She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch. She touched him as a blind person might. Deep in the floor of her welling eyes dead leaves scudding. Please go away, she said.
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises.
He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.
Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.
All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.
You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.
He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.
Then he told them another story and it was this story.
Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all.
He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it.
You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.
There was light all about him.
Lo que escapa a mi conocimiento, escapa a mi consentimiento.
Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.
But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy? Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.
All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door.
At the foot of the steps he picked up what appeared to be a wig and saw that it was fashioned whole from a dried human scalp.
Yes mam. I do. The people of Terrell County hired me to look after em. That’s my job. I get paid to be the first one hurt. Killed, for that matter. I’d better care.
He heard the fireman clank shut the door and leave and he poured the coffee and stirred in milk from a can and sipped and blew and read of wildness and violence across the cup’s rim. As it was then, is now and ever shall.
He was trudging out across the field with his chin down so that withdrawing in the firelight he looked like a headless revenant turned away from the warmth of men’s gatherings.