29

We rode south into what looked like desert never ending and then there were mountains where before there was nothing, as if they’d been set down momentarily en route to a more deserving home. The weather came and it came fast and the mountains were gone again, blocked by a snow that blew sideways, moving east without regard for those who would not follow.

Marcus and Tom made the line, passing out coats taken from the dead in Perry Springs, and I took mine and looked past the bullet-sized holes in the fabric and knew that in the face of the storm there was warm or cold and nothing else.

When Shelby came for a coat there was not one given and he was told they were only for those who killed and he complained and said the girl had a coat and Tom asked if he was a woman. I tried to give him mine and he refused and there was a hate in his eyes and I understood why. I watched the fog of his breath fill the air around his face like a mask and then he was gone, pushing Bullet toward the front of the column.

The storm broke near the base of the Chisos, the desert behind us and the climb ahead and the sun setting soon.

The next morning we started into the mountains, where Grimes said dozens more men were waiting. A dry arroyo started wide at the base but turned narrow and the men dismounted one after the other and walked their horses over the slick rocks and thawing snow. Marcus took my reins in hand with his and led us, the two horses and me, and he no doubt harbored a guilt for drawing down on me.

We saddled up again on the shaded side of the mountain, where the path disappeared into a pine forest and the air was colder still and it spilled out onto a set of steep switchbacks leading up. I worked my jaw around with my mouth open to relieve the pressure in my head and slumped forward onto the horse holding tight the horn of the saddle lest I slide backward on the steep grade of the trail.

I watched the mules and wagons navigate the sloped trail, the wooden wheels somehow failing to crack and splinter against the rock, and I felt the eyes of mule deer ventured down to below the snow line to forage and now come upon this winding snake of men and beasts. The grackles screamed at us from their branches and named us intruders, their wings and chests becoming wide and puffed in their defiance. When we made no move to turn back, they for a moment relented but then flew yet to other trees to repeat the notion.

The gray clouds and the peaks above us hid the sun like a glowing treasure behind their backs, and we could see they would not let it go until morning. The trees swayed and shook and shed in the blistering of the wind, the cold lassoed to it like a stubborn cowboy. I pulled tighter my coat around me and sought to tuck my jaw downward and erase the length of my neck so that I might bury my face into the fabric like a turtle into its shell. Other men did the same and soon it was as though a band of coats and hats rode up the mountain pass with only dark, inset eyes to guide them.

Even with our small party the going was slow and laborious and it occurred to me the suffering and logistical difficulties if the army were to send men up this mountain. It was also not lost on me the proximity to the Rio Grande and how easily the Lobos could slip into Mexico if they were to receive any unwanted company.

We reached the main camp at day’s end, and it looked more a proper village than the tent city I’d imagined. There were a handful of log cabins, a livery, and several bonfires burning throughout the clearing.

“What do you think?” Marcus asked, riding past me. “Home sweet home.”

The Perry Springs women were taken to one of the cabins, and I was shown to a tent near the livery by one of the men from the mountain.

“I’m G.W.,” he said and held out his hand. He looked a part of the mountain, covered in hides and hair and with a grizzled beard.

“Caleb,” I said, and we shook.

“Grimes says you’ll bunk with me. Says you like horses.”

I nodded.

“I like women,” he replied, disappearing into the tent. “But to each his own.”

I looked out at all that was before me. The sun was sliding from the sky and threatening to go west forever. The clouds moved in the opposite direction, as if they’d had a falling out or just come to some different conclusion about things. I watched them go. I watched as the shadows of dusk arose from their graves and were given life by the fading light. Soon the world would be covered in darkness and the shadows would return to the feet of those things from which they were birthed, but here in this magic hour they were free to move and grow and exist on some balanced plane between light and dark.

* * *

The sun shone our first full day in the camp, and men set about tasks of all nature. Some worked on building shelters, others chopped wood, a small group gathered to argue over the best way to smoke meat. G.W. and me followed the savory smells to the middle of the camp.

A tanned and leathered old woman of not much physical stature sat on an overturned bucket with her legs spread. The front of her dress, a discolored red, hung between her thighs, where her hands were fast at work plucking the feathers from a brown hen.

A man held position over a large cookfire where sat an iron grate full up with various cuts of beef.

“You got them steaks ’bout ready, Big John?” asked a slender man.

“They gettin’ there. Good steak takes time, son.”

“The hell it does. You overcook that meat, and Juanita ain’t gonna stop at them birds.”

The old woman spoke in Spanish, and the big man near the grill grunted.

“You just worry about your pollo, Abuela,” he said. “Leave the real meat to me.”

She glared at him.

“That’s Abuela,” G.W. said, leaning toward me. “She’s been here longer than me. Folks say Grimes killed her son, and now she just follows him around. Like he’s all she’s got left of her boy or something.”

“Seems strange,” I said.

G.W. shrugged. “Them old Mexicans are a strange bunch.”

“How long you imagine we’ll stay up here?” I asked him.

“Hard to say. Once it starts snowing, it ain’t likely to stop until spring. But that’ll give us plenty of time to breed that fresh crop y’all brought in yesterday.”

