Under the Saturnine Influence on the Trail

A cult got to us, an invented religion hewn from the hunt and from the gape of a country so impressive it seeped into our souls. If sovereign Heaven at all held sway, then it swayed by its distance. This was when hard, wartime poetry was still the best vernacular for an American verse, the way I used to live, a remembrance: 

1869. I was but five, knew neither letters nor numbers, knew nothing of the world save Arkansas and poverty. The War had taken Pap on the tip of a Yankee bayonet and left me in the care of my brother Odus, himself only tenderly a man, hardly of whiskering age. This did not prevent Odus from getting whiskey when he had coin enough to get it; he and our exslave, a hybrid Chocktaw-black called Red Homer, used to work some at the stables, breaking horses and shoeing. Some days those two would come home drunk and shoving, come to blows out front the house. That’s the nascent ingrained image of my soul, the vision of them, muddied up and stenched, tussling in the gruel like shoats. 

When Red Homer got lynched on account of raping the young Miss Lizzy Barnes, Odus went to each member of the posse what done it, demanding some sum for recompense. After enough of that squad shooed him off, he finally complained to the marshal, who said Odus better take it up with the dead Abe Lincoln, seeing as it was he who had emancipated the slave and made him ex-, thus freeing not just Homer from chattelhood but every white man from any obligation owed to Odus’ purse for him as well. 

It wasn’t long until Odus, drunk, yanked the tail of an unbroke and unnamed buck and received that appaloosa’s hoof, suffered mightily for it. Dispossessed of most of his chompers save the molars, concussed into a dizziness that was persistent, Odus’ mood turned mercurial. Something in his head got rattled, and like a rattler he grew poisonous and too quick to stay long sat. He’d leave the stable daily, get drunk and molest the whores that lived upstairs of the saloon. Groomsman Adams who ran that stable caught Odus stealing a greenback out his coat and from then on Odus was barred. I believe that Adams threatened to tie him to a post and place that same appaloosa before him and whip the beast until it concluded its business with Odus’ jaw. 

Cosmic mourning. Drinking and cussing, living like a suicide, like as if Odus had been hurled from heaven, a single rebel. Booze-blind Odus would slump to the earth and hurl ignominious hexes, “Fat bellied dog meat, tha’ Adams, tha’ ugly lump’a turds. Guzzle me, guzzle wha’ mah pecker’s fixed to give ya. I’ll learn ya wha’ I means tah steal!” 

When he woke it was all, “Awful, awful! Lil’ bro’er-”, seizing my nape and shaking me to tears, “- Best be learnin’ somethin’ now, I’s sure as shit won’t be long to teach ya. I’s gonna go to the tall bridge east’er here and jump.” Then with a howl he’d throw himself to the ground and say, “I’s feel blacker then Red was!” 

In intervals he’d invariably forget me, rummage for a bottle and fail to find one. “I’s not long fer this. Not long, not long…” 

And muttering imperceptibles he’d trudge through the door. In town he’d find the other sad drunk children and they’d commence another day of scavenging for grubs and halfpennies and fighting one another over the shiny things that are valuable to the barely adult poor. 

One night Odus returned swacked and frantic-screaming, that he’d strangled a whore and stole the little pistol she kept in her brazier. His swinging scrawniness made him the model of desperation, and his lefthand-held bottle touched his lips as often as his righthand muzzle grazed his bleeding temple. He would not say what caused that wound. For what felt a long time he staggered from wall to wall, kicking dirt and cursing the plumes. Then he remembered Adams: 

“Groomer! On his gizzard I can smell tha’ grease he’s made’a! Lard, oh lord, lard! Fatty fuckin’ fat. Tha’ bastard thinks ta’ ban me from his horsery, an’ fa’ what? Presum’shin, mere presum’shin. I am an inno’sin’ man, lil bro’er, destituted by the meanness of mah ahm-ploy. An’ you! That pot-bellied owner of a dozen ponies and a ugly appaloosa wrongs mah lil’ bro’er, condemns mah poor baby bro’er, mah ward and mah care! Ya eat dirt now, and yezzerday’s curdled milk. Ya’r so frail, honey, lookatcha.” 

