I. Your mother lay pale and bleeding in the tangled sheets when in the flight of her soul you announced yourself wailing into the world. The women in their bonnets and housedresses crossed themselves and muttered prayers while your father called out from his sorrow. He could never again gaze upon this woman, or say her name but with a strangled sound, and he commanded her body removed. They wrapped and carried her in those very sheets, blood matted and sticky with viscera, fly gathered already, to the edge of what was considered the yard. And so with all images and possessions of this woman, carried in bedsheets and set afire. Now your father regarded you from the edge of the room, saying unto his sister, “What shall I do with this one?” And the spinster, stern and manly, said with gray lips, “I will tend after him. I will tend after the both of you.” How in the brief years to follow your aunt was carried off in a fever and then your father was himself compelled to the soil, his blood misted before the plow, and into the mysterious overgrowth his hired man fled with your young stepmother. And when they found you in the dust they said you were red with the blood of your father.

II. Now this farmer in his felt hat and overcoat and this woman in her housedress and apron, her graying hair bundled, found you and gave you a bed within their barn, fed you bluing crusts and broth in the late evening, the oily clots along the surface, and they clasped your hands, bade you bless this meal with the name of the Almighty. And as you ate, the sounds and smells of those animals below, the exhilaration of barn cats and the horror of those they sought, the strand of tail dangling from maws, and elsewhere the chewing of cattle and horses and the confusion of chickens.

And when you reached for the farmer you called him “Father,” and to you the farmer said, “Your father lays forgotten in the soil!” and when you reached for the farmer’s wife you called her “Mother,” and she leapt back, crying out, “Do you mean to curse me, child?”

When the children of the house attended school, you attended to the chores: the extracting of milk and the creation of butter and the dispersing of seeds to the dust. And in the evenings you looked to your chores while the children giggled and whispered, the blond girl with pale brows, and the two blond boys who sat shoulder to shoulder upon the steps, each clasping a half-consumed apple. And when finished the brothers tossed the cores to the dust-yard, chortling, “Give that to the pigs.” So you gathered the fruit and dispensed the browning flesh, while they hooted and jeered.

The actual names of the brothers went unused, for in every aspect they seemed the same lad, save the scar along the one’s cheek and the scar along the other’s knuckles. And never was one boy seen without the other, for they toiled in unison: the dispersing of seed, the lugging of water from the pump, their infrequent studies before the ebbing flicker of a candle, the dubious frenzy of their quills. Yes, these boys inseparable in all doings, even in the way they stood in awe as their father slit the throat of the offering, mouths agape and hands on chubby hips, or how they went at the furtive task of throttling some chicken, giggling and panting with excitement, the breathless, agitated way they inspected the interior with fingers and penknives.

And you watched these lads through barn-wall openings, measured their ways and the ways of those they loved. And in the dust you drew a man and a woman and a girl and two brothers, watched them in what sunlight shone through. When you attempted to draw them moving they grazed in mute stupor like cattle, or milled in circles like hens, or waited, crouched, like barn cats. And you attempted to make them speak but mustered only soft moos, clucking sounds. And you now longed only for that moment when you could replicate their true motions and interactions.

And through candle-glow-tinted windows you noted the family’s manner: how the father held the mother in those rich seconds when no child seemed near, and the way the daughter gazed from her bedroom window to the moonlight, silent, wistful, her elbows upon the sills, her sighs, and how the boys chased each other shouting and throwing pebbles in the day and tussled in their room in the night. The way the family prayed before their meals and thus these prayers you ever said before your own humble dinner. And you saw the father hold one lad’s arm while he thrashed the other boy after they set fire to a barn cat or pelted a hog with rocks, giggling the while. And how the brothers swelled before an offering. Now the lamb’s bleating, the foreboding of rank death, the burning smells. And you watched as the boys watched their father depart, snickering in their brute, insolent way when he was safely gone.

And the father often walked in the yard in the moonlit hours, a bottle in his hands; sometimes he toppled into the dust, moaning, and sometimes he slouched upon a stump, and some hours he babbled to himself, or sobbed wordlessly, or moaned, or said some woman’s name. How you crept to go to him, but always turned back inside.

III. When you were of age you went into the fields, and there you worked the oxen at their plows. You became calloused and low shouldered, taut and muscled, and soon the hired men dwarfed you no more. And in the afternoons, while the farmer lunched at his table, you crouched on an abandoned cider barrel, telling bawdy jokes while the men praised the depravity of your wit. And you played cards and smoked the tobacco they rolled into papers, the flecks dappling your lips, while the brothers carried forth jugs of ale and the daughter brought crusty lard sandwiches on tarnished tin trays. This girl whose name you knew only from what the breeze carried out, who watched you when she thought you attended to your smoke, your cards, and you noted the dusty swan line of her neck; the pink of her lips, their slight part, the front edges of her teeth hinting there.

And when the work ceased for the night you lay in the moldering hay, in the soft glow of the oil lamp, reading the abandoned schoolbooks of the children of the family, the mud-finger-smudged McGuffey Reader, Aesop’s Fables, and Davies’s New Elementary Algebra, drifting your fingers along the language of these, wondering if the girl had once possessed this one, and were these her marks, and had she once traced her fingers here as you now did, and if you inhaled the yellowing dust of these pages would you inhale also the ghost of what was once her: flecks from the dirt of her travels, the stain of her perspiration, the inflection of her breath; while outside the loose drifts of sand and dust gusted against the windows, and long-off crickets hummed, and wolves moaned from the forest interior. Such were those years, beholden to the slightest gestures of the farmer and his family, to what they called their “generosity,” born of their love for the Almighty and of the Almighty’s love for all His inventions, great and small.

IV. Yes, in those days all the farmers and the friends of the farmers lived in constant and obsequious dread of the Almighty. Many nights the countryside seemed to burn with the light of the farmers’ devotion, the bleating of coming sacrifice, the black smoke of burnt offerings. And what farmer’s child by the age of seven had not laid an eviscerated goat before the mountain, or tossed a blood-emptied figure onto a fire and wafted the fumes mountainward? And what farmer did not instruct his child in binding the legs, in slitting the throat and collecting the blood? What farmer did not preach to his child the words to utter, while the animal’s consciousness passed into the Almighty’s mouth? And what child did not wonder, “Why must we do this?” and what farmer did not respond, “The Almighty is ever hungry.” And what man would not say that he would give his only begotten son in this manner to the Almighty, for such is the devotion required of man unto a Father he loves?

And women lit candles in the Almighty’s name, uttering the language of devotion, and in kind they bade their children speak His name as they kneeled at the foot of their beds. And what child did not dream the Almighty peering into His copper telescope, witnessing in the immortal lens the beating of their secret blackness? What child has not dreamed His eyes, great and gleaming, when He whispers His commandments unto them, while His sepulchral breath gusts through the valley?

And the thousand doomed pilgrims who climbed the Almighty’s black mountain, their walking sticks and bison-hide jackets, their packs stuffed with jerky and casks of water. They smiled to those they loved and waved to those they wished to impress. And into the mists they ventured, gone for days it seemed. And such fools always tumbled down, their grim ghouls faces scorched off and blistered open. And their remains were thrown into potter’s fields, or they were buried in yards, and soon bushes thrived above them, sometimes bursting into flame and humming what some considered songs and others dire warnings.

And in those days all dressed in their finest attire and went to the house of worship attended by their neighbors. Here all sought to illustrate the greatness of the love and fear they held within their breasts. So too on Sundays the farmer and his family boarded their wagon at an hour when even the chickens paced and pecked with respect for the calm. You and the other hands followed in a donkey cart, these men fresh shaved at the farmer’s instruction, unearthly pale and smooth compared with their otherwise sun-ravaged apparitions. And you men wore your best suits, your only suits, handed down from the farmer, dusty with flecks of hay and other common detritus. And you wore bowler hats or no hats. How stifling was this costume, as if trussed up in a coffin. So your caravan clopped toward the black mountain, and soon other carts and carriages filled with the blazed red faces of men; and the pale, coddled faces of boys in suits and hats; and the pale, sturdy figures of women and girls in dresses and bonnets. Elsewhere along the road and across the fields rode men on horseback. And here other families arrived in their burdened wagons. And here horses snorted and oxen milled in wary silence. And here sacrifices bleated, lambs and goats, and then their guts’ slick purple coil, and the bloodstained grasses, and the smoke and crackling. Tents were erected in the center of the field, often red and sometimes blue, sturdy and unwavering no matter the morning winds. And a hundred bodies streamed into the tent while others loitered the edges and children chased each other along the field, jacket tails flapping. So all gathered within: farmers and their families on folding chairs, while servants and hired hands massed along the edges. And the preacher at the fore was perhaps the man from last week, or perhaps that man was caught within some wife or daughter and forced to move along to another county. And while the preacher sermonized he gestured to the black mountain, saying, “Upon yonder hill the Almighty lives and sits and watches us all.” And while all others gazed mountainward you watched the girl seated with her family, her blue ribbon and light blond hair; the black blemish upon her neck’s long line, marvelously impure; her lips’ movement when she turned enough for you to witness them.

