by Dale W Decker
I
I can feel myself drifting. Like a heavy puff of cigar smoke in humid air, shifting, dispersing, yet still one entity. What went before fades and I am left without perception, mere consciousness remains. The vapor of my being stretches and the fear comes. Is this the end? Will the Divine hand wave me clear from space and time? And then, like fog settling in the hollows, I come back together. I collect in one spot, condensing from vapor to dew, the droplets run together and a puddle forms. Weight returns and the empty rind fills with moist flesh. Breath burns in my lungs like furnace heat.
The supine figure started up from the ground like a half-drowned swimmer, coughing and reaching for anything to keep from going back under. He wretched good and long but brought forth only barren heaves, the kind of muscle bunching you feel down low. He climbed to his feet gently, tenderly easing himself upright.
He scanned the horizon. Scrub, rock and sand, no shadows to be seen with the sun straight up. He turned a slow circle, arms out from his sides, head back, eyes closed. Reaching with some other sense, like water witching, until he felt the slightest nudge. Some scant inside inkling that made this direction different from that. He started walking.
What was a tickle had become an itch. Way down inside he sensed it, a twisting of the rightness of things, like a warped hoe handle or dull scythe.
Now he was running flat out, kicking up dust as he plowed over the desert floor. A piercing whistle burst from his lips. From a defile came trotting a red horse. It came along side him. The man and horse ran together until he grabbed the saddle horn and vaulted on. Hooves spurned the sand. The tug was stronger inside him, no longer a whisper, but a clear word. Someone had been marked.
II
He was a full grown man, though short, with a broad moon face and small hands. A child’s face, a child’s hands. His cotton trousers had holes in the knees and a serape lay round his shoulders like a long mangy cat. A sharp-spined burro with a halter of grass rope was wedged between his short legs. Neither of the pair wore shoes, though the burro had worn them before.
Turning, he gazed along his back trail. No movement save the shimmering waves of heat. A breath of air brushed his moon faced cheek. He scented green things. He kicked his callused heels into the galled sides of the burro, shuffling it down off the high plains toward the river below. The ambling gait of his mount and the heat of the sun upon his head was pleasant to him, and he smiled. His moonbeam smile in his round moon face with his child’s hands made him seem innocent, guileless, simple. He could get food, a place to sleep even, with a smile, a fidget of the hands, a simple lie. He smiled again when he saw the panner shanty in the bend of the swift flowing river. The smallness of it in the distance filled him with a sense of power.
III
I have no past, only after-images as looking into the sun, imprints with no detail. I know not time. I move, each place is different, each body as well, but whether I go forward or backward, I know not. I am old, I am young. I am equipped – language, thought, accouterments – suitable to the place I go. I have a task, the same task each time.
The wagon rutted path skirted the edge of a winding river. A drift-wood shanty sat in the crook of one bend, just above where flood water would reach. He guided his mount into a yard bounded by split-rail and Easter-lilies and dismounted. The red horse dropped its head and cropped weeds. The man stood staring at a three-legged willow chair under the leaky overhang.
The marked man had been here. An oily taint lay on everything. Not something that could be smelled or tasted like bad meat, yet the taint was discernable nonetheless. Bile rose in his throat. He hacked, spat and ducked under the overhang to step inside. The panner shanty was shy on comforts, but clean and in order. The bed was made with sheets over a straw mattress. The cook-stove was clear of ashes with a kettle of clean water waiting. Patched curtains framed a view of a meadow with foothills beyond. A woman’s touch.
I hate the necessity of my existence. Like a suture, I am only because a wound is. I am the needle and sinew pulling a gash of evil closed, serpentine stitches hauling together the ragged edges of Justice. The Balm of Mercy is not of me.
IV
The burro stumbled in the loose scree strewn across the hillside, leaping and dancing, turning like a sidewinder in the sliding sand, sitting back on its haunches until plowing into a large rock thrust up from the sand like a ram’s head. The man was skinned up with blood beading on his sweaty hide, but the burro’s foreleg was broken. It bawled in pain as the man scrambled free. He started to pull the knife he wore hanging about his neck under the serape, thinking to cut his suffering mount’s throat. He wavered. Something stayed his hand.