Odus pressed the bleeding welt that biggened his right side to my ear, squeezed and whispered, “A life of dis-ease, oh baby you’ll be sick all yer life. What can ya grow inta wi’out bread? He’s killin’ ya, the damned groomsman Adams is killin’ mah baby bro’er. Adams!” Strongly pressing the muzzle to his head before aiming it to Heaven and stiffly shaking his arm there, “Adams! Yer a mur’erer! Killin’ my honey bro’er, wi’hol’in my pay! Recompense me, mur’erer, or I’ll pay you! I’ll pay you, I ‘ave ev’ry righta do sa. Yer wi’hol’in of mine monies is a violence, a long buckshot’a starvation, cold and disrepute. ‘Nuffa it! I’ll end ya, Adams!” 

And in a flurry I was dragged through sopping streets of wet manure and trampled earth, dizzy drawn on by the hateful tug of Odus’ arm. He led me by the long way behind the building with the whore’s rooms, whereat I heard screaming and un-faced men within talk of vengeance. Odus bade me crouch and wrapped me in his slobbery bosom, bent the crook of his elbow across my mouth and let no sound escape me. Like a countrified crab he waddled me low past taverns and apothecaries and fast past the constabulary. So close to the upwards splash of street mud were we that soon we encrusted two were as dark as the night that quiet hummed about us. I perceived in all this a threat, a phantasm of danger that was wafting in the rare starlit fumes. 

At last we came to the stables. Odus hid me in a barrel that brimmed with foul smelling stuff and said to wait. He crept off around the far end of the office and disappeared in night. I still don’t know what stuff I sat in but I know that breathing it made me sick. Its noxiousness begun to trepan me, and the front side of my skull begun to throb. I tried to climb the barrel’s rim but was too slippery and plunged back into the toxicity. Surfacing, I could not help to cough and wheezed the waxy stuff from my nostrils in burning snorts. “Tha’ fuck, I said quit it.” That was Odus creeping up on me from the stable’s other side. “Ain’t you listen ta’ nothin’?” 

He yanked me out and set me upright on the mud. “Well, he ain’t here.” 

Odus ignored my sputtering and I pursued the wringing of my sticky hair. 

“I got’s his drink though. Tha’s a start. I’ll murder ya yet Adams, and glug yer drinky too.” 

A cork popped and flew into the stables. Odus sat with his back against the barrel and took long draws from the bottle. He looked to me, “Have a swig, honey,” and that was my first taste of drink. 

We sat and drank a long time. Odus didn’t talk, just stroked his mangy mustache and brooded through the long dark of the empty stable straight ahead, marinating something ugly within himself. For all his beating and cursing and unwashedness, I thought he looked littler than I. I felt warm and squirmed in my liquored skin.

I was the first to spot the horse’s form. It came lumbering and into view like a hesitant predator come to meet its betters. Aloud I noted it and Odus cocked his gun. “Tha’s the nag what snatched mah teeth.” 

Odus stood too fast and the appaloosa halted. It was dalmatian speckled and watched us with a frightful eye, full of fear and wonder. Its eyeballs were mostly whites and kept just the smallest drop of hazel pupil, tender, gentle. The appaloosa had to be a child, I could sense it in its bearing. It moved as I did. 

“Come kill this thang lil’ bro’er, i’s this what hurt me.” 

I took one step and froze. Odus snapped his head back and bore his toothless gums, scratched the crust of blood fossilized on his brow and ran it across the pinkness in his jaw like warpaint. “Come on now. This the horse what took mah teeth, cost me mah ahm-ploy. Do right by yer bro’er Odus, honey. Stand up.” 

The neigh cost me my courage. Armed with drink and infant stupidity I might’ve strolled up and shot the thing, but the killing of a sound-making animal was a different, difficult prospect. The appaloosa trampled in its spot and was nervous. Its hooves beat the ground and I heard it whiny again. My brother kept the pistol cocked and leveled and followed the shaking long head hither and thither, even as the appaloosa’s anxious minor frolics plead no in an animal sign language, intuiting malice. I was desperate to leave and felt a press upon my bladder, saw the appaloosa’s baby eyes gleam with distant starlight and wanted to cry. Still greased and slipping I weakly advanced to Odus, took the gun and held my youthful smooth hands between his sullied palms, stood against the bulwark of his kneecap, heard “‘Tween the beast’s eyes,” and “Now!” 