V. How many evenings then you watched the daughter in the muted light of her bedroom window, in her dressing gown, and how your fingers played against your shirtsleeve, or the barn door, as if caressing her hair. How those brothers sat smoking on the front porch, the red pulse of their pipes, watching you as you watched her. The note they nailed to the barn wall that read “We will spill your guts to the dust,” and below they scrawled what seemed the depiction of one boy murdered by two. So it was you gazed no more upon this girl; no matter, for now you carried her apparition within you always, and the long nights, nestled within your hay, ever drawing her, smearing the lines and refiguring them anew.

This was how you passed the hours when the Almighty first whispered your name. And into the night you were compelled, into the forests beyond the farmer’s fields, as if led by a hand unseen, and into the depth of blackness of the forest interior, where around you silent animals observed. Now the Almighty’s creature appeared and here the holy beast’s full horror: veined wings, and obsidian horns, and hooves of soot, and fur-tufted legs, and its eyes crimson and shining, as if lit by the eternal furnace of His soul. Pine needles sparked and flared, and leaves smoked and blackened. And you could not scream for your throat was constricted. And you could not run for you were frozen in the awesome light. Finally the creature spoke in the sound of choirs burning and trumpets melting, and by this wrathful din it was said you would bring the Almighty’s testament to the people. And in the later days of your life and all the days of your death you would be called a man of greatness and a bringer of light. And the creature commanded you to live a life of goodness and purity until it returned with the tablets of the final testament.

Soon you stood before her window, flushed with greatness and clasping a pebble readied to throw. And when her shadow loomed you were to shout her name, but now the only sounds that followed were the crickets and the slowing throb of your heart, and the pebble you now let fall.

VI. And no matter your dreams or intentions you never spoke to this girl, and you never would, for soon a young man from town arrived on horseback—his velvet jacket and bowler hat, his silk ribbon waving, and his substantial whiskers flickering against the rush of breeze. You peered from the barn entrance, and when he called you to hitch his stallion, back into the darkness you slid. That night he dined with the family, and from below the window you listened to silverware clattering on porcelain, the mother’s laughter and the father’s gruff approval. And from the barn you watched the young man smoke cigars with the farmer, and later when the young man stood outdoors with the daughter, her hand upon the rail and his own soft hand engulfing hers. How you muffled your sobs with the fleshy parts of your hand, and for days afterward you refused your broth, bound yourself in blankets, shivered and wept.

And of your apparent illness the brothers asked their father, “If he dies then may we burn him ourselves?”

VII. Finally you went to the farmer, saying, “I intend to leave all this and seek the wider world,” and the farmer said, “Is that right?” He stroked his stubble. He spat into the dust. He said, “After all we have done for you, an orphan in the fields, feeble before the circling birds and wild dogs?” and he sputtered, “How hollow your belly without the food with which we have fattened you!” and he raged, “After we have done for you all any man with a fear of the Almighty could possibly do unto another?” and his eyes said if he held a shovel he would shatter your skull, and if he held a knife he would gouge your belly, and if he held a pitchfork he would impale you into the farmyard. And he said, “Think of your life had we not found you swaddled but with the dust,” although other times he said they had found you in the grasses, or in the cornstalks, or surrounded by wild dogs, or in the hunched and swaggering shadows of vultures, or in a basket along the river, or crawling in a ditch, while the final description never wavered: “slick with your own father’s blood.” And when you responded without obeisance he again spat, “You are not too old for the switch,” and he seethed, “Nor am I too old to deliver it unto you.” And you did not test the measure of his words. And you did not spill his blood before the girl, watching from her bedroom window.

VIII. So that night while the farmer and his family slept, you stood beneath the full gauze of the midnight sky, and watched the darkened glass of her window, and you dreamed the figure asleep within. Soon you crept onto the road, your bundle of schoolbooks slung over your shoulder. And now you were alone in the moonlit dirt, with your pulsing heart, your choking breath.

Now the roadside dark was speckled with incandescent eyes and there shone a wilderness of teeth. And with a hand trembling you brandished a knife, and with chattering teeth you spoke the Almighty’s name.

And you awaited the long-off bloom of dust foretelling the farmer and his sons, their muskets and snorting horses, and in their eyes, the depth of blackness, the coming of oblivion.

When no dust bloomed you constructed a fire from dead leaves and branches and curled upon the road with your bundle as a pillow. Now you dreamed the Almighty on His mountain and there He seemed a man as any other, in beard and robe, but His eyes flashed fire, and in a voice of thunder He commanded, “Go forth.”

Now in this dream you went down from His mountain to the forest of suicides: the white rows of birches, bark flaking like molting flesh, and dead men, hoary with flies, dangling from ropes. Finally you emerged on the edge of a pond. Here deer and rabbit tracks were stamped in the mud while the sun fractured white and violet upon the water. You filled your hands with this bounty while overhead carrion birds circled.

Across the way sat two young men, hunched on a log, their fishing poles bent and tremulous. And the water fractured before them and one called out to the other and they both laughed. So you knew this laughter well. And nowhere present seemed the farmer but in smoke coiling from beyond the forest.

And in this dream the Almighty whispered the brothers’ names, although they seemed articulated in an ancient language, and your dream-mind called this language “Hebrew.” Now you traveled back through the forest, emerging finally into a clearing where a fire burned and the farmer lay, hands clasped beneath his head. Some distance beyond loomed a smote black house with black pillars, warped and vibrating in the smoking air.

And you dreamed that you took a rock of sharpness and heft from the soil, clung to with moss and dirt, and smelling of the long submergence. And when you heard the faintest snore from the farmer you crept to him.

And from the soil you took this rock and into the skull of the farmer thus you submerged this rock. Thus planted no more would this man moan or speak or dream but bleed, yes, and coagulate, yes, and feed the soil thereafter, yes.

And when you finished you opened your eyes to the blur of the sun. You lay in the road, your heart throbbing and your fire gone to ash. And flies buzzed upon your flesh for you were also red and sticky with the discharge of your atrocity.

IX. You next woke in town, slouched against a shop door, while the shopkeeper glared over you. He said, “Sleep it off elsewhere.” And when you asked for work he said, “I have no use for addicts or derelicts.” And you stuttered, “I am alone in this world, sir,” and you choked back sobs and now said your mother and father were dead.

And this man regarded your blood-spattered clothing, the mess thick in your hair, saying, “Was it natives?” and you said, “Sir?” and he said, “Did natives do this?” And he gestured to a native walking the street: “Did one of those red devils butcher your family?” You looked at the native man unhitching a horse, and you looked at this shopkeeper, and you said, “Yes.” And this shopkeeper swore, and he paced, and he swore again, and from his pocket he gathered a flask, and he said, “Well, here,” and he bade you drink, and what you had thought would be whisky was only water. How you drank it anyway. And when the shopkeeper asked your name you invented the name the world knows you as. Now when this shopkeeper asked if you could stand, you said, “Of course,” but you fell in a lump, so the shopkeeper hoisted you, and now when he asked, “Can you walk?” you answered, “Of course,” and now you hobbled against him with legs of rubber.

Now the shopkeeper brought you to his house, and there he instructed you to bathe. You simply looked at him. So he showed you how to operate the faucet, turning one knob and saying, “This is for cool water,” and then turning the opposite knob and saying, “This is for hot water.” And you said you had never known there was more than one kind. And now he handed you a bar of soap and you gazed at it as if it were of alien manufacture, and he said, “You bring this over your figure, as thus,” and he pantomimed the bathing process. When you submerged yourself the clear water filled black with blood and dirt, and your body seemed to bob, weightless, and you let out a soft moan and your lids closed, the water rising and falling against your chin. And when you finished the shopkeeper brought a pair of shears, for by this time your hair fell to your shoulders, greatly tangled with hay and lice and fleas and all the sordid insects of the barn. The shopkeeper dispatched your locks to the floor with much pulling and grunting, and with this concluded he brought you to a bedroom. The walls of this room were white and bare save those bookshelves, dusty and empty, and these you ran your finger across. After some silence the shopkeeper said, “This was my son’s room,” and of this matter he said no more, and so you indicated the bed, primly made and unused in some while, saying, “I’ve never seen one of those before…” and after a pause you finished, “… except in books.”

X. At his shop, he made you watch his every endeavor, and soon he bade you mimic him and you did. And there were customers who exclaimed, “Why, this isn’t Harvey!” meaning the old hired lad, gone west as so many before. And there were those who said, “He seems the spitting image of John,” and you would learn they meant the shopkeeper’s son. To these customers he said nothing, although later you saw he chewed his lip until it bled.

