John Steinbeck - To A G-d Unknown [Excerpts]

       
      He is the giver of breath, and strength is his gift.
      The high G-ds revere his commandments.
      His shadow is life, his shadow is death;
      Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
       
      Through His might He became L-rd of the living and glittering world
      And he rides the world and the men and the beasts
      Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
       
      From His strength the mountains take being, and the sea, they say,
      And the distant river;
      And these are his body and his two arms.
      Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
       
      He made the sky and the earth, and His will fixed their places,
      Yet they look to Him and tremble.
      The risen sun shines forth over Him.
      Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
       
      He looked over the waters which stored His power and gendered the sacrifice.
      He is G-d over G-ds.
      Who is He to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
       
      May He not hurt us, He who made earth, 
      Who made the sky and the shining sea? 
      Who is the G-d to whom we shall offer sacrifice?
       

      --VEDA

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WHEN the crops were under cover on the Wayne farm near Pittsford in Vermont, when the winter wood was cut and the first light snow lay on the ground, Joseph Wayne went to the wing-back chair by the fireplace late one afternoon and stood before his father. These two men were alike. Each had a large nose and high, hard cheekbones; both faces seemed made of some material harder and more durable than flesh, a stony substance that did not easily change.
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"And so you see, sir, there won't be enough in the land for all of us."

John Wayne lifted his eyes again. "The land suffices, Joseph," he said placidly.

"Burton and Thomas brought their wives home and the land sufficed. You are the next in age. You should have a wife, Joseph."

"There's a limit, sir. The land will feed only so many."
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"There's something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward."

"But they're homesteading the western land, sir. You have only to live a year on the land and build a house and plough a bit and the land is yours. No one can ever take it away."

"I know, I've heard of that; but suppose you should go now. I'll have only letters to tell me how you are, and what you're doing. In a year, not more than two, why I'll go with you. I'm an old man, Joseph. I'll go right along with you, over your head, in the air. I'll see the land you pick out and the kind of house you build. I'd be curious about that, you know. There might even be some way I could help you now and then. Suppose you lose a cow, maybe I could help you to find her; being up in the air like that I could see things far away. If only you wait a little while I can do that, Joseph."
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The winter came soon, with deep snow, and the air was frozen to needles. For a month Joseph wandered about the house, reluctant to leave his youth and all the strong material memories of his youth, but the blessing had cut him off. He was a stranger in the house and be felt that his brothers would be glad when he was gone. He went away before the spring had come, and the grass was green on the hills in California when he arrived.
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Nuestra Señora, the long valley of Our Lady in central California, was green and gold and yellow and blue when Joseph came into it The level floor was deep in wild oats and canary mustard flowers. The river San Francisquito flowed noisily in its bouldered bed through a cave made by its little narrow forest. Two flanks of the coast range held the valley of Nuestra Señora close, on one side guarding it against the sea, and on the other against the blasting winds of the great Salinas Valley. At the far southern end a pass opened in the hills to let out the river, and near this pass lay the church and the little town of Our Lady. The huts of Indians clustered about the mud walls of the church, and although the church was often vacant now and its saints were worn and part of its tile roof lay in a shattered heap on the ground, and although the bells were broken, the Mexican Indians still lived near about and held their festivals, danced La Jota on the packed earth and slept in the sun.
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Joseph's horse walked quickly along, swishing with its hoofs through the brittle oak leaves; the iron shoes rang against protruding stones. The path went through the long forest that bordered the river. As he rode, Joseph became timid and yet eager, as a young man is who slips out to a rendezvous with a wise and beautiful woman. He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forest of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs, about the long green cavern cut by the river through the trees and the brilliant underbrush. The endless green halls and aisles and alcoves seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the symbols of an ancient religion. Joseph shivered and closed his eyes. "Perhaps I'm ill," he said. "When I open my eyes I may find that all this is delirium and fever." As he rode on and on the fear came upon him that this land might be the figure of a dream which would dissolve into a dry and dusty morning. A manzanita branch whipped his hat off and dropped it on the ground, and, when Joseph dismounted he stretched his arms and leaned down to pat the earth with his hand. There was a need in him to shake off the mood that had fallen upon him. He looked up to the treetops where the sun flashed on trembling leaves, where the wind sang huskily. When he mounted his horse again he knew that he could never lose the feeling for the land. The crying leather of his saddle, the jingle of his spur chains, the rasping of the horse's tongue over the bit-roller sang the high notes over the land's throbbing. Joseph felt that he had been dull and now suddenly was sensitized; had been asleep and was awakened. Far in the back of his mind lay the feeling that he was being treacherous. The past, his home and all the events of his childhood were being lost, and he knew he owed them the duty of memory. This land might possess all of him if he were not careful. To combat the land a little, he thought of his father, of the calm and peace, the strength and eternal rightness of his father, and then in his thought the difference ended and he knew that there was no quarrel, for his father and this new land were one. Joseph was frightened then. "He's dead," he whispered to himself. "My father must be dead."
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"Damn you," he cried. "Eat other creatures. Don't eat your own people."
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On top of the ridge stood a clump of giant madrone trees, and Joseph saw with wonder how nearly they resembled meat and muscles. They thrust up muscular limbs as red as flayed flesh and twisted like bodies on the rack. Joseph laid his hand on one of the branches as he rode by, and its was cold and sleek and hard. But the leaves at the ends of the horrible limbs were bright green and shiny. Pitiless and terrible trees, the madrones. They cried with pain when burned.
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As he looked into the valley, Joseph felt his body flushing with a hot fluid of love. "This is mine," he said simply, and his eyes sparkled with tears and his brain was filled with wonder that this should be his. There was pity in him for the grass and the flowers; he felt that the trees were his children and the land his child. For a moment he seemed to float high in the air and to look down upon it.
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From over the western mountains the lean grey ocean clouds came racing in. The wind started up with a gasp and sighed through the branches of the trees. The horse stepped lightly down the path toward the river again, and often it raised its head and sniffed at the fresh sweet odor of the coming rain. The cavalry of clouds had passed and a huge black phalanx marched slowly in from the sea with a tramp of thunder. Joseph trembled with pleasure in the promised violence. The river seemed to hurry along down its course, to chatter excitedly over the stones as it went. And then the rain started, fat lazy drops splashing on the leaves. Thunder rolled like caissons over the sky. The drops grew smaller and thicker, raked through the air and hissed in the trees. Joseph's clothing was soaked in a minute and his horse shone with water. In the river the trout were striking at tumbled insects and all the tree trunks glistened darkly.

