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Prairie



Patrick Waters

��Daddy rolled out of the Tennessee hills in eighteen seventy six. After he saw the Rockies looming over him as God loomed over Moses on Sinai he could not call what had been his mountains mountains anymore, those Tennessee mountains became hills. I think it takes something out of a man when his god and order is found lacking and small in the world.
��He built our home over virgin land in prairie country in Nebraska. The wood of the shack rose up over the small rise of the foundation, roofline stuck against the blue sky like a tick on a hound or profane humanity against a god, footer steeped in the loam of the ground. The wood rose up in the grass and the two substances, dead and wild, were never far apart. The corral was in the small holler, as that’s what Daddy still called them, and the river further on. Trees only grew near the river, mostly stunted and deformed cottonwoods like children for who adulthood came under a short ceiling in the cave dwellings of the Southwest. One big oak stood for no damn good reason. It was tall and straight and proud, a lord over peasants, a lord over daddy who lorded over me. That oak never bent in wind or when men would come calling to hang devils off it. Then men would come inside our home, murder and coffee going together like lovers in the night.
��Daddy had to entertain the men that came by. They would stare at Momma for she was a woman and drool over Sister for she was a girl and come back the next week on Sunday to court Sister, the killin’ of the week before gone like as the waters of a river and this day was a new world with a new Sabbath. Momma would cook up what little we had and sling half-raw beef down a table, beef that we could barely afford anyways, to the eager coyote faces with curiously white teeth. The men would savagely swallow down the food the way feral dogs feast on a buffalo’s innards. The men would offer to hire on to stay or when Sister became old enough they’d take Sister for a walk and if they did she’d walk for an hour and come back with coins or script or gold or silver and Daddy would say, good girl, and she’d preen and smile and give him the money and the look at Momma and exclaim, what did I say, she’s a moneymaker. And over this domestic life there would be a man in the window across the way from me, hung from the neck until dead, swinging back and forth and I would shudder. After Hell, the men would see my broken form and only see evil. To others I wasn’t even human, just a coyote. Other men were beasts to me. They created death and take whatever virgin innocence Sister still had. These things I saw from dark eyes stilled with morphine.
��The market busted south in eighteen eighty six, five full years before I was born. Daddy said, those days, before the bust, I was a rich man, running all of them cattle up and down the prairie, into and out of the hollers, around dusty towns and roads and into huge long trains which the bellowing of steers reminded me of the death bells I heard coming from the county church when my own daddy died by a shotgun blast.
��I got born in ninety one and sister got born in the late winter of nineteen double aught. I thought Sister was beautiful the first time I saw her. Momma had gone into labor on night and when the cries stilled, of her voice and Daddy’s and a new voice, I knew Sister was born, but until I saw her at the table a week after, I never truly believed. Her hair was white gold and mine dirt black. Her skin was gold peach and my skin was black grime. She was birth and new made, and within years I would dig graves when men hung. She looked like the babe I saw in the Bible momma would pray to before I got crippled and she said, Sister was Daddy’s prayers came true.
��Momma was still young and Daddy would leave her for months on those drives which never got us enough because the cowboy was already gone and Daddy was fighting against the world. When Daddy came back in nineteen oh one, after getting thirteen-fifty for fifteen dollar steers and we had no new clothes for three years straight, after all this he came home to a silent wife. I entered purgatory for a sin which only Daddy, not god, could forgive and Daddy wouldn’t because then it would be his own sin, and daddies can’t carry sin like a noose around the neck like wives and daughters and sons can.