And when the shopkeeper busied himself with those who mobbed him for the gossip of the day or the politics of the moment or even the speculations on the potato market, you lost yourself in your investigations, wandering the store and the back room, the mice dead in their traps, their bloody teeth; the barrels and burlap sacks slouched against the walls stuffed with dried beans and corn and rice, how you sifted your hands into these; the casks of root beer; the boxes of potatoes and carrots and snap peas and string beans and beets and rutabaga yet black with soil; and everywhere the pungency of leather from boots and shoes and belts there displayed, and walls were hung with wrought-iron pots and pans, and the shelves lined with lamps and stacked with dyed cloth, canned pears and peaches and beans and beets and tomatoes, and these you shook against your ear, as if the fluid within could speak its mystery.

Now the life you made within this store, the bow tie you wore and adjusted and readjusted, the pencil you slid behind your ear, the tip you wet when jotting calculations. How you soon knew the names of all who came before you and they called you “sir,” and you told them jokes about the weather or the politics of the day. And a great many customers wandered through his shop, farmers and their sons and their hired men, and always afterward the stinking track from their boots. And always you thought of the farmer and his sons, although with each day such thoughts dulled. Natives too passed through the doors, and some dressed as a white man dresses, and some dressed yet in their buckskins, and some wore feathers, and others simply wore their long hair braided, and the shopkeeper observed these men as a farmer observes a cloud of locusts. And many women wandered through the doors, or those who wished for you to meet with women wandered through, who asked of you, “When will you be stopping over?” for their daughter Marie or Sara or Claire would certainly love to meet a young man of such “fine determination,” and you blushed and averted your eyes. And soon it was that even the elders who passed before you brought forth their daughters, unwed and aging, often smiling, sometimes forced near sneers, and other times only too eager, lascivious. And there were those women dressed entirely in black, and their eyes seemed to linger the longest and their fingers seemed to brush against yours the most, while you blushed and mumbled some witticism about the potato market.

And there were those men in rumpled suits and well-worn shoes and dusty hats who walked through the doors with “items” they wished to sell to the shop, antiaging creams and pills and potions and liquors in bottles labeled “Elixir” and “Miracle Agent” and “Eternal Youth.” And these men sometimes gave their full pitch wherein they claimed the aged would regain the color of their hair and their teeth would re-form from their bloody, gaping gums, and those who walked stooped as cripples would straighten their backs, and those who could not walk would learn to walk anew, and those with milky eyes would know their vision cleared, and those with no memories would again recall all they had known and loved. And sometimes these pitches came in the form of “yarns” they “spun” about “real folks” who had prospered by these miracle cures, derived from native recipes forgotten by the modern world. “We think because we have the steam engine that we have all the answers, but it isn’t so. The common people of the land, the native folk of these areas, they were in touch with answers we don’t even know the questions to.” And other times there came a song, perhaps a banjo tune or two, and sometimes a woman sang and a child danced, or an outfitted monkey clanged symbols, or some dog stood upright, hopping in circles as if deranged. And some days the shopkeeper allowed this business, and other times when he heard the carriages approach by the hee-hawing of their mules or the tinkling of their cans, he fended them off with a broom or he brandished his rifle, and sometimes they came forth no matter his objections, saying, “When you find out what I have in these here cases you’ll thank me for stopping,” and sometimes it took one shot into the air, and sometimes it took two, and very often it took three. And of these men the shopkeeper often said, “Never turn your back, for such men would gladly see the both of us dead and this shop entire cluttered with their wares.” And when you smiled the shopkeeper said, “You listen to me,” and when you said, “Who would want a shop filled with trinkets and absurdities?” he responded, “Most of the men and women of this country.”

For in those days the nation was known as a land of coming splendor, a land of young men on the make, and into those mysterious western places many a second son and orphan went, seeking his fortune. And what farm boy or wandering orphan did not dream himself dressed as a millionaire, in top hat and tapping out his way with a diamond-headed cane? And no matter the western beat of heathen drums, for what honest white man did not long to eradicate the natives in favor of shops and schools, factories and churches?

And when he found you reading dusty volumes from his shelves, yawning for their dullness as these contained mostly letters and decrees composed by politicians and sermons composed by preachers, this shopkeeper insisted you set them aside. “There are those who say we have no literature in this country,” he said. “They are wrong, for within these pages we find the great truths of all our nation, we find the language of our coming greatness.” And now he brought you certain magazines and newspapers, and within those pages you found ads for encyclopedias and dictionaries and travel magazines; and hand-wrought jewelry; and gold watches certain to keep time no matter the wear and damage of the piece; and life insurance; and galvanized iron roofing; and internal flushings to eliminate “all waste and disease from the bodily system”; and fertile chicken eggs; and counterirritants for rheumatism, gout, stiff joints; and matchless cigar lighters; and books purporting to explain the “science of Life and Self-Preservation”; and notebook holders and ink stands; and bust enhancers and waist shapers; and imported tea sets decorated with cocks and hens; and typewriters guaranteed to save all from “your pen-scribbled puzzles”; and cures for stammering; and steam-powered threshers and mowing machines; and soothing syrups for wind colic and the unstable bowels of teething infants; and foolproof serums for the devastated kidneys and liver of addicts and drinkers; and elixirs guaranteed to perpetuate the loveliness of new carpets; and one hundred doses of “vital sparks” syrup to stimulate a man to “red-blooded vitality” and return the aging “gentleman” to “glorious youth”; and oil lamps and oil lubricants and oil lozenges and oil jellies; and country homes in unknown and unsettled lands; and rye whisky; and electricity machines guaranteed to return eyesight and hearing and cure headaches, neuralgia, bronchitis, weak lungs, and “waning virility” (thus a man was shown wired to this machine while lightning flashed and in the next illustration he was shown well muscled and juggling bowling pins); and cures for weak ankles; and lawyers for “all domestic relations”; and hand-tailored “vogue hats”; and companies promising to deliver “lettuce salad daily”; and soaps for the complexion and soaps for the aging; and apple jellies; and Turkish cigarettes (and here were belly dancers with rounded hips and tantalizing bellies); and books guaranteed to illuminate the mysteries of the meat industry; and dolls for the children; and there were scores upon scores of ads for still more catalogs and brochures and pamphlets. So you cut these ads from the papers and slathered them with glue and spread them along the walls of the bedroom, and when there was no more room you plastered them upon the ceiling, and when there was no more room upon the ceiling you glued them into notebooks. How often you gazed at the walls and the ceiling, transfixed by these weird marvels and the illustrations that bent them into some kind of reality, the language that made their accomplishments almost tangible.

And so it was this shopkeeper who said, “There will come a time when the only story a man may read in this nation will stand plastered on the walls of his favorite tavern or slathered onto the sides of the carriages in the streets, and it will be written in such a language as all men may understand and not simply those few.” And it was this shopkeeper who said, “Soon all men of this land may know and comprehend the plain and simple language of another.”

XI. And often there were those who peddled wares not for the flesh but for the eternal soul as prescribed by the Almighty, for in the progress of this new nation all faiths seemed possible, and all manifestations of the Creator seemed true. Now there were those who gathered in the forests and bathed in the rivers, and so many playing children were unwittingly greeted by the pale, liberated flesh of the godly—oh, to be a lad before that wilting and corpulence, to feel the breath quicken as a sagged woman coos from the brush, or a flaccid man pleads for a roll in the needles and leaves. Oh, to believe with deepest faith that in another’s flesh one finds the Almighty’s light! And there were those who would not murder or eat the flesh of animals, gnawing upon only what they found growing from the land. And there were those who uncovered the flesh of men buried, and these were seen wandering with burlap sacks and crowbars and sniffing at the soil. And there were those who lived twelve or more within the same house and worked no jobs, choosing rather to till the soil and raise livestock, to feast upon the bounty of their labor. And here the men slept in rooms across from the women, but no sex frolicked with the other, for to fornicate was considered the foulest sin. And now pregnant women were excommunicated and sent to live amongst the sinners of the land while the implanter of the seed was but reprimanded, for “a man’s lusts are the deepest of all nature’s transgressions” and it was well known that “the female encourages and lures the male.” And some called for an end to priests, for one man should not stand as gatekeeper to another man’s salvation.

And some called the natives the “wandering tribes” of the original peoples. And some found in caves and under rotten stumps tablets writ with the language of the Almighty.

And there were men who drifted from church to church, from movement to movement, and from tavern to tavern, finding no solace for that which burned their soul, the torment and doubt. And when all faiths and tonics were exhausted they were found slouched against boulders, their heads blown out, pistols fallen to their chests, or they dangled from the trees, their necks rope-burned red, and black tongues distended. So many gave up their flesh beneath His black mountain that medical students traded the graveyard for this forest when seeking fresh corpses. And schoolchildren dared their chums to gaze upon the ghoulish decompositions, the souls struggling free, diaphanous, and wandering mountainward.