The trail left the river again, and as Joseph neared his lent the clouds rolled backward from the west to the east like a curtain of grey wool and the late sun sparkled on the washed land, glittered on the grass blades and shot sparks into the drops that lay in the hearts of wildflowers.
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The hunger in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. His possessiveness became a passion. "It's mine," he chanted. "Down deep it's mine, right to the center of the world." He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. He flung himself face downward on the grass and pressed his cheek against the wet stems. His fingers gripped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth.

The fury left him and he was cold and bewildered and frightened at himself.
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"The dead are always here, señor. They never go away."

"No," Joseph said earnestly. "it is more than that. My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it. Can you talk to me a little Juanito? You were born here. Since I have come, since the first day, I have known that this land is full of ghosts." He paused uncertainly. "No, that isn't right. Ghosts are weak shadows of reality. What lives here is more real than we are. We are like ghosts of its reality. What is it, Juanito? Has my brain gone weak from being two months alone?"

"The dead, they never go away," Juanito repeated. Then          he looked straight ahead with a light of great tragedy in his eyes. "I lied to you, señor. I am not Castilian. My mother was Indian and she taught me things."

"What things?" Joseph demanded.

"Father Angelo would not like it. My mother said how the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has life from the mother and goes back into the mother. When I remember, señor, and when I know I believe these things, because I see them and hear them, then I know I am not Castilian nor caballero. I am Indio."

"But I am not Indian, Juanito, and now I seem to see it."

Juanito looked up gratefully and then dropped his eyes, and the two men stared at the ground. Joseph wondered why he did not try to escape from the power that was seizing upon him.

After a time Joseph raised his eyes to the oak and to the house-frame beside it. "In the end it doesn't matter," he said abruptly. "What I feel or think can kill no ghosts nor G-ds. We must work, Juanito. There's the house to build over there, and here's the ranch to put cattle on. We'll go on working in spite of ghosts. Come," he said hurriedly, "we haven't time to think," and they went quickly to work on the house.
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He worked mightily, as the hills work to produce an oak tree, slowly and effortlessly and with no doubt that it is at once the punishment and the heritage of hills to strive thus.
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In the center of the clearing stood a rock as big as a house, mysterious and huge. It seemed to be shaped, cunningly and wisely, and yet there was no shape in the memory to match it.
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To Joseph's mind there leaped the memory of the round glade among the pines. He remembered every detail of the place, the curious moss-covered rock, the dark cave with its fringe of ferns and the silent clear water flowing out and hurrying stealthily away. He saw how the cress grew in the water and how it moved its leaves in the current.
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"In all the time I've had to learn about myself, I have learned nothing."
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With evening the air grew clear with moisture, so that the mountains were as hard and sharp as crystal. After the sun was gone, there was a hypnotic time when Joseph and Elizabeth stared ahead at the clear hills and could not take their eyes away. The pounding hoofs and the muttering of water deepened the trance. Joseph looked unblinkingly at the string of light along the western mountain rim. His thoughts grew sluggish, but with their slowness they became pictures, and the figures arranged themselves on the mountain tops. A black cloud sailed in from the ocean and rested on the ridge, and Joseph's thought made it a black goat's head. He could see the yellow, slanting eyes, wise and ironic, and the curved horns. He thought, "I know that it is really there, the goat resting his chin on a mountain range and staring in on the valley. He should be there. Something I've read or something I've been told makes it a fitting thing that a goat should come out of the ocean." He was endowed with the power to create things as substantial as the earth. "If I will admit the goat is there, it will be there. And I will have made it. This goat is important," he thought.

A flight of birds rolled and twisted high overhead, and they caught the last light on their flickering wings, and twinkled like little stars. A hunting owl drifted over and shrieked his cry, designed to make small groundling creatures start uneasily and betray themselves against the grass. The valley filled quickly with dark, and the black cloud, as though it had seen enough, withdrew to the sea again. Joseph thought, "I must maintain to myself that it was the goat. I must never betray the goat by disbelieving it."

Elizabeth shivered slightly and he turned around to her. "Are you cold, dear? I'll get the horseblanket to go over your knees." She shivered again, not quite so well, because she was trying to.

"I'm not cold," she said, "but it's a queer time. I wish you'd talk to me. It's a dangerous time."

He thought of the goat. "What do you mean, dangerous?" He took her clasped hands and laid them on his knee.

"I mean there's a danger of being lost. It's the light that's going. I thought I suddenly felt myself spreading and dissipating like a cloud, mixing with everything around me. It was a good feeling, Joseph. And then the owl went over, and I was afraid that if I mixed too much with the hills I might never be able to collapse into Elizabeth again."

"It's only the time of day," he reassured her. "It seems to affect all living things. Have you ever noticed the animals and the birds when it's evening?"

"No," she said, turning eagerly toward him, for it seemed to her that she had discovered a communication. "I don't think I've ever noticed anything very closely in my life," she said. "Just now it seems to me that the lenses of my eyes have been wiped clean. What do the animals do at evening?" Her voice had grown sharp and had broken through his reverie.