“The women?”

“Hell, yeah, the women. What? You still thinking about horses?”

“Have you done it before?”

“Not me. Last winter was the first, but there weren’t as many girls, so it was mainly Grimes and a few of the boys who’d been here longest.”

“And they had children?”

“Yessir. Got a whole nursery set up in one of the cabins,” he said. “Can’t wait to add mine to the bunch.”

I nodded.

“One more question,” I said. “Is there a cowboy up here goes by the name of Frank?”

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t know any Frank,” he said.

That night I went to the tobacco cart and took a small sack and filled it and wrote my estimate on the ledger and signed my name. I didn’t know the day so I drew the shape of the moon with the pen and left it full and unshaded so that it might mirror the image staring down at me from the starry world of blackness and blaze.

In front of the tent I fed a small fire and watched it lay and rise with the wind, and the flames would swirl up and then die with each great gust and from the dead they rose time and again as a savior from the cold.

“Come on,” G.W. said. “Time to howl.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I followed, and dozens of men fell in with us, all moving toward a giant bonfire just outside of the camp.

Grimes stood pale and naked before the fire and the others looking up as if he were some monument to a bygone world. He raised his arms high to match the growing flames, and there he was, erect in the light of the moon and the stars and all these things burning. He took in such a breath and stood, mouth closed and eyes wide, and looked to each man in his own eyes and then turned upward toward the floor of the universe and let loose a guttural moan, and those before him stamping their feet into the rock and silt and sand.

He pointed at the men, and the all of them did commence with returning his cry. They howled and barked and screamed out until the false line between man and beast was overrun with savagery. Grimes smiled and held out his hand and the he-wolves quieted and he looked at them again.

“My sons,” he said. “My brothers.”

He bent down and squatted above the dirt and was slow in doing so. He moved his hands overtop the ground in long sweeping motions. He patted the soil, then plunged his hand beneath its surface and came up as if being brought forward by some wave, the earth falling through his fingers and down his arm.

“The moon rises full. A light for believers and nonbelievers alike. All turning to the night sky with straining necks and searching eyes. Not unlike those who came so long before us. Such creatures, these distant kindred of the first men, such frightened vessels of an assiduous evolution from which their own forebears were molded and shaped. And to the moon, whole and blood and immortal, they did turn. Panting, shrieking, snarling. And all of it some unknown edict of a strange need not met. This moon, this other world where spirits roamed or demons lurked. This glowing godhead, birthing a great light upon the darkness. This astronomical despot to which all the stars paid homage. This moon, and with it the madness of being, the species-altering desire to understand. And still the wolves howled.

“With revolutions came a straighter stance, but with each answer a swell of questions new. And with each path taken, a foundation poured atop a divergent future. The flow of knowledge compounding on itself, continually engineering an outcome no more likely to occur than another. And always some moon to stand against the midnight, to illuminate that not yet discovered. Men were drawn to power, to purpose, to the re-creation of self. A misstep not foreseen by the natural fibers of selection. Human domination of the earth brought forth a great many improbabilities.

“If the earth were to tell the story of men, it would need only a matter of minutes, perhaps even seconds, and there would be nothing left to say.

“All this, and then there is us. And what then is our purpose? What is our charge? The story of this country is still being written. Written by the land and the men who control it. Written by machines and the men who own them. Written by the bankers and lawyers and the politicians they install. But what’s left for us, gentlemen? Where, in all the chaos of industry and greed, do we have our say? It will be here, brothers. It will be here that we lay the foundation of a new world. A world where voice is given to the voiceless. A world where our children’s children will not be forced to carry the loads of some higher class upon their backs.”

The men howled and yelled and began to shed their clothes until they were, to a man, as naked as their ancestors. I’d never seen the like.

I didn’t join them. Instead, I crept away from the fire and back to the camp and thought of Sophia until I fell asleep.

I dreamt that night of a great black horse, a stallion coated so dark it shined even in the twilight, and no man could ride it as it was bound always to be free and with that freedom came all the knowledge and pain of this world and the worlds before. And in the dream I knew the horse. I knew its shape, there, the moon upon it, and each desire in its heart was also in mine. I could feel the battle everlasting between isolation and love, and in such fighting there are no victors save madness and uncertainty.

The horse reared and whinnied and stomped, its soul fracturing from within as the earth once did and perhaps will again. It raced down from atop a stretched mesa and into an endless and shadowed valley, and as it ran its muscles pressed against their skin in flexed masses of gluteus and vastus and femoral strength, and from its nostrils spewed breath heavy and salient upon the night air. And wherever the horse ran, I somehow followed, my own breathing labored and unworthy, until at last we stopped as one and stood in silence, looking out at the country before us with eyes undecided.

I felt my chest rise and fall and with the coursing of my new lifeblood there came both suffering and strength. The tissue beneath my skin tightened and I could feel some unseen aggravation which sought to magnify every awareness within my broadening bones. I shuddered and jerked and turned my head upward toward the infinity of the stars and my front two feet raised and kicked as I screamed for all things forgotten and all those left to come.