And many who did not put the pistol to their mouth found relief in lashing themselves, so parading the forests and streets, moaning and spilling black blood, while stray dogs and cats trotted at a careful distance, lapping the red tide. Or they found relief in those who preached the end of time, the final date named, and congregations made to renounce all possessions (although many of these preachers and followers invariably did kill themselves rather than admit the folly of false hopes). Indeed, how many false revelators were dragged through the streets, the cobbles strewn with bloody scraps of preacher’s garb? And others fled in the dead night for new towns, where their shame was not yet known, and there they named some new date of final doom, now again entirely certain to come.

Yes, you knew these preachers, in all their names and guises. They attempted to infiltrate the shopkeeper’s home and the shopkeeper’s shop, to explain the days and why they were made, and when the world would fall to a final night. You heard them speak the words of the Almighty, and you saw them in the forests of the land, praying unto the trees, gathering up the moss and the sticks and calling them the voice of God, or you saw them at the golden altars of their churches, decrying all other churches and preachers as the utterers of ignorance and sin. And when in the presence of no one else you told these preachers, “His creature has visited me in the night and bathed me in its terrible light,” and they replied, “Sure it did,” or “You all right, son?” or “You mocking me?”

And middle-class preachers preached in their own parlors, coffee and tea and cakes provided afterward by their wives, and poor preachers preached in town squares and on stoops, in tin sheds and in wooden shacks, and here they shouted their twisted impressions of holy books known to all. By this time a thousand preachers of a thousand configurations wandered the streets, and some promised ruination and the rise of devils and a “great roasting,” while others pledged cities in the clouds, and others promised choirs of creatures, and others said there was no end or beginning, for all lived within the same constant breath of life. And no matter the nature of their inclinations or the origin of their holy insights, all insisted upon tithes and donations of possessions. Indeed many preachers wept openly at collection plates heaped with silver coins and watches and pearl necklaces and gold teeth, and later they slept upon these riches, or filled tubs with coins and jewels and bathed in them. And many were run out of town with shotguns and pitchforks, and others were feathered and run out of town straddling rails, the fumes of scorched skin and tar, white eyes beneath the morass. And many built enormous houses with gold fountains on the front lawn, naked children spitting water, and these preachers too were run out of town, or strung up, or filled with boiling silver or lead, for none could suffer a charlatan in those days.

And you walked in their midst, listening to all. And it is said you learned much of the world from these men.

XII. And the shopkeeper simply said, “There is no world beyond the one you see here,” gesturing to the shop, the goods, and the advertisements adorning the walls. And when you asked why he owned their books he replied, “If you understand the language these men speak, you will also know how to sell them goods.” And when you indicated the black mountain this shopkeeper said, “Son, there’s no man living on that mountain. And if there is, I promise you His will does not make this world turn.”

And this shopkeeper insisted you dress in the fashion he desired, and he insisted you keep your face clean of whiskers and your hair short and tidy, and he sometimes asked of you, “May I call you ‘son’?” You never could say otherwise to this man. And he told you the books to read and the philosophies to espouse and the dreams to place burden upon, for this shopkeeper openly explained his sole ambition in these final days was to see you take over the shop “when I’m safely moldering in the ground.”

And this shopkeeper brought you the daily paper illustrated with the great finding of the day—some enormous and terrible lizard a hundred million years dead and buried, transfigured into bone and stone and now dug up. “This creature and its entire species was born and died before your black mountain was dreamed.” And you spat upon the man and you tore the paper in two and cast the fragments to the wind. “You see what I think of your stories,” you said.

XIII. And now when you and the shopkeeper closed shop for the night you said, “I have small business to attend to,” rather than return home with him. And the shopkeeper winced, saying, “Well, do what you must, but hurry back then.” And these hours you spent along the alleyways laughing and drinking whisky from flasks and puffing cigars with peddlers, their slouch hats and yellow eyes and seldom teeth. And these men explained their potions were concocted with no magic but the bounty of alcohols and common herbs and cocaine and sugar—yes, to you and your wide eyes they explained the secrets of their methods without hesitation—and you listened in silence, your only motion of interest a slight nod. And they explained the mystic wisdom of the natives, the fear of the heavens, the looming horror of all disease, and how “all folks believe deep down there’s a better land, and that long ago we lived in such a better land,” and “some believe this is a place of the earth” and “some say it is a land divine,” and you said, “—on top of the black mountain,” and they said, “Some would have it so. More folks in this particular valley than anywhere else we’ve seen.”

And some days you crept to the perimeter of revival tents. Now while others sang and swayed within those red-and-white-striped skins, you lingered at grog stalls, drinking deep of what seemed meant to clean paint from the walls. How your throat blazed and your eyes livened. You tossed your last coins onto the table and shook your empty cup at the vendors, while ever in the background droned the preacher’s furious, intoxicating chants. Here you watched always for the farmer, his wife, his sons, and here you waited for the daughter, the line of her neck, her high laugh. And when you believed you saw the brothers or the farmer, you followed them, plucking a branch from the ground in your stride. So in these times thoughts of murder alone trespassed your mind.

And when you did not find these brothers you returned to the stalls, and now lost in the fumes of drink you wept, describing the lines of her neck and confessing your secret hopes and transgressions.

How beautiful the burn of the grog, the grip of the fumes, and you swayed as you drank, while preachers and peddlers lectured on their travels, on their dreams. How often these men spoke words like “respectable” and “society,” for in those days even a man with three teeth in all his mouth dreamed of seating himself amongst the tables of the wealthiest and most prestigious society. And you cheered and toasted them and you cried out, “How right you are! How right you are!”

And after these revivals you often found yourself moaning and half asleep in a ditch, sticky with dew and the saliva of malefactors unknown. And there were nights you found yourself in a nameless woman’s arms, her black teeth and breath of rot. And there were nights you woke slouched against a tree with your pockets rifled through, and other nights you staggered home stinking of grog and piss and the Word of God. And some nights the shopkeeper who called himself “Father” waited for you, feigning to read by candlelight. And some nights he only ground his teeth, his face pulsing red, and would not speak. And some nights he was unable to meet your gaze and you were unable to meet his. And some nights the kitchen floor was strewn with broken plates and the shopkeeper was passed out in some corner of the house. And some nights you sneered at him, snoring, a bottle of bourbon clutched to his chest. And some nights you covered his prone boozy body with a blanket. And some nights you fell into his arms weeping.

No matter. Each night you continued on with these men. Nothing more luxuriant than a preacher in new silk robes leading a young woman to his tent for “prayers.” Little seemed more fabulous than the murky vials of peddlers, mundane elements churned into elixirs and charms, cure-alls and tonics, common ingredients made to carry the breath of God.

XIV. One morning the shopkeeper awaited you at his front stoop. His face was slouched and gray, and when he attempted to speak now you told him of a world newly born before you. You told him how the very night before, while a preacher ranted and bonfires blazed, you staggered into the forest. Here you traversed a moonlit stream, slipped on moss-slick rocks, and stumbled over rotten limbs and decaying birch trunks, and soon you lay moaning in the muck. So you remained until a soft light glowed overhead. And the ground pulled open and the soil swirled into a pool of fire, and there gnashed and writhed a million damned. And from the fires rose the creature you had known in your boyhood, its sharp glinting hooves and dense obsidian tongue. And when the creature cried for you to repent you fell to your knees—“Is that so?” said the shopkeeper—and the creature led you to a dank and putrid cave where the bleached skulls of many animals lay, and within this darkness were the golden tablets of the Almighty’s final word. “It is time you knew the fullness of your destiny,” the creature brayed. And when the shopkeeper wondered, “And where are these tablets?” you shrugged. “The dread beast chastised me as a backslider and said I could not see them for many years. I must make for myself first a holy life.” So the shopkeeper cried, “How you break my heart!” and he wept, “You would rather see me dead than call me ‘Father.’”

And you mentioned no more to the shopkeeper of such a visitation.

XV. Now there were nights you did not return to his house. On the first such night the shopkeeper waited in the glow of his lantern, his voice like a sob when you entered at dawn, asking if you were hungry or if you needed new clothes, for you now wore little more than rags. You merely sneered and called him a fool. From then on he awaited your arrival from his bedroom window and listened to your comings and goings and all your movements in between through the floor. In time then he would know you by your tracks and handprints alone, for you trailed dirt wherever you went, and your hands were always gray with dried mud.

XVI. Each night now you ventured forth with four men—orphans such as you, come from farms to seek the wider world—and you knew them well by their cigars and pipes, slouch hats and beards. And since many men sought their fortunes through the finding of treasure, you told them you had acquired what you called a seer’s stone, saying, “It produces for me a great diminishment of space,” and “I have peered through all manners of material into the secrets housed therein.”

And you each spun stories of the fortunes you would make, the possessions you would obtain. And you said, “Finally, I will be quit of this damned shopkeeper.”