"I don't know," he said sullenly. "I mean--I know, but I'll have to think. These things aren't always ready to hand, you know," he apologized. And he fell silent and looked into the gathering darkness. "Yes," he said at last, "it's like that--why all the animals stand still when it comes dark evening. They don't blink their eyes at all and they go dreaming." He fell silent again.
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Rama continued: "I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make others seem unreal. Perhaps a G-dling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. When you are away from him, try thinking of him and you'll see what I mean. His figure will grow huge, until it tops the mountains, and his force will be like the irresistible plunging of the wind. Benjy is dead. You cannot think of Joseph dying. He is eternal. His father died, and it was not a death." Her mouth moved helplessly, searching for words. She cried as though in pain, "I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men. The strength, the resistance, the long and stumbling thinking of all men, and all the joy and suffering, too, cancelling each other out and yet remaining in the contents. He is all these, a repository for a little piece of each man's soul, and more than that, a symbol of the earth's soul."
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Rama looked slowly up and her eyes moved over Elizabeth's face and then dropped again. "I do not love him. There is no chance of a return. I worship him, and there's no need of a return in that. And you will worship him, too, with no return. Now you know, and you needn't be afraid."
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The sun wheeled past meridian and slanted toward the hills, and a high wind soughed out of the west. The dancers, one by one, went back for meat and wine.
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She saw how the stream gently moved the cress that grew in its water, and she saw the mica specks glittering in the sand at the bottom. Then, turning for protection, she looked down on the clustered farm buildings where they were drenched with sun, and on the yellowing grass that bowed in long, flat silver waves before the afternoon wind.
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Her helpless hands lay crossed in her lap, but her bones were casting bones and her blood was distilling blood and her flesh was molding flesh. He laughed shortly at the thought that she was idle.
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The sun, sinking behind the hills, was melting out of shape.
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Burton stood over Elizabeth and looked down at the child. "It isn't only you, Joseph. The rot was in our father, and it was not dug out. It grew until it possessed him. His dying words showed how far he had gone. I saw the thing even before you ever started for the West. If you had gone among people who knew the Word and were strong in the Word, the thing might have died--but you came here."

His hands swept out to indicate the country. "The mountains are too high," he cried. "The place is too savage. And all the people carry the seed of this evil thing in them. I've seen them, and I know. I saw the fiesta, and I know. I can only pray that your son will not inherit the rot."

Joseph resolved quickly. "I will swear if you will stay. I don't know how I'll keep it, but I'll swear. Sometimes, you see, I might forget and think in the old way."

"No, Joseph, you love the earth too much. You give no thought to the hereafter. The force of an oath is not strong in you." He moved away toward his house.

"Don't go at least until we talk this over," Joseph called, but Burton did not turn nor answer him.

Joseph looked after him for a minute before he turned to Elizabeth. She was smiling with a kind of contemptuous amusement. "I think he wants to go," she said.

"Yes, that's partly it. And he really is afraid of my sins, too."

"Are you sinning, Joseph?" she asked.

He scowled in thought. "No," he said at last. "I'm not sinning. If Burton were doing what I am, it would be sin. I only want my son to love the tree." He stretched out his hands for the baby, and Elizabeth put the swathed little body in his hands. Burton looked back as he was entering his house, and he saw that Joseph was holding the baby within the crotch of the tree, and he saw how the gnarled limbs curved up protectingly about it.
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And when he had done eating, he walked out past the barn and up on the hillside. He felt with his palms the dry earth, still warm from the day's sun. And he walked to a copse of little live oaks and rested his hands on the bark and crushed and smelled a leaf of each. Everywhere he went, inquiring with his fingers after the earth's health. The cold was coming in over the mountains, chilling the grasses, and on this night Joseph heard the first flight of wild geese.

The earth told him nothing. It was dry but alive, needing only the rain to make it shoot its spears of green. At last, satisfied, he walked back to the house and stood under his own tree. "I was afraid, sir," he said. "Something in the air made me afraid." And as he stroked the bark, suddenly he felt cold and lonely. "This tree is dead," his mind cried. "There's no life in my tree." The sense of loss staggered him, and all the sorrow he should have felt when his father died rolled in on him. The black mountains surrounded him, and the cold grey sky and the unfriendly stars shut him down, and the land stretched out from the center where he stood. It was all hostile, not ready to attack but aloof and silent and cold. Joseph sat at the foot of the tree, and not even the hard bark held any comfort for him. It was as hostile as the rest of the earth, as frigid and contemptuous as the corpse of a friend.

"Now what will I do?" he thought. "Where will I go now?" A white meteor flared into the air and burned up. "Perhaps I'm wrong," Joseph thought. "The tree may be all right after all." He stood up and went into the house; and that night, because of his loneliness, he held Elizabeth so fiercely in his arms that she cried out in pain and was very glad.
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"The summer drank the water out deep down. Have you noticed how low the water is in the well? Even the potholes in the river are dry now."
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He looked about his land and it seemed to be dying. The pale hills and fields, the dust-grey sage, the naked stones frightened him. On the hills only the black pine grove did not change. It brooded darkly, as always, on the ridge top.
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"Well, as I say, it was my condition. When I was carrying the child, little things grew huge. I didn't find the path, going in. I broke my way through the underbrush, and then I came into the circle. It was quiet, Joseph, more quite than anything I've ever known. I sat in front of the rock because that place seemed saturated with peace. It seemed to be giving me something I needed." In speaking of it, the feeling came back to her. She brushed her hair over her ears, and the wide-set eyes looked far off. "And I loved the rock. It's bard to describe. I loved the rock more than you or the baby or myself. And this is harder to say: While I sat there I went into the rock. The little stream was flowing out of me and I was the rock, and the rock was--I don't know--the rock was the strongest dearest thing in the world." She looked nervously about the room. Her fingers picked at her skirt. The thing she had intended to tell as a joke was forcing itself back upon her.

Joseph took up her nervous hand and held the fingers still. "Tell me," he insisted gently.

"Well, I must have stayed there quite a while, because the sun moved, but it seemed only a moment to me. And then the feeling of the place changed. Something evil came into it." Her voice grew husky with the memory. "Something malicious was in the glade, something that wanted to destroy me. I ran away. I thought it was after me, that great crouched rock, and when I got outside, I prayed. Oh, I prayed a long time."


Joseph's light eyes were piercing. "Why do you want to go back there?" he demanded.

"Why don't you see?" she replied eagerly. "The whole thing was my condition. But I've dreamed about it several times and it comes often to my mind. Now that I'm all well again, I want to go back, and see that it is just an old moss-covered rock in a clearing. Then I won't dream about it any more. Then it won't threaten me any more. I want to touch it. I want to insult it because it frightened me." She released her fingers from Joseph's grip and rubbed them to ease the pain in them. "You've hurt my hand, dear. Are you afraid of the place, too?"

