The Diezmo, Rick Bass [spiritual books to read .TXT] 📗

order or design, even as I knew all along—or almost all along—that I would survive.

Have I subsequently lived in such a fashion as to justify being spared? Have I done anything magnificent, achieved more than those who died would have? Fifty years later—a farmer of stock, a raiser of goats, sheep, and cattle, a grower of corn and cotton—I can find no reason for my survival, but then I can find no good reason for having crossed the border in the first place.

The night before Green and Fisher arrived, I had been troubled by dreams. In the first dream, my friend James Shepherd and I were camped along the James River, which was where we liked to go in the summer to fish for catfish. We could catch them closer to home, in the lower meandering of the muddy Brazos; but in the James River, farther up into the hills, the water ran clearer and faster and the fish tasted better. It was Comanche country, though, and we usually went there only in the early summer, when the People, as the Comanches called themselves, had gone north to hunt buffalo.

There was nothing Shepherd and I loved more in the world than to eat catfish from the James. There was no finer food, no finer times than on those days and nights when we camped beside the clear-running river and feasted on catfish and dreamed about the shape our lives might take. James Shepherd was going to be governor of Texas, or a senator at least, while I, James Alexander, was less sure of my role. I was the better student, and I thought for a while that I might become a physician. (Shepherd, on the other hand, was troubled by the sight of blood, so much so that I had to clean and prepare the fish for him at our meals each morning and evening.)

In this dream that came to me the night before Captains Green and Fisher arrived, Shepherd and I had built a little hut woven from oak and juniper branches—a mound that we latticed and stitched tight with leaves and smaller branches until it resembled the larval encasement of a caddis fly. Such structures kept us warm and dry during even the most violent thunderstorms, and we had spent countless nights in these little huts, bathed in the sweet scent of our oak cook fire, as well as the odor of the crushed juniper bushes and their gin-scented berries.

But in this dream, our earth and branch huts were blazing, and it was neither campfire nor lightning bolt that had ignited them but some dark bird flying through the night, dropping clumps of soil onto every hut. Seconds later, each hut would burst into bright flame, lighting the night.

Every hut of our childhood was there, every sanctuary, and the dark bird dropped load after load of rich soil onto our thatched shelters, each one blossoming into flame; and in the dream, we were sometimes in those huts, and other times we were running from the giant bird and the burning huts.

The bird, or whatever it was, seemed to have no knowledge of us personally but was mindlessly intent on destruction, and this cold-blooded indifference made its terror slightly less frightening.

I woke drenched in sweat. The dream was so real I went outside to see if any fires were burning, but the horses were quiet in the barn and there were only a few fireflies circling in the meadow and ah owl murmuring down by the creek.

I sat down and wrapped my arms around my legs and watched the stars for a long time, as if waiting for something.

My heart was racing, but the world seemed large and quiet, unperturbed. I went back to bed, and almost immediately upon falling asleep I dreamed the second dream, which was more real than the first.

I was up in the loft of an unfamiliar house. Giant beams were crashing down, breaking through the roof and cracking open the walls, and though the timbers seemed directed toward me, I did not seem to be at risk. This time when I woke, I could not go back to sleep but went outside and sat until dawn, watching and waiting.

I think I knew then that I would survive many tests—that some are chosen for no reason—and the loneliness of that revelation was fierce and complete, involving my greatest fear of being left alone, or behind. It was a fear that had a place in the world. It seemed that I might be called on to keep a certain terror burning in my heart, until finally it burned no more.

Both Green and Fisher rode bay mares, exquisite animals gotten from the spoils of war. Green, a small, chesty man, seeming as wide as he was tall, rode the larger of the two horses, one that was two hands too big for him, so that although he rode it well, he never quite seemed graceful but appeared to expend considerable effort to control the horse. Fisher was taller, more military-looking, and rode a more average-size horse. When the two men were asaddle next to each other, the eye was drawn to Green, as his tall, stiff-legged horse turned and backstepped, cantering and crabbing sideways and rattling her bit. Fisher sat motionless beside such prancings, his eyes searching the crowd, until his gaze narrowed on someone as if that person had disappointed or betrayed him. Then he gazed upon that person with an almost tender forgiveness, but with a fierce, angry curiosity as well, as if asking, How could you? As if calling into question all the choices a person had made in a lifetime.

Such was the look that fell upon me that morning they rode into town.

Fisher seemed to study me for hours, but it could only have been seconds. When he finally released me, I turned to search for James Shepherd and saw that he was watching the curious exhibition of Thomas Jefferson Green