And one man worked as a farmhand, and he desired to be free of the plow and spend his hours “within the whores.” And two others pitched wares, “exotic” creams and lotions, boiled roots mashed into “antiaging elixirs.” And another man lived immersed in “ancient” maps, scouring the valleys, the riverbeds, the mountains, digging holes as deep as a man is tall, sifting the silt and sand. Ever thwarted in his endeavors, now you placed your hand upon his bosom, saying, “The end of your failures is nigh, my friend.”

When you had coins you slept in boardinghouses, and when you did not you crept into barns, and there rats and fleas, and there the indomitable quiet of cattle. Now in the hours before dream you rhapsodized of the fortunes to come, and you joked of the wealthy men you had known, how their riches bought them “water flowing right into their houses” and how “this water was as hot or as cold as you could want,” and “they sleep on beds as light and airy as the clouds themselves,” and “when they desire a steak someone fixes them a steak” and “when they desire fancy potatoes someone fixes them fancy potatoes.” And you spoke of the cigars the wealthy smoked, the brandy they drank, the magnificent burn, “how smooth and luxurious his liquor is compared with our own.” And you joked about the wealthy man’s laziness, his cruelty and indifference, and you clapped your friends warmly upon the backs, saying, “That will be each of us, soon enough, if you have faith in my stone.” And to a man they murmured they would follow you unto the ends of the earth.

XVII. Now you scoured the land, investigating every farm and field, hillside and cave, and when the skies blackened you fled to dark forests, where bloated suicides swung like enormous cocoons and wolves in their caverns dreamed of murder. In the winds and rain, shivering and starving, you spoke of chests of gold hidden in caves, or the barren husks of oaks. And you said sacks of gold dwelled at the bottom of wells. And you said, “The great explorers of old found such riches on these shores as never before conceived.” And when your comrades wondered why those settlers had never retrieved their buried fortunes, you explained a great many forces, seen and unseen, had murdered them.

Ever the days, then, seated before fires, eyes blurry and lustful, unfurling ancient maps and sketching new maps, weighing and measuring and calculating the illustrated X where treasure surely lay. When in dank caverns and gloomy forests you found the place marked X you commanded, “Dig,” and the very soil exhaled from the split earth. Into the ground these men went, lost within the mania of their toil. And they hefted out muck and rocks, bones and skulls, with sacks fashioned from their clothing. And when no man recovered treasure they insisted some force must have removed the riches, for they had envisioned gold glittering out of reach. And at each of these pronouncements, at every inexplicable failure, you cried, “See that trail of soot? Brothers, the Evil One has again played us for fools.”

You were soon infamous, covered always in soil and stink and paying your bills in promises, but all men dream of a greater world and many fellows with moth-chewed maps and family legends commissioned your talents. And many raved of your skill, claimed you found marvels and riches and heaps of jewels and fascinating artifacts, while others insisted any man who hired you was being duped. Flush for the first in your lives, who in your small and fragile clan did not spread the coins of his bounty before his bed? And when you said, “There is much more where that comes from,” they looked upon you with great affection, called you “Boss,” and named your peeping stone the “Sacred Rock.”

And in taverns, the Hog’s Head and the Bristled Cow, you made your name as a great player of cards. Here your eye was often blackened as a cheat’s, yet you were beloved by almost all, and here they called you “a most vivid personality” and “the fellow most likely to tell the bawdiest jokes and sing the loudest songs.” And so you sang, and so you drank, and how often did they find you retching in the street, and how many strange women did you cling to in these bottomless and ill-remembered nights? And did you know regret in your soul, or did you lust only for the night, to return to those women, hoary and ragged and groaning, and some merely seeming to be women?

And when the money was gone, you camped in fields and forests, slumped in alleyways and slumbered on benches, and you fell into the arms of widows and women of poor repute. And to the whores you left what coins you had, and when you had no coins you paid in “promissory notes.” Hollow payments that left you spitting blood, cast into the street by pimps who knew only the language of murder.

And you stayed in boardinghouses and in the homes of Samaritans, kindly men and women who feared the blackness of His mountain and the depth of His horrid soul. Here you men shared a room: you tucked into the bed while another man nested in a velvet armchair, his ragged hat slouched over his brow, and the other two curled with each other on the floor, arms haphazardly tossed over bodies, stained undershirts or no shirts, faces nuzzled into shoulders, whiskered cheek mashed to whiskered cheek. In those nights the smell of one man mingled easily with the smell of another, and what man did not dream lonesome and needy thoughts of the man pressed into him, breathing faintly into his ear?

And if one cracked the window to let free their musk, then surely you heard the sounds of the wolves from the forests and none could sleep for the tightening of his blood gone cold—

And did you gaze upon these fellows in the light of the moon, knowing you could never sleep with them while you possessed the stone? And did you watch them believing they prayed for your demise, a busted bottle lodged in your throat, a pool of black blood on some beer-sloppy floor, or splayed across sweat-and semen-slick sheets, drained of blood by a pimp’s knife while the whore emptied your wallet?

Did they plot to slit your neck, to remove this glass marvel from your open and cooling hands? And what fortunes would they acquire while you lay moldering in a potter’s field?

Yes, how could you sleep with these men, or seek treasure in their creeping presence, when coming doom pressed constant upon your skull? Your life now in wait for the shovel blow, your skull burst and bleeding and your flesh a cooling husk. Your dead eyes open while your friends fleece the stone. And perhaps they would bury you in a shallow grave, or perhaps they would leave your corpse for wolves and birds. No, you could not; surely you could not so much as drink the coffee they brewed for even this seemed laced with lye.

And did such thoughts come from your mind or from the voice of the creature you said visited your bed? Whose mouth twisted from the ceiling and dripped a substance unknown unto your very soul, and then a blistering and a crackling, and when you screamed there came no sound but a rattling from the bottom of your throat.

And what of the morning you said you would seek treasure no more? When you bequeathed those men your stone and sent them down the dusted road. How fat their eyes, how their hands shook, even after you said, “It will give no power unto you.” They took it anyhow. Then the distant year when you saw them strung from posts, your destiny shown in their limp, swinging figures had you not cast off their sordid lot.

XVIII. You remained in the room, although soon you could no longer afford the luxury. And you prepared letters to the shopkeeper, some requesting funds, some begging forgiveness, some attesting to your “love” for the man you now called “Father.” And these you never sent. These you lit with your candle, and the language of your endearment flickered and curled into oblivion.

Soon you returned to taking commissions, and it was said even without your artifact you retained your prior skill. Now you pointed mere branches toward the fields, called them “divining rods” and followed their indication at a trot, as if led by some invisible hound. And when you found water or silver or boulders apparently illustrated in chalk with images of chests of gold or wealthy ancient peoples, there were those who praised your insight. And there were those who paid you double to replicate your success. And there were those who said you planted some findings, and fluke luck provided the rest. And some days you were made to return your fees, and some days you were bloodied into the dust, and some days you were brought before the courts and made to defend your manner of business. Ever you persisted in your industry, no matter the weariness that came, for no force could ever make you labor like other men.

XIX. And many days you walked the cobbled streets and alleyways. And you knew much of the flies and the muck, and you knew much of the manure and the silent chewing of horses, the low tails of dogs dining at the refuse-lined gutters. And the ladies who lifted their skirts for the piling of filth and the university-educated priests who were loath to tread where their congregation had trod, the finery of their gowns, the whiteness of their collars, and you saw these men, prim and gallant in their carriages, laughing and carrying on with the comeliest ladies of the congregation.

And you saw much of the sooty-faced urchins, hunkered on wharves and scrounging in alleyways, smoking butts and snapping open the discarded bones of some rich man’s lunch, sucking the marrow, or gazing sullen eyed from orphanage windows, longing to fashion a rope from bedclothes. And what child, vagrant and wild, did not pelt you with rotten fruit as you drifted along, or flash his penknife, or lift your wallet? And when you did not box his ears, when you took him aside and lectured on the Almighty’s benevolence, did he not spit on you and scamper to meet his brothers?

And you saw civilized natives dressed in the white man’s clothes, praying to the Almighty in the white man’s manner, while wild natives prayed to their own gods, shaped as foxes and eagles and deer. For a fee these natives led you to ancient depictions of horned beasts and bears and wolves, images drawn into the rocks of the forests. Images originating from the days when men and animals strode together, intermarrying and breeding, and in this time men grew wings and walked with hooves, horns glinting from their skulls. And the natives said in the original design men and animals knew no separation. In those days all flesh had been as one.

And you walked the corridors of the Museum of Natural History, where all manner of beasts were posed in perpetual snarl and glassy stare. How fathers and sons gaped at brown bears and lions and elephants, stiff and sawdust stuffed, impervious to decay and the motions of time. And you stood before the erected bones of a long-dead monster. The creature towered over all, and through the vacant socket one saw only darkness in place of what had been. Men and women came and went, chattering while you remained motionless, your face as if burning. The ribs bones and the absence of where once beat the heart. How the teeth must have brutalized all. Entire species butchered and consumed here. And no man had ever coupled with this horror. No words ever left those long-eradicated lips but pure sounds, roaring and gnashing and oblivion. And when a whiskered man in a bowler hat said to the woman beside him, “This thing died a billion years ago,” you sneered, “It’s a damned lie.” And at this couple, wide eyed and moving away, you wagged your fist: “You should be more careful how you blaspheme His name.”