"No," he said. "I'm not afraid. I'll take you up there." He fell silent, wondering whether he should tell her what Juanito had said about the pregnant Indian women who went to sit in front of the rock, and about the old ones who lived in the forest. "It might frighten her," he thought. "It is better that she should lose her fear of the place."
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He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it--Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, "It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness." He leaned back in his chair and turned the lamp wick down until only a little blue light came from it. And then he sat relaxed and tried to shepherd his thoughts again, but they had spread out, feeding in a hundred different places, so that his attention was lost. And he thought in tones, in currents of movement, in color, and in a slow plodding rhythm. He looked down at his slouched body, at his curved arms and hands resting in his lap.

Size changed.

A mountain range extended in a long curve and on its end were five little ranges, stretching out with narrow valleys between them. If one looked carefully, there seemed to be towns in the valleys. The long curved range was clad in black sage, and the valleys ended on a flat of dark tillable earth, miles in length, which dropped off at last to an abyss. Good fields were there, and the houses and the people were so small they could be seen only a little. High up on a tremendous peak, towering over the ranges and the valleys, the brain of the world was set, and the eyes that looked down on the earth's body. The brain could not understand the life on its body. It lay inert, knowing vaguely that it could shake off the life, the towns, the little houses of the fields with earthquake fury. But the brain was drowsed and the mountains lay still, and the fields were peaceful on their rounded cliff that went down to the abyss. And thus it stood a million years, unchanging and quiet, and the world-brain in its peak lay close to sleep. The world-brain sorrowed a little, for it knew that some time it would have to move, and then the life would be shaken and destroyed and the long work of tillage would be gone, and the houses in the valleys would crumble. The brain was sorry, but it could change nothing. It thought, "I will endure even a little discomfort to preserve this order which has come to exist by accident. It will be a shame to destroy this order." But the towering earth was tired of sitting in one position. It moved, suddenly, and the houses crumbled, the mountains heaved horribly, and all the work of a million years was lost.

And size changed, and time changed.

There were light footsteps on the porch. The door opened and Rama came in, her dark eyes wide and glittering with sorrow. "You are sitting in the dark, almost, Joseph," she said.

His hands rose to stroke his black beard. "I turned down the lamp."
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He rode slowly home along the banks of the dead river. The dusty trees, ragged from the sun's flaying, cast very little shade on the ground. Joseph remembered how he had ridden out in a dark night and flung his hat and quirt away to save a good moment out of a tide of moments. And he remembered how thick and green the brush had been under the trees, and how the grass of the hills bowed under its weight of seed; how the hills were heavy-coated as a fox's back. The hills were gaunt now; here was a colony from the southern desert come to try out the land for a future spreading of the desert's empire.

The horse panted in the heat, and the sweat dripped from the cowlick in the center of its belly. It was a long trip and there was no water on the way. Joseph didn't want to go home, for he was feeling a little guilty at the news he carried. This would break up the ranch and leave it abandoned to the sun and to the desert's outposts. He passed a dead cow with pitifully barred sides, and with a stomach swelled to bursting with the gas of putrefaction. Joseph pulled his hat down and bent his head so that he might not see the picked carcass of the land.
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The earth still radiated heat from the day before, and the hillsides were quiet. The ringing of hoofs on the rocky trail splashed uneasy sounds in the quietness. Once, when the dawn was coming, they stopped to rest their horses, and they thought they heard a little bell, tinkling in front of them.

"Did you hear it?" Thomas asked.

"It might be a belled animal," said Joseph. "It isn't a cowbell. It sounds more like a sheep bell. We'll listen for it when the daylight comes."

The day's heat started when the sun appeared. There was no cool dawn. A few grasshoppers rattled and snapped through the air. The cooked bay trees spiced the air and drops of sweet heavy juice boiled out of the greasewood. As the men rode up the steep slope, the trail grew more rocky and the earth more desolate. Everywhere the bones of the earth stuck through and flung the dazzling light away. A snake rattled viciously in the path ahead. Both horses stopped stiffly in their tracks and backed away. Thomas reached down and slipped a carbine from the saddle scabbard under his leg. The gun crashed and the thick snake's body rotated slowly around its crushed head. The horses turned downhill to rest, and closed their eyes against the cutting light. A faint whining came from the earth, as though it protested against the intolerable sun.

"It makes me sad," Joseph said. "I wish I could be less sad about it."

Thomas threw a leg around his saddle horn. "You know what the whole damn country looks like?" he asked. "It looks like a smoking heap of ashes with cinders sticking out." They heard the faint tinkling of the bell again. "Let's see what it is," Thomas said. They turned the horses back uphill. The slope was strewn with great boulders, ruins of perfect mountains that once were, and the trail twisted about among the rocks. "I think I heard that bell go by the house in the night," Thomas said "I thought it was a dream then, but I remember it now that I hear it again. We're nearly to the top now."

The trail went into a pass of shattered granite, and the next moment the two men looked down on a new fresh world. The downward slope was covered with tremendous redwood trees, and among the great columned trunks there grew a wild tangle of berry vines, of gooseberry, of sword ferns as tall as a man. The hill slipped quickly down, and the sea rose up level with the hilltops. The two men stopped their horses and stared hungrily at the green underbrush. The hills stirred with life. Quail skittered and rabbits hopped away from the path. While the men looked, a little deer walked into an open place, caught their scent and bounced away. Thomas wiped his eyes on his sleeve. "All the game from our side is here," he said. "I wish we could bring our cattle over, but there isn't a flat place for a cow to stand." He turned about to face his brother. "Joseph, wouldn't you like to crawl under the brush, into a damp cool hollow there, and curl up and go to sleep?"

Joseph had been staring at the up-ended sea. "I wonder where the moisture comes from." He pointed to the long barren sweeps that dropped to the ocean far below. "No grass is there, but here in the creases it's as green as a jungle." And he said, "I've seen the fog heads looking over into our valley. Every night the cool grey fog must lie in these creases in the mountains and leave some of its moisture. And in the daytime it goes back to the sea, and at night it comes again, so that this forest is never kept waiting, never. Our land is dry, and there's no help for it. But here--I resent this place, Thomas."