��Momma didn’t talk for five months after Daddy came home that winter with more cash than we’d had in years and then he paid the debts he could and borrowed to pay debts he couldn’t and began to plan for a horseraising and a horsebreaking business and he made ready for the alfalfa planting season which was coming with a Chinook wind, the one prairie wind that don’t howl like a woman hurt. But Momma was a woman hurt and she told Daddy in slow words, first as half-mumbles in cold sleep next to him in a bed heaped with quilts and blankets made when he was gone, then whole words muttered when she saw the oak protruding itself into our lives like greek gods onto heroic mortals, then halting sentences when he wasn’t in the room until he overheard her crying by the woodpile one morning when she thought he was in the stables breaking a mustang. That horse didn’t get broken that day but Momma broke and Daddy looked to his god and saw himself rise into air, hung on his own sins.
��The men had come with a horse thief. A restless mob perched on gaunt damn near wild horses craving for the violence they knew must come. They didn’t seem to be men at first she said, as she saw the floating dust a veneer over the men. She said they looked like purposeless ants milling about a lone sweet stick covered with honey and then the form rose up the lone oak in the valley, hanging by the neck until dead, sentenced without a judge, jury or defense other than the pistol the horse thief didn’t have money to buy bullets for. She saw the horse thief rise up in a hazy red dust cloud and she saw the horse thief die. The dishes in her hand suddenly stilled and the wind suddenly howled but it had been howling all along; she had never heard it until then. Then the dust thrust into her home, clinging to forms that must have been men as some point but were changed into animals. They took her, she said, and that was that.
��Daddy looked at me with eyes that were so away and old and cold and said, where were you?
��Scared, Daddy. Me and Sister run out from the house to the stall. Momma said run and we did.
��You should have stayed and protected her.
��I ain’t a man, daddy.
��Those weren’t men that did this, you goddamn coward.
��My purgatory had begun.
��Daddy never went to town to talk to the sheriff and never tore down the oak. He just moved the table so my seat stared out to the tree where dead men swung. When I was little, he would cut down the men and dig the graves on a hill facing the graveyard with the two sisters that didn’t live long. Then I turned twelve and he told me to dig. I had grown big, big enough for a spade and big enough to climb the oak and saw the line and drag the body by the neck as I rode a broken mustang. Daddy would watch from the table as my spade sunk into the loam and the spade rose and dirt flew and my spade sank into the loam again and rose again and my penitence, postponed for two years, began. Momma didn’t say nothin’, but I saw her if I stopped in the window. She just stared back straight through me. I went on with the work.
��There are things that roll through your mind as you dig a grave even when you are young. What did they do, when will you be in one. I once laid down in the bottom, with steam rising off my chest into the air and the dirt streaking down my skin and me thinking as I saw dirt rise six feet above my head that maybe this is hell and I looked to the sky but I was in the shadow of a grave. I saw clouds and an unfeeling sky, a sky the color of daddy’s eyes when he first called me coward and stopped calling me son.
��Those years before Hell were a paradise. I remember Sister was eight by then and she used to laugh with me and play with me and we’d walk into the nothingness that was Nebraska farm and we’d play games among wheat that never grew high enough and steers that could never find feed enough. Her laugh would give her away when she hid for the sound reminded me of what the river murmured when I woke up before the birds and I saw the sun rise up warm and beautiful before it became harsh and killed daddy’s farm in front of his eyes. Those mornings I would go down and see a new man hanging and I would wonder what that person did and walk up to him and know I would bury him come high noon but for the moment I just turned my back and pretended he wasn’t there and I fished for fish I knew weren’t there and pretended the murmur of the river as was my sister laughing.
��Daddy bought a stallion at the last public mustang auction in Nebraska. The mustang was gone from the prairie after that auction and Hell was the last mustang stallion. Ain’t nothing’ should have broke that horse, but I tried. Daddy could have broken Hell in a day but it was my turn to be a man, he said. I didn’t become a man, just a cripple.
��Hell was a compact, muscular horse. Hell’s eyes were cock-eyed and blazed wild with near-human hate and his jaw had been shot through with a rifle bullet. The maiming must have happened before Hell stopped growing because his teeth grew in crooked sharp like the teeth of wolves that ate human flesh. His lip was twisted into a snarl, the snarl of lonely men who live with sins and do not find the forgiveness they should find in their own heart. Daddy said, god said death rode a pale horse and hell followed with him. That wasn’t true. Hell was Hell and I had to ride him.