What is life? Is it blood? Is it breath? He had always wondered, ever since that first time, as a boy. He had been playing in the hot yellow dust near a hog pen. A farm hand with a pitchfork of feed passed by and threw it into pen with the hogs. A small grey shape scurried away from the chomping snouts. He snatched it up, bringing his small hands near his dusty, round face. Whiskers with black eyes stared back him, the hammering heart pulsing in his palms. So small, so vulnerable. He felt as if he had grown as large as a bull. His own quickening breath brought in the smell of the earth, the smell of life. He held life in his hands. He tightened his grip. The mouse struggled. He tightened more. The mouse clawed, and he squeezed. The mouse bit, and his blood flowed. He looked at the bright drops as they fell into the dust. Drops of my life, he thought. He was seized with the fear that his life would flow away into the dust and disappear, like when he made water. He must get his life back. He clenched the small body as tightly as he could, to absorb its life back into his injured hand, he sucked in his breath sharply to catch the exhalation. The mouse was still, not breathing, and the red blood from its mouth mingled with his own in his hand. What is life? Is it breath? Is it blood?
The shanty was hidden from sight, now that he had descended from the high plain. The burro had grown quiet but the soft eyes rolled to follow the man as he cast about. Stooping, he hefted up a stone. Too big for his child’s hands to grip so he dropped it. He thumbed the knife again. Breath or blood? Breath or blood? He stared down at the burro. The ribbed side rose and fell, rose and fell. A tuft of grass pulsed where the gray muzzle lay. Breath. He sat and laid his hand on its neck, feeling an unsteady thrum beneath his palm. Blood. He sat there, letting the sun moved the shadows across the valley floor. Finally, unable to discern between breath and blood, with one hand he opened the vein beneath his palm and let the blood-life flow between his fingers and cupped the quivering muzzle with the other to feel the breath-life, hot and damp, till it stopped.
Blood or breath? Breath or blood? He brought both hands up before his face. The fingers of his blood-life hand ran wet but were beginning to get sticky at the tips. His breath-life hand glistened with burro mucous where he had cupped the mouth and nostrils. He brought his hands together slowly, rubbing the blood and mucous together. As the sun slid lower the shadows of the stones around him pointed down the slope toward the river. Red clouds had come down on a falling wind to turn the river a shimmering, bubbling faded rose color. Blood or breath? He looked at his hands and shivered though it wasn’t cold yet. The water under the sky had guessed it right. Blood AND breath. The river churned into a bend and out of sight, but it carried his mind back to the shanty. Blood and breath.
V
He found them in the flowered meadow downstream of the shanty. Or rather he found their bodies. A youngish couple, though not too young, enjoying a picnic. He drove the buzzards off with a wave of his hat. The man was leaning against the live oak that had shaded them. His throat had been cut, the clotted blood thick on his shirt like blackberry preserves. His open eyes staring and filled with despair. Not a dozen feet away lay the naked body of his wife. Her plain, homespun dress had been cut from her freckled thinness. The pale ruin of her crushed throat showed bruises like soot on snow. The stink of the marked man lay on her body, though her soul was now beyond such earthly cares. He interred their remains in the dust from whence they had come and said a prayer for the souls now awaiting the appointed Day.
VI
Oh, yes, I am very hungry. No, I have had nothing for days. He smiled and sat with them near the river. The man had a red face, he said from the sun, but it was a face of blood. The woman laughed with her mouth open, a breathy laugh that showed the back of her throat. The marked man was on the corner of the picnic quilt, eating a piece of cornbread smeared with sorghum, his bare dusty feet sticking into the tall grass. A bead of dew ran down the side of the clay jug filled with ginger water. The river gurgled behind him, but the clouds overhead were too high to hear it. The river whispered to him of what had been learned on the hillside. No hurry. The sorghum stuck to his teeth but was earthy sweet on his tongue.
He lied to them about his life. He was good at lying because his face looked honest. He laughed while telling them of a childhood that never happened, laughing at them though they didn’t understand. To the good, others must seem good, he pondered in his mind, talking and chewing and lying with his mouth.