"I want to get down to the water," Thomas said. "Come on, let's move." They started down the steep slope on the trail that wound among the columns of the redwoods, and the brambles scratched at their faces. Part of the way down, they came to a clearing, and in it two packed burros stood with drooped heads, and an old, white-bearded man sat on the ground in front of them. His hat was in his lap and his damp white hair lay plastered against his bead. He looked up at the two with sharp shiny black eyes. He held one nostril shut and blew out of the other, and then reversed and blew again.

"I heard you coming a long way back," he said. And he laughed without making a sound. "I guess you heard my burro bell. It's a real silver bell my burro wears. Sometimes I let one wear it, and sometimes the other." He put on his hat with dignity and lifted his beaked nose like a sparrow. "Where are you going, down the hill?"

Thomas had to answer, for Joseph was staring at the little man in curious recognition. "We're going to camp on the coast," Thomas explained. "We'll catch some fish, and we'll swim if the sea is calm."

"We heard your bell a long way back," said Joseph. "I've seen you somewhere before." He stopped suddenly in embarrassment, for he knew he had never really seen the old man before at all.

"I live over to the right, on a flat," the old man said. "My house is five hundred feet above the beach." He nodded at them impressively. "You shall come to stay with me. You will see how high it is." He paused, and a secret hesitant mist settled over his eyes. He looked at Thomas, and then looked long at Joseph. "I guess I can tell you," be said. "Do you know why I live out there on the cliff? I've only told the reason to a few. I'll tell you, because you're coming to stay with me." He stood up, the better to deliver his secret. "I am the last man in the western world to see the sun. After it is gone to everyone else, I see it for a little while. I've seen it every night for twenty years. Except when the fog was in or the rain was falling, I've seen the sun set." He looked from one to the other, smiling proudly. "Sometimes," he went on, "I go to town for salt and pepper and thyme and tobacco. I go fast. I start after the sun has set, and I'm back before it sets again. You shall see tonight how it is." He looked anxiously at the sky. "It's time to be going. You follow after me. Why, I'll kill a little pig, and we'll roast it for dinner. Come, follow after me." He started at a half run down the trail, and the burros trotted after him, and the silver bell jingled sharply.

"Come," Joseph said. "Let's go with him."

But Thomas hung back. "The man is crazy. Let him go on."

"I want to go with him, Thomas," Joseph said eagerly. "He isn't crazy, not violently crazy. I want to go with him."

Thomas had the animals' fear of insanity "I'd rather not. If we do go with him, I'll take my blankets off into the brush."

"Come on, then, or we'll lose him." They clucked up their horses and started down the hill, through the underbrush and in and out among the straight red pillars of the trees. So fast had the old man gone that they were nearly down before they took sight of him. He waved his hand and beckoned to them. The trail left the crease where the redwoods grew and led over a bare ridge to a long narrow flat. The mountains sat with their feet in the sea, and the old man's house was on the knees. All over the flat was tall sagebrush. A man riding the trail could not be seen above the scrub. The brush stopped a hundred feet from the cliff, and on the edge of the abyss was a pole cabin, hairy with stuffed moss and thatched with a great pile of grass. Beside the house there was a tight pigpen of poles, and a little shed, and a vegetable garden, and a patch of growing corn. The old man spread his arms possessively.

"Here is my house." He looked at the lowering sun. "There's over an hour yet. See, that hill is blue," he said, pointing. "That's a mountain of copper."
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The sun's edge touched the fog. The sun changed its shape; it was an arrowhead, an hour glass, a top. The sea turned red, and the wave-tops became long blades of crimson light. The old man turned quickly to the table. "Now!" he said, and cut the pig's throat. The red light bathed the mountains and the house. "Don't cry, little brother." He held down the struggling body. "Don't cry. If I have done it right, you will be dead when the sun is dead." The struggling grew weaker. The sun was a flat cap of red light on the fog wall, and then it disappeared, and the pig was dead.

Joseph had been sitting tensely on his bench, watching the sacrifice. "What has this man found?" he thought. "Out of his experience he has picked out the thing that makes him happy." He saw the old man's joyful eyes, saw how in the moment of the death he became straight and dignified and large. "This man has discovered a secret," Joseph said to himself. "He must tell me if he can."

His companion sat on the bench beside him now, and looked out to the edge of the sea, where the sun had gone. And the sea was dark and the wind was whipping it to white caps. "Why do you do this?" Joseph asked quietly.


The old man jerked his head around. 'Why?" he asked excitedly. And then he grew more calm. "No, you aren't trying to trap me. Your brother thinks I'm crazy. I know. That s why he went to walk. But you don't think that. You're too wise to think that." He looked out on the darkening sea again. "You really want to know why I watch the sun--why I kill some little creature as it disappears." He paused and ran his lean fingers through his hair. "I don't know," he said quietly. "I have made up reasons, but they aren't true. I have said to myself, 'The sun is life. I give life to life'--'I make a symbol of the sun's death.' When I made these reasons I knew they weren't true." He looked around for corroboration.

Joseph broke in, "These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes."

"You see it. I gave up reasons. I do this because it makes me glad. I do it because I like to."

Joseph nodded eagerly. "You would be uneasy if it were not done. You would feel that something was left unfinished."

"Yes," the old man cried loudly. "You understand it. I tried to tell it once before. My listener couldn't see it. I do it for myself. I can't tell that it does not help the sun. But it is for me. In the moment, I am the sun. Do you see? I, through the beast, am the sun. I burn in the death." His eyes glittered with excitement. "Now you know."

"Yes," Joseph said. "I know now. I know for you. For me there is a difference that I don't dare think about yet, but I will think about it."

"The thing did not come quickly," the old man said.

"Now it is nearly perfect." He leaned over and put his hands on Joseph's knees. "Some time it will be perfect. The sky will be right. The sea will be right. My life will reach a calm level place. The mountains back there will tell me when it is time. Then will be the perfect time, and it will be the last." He nodded gravely at the slab where the dead pig lay. "When it comes, I, myself, will go over the edge of the world with the sun. Now you know. In every man this thing is hidden. It tries to get out, but a man's fears distort it. He chokes it back. What does get out is changed--blood on the hands of a statue, emotion over the story of an ancient torture--the giving or drawing of blood in copulation. Why," he said. "I've told the creatures in the cages how it is. They are not afraid. Do you think I am crazy?" he demanded.