��Daddy roped Hell and managed to get him in the chute and when I looked at Hell’s body swirling and twisting and fighting and kicking and gouging and trying to destroy the only restriction to unfettered freedom he had ever known, I vomited at the sight. Daddy called my name; I came running to the shoot with bile still burning my throat and spittle spurting between my teeth. I jumped on Hell’s back, called to Daddy, throw gate, and I rode and rode hard.
��Hell busted way out and my shoulder blades slammed into his back. My feet were flying high up in the air, spurs flashing, as I kicked into the shoulder flesh of that beast and I saw small blood drops fly and fleck my clothes. Hell bucked high and swung right. Hell bucked high and swung left and then something snapped. Hell bucked high and we were one statue, my body prone sideways across Hell’s hard spine, Hell stiff legged, spinning perfectly, spinning like the sky and ground just slowly switched places along an unknown axis somewhere just under my legs, maybe even through Hell’s own heart.
��Hell slammed on me, his body going straight into my chest as if he was going to bury me with his momentum for a spade. He kicked twice into the air, screaming at the sky or god that had flipped us and not knowing it was his own body and his own hate. He twisted and ground me into dust as the druggist does to the drug in the mortar, and I saw the cinch flap when it shouldn’t have. The cinch was sliced through.
��My brain was translated into a white hot light. My chest caved in and I felt a waterfall in me, just water running through my chest in spurts all over. Hell twisted off and rose up, my head seeing flashing rear hoofs. He kicked and sent me whipping around to hit his forelocks and me looking down my leg to see my foot still caught in the stirrup. My mouth was full of bile and mud and horseshit, my eyes covered in the grime only fit for my feet. I couldn’t even shed tears to wash the hurt and dirt away.
��Hell leapt forward and I fell behind him. Hell kicked once, twice, and my body ripped free and Hell was finally free of his master, a master who could master nothing not even a wild mustang his daddy could have broken in a day. Hell’s kick went into my jaw, smashing my own teeth into my own throat, cutting my flesh all the way down. I could not feel my right foot and my jaw was unhinged and nearly off and my eye was gone from a hoof that pierced the fragile bubble of sight, making me a cyclops. Nobody had destroyed me, only Hell.
��Daddy was there when I came to, dull on morphine. Momma rested by my bed and Daddy looked out to see the tall oak.
��Daddy said, God said penitence wasn’t over. You are not forgiven. You can’t get on your knees to pray, so you’ll just go to hell. There is no forgiveness for the unrepentant sinner.
�� After I rode Hell into the dust Sister never looked at me again and her laugh became the unnatural hiss of water over a dam. My jaw had been reformed into a shape from which sound could not slip through and I could not ask her to murmur like the river and float me away where oak trees couldn’t hang men.
��In nineteen sixteen three men were hung and the animal pack that hung them burst into our home still drunk, still happy that they were alive and that they could kill men who really weren’t even men, just animals like themselves. They called, hello house, and tramped up as if they were welcome all along, that it was not midnight and the moon had not disappeared behind clouds which never came except for nights in which dead men swung. The men came into the house and tried to find mother but she was hidden and they just found daddy at the table and my form, crippled and broken lying on the floor. Daddy never moved as the men broke into our sanctuary. They didn’t care home was sacred and Daddy didn’t know home was sacred.
��The men yelled and hungered for food. I got up and shuffled, trying to serve their needs and trying to keep them quiet and satisfied. I looked up into the loft and saw my sister’s face looking down. Her hair was matted, the matted hair of a slatternly mare, a mare which still needed protection in her sluttish weakness. Her lips curved in laughter as I shuffled to serve animals which weren’t even men, just beasts that killed because they were strong unlike some men who were weak because god, who never watched and only gave a blue sky blanket and a hard yellow sun for men to find comfort in, that god was the oak, an unbending and an unquestionable lord, a father that never should have born new flesh in the body of another. Sister laughed, her laugh the harsh, jaunty roar of a flood into the ditches Daddy built to irrigate the upper fields.
