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You dont know what a indian’s liable to do, said Boyd. What do you know about indians, said Billy. Well you dont. You dont know what anybody’s liable to do.
What woke you up? he said. You did. I didnt make a sound. I know it.
The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.
Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they’re smarter. It’s just that they aint got all that much else to think about.
Él está? he said. I’m thinking it over. What’s there to think about? He’s either here or he aint. Maybe.
What is your name? Parham. Billy Parham. The old man said the name in silence to himself. Te conozco? No señor. Estamos a las Charcas. La Charca. Sí. Hay una historia allá. Historia? Sí, said the old man. He lay holding the boy’s hand and staring up at the kindlingwood latillas of the ceiling. Una historia desgraciada. De obras desalmadas.
Conocemos por lo largo de las sombras que tardío es el día, he said. He said that men took this to mean that the omens of such an hour were thereby greatly exaggerated but that this was in no way so.
He said that the matrix was not so easily defined. Each hunter must have his own formula. He said that things were rightly named its attributes which could in no way be counted back into its substance.
El señor Sanders me dice que el señor Echols es medio lobo el mismo. Me dice que él conoce lo que sabe el lobo antes de que lo sepa el lobo. But the old man said that no man knew what the wolf knew.
El lobo es una cosa incognoscible, he said. Lo que se tiene en la trampa no es mas que dientes y forro. El lobo propio no se puede conocer. Lobo o lo que sabe el lobo. Tan como preguntar lo que saben las piedras. Los arboles. El mundo.
Escúchame, joven, the old man wheezed. If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.
Lugares donde el fierro ya está en la tierra, the old man said. Lugares donde ha quemado el fuego.
Yessir. She’s fixin to have some. What have you got against the Mexicans? I dont have nothin against em. You just figured they might could use another wolf or two. The boy cut a piece from his steak and forked it up. The man watched him. How are they fixed for rattlesnakes down there do you reckon?
Es feroz la perra, no? Bastante.
Los que no pueden recordar la sangre de la guerra son siempre los más ardientes para la lucha.
Sabemos lo que sabemos, the old woman said. Sí, said the girl. Lo que es nada.
DOOMED ENTERPRISES divide lives forever into the then and the now.
like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him.
Billy knew afterward that he had seen the actual riflebullet. That the suck and whiff at his ear had been the bullet passing and that he had seen it for one frozen moment before his eyes with the sun on the side of the small revolving core of metal, the lead wiped bright by the rifling of the bore, slowed from having passed through his brother’s body but still moving faster than sound and passing his left ear with the suck of the air like a whisper from the void and the small jar of the shockwave and then the bullet caroming off of a treebranch and singing away over the desert behind him that
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time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case. He said that in his opinion no one could speak for the origins of such men nor where they might appear but only of their existence. He said that who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden.
The blind man sat for some time. He could have been sleeping. He could have been waiting for word to be brought to him. Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until they were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to
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most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.
She said that in every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.
Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.
The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years.
the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and inameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it.
You got good eyes, she said. Yes mam, he said. I always did. Well I guess so, she said. You dont normally start out with bad ones and they get better.
Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do.
The ends of all ceremony are but to avert bloodshed.
He said that he objected to the seal which was the seal of an oppressive government. He said that he would not drink from such a bottle. That it was a matter of honor. Billy looked at the drunk man. Es mentira, the drunk man said.
men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men. It believes that where two men meet one of two things can occur and nothing else. In the one case a lie is born and in the other death.