Joseph smiled. "Yes, you're crazy. Thomas says you are. Burton would say you are. It is not thought safe to open a clear path to your soul for the free, undistorted passage of the things that are there. You do well to preach to the beasts in the cage, else you might be in a cage yourself."
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He smiled at her, and the calm he knew came upon him. He pointed to the dead and naked tree beside the porch. "Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it."

He stopped and stroked his beard and turned the ends under, as his father had done. His eyes drooped with pain and tightened with resistance to the pain. "Look on the ridge where the pines are, Rama," he said. "There's a circle in the grove, and a great rock in the circle. The rock killed Elizabeth. And on the hill over there are the graves of Benjy arid Elizabeth." She stared at him uncomprehendingly. "The land is struck," he went on. "The land is not dead, but it is sinking under a force too strong for it. And I am staying to protect the land."

"What does all this mean to me?" she asked. "To me or to the child?"

"Why," he said, "I don't know. It might help, to give the child to you. It seems to me a thing that might help the land."

She brushed her hair back nervously, smoothed it beside the part. "Do you mean you're sacrificing the child? Is that it, Joseph?"

"I don't know what name to give it," he said. "I am trying to help the land, and so there's no danger that I shall take the child again."

She stood up then, and backed away from him slowly. "Good-bye to you, Joseph," she said. "I am going in the morning, and I am glad, for I shall always be afraid of you now. I shall always be afraid." Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. "Poor lonely man!" She hurried away toward her house, but Joseph smiled gravely up at the pine grove.

"Now we are one," he thought, "and now we are alone; we will be working together." A wind blew down from the hills and raised a choking cloud of dust into the air.
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The thick moss was turning yellow and brittle, and the ferns around the cave had wilted. The stream still stole out of the hole in the rock, but it was not a quarter as large as it had been. Joseph walked to the rock apprehensively and pulled out some of the moss. It was not dead. He dug a hole in the stream bed, a deep hole, and when it was full he took up water in his hat and threw it over the rock and saw it go sucking into the dying moss. The hole filled slowly. It took a great many hatfuls of water to dampen the moss, and the moss drank thirstily, and showed no sign that it had been dampened. He threw water on the scars where Elizabeth's feet had slipped. He said, "Tomorrow I'll bring a bucket and a shovel. Then it will be easier." As he worked, he knew the rock no longer as a thing separated from him. He had no more feeling of affection for it than he had for his own body. He protected it against death as he would have saved his own life.

When he had finished throwing water, he sat down beside the pool and washed his face and neck in the cold water and drank from his hat. After a while he leaned back against the rock and looked across at the protecting ring of black trees. He thought of the country outside the ring, the hard burned hills, the grey and dusty sage. "Here it is safe," he thought. "Here is the seed that will stay alive until the rain comes again. This is the heart of the land, and the heart is still beating." He felt the dampness of the watered moss soaking through his shirt, and his thought went on, "I wonder why the land seems vindictive, now it is dead." He thought of the hills, like blind snakes with frayed and peeling skins, lying in wait about this stronghold where the water still flowed. He remembered how the land sucked down his little stream before it had run a hundred yards. "The land is savage," he thought, "like a dog far gone in hunger." And he smiled at the thought because he nearly believed it. "The land would come in and blot this stream and drink my blood if it could. It is crazy with thirst." He looked down at the little stream stealing across the glade. "Here is the seed of the land's life. We must guard against the land gone crazy. We must use the water to protect the heart, else the little taste of water may drive the land to attack us."
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"It will win," Joseph said aloud. "The drought will get in at us." He was frightened.
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"No, I am well. Why did you come back, Juanito?"

Juanito smiled at a remembered pain. "The thing that made me go was gone, señor. I knew when it was gone, and I wanted to come back. I have a little son, señor. I just saw him tonight. He looks like me, with blue eyes, and he talks a little. His grandfather calls him Chango, and he says it is a little piojo, and he laughs. That Garcia is a happy man." His face had grown bright with all this gladness, but he grew sad again. "You, señor. They told me about you and the poor lady. There are candles burning for her."

Joseph shook his head a little against the memory. "There was this thing coming, Juanito. I felt it coming. I felt it creeping in on us. And now it is nearly through, just this little island left."

"What do you mean, señor?"

"Listen, Juanito, first there was the land, and then I came to watch over the land; and now the land is nearly dead. Only this rock and I remain. I am the land." His eyes grew sad. "Elizabeth told me once of a man who ran away from the old Fates. He clung to an altar where he was safe." Joseph smiled in recollection. "Elizabeth had stories for everything that happened, stories that ran alongside things that happened and pointed the way they'd end?"

A silence fell upon them. Juanito broke up more sticks and threw them on the fire.
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"There is only the rock and the stream. I know how it will be. The stream is going down. In a little while it will be gone and the moss will turn yellow, and then it will turn brown, and it will crumble in your hand. Then only I will be left. And I will stay." His eyes were feverish. "I will stay until I am dead. And when that happens, nothing will be left."

"I will stay with you," Juanito said. "The rains will come. I'll wait here with you for the rains."

But Joseph's head sank down. "I don't want you here," he said miserably. "That would make too much time to wait. Now there is only night and day and dark and light. If you should stay, there would be a thousand other intervals to stretch out the time, intervals between words, and the long time between striding steps. Is Christmas nearly here?" he demanded suddenly.

"Christmas is past," Juanito said. "It will be the New Year in two days."

"Ah." Joseph sighed and sank back against his saddle. He caressed iris beard jealousy. "A new year," he said softly. "Did you see any clouds as you rode up, Juanito?"

"No clouds, señor. I thought there was a little mist, but see, the moon has no fringe."

"There might be clouds in the morning," Joseph said. "It's so close to the new year, there might be clouds." He lifted his bucket again and threw the water over the rock.

