The pain got a rhythm, a throb to the beat of the heart, greenstick fracture they call it, as if blood were the same as sap, and flesh the same as wood, and the bone the bole of a tree you break to feed, in the end, a fire.
For sure the arm was-below the elbow there-broke. GB pictured the day they decided, him and Sparrow, to conquer the tree. A dead letter of the law is all, and all because-nobody’s fault but their own-they don’t got the capacity to appreciate the grandeur of the vigorous lie. Sure they got the truth-from out the vasty ocean a pincher of salt. The all of it.īut don’t they got the truth? you say, say you. The boys who beat him? What do they got? Blood is what they got. Plenty people don’t even got so much as a breath. You do what you do, right? When you don’t got a breeze you settle for a breath. What with the broke arm and the face all purpled up into a bruise, more like a notion than a hope, but hell. From up top of the tree the territory, the sight of the territory, stirred in him a hope. Give her back, pressed down and running over, the whole of the world she’d-in her stubborn way-always refused before.Īnd who knows? Maybe today was the day to begin. No place to plant a foot without a charge of trespass. He pictured himself with a deed in hand to cover the whole of the earth, and the oceans to boot, and the grains of sand by the billion at the border between the two. The imprint of them boots of his too small a claim to carry the day. A logical man, okay, but a logic that made him, in the game of love, a fool. He figured the way to win a gal like Maggie was to gather up a spread of a size to make him a squire, a man to be reckoned with, a citizen true. No wonder then, when it come to Maggie and Barnett, you got yourself a collision. To parcel it? Price it? Pay it out by the yard like a length of batting? You’d sooner slip a river in your pocket or carve yourself a slice of air. Defended her territory same as any other creature of the wild, sure, but to her the land was a field of battle, a room to maneuver in that war of hers against everything and everybody. To Maggie the land was no more than the dirt beneath her feet. No money, no trade, no property? No matter.
Nothing but the pleasure of his company is what the boy give her, and no charge, cheap as a breeze, but that was enough.
Allowed himself to be carried in the current of the come and the go, to travel in the shadow of Maggie without losing that shadow of his own. Not in so many words-mute as a mushroom, Sparrow-but in the way he moved. It was Sparrow made him see what Maggie wanted. Whatever you tell him, he takes it all in, neither believing or disbelieving, and not like he ain’t sharp enough to see the difference, but he got him a scale of his own to weigh it, touch it, tell if it’s crooked or true.
Watched himself whip out a cigar, finger the fob of the pocket watch, the-what do they call it?- fret at the neck of the fiddle. Tell her you seen me-” Barnett pictured himself at the depot, attaché in hand, the brim of the fedora bent to match the curve of the earth. Awake or asleep, ragged or spruce, horny or hale or all beat to hell and back again, it don’t matter he figured, it’s all the same: every day you wake, and poke your nose up out the bedcovers, and discover you ain’t dead yet, that day’s the day God said Let there be light. Grateful, and like any other man who ever lived, a cosmos in the making. On the plank in the crown of the cypress, under the tarp that splits the wind and parries the sun, lies a man all beat to hell. It don’t amount to much, from overhead, coming in out the clouds, nothing really, the sight of a tent up in the arms of a tree, and nothing but air beneath it-satchel of canvas surfing the swell-but you’d be mistaken.
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