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.