XX. And what of this family you lodged with, the mother and father you heard arguing through the floor. The father, a butcher, who stank of bones and meat, of blood stickiness and flies, who wanted you cast into the street, and the mother who wanted only your money, and their daughter, who danced in the yard amidst the swirling leaves and dust, her skirts twirling as she twirled. How you feared she would snap in her contortions, so slender and pale was she in those days. This girl who seemed somehow Spanish, with her black hair and her dark brown eyes, who gazed upon her shoes when you stood before her, and when you said, “That is a lovely bow in your hair,” or “How this dress compliments your complexion,” she murmured her thanks. Somehow you knew better than to touch her chin and bring her gaze unto your own.

The woman who cleaned the manure and dust from your shoes, who brought them shined each morning, and each evening set a plate of stewed beef and potatoes and cabbage and carrots before your door. This food you ate while sitting on the edge of your bed, gazing into a streaked and tarnished mirror, and the man who returned your gaze no longer resembled any man you had known. Nights you ventured out, along the piss-stinking mud of alleyways and the sawdust floors of taverns, no longer drinking or gambling, for now you merely gazed upon men in the thrall of excess and sin. And when the wrinkled whores, their liver spots smeared with powders and paint, batted their fat black lashes and slurred, “What would you like, honey?” you sat rigid and cold, finally muttering bawdy jokes until they left.

So you continued until the butcher took you aside, whispering, “Your gambling and whores bring a sickness into my home.” He took you by the shirt, seething, his eyes trembling with redness, before finally he pushed you away. Not until he departed did you wipe his spittle from your brow.

XXI. And when one night the mother was ill, their daughter brought boiled potatoes, her tied-up hair, those strands fallen along her brow, her cream pallor and averted eyes. You asked, “Is your father aware you brought these?” When she said nothing, you continued: “He finds me undesirable.” The girl barely nodded. And you said, “What do you think?” Finally, she spoke: “I suppose I wouldn’t know”—and then, slowly, her eyes along the length of your fingers, the bones of your hand—“Mother doesn’t think you’re so terrible.” And now when she looked down you touched her chin, bringing her gaze to your own, the rise and fall of her chest in the dim oil light.

And every morning thereafter you waited for her at the door. Mutely she brought your shoes, shined and spotless, and when you complimented her work, she pulled away again, watching only the shadow spread before you. Each morning she arrived earlier and earlier, and always you woke to her feet creaking the floorboards and always you stood before her in some condition of wakefulness. Soon there came then the morning her fingers brushed against yours, and now she dared to look upon your hand, and now she dared to look upon your neck, and now the sudden moistness as she licked the plump pinkness of her bottom lip.

And soon she brought your meals, lingering as you ate, and often she hummed for you some pretty melody, her sense of tune as if mountain-sent. And when you learned she played the flute, you requested a performance until she pantomimed the action, her closed eyes and furious blush. How you praised first her nimble fingers, and now you took these in hand, and they were cold, moist, and then you whispered of her beautiful flush, your hand now to her skin, and how it burned and burned. And these mornings you told her of your life: the shopkeeper and the grog stalls, the seer’s stone and the girl you said gave it to you, “the prettiest girl I ever saw… until you.”

And you explained your fate as bestowed by the creature of the Almighty, the terrible restlessness you felt. And you gestured to the room around you, saying, “I have tarried with bad men, I have misspent my days; what of my soul when the beast returns for me?”

She laid her hands upon yours and there they smoldered. “He knows you are a good man, even if you do not,” and she looked away before concluding, “As do I…” There her hands remained, until her mother bellowed from below. Soon you were alone, and then you were not, for the butcher swayed in the doorway, his drunk eyes swiveling within his skull. “Care for a smoke?” he said, and you could not meet his gaze. “A drink then?” and when you knew no joke about liquor you murmured, “No, sir.” The butcher nodded. “You will walk with me then.” Now you followed him to the yard, where the elms stood black and withering and everywhere the fragrance of their decay. The butcher tottered and hiccupped and finally he said, “I don’t care what your intentions are toward my daughter—with men like you it amounts to one sort anyhow.” And when you did not respond he gestured at a hunched, misshapen elm: “If you look upon my daughter again I will see you buried beneath yonder sycamores.” You trembled and your face burned in that fragile silence, and only after he whispered, “Please,” could you look at the man in his weakness. His eyes welled and his mouth hung open. And now you smiled.

And the girl’s face shone through her bedroom window, pale and smudged with tears, her mother’s shape looming in the shadows behind.

XXII. That night she stood in the dust of the long dirt road, bound up in her arms, in the frailty of her gown. How she smiled when she saw you, as if she would dart, or melt, or disappear into the mist. And you held her, whispering, “The creature has decreed we must go forth into the world.” How strange her moonlit eyes, when she trembled against you, crying, “Oh, my dearest,” in what had been a child’s voice, in a voice no longer her own. Now her lips mashed against your cheeks, and your throat, and, finally, your lips. So you took her from her home, your few possessions wrapped in canvas and bound to your back, and in the morning you were married at the courthouse before a white-haired servant of the law, his smudged spectacles and yellow teeth. There you slid a gold band over her finger—“My one remnant of Mother.” And afterward, in the dung-and-straw-strewn streets, you held this girl as she sobbed into your chest.

XXIII. You carried your bride across a threshold of long grasses, for your marriage bed awaited in grain fields. And here you constructed a deer-hide tent. So the natives regarded you from the birch bark forest, and when your wife grew fearful of their drums and the smoke coiling from the forest interior, you explained you would build a cabin “where no heathen will dare trespass.” You told her of the days to follow: your ceaseless toil, chopping and hauling and constructing, while she would gather nuts and berries in the day and prepare dinner in the evening. And when you wearied of this game you rested your head upon her lap and told her of the Almighty and His creature, and how someday they would raise you above all other men.

XXIV. Now in the darkness of your tent you knew only your wife, her lips and skin, the sound of her voice. And when she said, “You will tire of me,” you kissed her brow, and when she said, “Do not tarry with questionable men,” you insisted she had silenced the rowdiness within your soul. And in these nights you wanted nothing of God or His works, for you desired only to lie within her. You told her, “My only city shall be the city we build here.”

XXV. In the early days you went into town for goods, and there the men whispered of the “infamy” of your union. You returned with an ax and a saw and bundles of rope, and when you confessed your journey to your wife you never spoke of the way both men and women gossiped, the way you bristled to hear the names they gave her. In the morning you left her, and now you spent many hours within the woods, hacking and resting on the handle of your ax, watching the bugs in the dirt and the leaves, listening to the birds, stripping the bark in near-transparent sheets, lacing your fingers behind your head and napping against a sturdy birch, before finally returning in the dim light, raving of the great work you had accomplished and how your house was “within reach.”

And when you cooked the meat of a recent kill you left the tent pulled open, and there your wife lay in the glow of the flame. And you followed the smoke drifting by her bare shoulders, the shadowed rise of her buttocks as if dipped in ink. How your breath caught and she turned to watch you work. How her eyes seemed lost for the dark, for the smoke, for the fumes of the rabbit you roasted on dripping spits. And when you left the tent open through the night, the long fingers of the misty dawn chilled your flesh, and now you held each other, tight and shivering, the chattering of her teeth, and now you warmed her goosefleshed figure with your hands and kisses. How she scarcely stirred against a new dawn and then the soft moan when you kissed her neck. How with your tongue you drew houses and roads and schoolhouses on her belly, her breasts, depicted the children you dreamed to create and name, and the shape of all the days you longed to know with her.

And there were evenings when the distant grasses seemed to glint with the eyes of natives.

And there were days you returned to the forest after a lapse, first of a day, and then after several days, and then after a week. And then more weeks, and finally you dragged the logs into the field. There they lay, strewn, while you slept, exhausted and drenched with sweat.

And there were days the logs swelled and rotted and moldered while you held your beloved tight, whispering of the world to come.

And when the weather cooled you wandered the forests for abandoned cabins. You found them with roofs caved in or the rotten walls collapsed, and the doors ajar or no doors at all. And within these weathered constructions you often found bodies, decomposed and mere skeletons, what were once parents holding what were once children, the carpets and walls splattered with brown blood. And in others you found only blood patterned in secret testimonies of horror. And here you found dusty and unopened cans of beans and peaches, and you found the nests of birds, and you found the ancient droppings of bears and wild cats, and from certain corners came low growls and yellow eyes.