The breathy woman pulled a bundle wrapped in checkered cloth from the basket. Apple pie. The cross-hatched crust was brown and shiny from egg-wash and flaked as she cut it into four pieces. One slice for each of them. The man leaned his blood red face over and kissed her breathy mouth.
The marked man smiled to himself as the river whispered to him. Breath and blood. Breath and blood. Breath and blood. A raven, high above, cawed and sent a shadow up from the bulrushes of the bank, across a patch of prairie blue-eyes and down the back of his neck. He went silent. He could no longer taste the food in his lying mouth. He reached out, groping, small fingers closing around the handle of the kitchen knife.
VII
As he mounted the red horse he saw something in the bulrushes near the stream. He dropped back to the ground and followed a flattened grass trail from the tree down to the bank. A doll. Its pillow ticking face was faded and its yarn hair tangled with beggar’s lice and burs, yet to his eyes it fairly glowed with a little girl’s showered love. On that shining aura of love lay the smears of the marked man’s greasy fingers. Small fingers.
VIII
He took the girl with him because the river had stopped its whispering. All he could hear now was his own ragged breathing and the pounding of his blood in his head. The river’s sudden silence unnerved him. He left the river and put the sun at his back, she stumbled along beside him. His hand was larger than hers and only fingertips showed where he grasped her. He had no lust for her, no feeling for her at all, except that he might be able to trade her for a horse. Their shadows shot out across the ground before them, the legs taking gangly crane steps.
A snake emerged from the crevice of an outcrop, sidewinding across his path, the scales rasping on the sand. Breath and blood. The man stopped and listened to the snake. Breath and blood.
IX
Why do the wicked prosper? An age old mystery, it would seem. Yet I am he who brings justice to the wicked. Righteousness precedes transgression, but justice follows it. I exact the cost. I collect the debt. Whence then is Mercy? Mercy is not of me. I am for those who have past their appointed repentance. Like Cain, they will find no occasion for turning back. Once loosed, like an arrow from a bow, I cannot be recalled. I am as sure as midnight. I am the avenging angel. I am Justice.
Justice overtook the marked man at sundown.
The hand of Justice went down empty but came up filled with wrath. The gun looked like a heavy black fist with one huge finger pointing. The finger of the Almighty, separating the sheep from the goats on Judgment Day. That finger of doom pointed at the man standing over the girl. His sweaty face turned as he heard the hammer ratchet back. He saw the gun and the arm, but the face of Justice was a mask between him and the falling sun. The black hole of the gun filled his vision.
The eyes of Justice looked into the man’s eyes and looked past them to the soiled, silenced conscience behind. Petty mischief and stolen candy clumped with strangled cats and gut shot hogs. Lying, cheating, man stealing, too, were there. Filth soaked and caked with foul acts of depravity, born unclean and unclean now. Conscience hogtied and gagged to stop the nagging, mind itching guilt. Burned over with a hot iron to seared muteness. The man had squeezed his last grape into the Cup of Wrath.
The hammer fell like the gavel of a hanging judge. A ball of lead big as a thumb vomited from the barrel in a ring of hellfire. The man’s face went out the back of his head and his soul fell into the hands of his Maker.
Justice turned and walked towards the approaching twilight, fading along with the sun
Food For Thought
The author addresses two main themes in this story. The first theme is the concept of justice. The story presents a personification of justice whose existence is linked to a divine will. This figure knows that his seemingly cyclical being and purpose is tied to the existence of injustice. Several questions arise from the interplay between justice and injustice in this story. Is a divine will necessary for the concept of justice to make sense? Do we commit injustices against individuals alone or is there also a cosmic element to our actions? Can the individual injustices committed by a person accumulate like a debt? Will there ever be an accounting for the wrong we do as individuals?
The second theme is the concept of life-force or vitality. The marked-man character has an ongoing inner debate about the source of life. What is life? Of what does life consist? Is life, as from his demented point of view, a substance one can both have and lose by degree? What is the connection between physical life and the life of a soul or psyche?