They sat silently before the fire, feeding it with twigs now and then, while the moon slipped over the circle of sky. The frost settled down, and Joseph gave Juanito one of his blankets to wrap about his body, and they waited for the bucket to be slowly filled. Juanito asked no questions about the rock, but once Joseph explained, "I can't let any of the water go to waste. There isn't enough."

Juanito roused himself. "You are not well, señor."

"Of course I'm well. I do not work, and I eat little, but I am well."

"Have you thought to see Father Angelo," Juanito asked suddenly.

"The priest? No. Why should I see him?"

Juanito spread his hands, as though to deprecate the idea. "I don't know why. He is a wise man and a priest. He is close to G-d."

"What could he do?" Joseph demanded.

"I don't know, señor, but he is a wise man and a priest. Before I rode away, after that other thing, I went to him and confessed. He is a wise man He said you were a wise man, too. He said, 'One time that man will come knocking at my door.' That is what Father Angelo said. 'One time he will come,' he said. 'It may be in the night. In his wisdom he will need strength.' He is a strange man, señor. He hears confession and puts the penance and then sometimes he talks, and the people do not understand. He looks over their heads and doesn't care whether they understand or not. Some of the people do not like it. They are afraid."

Joseph was leaning forward with interest. "What could I want from him?" he demanded. "What could he give me that I need now?"

"I don't know," Juanito said. "He might pray for you."

"And would that be good, Juanito? Can he get what he prays for?"
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The terse Indian stories his mother had told him came into his mind, stories of the great misty Spirit, and the jokes he played on man and on other G-ds. And then, while he looked at Joseph's face, Juanito thought of the old church in Nuestra Señora, with its thick adobe walls and mud floors. There was an open space at the eaves, and the birds flew in sometimes, during the mass. Often there were bird droppings on Saint Joseph's head, and on the blue mantle of Our Lady. The reason for his thought came slowly out of the picture. He saw the crucified Christ hanging on His cross, dead and stained with blood. There was no pain in His face, now He was dead, but only disappointment and perplexity, and over these, an infinite weariness. Jesus was dead and the Life was finished. Juanito built a tall blaze to see Joseph's face clearly, and the same things were there, the disappointment and the weariness. But Joseph was not dead.
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Because Juanito thought the church might help Joseph, he struck slyly. "I have been in this country since I was born, señor, and you have lived here only a little while. There are things you do not know."

"What things?' Joseph asked.

Juanita looked him full in the eyes then. "I have seen it many times, señor," he said in compassion. "Before a spring goes dry it grows a little."

Joseph looked quickly at the stream. "This is a sign of the end, then?"

"Yes, señor. Unless G-d interferes, the spring will stop."

Joseph sat in silence for several minutes, pondering. At last he stood up and lifted his saddle by the horn. "Let's go to see the priest," he said harshly.

"Maybe he can't help," Juanita said.

Joseph was carrying the saddle to the tethered horse. "I can't let any chance go by," he cried.
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Joseph felt the power of the man before him. "Juanito told me to come, Father."

"Of course he did, but did the tree fail you at last?"

"My brother killed the tree," Joseph said sullenly.

Father Angelo looked concerned. "That was bad. That was a stupid thing. It might have made the tree more strong."

"The tree died," Joseph said. "The tree is standing dead."

"And you've come to the Church at last?"

Joseph smiled in amusement at his mission. "No, Father," he said. "I've come to ask you to pray for rain. I am from Vermont, Father. They told us things about your church."

The priest nodded. "Yes, I know the things."

"But the land is dying," Joseph cried suddenly. "Pray for rain, Father! Have you prayed for rain?"

Father Angelo lost some of his confidence, then. "I will help you to pray for your soul, my son. The rain will come. We have held mass. The rain will come. G-d brings the rain and withholds it of his knowledge."

"How do you know the rain will come? Joseph demanded. "I tell you the land's dying."

"The land does not die," the priest said sharply.

But Joseph looked angrily at him. "How do you know? The deserts were once alive. Because man is sick often, and each time gets well, is that proof that he will never die?"

Father Angelo got out of his chair and stood over Joseph. "You are ill, my son," he said. "Your body is ill, and your soul is ill. Will you come to the church to make your soul well? Will you believe in Christ and pray help for your soul?"

Joseph leaped up and stood furiously before him. "My soul? To Hell with my soul! I tell you the land is dying. Pray for the land!"

The priest looked into his glaring eyes and felt the frantic fluid of his emotion. "The principal business of G-d has to do with men," he said, "and their progress toward heaven, and their punishment in Hell."

Joseph's anger left him suddenly. "I will go now, Father," he said wearily. "I should have known. I'll go back to the rock now, and wait."

He moved toward the door, and Father Angelo followed him. "I'll pray for your soul, my son. There's too much pain in you."

"Good-bye, Father, and thank you," and Joseph strode away into the dark.

When he had gone, Father Angelo went back to his chair. He was shaken by the force of the man. He looked up at one of his pictures, a descent from the cross, and he thought, "Thank G-d this man has no message. Thank G-d he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in." And, in sudden heresy, "else there might be a new Christ here in the West." Father Angelo got up then, and went into the church. And he prayed for Joseph's soul before the high altar, and he prayed forgiveness for his own heresy, and then, before he went away, he prayed that the rain might come quickly and save the dying land.
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At last they topped the rise and Joseph saw the houses of the ranch, bleached and huddled. The blades of the windmill shone faintly in the moonlight. It was a view half obscured, for the white dust filled the air, and the wind drove fiercely down the valley. Joseph turned up the hill to avoid the houses, and as he went up toward the black grove, the moon sank over the western hills and the land was blotted out of sight. The wind howled down from the slopes and cried in the dry branches of the trees. The horse lowered its head against the wind. Joseph could make out the pine grove darkly as he approached it, for a streak of dawn was coming over the hills. He could hear the tossing branches and the swish of the needles combing the wind, and the moan of limbs rubbing together. The black branches tossed against the dawn. The horse walked wearily in among the trees and the wind stayed outside. It seemed quiet in the grey place, more so because of the noise around it. Joseph climbed down and lifted the calf to the ground. And he unsaddled the horse and put a double measure of rolled barley in the feed-box. At last he turned reluctantly to the rock.