XXVI. And on the forest floor you found the remains of a man. Above him a rope yet dangled from the branches while a note, wilted and blurred beyond comprehension, was nailed to the trunk. How you observed the flesh, mostly now eaten away, the pale bone and empty sockets, the tattered coat and trousers, shoes removed and placed neatly to the side and a pocket watch placed within. Your hand trembled to touch the smoothness of what remained, where neither bug nor creature clattered anymore within. How you said, “Did you have no father? Did you never know the name of God? Did no woman ever love you and was no child ever born of your flesh?” And no answer came from the once man, nor did any response follow from the mountain.

XXVII. And some days you made the pretense of stacking and arranging what remained of the logs, although soon you sighed and instead wandered the forest. And while you worked, your wife drew figures in the dirt, smearing them out when you returned. And she said, “We should move into one of those cabins,” and after some silence you almost said, “The other cabins are unlivable,” and you almost said, “I believe men and women have been murdered in them,” and you nearly said, “I would fear for our safety, even more, because we could not see them coming,” but instead you said, “These walls provide the only shelter we need. For the Almighty’s creature watches over us.” And when your wife fantasized about a house in town, desiring the presence of markets and the society of others, you gestured to the forest, saying, “Here is enough to quench our earthly longings.” She averted her eyes: “Of course, your love is the only community I want, my darling,” and placing your hand upon her belly, the warm, smooth flesh, she said, “But what if I was with child?” And you lay beside her: “His creature will watch over the child too.” And your wife continued: “What would we name him?” And you said, “Him?” And she nodded, so you said the name you claimed as your father’s. And she said, “How would he appear?” and you described your own shape and you described the shape of the man you always dreamed was your father.

And in the hot days you lay opposite each other, unclothed and dripping, and in the cool days you wrapped yourselves in furs, locked arms, legs, hips, and now between you the great warmth. And inside this world you constructed there seemed no distinguishing the days from the nights, for you slept in the hours all others knew as the day, while during the night you made love and told stories and considered the possibilities of the world, for your great glory would soon follow. And when you woke to her weeping she looked upon you with red and fearful eyes, and when you spoke she said nothing, and when you touched her shoulder she left the tent.

And there were days when you held her, when you kissed her neck, her ears, and against the heat of your affection she talked of your child, how he would be as his father, how you would raise him into manhood. And she groaned when you said the Almighty’s name, going to the opposite side of the tent and refusing to speak when you reminded her you would be called to minister. There she sulked, withholding her favors, until you said, “Perhaps I may seek some… reprieve.” Now her eyes lit with a fire and she fell upon you in a fever.

And other days you went into the forest, into the deeper grasses, inspecting your traps for the stillness of a recent kill. Sometimes you returned with a deer or rabbit or squirrel bundled in dripping burlap, while other times you returned drained of color and scarcely able to speak. Now you murmured that the shadow of the creature floated over the trees, cackling in the voices of dying lambs. Your voice a delirious cadence until your wife turned away. “Please,” she said. “No more of this.” And you insisted, “I pleaded with Him. I kneeled before the mountain and I begged, ‘Is it not enough that I conduct myself with righteousness as a husband and a father?’”

And you never confessed you sensed the presence of the natives, the flickering of their feathers, the glistening of their greased arms, the almost silence of their movements.

And the creature perched upon the hillside, watched your shadow make love to the shadow of your wife, saw you suckle from her, leave her red marked and moaning. And now the hunched, monstrous figure circled the tent, and in the morning the soot-burned tracks, the brimstone smell.

XXVIII. Your wife said nothing when you told her of the creature and she said nothing when the natives finally crept from the forest, their bodies painted gray and white and adorned with feathers. The grim pantomime they performed, elongated motions, and fingers pointing from their heads like horns. In silence you watched them, while your wife remained in the tent, and now her chattering teeth, and now a low, breathless sound.

Day into night, and when you told her of the natives, the shadows of their dance, she held your hand to her belly, whispering, “What would you tell him?” and now you were silent, and now you felt the heat beneath your hand, and you said, “To love all the inventions of the Almighty,” and you knew then the corn silk softness of his dark hair, the lazy weight of his skull against your chest, the distant murmuring of his child’s voice, and you said, “He will know his letters and he will know his numbers,” and “I will tell him always to run in the grass, for a child is too young to toddle in the dust,” and you continued with your instruction long after your wife fell to snoring. And through all the hours of the night the natives continued their tumult, ceasing only with the morning light.

At dawn their spears jutted from the horizon, while the fumes of what they cooked carried, pungent and wild. Your wife sniffed the air and cried that her child needed food. Now you opened your final tin of peaches, and your wife clawed for them, slurped them greedily, lips and hands glistening with syrup. And the child was not sated, and your wife moaned for the ravenous life within. Now you went to your traps, and here lay the shattered figure of a rabbit. The jut of native spears almost impossibly close across the grasses, the wild and incoherent language. Now you skinned and cooked the rabbit, and soon you wiped her greased face and she slept as you stroked her belly. Now you propped her head onto your lap, whispering that she fulfilled what no other could, and how all these years you had drifted but now you were happily moored in her arms. And then you placed your ear against her belly, and from within came no movement, no murmuring. And to this silence you whispered, “Sleep now, my dear little Isaac.”

XXIX. In the morning you woke alone in the tent, and now you found your wife waddling in the snow-streaked fields. There she stooped and grunted and pulled at the stalks of brown grass. She gazed upon you with eyes pale and dead. To see her you almost could not move. Finally, you touched her shoulder, her hip, and in a voice choked you whispered, “The ground is frozen.” She gazed beyond you, her hollow eyes, her cracked and bleeding lips, before she finally pleaded, “Will you try?” You brought her to the tent and covered her in blankets, and there she lay, feverish and shivering. Now you built a fire with the last of your cabin wood. Her wane visage in the flickering.

And when you said her name she did not stir. And when you repeated her name the sound emerged as a croak. Now you beat the ground and you seethed and you struck at the air, and you grabbed your skull, and you heaved, and you heaved. And now you left your wife, sleeping and shivering, yet slick with the heat of the fire and the terrible heat within, and you ventured across the grasses.

You meant to plead for herbs and medicine, to barter your very soul for their sacred insight, but when you reached the far grasses you found only the smears of dead fires, animal bones charred beyond edibility, the beaten-over places where they had danced and erected their tents.

And now within the forest you found no animals, and the cabins were emptied of their goods. And the ponds contained only the unbreakable gleam of ice. And had you found cows milling in the fields you would have returned with jugs of milk, and had you found nests in the trees you would have brought eggs. Instead, you heated lumps of snow, and with this you boiled your left boot, wrapping your blistered and bloodied foot in rags. When the leather softened you pried the leather from the sole and fed your wife the slices, and she sucked and supped upon these cutlets as if they were the finest veal.

And you have said you faced the black mountain, your brow pressed to the snow, whispering, “Please, do not forsake us.” And you pledged further honesty and charity, but not your service, for your soul belonged in devotion to her alone. “O Father, she is all my heart, can’t you know this?”

XXX. And that night you woke while she murmured to her belly. When you pressed your ear to the flatness she said, “Do you hear him sing? What a lovely melody there.” And how could you admit you heard only silence? That you felt no movement? How could you say anything other than “Yes, he will be a lovely lad.”

And in the night you boiled your other boot, the brown bubbling and the murky fumes of rot, while the eyes of the natives glowed through the trees. Their silent creep across the snowfields, while your wife gnawed and slurped.

And how many days did you ask the Almighty, “O Father, have I done wrong?”

And when the natives returned to their camp, their fires rose as shimmering walls, enclosing the sky with smoke, and their shadows bucked and convulsed. You pulled your sleeping wife against you, her belly and unconscious moans. The knife you clutched in wait.

And in the dawn the snow before your tent was crusted black with char.

And you awaited their assault, and when no assault came you awaited their emissary, and when no emissary came you cried, “He watches over us still!” but your wife noticed nothing. She slept against you, pale and sweating and murmuring, and now you rubbed her brow with a cloth made cool with snow, and whispered to her of all the days to come.

Then the snow clotted the sky and drifted thick against your tent. And the drums returned, the birdlike cries and rhythmic chants, and the fires flared and the snows melted. All the world became shadows and heat; vast, glowing ruins; the wife you held, covered in skins; your whispers, lost in the ancient din. And you told the child in her belly that you would protect him always. And the Almighty would watch over you three until the end of time. And perhaps in this moment you even believed your words.

XXXI. You woke alone, as a cold wind blew through the opened tent. Your wife lay before the tent, bloodied and nude from the waist down, lines of soot drawn across her throat, her chest, while her eyes flickered with a child’s simplicity and confusion. Her clothing slashed away and cast to the snow. You gathered her into your arms and you did not scream and you did not sob. Inside the tent you wrapped her in blankets and skins. And she cried for her child, so you returned to the snows, and there the cord, shriveled and cut away, coiled in the red-soaked snow. There you dug until your hands numbed, raw and blood dripping. And you saw no bloody tracks of man or animal. And no wailing cry did you hear, and no child did you find.

