Then I woke.

From his dream or yours?

There was only one dream to wake from. I woke from that world to this. Like the traveler,
all I had forsaken I would come upon again.

What had you forsaken?

The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The
marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient
shells. Things dim and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The
dreams enchased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence.
The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.

I got to get on.

I wish you well, cuate.

And you.

I hope your friends await you.

And I.

Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is
no way to abate the
fear of
it except
to love
that man who stands for us.
We
are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is
all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for
him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to
his tale?

HE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in a concrete the by the highwayside where a roadcrew had been
working. A big yellow Euclid truck was standing out on the mud and the pale and naked
concrete pillars of an eastwest onramp stood beyond the truck, curving away, clustered and
rising without capital or pediment like the ruins of some older order standing in the
dusk. In the night a wind blew down from the north that bore the taste of rain but no rain
fell. He could smell the wet creosote out on the desert. He tried to sleep. After a while
he got up and sat in the round mouth of the tile like a man in a bell and looked out upon
the darkness. Out on the desert to the west stood what he took for one of the ancient
spanish missions of that country but when he studied it again he saw that it was the round
white dome of a radar tracking station. Beyond that and partly overcast also in the
moonlight he saw a row of figures struggling and clamoring silently in the wind. They
appeared to be dressed in robes and some among them fell down in their struggling and rose
to flail again. He thought they must be laboring toward him across the darkened desert yet
they made no progress at all. They had the look of inmates in a madhouse palely gowned and
pounding mutely at the glass of their keeping. He called to them but his shout was carried
away on the wind and in any case they were too far to hear him. After a while he rolled
himself again in his blanket on the floor of the tile and after a while he slept. In the
morning the storm had passed and what he saw out on the desert in the new day's light were
only rags of plastic wrapping hanging from a
fence where the
wind had blown them.

He made his way east to De Baca County in New Mexico and he looked for the grave of his
sister but he could not find it. The people of that country were kind to him and the days
warmed and he wanted for little in his
life on
the road. He stopped to talk to children or to horses. Women fed him in their kitchens
and he slept rolled in his blanket under the stars and watched meteorites fall down the
sky. He drank one evening from a spring beneath a cottonwood, leaning to bow his mouth and
suck from the cold silk top of the water and watch the minnows drift and recover in the
current beneath him. There was a tin cup on a stob and he took it down and sat holding it.
He'd not seen a cup at a spring in years and he held it in both hands as had thousands
before him unknown to him yet joined in sacrament. He dipped the cup into the water and
raised it cool and dripping to his mouth.

In the fall of that year when the cold weather came he was taken in by a family just
outside of Portales New Mexico and he slept in a shed room off the kitchen that was much
like the room he'd slept in as a boy. On the hallway wall hung a framed photograph that
had been printed from a glass plate broken into five pieces and in the photograph certain
ancestors were puzzled back together in a study that cohered with its own slightly skewed
geometry. Apportioning some third or separate meaning to each of the figures seated there.
To their faces. To their forms.

The family had a girl twelve and a boy fourteen and their father had bought them a colt
they kept stabled in a shed behind the house. It wasnt much of a colt but he went out in
the afternoon when they came in off the schoolbus and showed them how to work the colt
with rope and halter. The boy liked the colt but the girl was in love with it and she'd go
out at night after supper in the cold and sit in the straw floor of the shed and talk to
it.

In the evening after supper sometimes the woman would invite him to play cards with them
and sometimes he and the children would sit at the kitchen table and he'd tell them about
horses and cattle and the old days. Sometimes he'd tell them about Mexico.

One night he dreamt that Boyd was in the room with him but he would not speak for all that
he called out to him. When he woke the woman was sitting on his bed with her hand on his
shoulder. Mr Parham are you all right? Yes mam. I'm sorry. I was dreamin, I reckon. You
sure you okay? Yes mam. Did you want me to bring you a sup of water? No mam. I appreciate
it. I'll get back to sleep here directly. You want me to leave the light on in the
kitchen? If you wouldnt mind. All right. I thank you. Boyd was your brother. Yes. He's
been dead many a year. You still miss him though. Yes I do. All the time. Was he the
younger? He was. By two years. I see. He was the best. We run off to Mexico together. When
we was kids. When our folks died. We went down there to see about gettin back some horses
they'd stole. We was just kids. He was awful good with horses. I always liked to watch him
ride. Liked to watch him around horses. I'd give about anything to see him one more time.
You will. I hope you're right. You sure you dont want a glass of water? No mam. I'm all
right. She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of
it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read.
There God's plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world. She rose to
go. Betty, he said.

Yes.

I'm not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I dont know why you put up with me.

Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I'll see you
in the morning.

Yes mam.