The light had come secretly in, and the sky and the trees and the rock were grey. Joseph walked slowly across the glade and knelt by the little stream.

And the stream was gone. He sat quietly down and put his hand in the bed. The gravel was still damp, but no water moved out of the little cave any more.

Joseph was very tired. The wind howling around the grove and the stealthy drought were too much to fight. He thought. "Now it is over. I think I knew it would be."

The dawn brightened. Pale streaks of sunlight shone on the dust-clouds that filled the air. Joseph stood up and went to the rock and stroked it. The moss was growing brittle already, and the green had begun to fade out of it. "I might climb up on top and sleep a little," he thought, and then the sun shone over the hills, and the shaft of its light cut through the pine trunks and threw a blinding spot on the ground. Joseph heard a little struggle behind him where the calf tried to loosen its legs from the riata loops. Suddenly Joseph thought of the old man on the cliff-top. His eyes shone with excitement. "This might be the way," he cried. He carried the calf to the streamside, held its head out over the dry bed and cut its throat with his pocketknife, and its blood ran down the stream bed and reddened the gravel and fell into the bucket. It was over too soon. "So little," Joseph thought sadly. "Poor starved creature, it had so little blood." He watched the red stream stop running and sink into the gravel. And while he watched, it lost its brightness and turned dark. He sat beside the dead calf and thought again of the old man. "His secret was for him," he said. "It won't work for me."

The sun lost its brilliance and sheathed itself in thin clouds. Joseph regarded the dying moss and the circle of trees. "This is gone now. I am all alone." And then a panic fell upon him. "Why should I stay in this dead place?" He thought of the green canyon over the Puerto Suelo.

Now that he was no longer supported by the rock and the stream, he was horribly afraid of the creeping drought. "I'll go!" he cried suddenly. He picked up his saddle and ran across the glade with it. The horse raised its head and snorted with fear. Joseph lifted the heavy saddle, and as the tapadero struck the horse's side, it reared, plunged away and broke its tether. The saddle was flung back on Joseph's chest. He stood smiling a little while he watched the horse run out of the glade and away. And now the calm redescended upon him, and his fear was gone. "I'll climb up on the rock and sleep a while," he said. He felt a little pain on his wrist and lifted his arm to look. A saddle buckle had cut him; his wrist and palm were bloody. As he looked at the little wound, the calm grew more secure about him, and the aloofness cut him off from the grove and from all the world. "Of course," he said, "I'll climb up on the rock." He worked his way carefully up its steep sides until at last he lay in the deep soft moss on the rock's top. When he had rested a few minutes, he took out his knife again and carefully, gently opened the vessels of his wrist. The pain was sharp at first, but in a moment its sharpness dulled. He watched the bright blood cascading over the moss, and he heard the shouting of the wind around the grove. The sky was growing grey. And time passed and Joseph grew grey too. He lay on his side with his wrist outstretched and looked down the long black mountain range of his body. Then his body grew huge and light. It arose into the sky, and out of it came the streaking rain. "I should have known," he whispered. "I am the rain." And yet he looked dully down the mountains of his body where the hills fell to an abyss. He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. "I am the land," he said, "and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while."

And the storm thickened, and covered the world with darkness, and with the rush of waters.

    26


THE rain swept through the valley. In a few hours the little streams were boiling down the hillsides and falling into the river of Our Lady. The earth turned black and drank the water until it could hold no more. The river itself churned among the boulders and raced for the pass in the hills.


Father Angelo was in his little house, sitting among the parchment books and the holy pictures, when the rain started. He was reading La Vida del San Bartolomeo. But when the pattering on the roof began, he laid the book down. Through the hours he heard the roaring of the water over the valley and the shouting of the river. Now and then he went to his door and looked out. All the first night he stayed awake and listened happily to the commotion of the rain. And he was glad when he remembered how he had prayed for it.

At dusk of the second night, the storm was unabated. Father Angelo went into his church and replaced the candles before the Virgin, and did his duties to her. And then he stood in the dark doorway of the church and looked out on the sodden land. He saw Manuel Cornea hurry past carrying a wet coyote pelt. And soon afterward, Jose Alvarez trotted by with a deer's horns in his hands. Father Angelo covered himself with the shadow of the doorway. Mrs. Gutierrez splashed through the puddles holding an old moth-eaten bear skin in her arms. The priest knew what would take place in this rainy night. A hot anger flared up in him. "Only let them start it, and I'll stop them," he said.

He went back into the church and took a heavy crucifix from a cupboard and retired with it to his house. Once in his sitting-room he coated the crucifix with phosphorus so that it might be better seen in the dark, and then he sat down and listened for the expected sounds. It was difficult to hear them over the splash and the battering of the rain, but at last he made them out--the throb of the bass strings of the guitars, pounding and pounding. Still Father Angelo sat and listened, and a strange reluctance to interfere came over him. A low chanting of many voices joined the rhythm of the strings, rising and falling. The priest could see in his mind how the people were dancing, beating the soft earth to slush with their bare feet. He knew how they would be wearing the skins of animals, although they didn't know why they wore them. The pounding rhythm grew louder and more insistent, and the chanting voices shrill and hysterical. "They'll be taking off their clothes," the priest whispered, "and they'll roll in the mud. They'll be rutting like pigs in the mud."

He put on a heavy cloak and took up his crucifix and opened the door. The rain was roaring on the ground, and in the distance, the river crashed on its stones. The guitars throbbed feverishly and the chant had become a bestial snarling. Father Angelo thought he could hear the bodies splashing in the mud.

Slowly he closed the door again, and took off his cloak and laid down his phosphorescent cross. "I couldn't see them in the dark," he said. "They'd all get away in the dark." And then he confessed to himself: "They wanted the rain so, poor children. I'll preach against them on Sunday. I'll give everybody a little penance."

He went back to his chair and sat listening to the rush of the waters. He thought of Joseph Wayne, and he saw the pale eyes suffering because of the land's want. "That man must be very happy now," Father Angelo said to himself.
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