Now you ran without guidance from the mountain or pause for prayers. Through a world vast with snow you ran, and you ran beyond your endurance for pain, until your feet numbed and your arms seemed as stone, and then your body simply stopped, and you fell to the snow and there you lay, unmoving, and everywhere seemed the sound of her screams.

Your wife’s father found you beside the road, purpled and frost covered, rouged with the blood of your wife and what you believed was the blood of your child. He found you murmuring in a language he could not comprehend, and some have said you were found uttering in tongues.

XXXII. They warmed you before the fireplace. In your fever you told them the Almighty’s creature had come with black wings flapping. And the mother and father merely looked at each other, and then the mother draped moist rags across your brow and the father, the butcher, threw a glass against the wall. He would have strangled you had the mother not stood before him. And so the father left, and while the mother paced you lay, babbling in your fever.

When you woke, you staggered finally to the room where you once stayed, and with a voice feeble you cursed the day you first heard His name. But even then you smelled the brimstone of the creature’s trail, and the windows did seem to glower with its light.

And finally the butcher returned on horseback, your wife, pale and sagging against her father, bound to him with twine. You waited, mute in the shadows, while the butcher shouted at his wife, and now the two rushed back and forth with rags and steaming bowls. So they cleaned her numb, shivering body, water basins soon blood murky, and then they piled her with blankets and coats. And then they waited to know.

How many nights did you hold her in her convalescence? How many nights did she cower beneath the pale sheets? And now lucid you denied to the mother and father any mountain-sent creature had come. And when your wife began to speak of what she had seen, you said, “No, no, my darling. It was natives. In your heart, you know, they came from the forests.” And you told her the story of the tragedy in place of the one she recalled.

XXXIII. So it was the butcher and his wife had lost all of their children but this wife of yours. And had you asked, he would have led you to the white stones where they lay beneath dust and loam. And in the blue glow of the falling sun, the butcher lit his pipe and gestured to the mountain. “That god of yours gave us a terrible road to travel,” he said. “Please, never again take her from us.” He could not look at you, or you at him, and finally in a voice wavering you promised you would not.

After some years your wife again conceived, and soon this child toddled in the dust. Fallen often in those hours onto his stumpy knees, his face transformed into redness and wailing, and how quick to hold him, to soothe, was your wife. The child’s face clasped to her breast and muffled and calmed. How strange to not leave him in the dirt, for such lessons alone you had known. The butcher, a playmate unto your child as he grew, chased after the boy, growling with outstretched arms, while your wife watched and laughed. And in these hours you stood in the shadows, watching while the butcher tended to your son.

In the evenings your wife read to the boy, giggling as if she were a child herself. And as he chased butterflies along the breeze, she gathered him into her arms, spun him, his arms and legs ever outward. And there were hours when she dozed with him, amidst the long grasses and the yellow flowers, while the foxes and barn cats came to watch, fleeing at the sign of her waking. And when you were home you stood behind the house, listening to the sounds of their play. And you closed your eyes and considered the days of your life that had led to this moment.

And when your wife asked why you never held your son you stooped to the child, who pulled away, wailing. And you said it was for the gathering flies that the child seemed wary, for now you worked alongside the butcher, a butcher yourself, ever spattered with blood and offal. You said, “I could have washed better, perhaps.” And you clucked your tongue to the boy, as one does to chickens, and still the child drew no nearer to you, merely clasped his arms about his mother’s legs, sunk there into her dress. And you went to pet the child, as one does a cat, and again the child wailed and wept. So it was you retired into the house, and there you sank to your knees, repeating the name of the Almighty a thousand times over, begging Him to remain on His mountain.

And there was no room for the Almighty within the butcher’s shop, not His words or symbols upon the walls, nor His voice in the skulls and the bones, the spatter and the gristle. Yet the Almighty taught you patience and the Almighty gave you skill, until even the butcher marveled at how easily you hacked meat and bone, and gesturing to his shop, its flies and tables, he said, “All of this will someday belong to you.” And it is said you felt only gladness, for you understood the language of the meat. You knew the story told by the curves of the red flesh, the lines, as well as any illustration in any book, the life lived and ended so that some man and his family could prosper and fatten.

And in the twilight of those evenings you departed into torch-lit streets—the butcher by way of his carriage while you insisted always upon a stroll. And the dung stink, the moonlight glow in the slop. And you listened to louts congregated outside taverns, no longer engaging with these men. Now the mountain alone held your attention. Some nights in the open air, you lingered in the streets, the dirt roads, waiting for some gesture. And when the voice of the creature nowhere sounded you said, “I do not wish to be a great man—just this man.” And you said through gritted teeth, “She is my only glory. The boy is my glory—I want no other.” And you said, “Your silence has given me joy.” Now each night you returned ever later, ever wearier, and your wife said you seemed as if you had seen a terror. You replied, “No, I’ve seen nothing at all.”

XXXIV. Now one night a voice came to you in a dream. And it sounded in a compulsion deeper than sense, and now you were drawn across the land, and now you walked through the birch forest, where the bark flaked like strips of skin and the suicides smiled with bloody teeth. The rocks steamed and a terrible wind moaned at the foot of the mountain, and you ascended, and the sky shone with the vastness of the universe, the immeasurable darkness everywhere burning. The hours and days fell to ash. At the peak you waited, and in the dirt a blade and a bundle of kindling. Now from the darkness a voice droned in the sound of trumpets, “One does not become a shepherd of men without the payment of blood.” Into the din you cried, “Father, I brought no lamb.” And the voice replied, “So I will gather my own.”

XXXV. Soon you and the butcher constructed a small home across the tall grasses from their land. And there was a room for the child, and there was a room for you and your wife, and there was a room for all of you to sit in community. And so it was your family grew by two children, a daughter and a second son. And your children ran and played in the dust of the yard. And they petted dogs wandering the roads. And both daughter and son carried wriggling barn kittens in the skirts of their dresses, held open into hammocks. And when the children fell into illness you said the name of the Almighty, and when they rose healthy you said the name of the Almighty. And you were not yet thirty when your temples grayed, when your expression lined and cracked, when you first saw the world as through a thin gauze. And, yes, your wife sagged at her shoulders, her breasts, but none would say she did not remain a beauty. None could say she did not arrest your heart when you saw her at common tasks—the stirring of a stew, the hanging of the wash—or when she stood in silence in the bedroom, oblivious to your gaze, her curves beneath the loose fabric of her gown. And how gray she seemed in the dawn, asleep and painfully fragile. After all the years, she remained all you knew and all you wanted to know.

And most days you thought nothing of the Almighty or His creature. And to ask your wife she would have said the same.

XXXVI. Yet some days your wife woke speaking the name intended for your first son. And some afternoons in town she inspected the faces of pale native boys, or the faces of woodsy boys drifting through town or leaning on fences, those with black hair and eyes as brown as her own. And she sought those young men who darted along the streets, dusty and barefooted, wild with tobacco and liquor. Ever you restrained her—“It is not he”—and ever she disappeared into you with each such revelation. But when you were not with her she searched the streets without limit, calling in a hoarse voice the name she never gave the child, a name never discussed but within the forests of her dreams, the ache along her heart.

XXXVII. And the night your first daughter fell to fever, your wife tended to her with rag and bucket. The child slow choked of life while she gazed and pleaded with her eyes. And you dabbed at her brow and you held that still, cold hand, and rather than say the name of the Almighty you said, “Oh, my girl. Oh, my sweet princess.” And when the child forever stilled a sob tore your wife’s breast, while in their beds your other children wondered if they would see their sister again. And to them you soothed, “Someday, yes, a long, long while from now.” This assertion punctuated by your wife’s cries, while her mother pulled her from your daughter, who slid limp across the bed. How small a life is in the mind of the Almighty. And the butcher breathed heavily at your side: “You must be strong for your family.” Only now you realized you held a bottle of your wife’s cooking sherry, and you set this aside. “Oh, yes,” you murmured to the butcher. “Of course.”

And only in the years to follow did you say that on this night you heard the creature’s claws clatter upon the roof.

And when your second son fell to fever you laughed maniacally, and you told incomprehensible jokes during the prayers the priest led the others in. And you pulled away from the butcher as he took you from the room. He called your name and you babbled and spat. And you said the names you called your child, and you said the moments when you had loved your child best, and these fell into the open air a derangement of language and tears. And with rubbery legs you went into the dust of the yard, into the moonlight, and there you knelt. And you said you would burn all the flesh of the butcher’s shop as an offering. And you said to the shadow of His black mountain, “Please do not kill my son.” And you said the given name of your eldest boy, and you said, “Please do not murder my Isaac.”

Only now did the lip of the forest shine with a horrid light. Only now did the awful winds bid you enter.