��The animals saw her and she shrieked as a caught rodent and she slunk back into the loft trying to forget she even saw and hoping the men wouldn’t notice that a young sin-haloed girl was standing above them just out of reach but yet in reach if they could climb, this mare slut one who was laughing at their jokes and therefore wanted their company or even more if she could be had like they had her mother had been had years before. Those animals wanted her and one of them, a thing in shabby clothes with a brokened tooth grin which was Hell’s snarl and mine too if you squinted and remembered I could have been a beast once to in some other life, one of them climbed up to get his prize, the prize which was his and not mine because he was whole and not broken like me.
��That beast pulled her down and I shuffled brokenly to the corner of the room where the shotgun stood, the gun Daddy didn’t allow me to shoot. I only learned how when Daddy had gone on his drives again. I pointed the gun but words couldn’t come out of my snarled smashed mangled jawbone. That man had my sister and I shot him down where he stood. The other men rushed me and Daddy.
��Daddy yelled as Lot did to the mob, take him, take her, except there were no angels to save from worse rape, just himself and he yelled again, I didn’t do nothin’ and I will not die for the sins of my son and I thought, Daddy. Any sins I got, they were passed down. This is our lot.
��I was taken down to the river and stood under the big oak, the shade of this oaken lord deepening the night. Sister was with me for they had taken her too and daddy was there for he couldn’t save himself and momma was at window with a rifle.
��I was calm. I saw momma raise the rifle and look through the sight.
��I was on Hell again and I thought it was good that Hell was with me and would send me to the next cycle of life and I would come back. Hell stood there angry at the saddle and rope and slavering beasts and I looked to my mother who was still. I watched her count her breaths the way Daddy taught her after he came back and found I couldn’t protect her, one, two, in, out and sigh. And Daddy leapt into the air beside me, his shirt pushing out bellshaped and then a small red flower coming out, so short lived it just turned into blood and Daddy now swung in the air beside me. His face stretched in death and froze, him hung and shot and now swinging dead, a sin hanging from god’s own neck.
��Then I heard the rifle’s ghostlike echo, an echo that never should have been as on the prairie there is nothing to echo against. I heard the rifle in my ears and looked to Momma. The beasts cowed at the invisible death and unnatural noise and saw Momma who was unnatural and raising the rifle again and the beasts broke, running away at the sight of a woman, who was still more man than a pack of wolves.
��Momma came down and stood in front of me on Hell and Sister on Daddy’s horse.
��His seed should die with his sins, she said. His seed made her, she pointed to Sister, and his sins made you, as she pointed to me.
��I said nothing as sister started crying and then Sister yelled, it wasn’t my choice and daddy was god and made forgiveness not Momma and Momma said, then god is dead.
��Momma slapped Daddy’s horse and Sister dropped until she was caught by the wet rope. Her breath snuck out of her in small harsh ugly gasps that came out like the river hissing over a dam and her lips turned a dark blue, then purple and then her eyes filled with hate at Momma and then she died and swung and was dead. Her body was stiff and swung slowly in the night and I saw something evil in her, something evil and small and her teeth shown like a dead coyote’s and her hair was matted like the mane of a yellow mustang and nothing of her was human. Sister was human at birth, just out of Mamma but Daddy’s seed took and twisted her beauty and soul into something too much like him, too much like that selfish god Daddy worshipped and I saw all this in her eyes and I felt pity, pity Sister and pity for Daddy and pity for Momma and pity for me.
��Momma cut me down.
��Penitence is over, she said and Momma walked away.
��I buried Sister and Daddy and their sins with them.



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