A new splatter added to the speckled dot decoration of the appaloosa’s coat. The gush proceeded in a pretty way, the split vein sending a stream of wine dark fluid into a half-arc that was Appolonian and ideal. That arc terminated at the apex point and resolved itself into globby drops. The appaloosa went straight onto its left side, thudded and kicked the hooves that had wronged Odus in a spindle of limbs, and only then did it start to scream. My hands trembled and Odus snatched the pistol as he hopped the fence and ran to where the ponies were. 

Ours was a stout blonde mare and it moved fast enough to spirit us from town before the sherif or the men from the whorehouse knew we’d slaughtered the hundred buck horse. We rode. Ozark jungle. Plants, fatted on chlorophyll and bare sun. When Odus trapped game I was happy, usually I was thirsty, usually delirious with heat and dehydration. Months unmoored from any home or homestead and attached only to Odus and his unending monologue, the stream of complaints about his station and wrong-gotten lowliness. I watched him turn whiskey into vacant glass as if his stomach were an alchemist’s athanor that cooked substance and made it disappear and I watched him visit too many hick ladies and squander our last paper bills on them and watched him find the colored neighborhood of every town we went through just to fight whatever gang of freedman he could offend and watched him bleed and never heal and then bleed again and watched him move with an unset broken arm in a sling made of his shirtsleeve and watched his bones ossify into a crookedness and watched him steal boots from a tannery and neglect mine own bare feet and watched him, and all of it as if in a dream, and when I awoke I was in Independence. 

Whereat the federal government of these states and territories had not long ago torn up in a hail of incendiaries was by then all diverted to transition, halfway built and everything just nearly constructed. The buildings bore their timber scaffolds on their upper stories if they had them, and great patches of grass bore the marks of newly outgrown char. From here, countless lives would be launched into Oregon, abandoning the upset structure of law and taxes for what each pilgrim thought would prove fertility and a coast that needed ports. In droves of hopefuls, full-fleshed and ready, they’d be herded in inclement weathers and past whatever scalpers still remained in the nation’s embryonic middle, then get skinny and succumb to every pox that coughed on them. Many would eat the thin skin of the horses that were starved in that endeavor, or slaughter an ox when the end was near and the food run low. I myself, upon our entrance, observed a group of go-backers, gossiped about in hushed tones of condemnation: that this family of formerly four and now three had fallen far behind their wagon train and wandered back in desperation. That the parents had sold their youngest daughter to an Indian in exchange for a week’s worth of meals. 

Soon Odus fell in with a group of ciboleros and gained their confidence. These leathered men had come to Independence to sell a haul of char, and some of their crew had determined to leave and go east for steady work and female company. The head clansman among them was a cruel Okie called Junebug, a hairy Gargantua and reputed to be equally unkind to man and buffalo alike. “He kill’t a hundred of them thangs on his lonesome not but a year ago, set down in north Nebraska and let ‘em come to him. Picked the brutes off just as they passed.” All agreed on the veracity of this tale, but there was dispute as to whether the brutes in question were bison or Sioux. 

Charmless Odus somehow charmed Junebug and got hired on as a bone-picker. “We’re headin’ up, killin’ big shaggies,” was all he said. 

My mind’s eye still sees Junebug’s own squinting overhead. His left flashed like lightning and his right was half hidden behind a drooping lid. What sliver I could see was gelatin, pink and white pulverized and barely holding to the socket, crushed in some ancient injury. Junebug inspected me with his good ball and, breathing putridity from between his open lips, adjudicated: 

“Fine by me.” Then turning to Odus and beholding my brother through his lameness, “But you’s feed ‘im and attend to his necessaries. If he is wounded or is a nuisance then I will shoot him.” 

For the first and last time in my life I lived as a pack animal. Our crew moved like lobos, lean spewing rabid froth. Vicious men, silhouettes, lacking compass or compassion, tarantula legged players in a long dumbshow. Across the unbordered country we proceeded, our brute cabal. In newly mint Nebraska I saw Odus wield the knife that defrocked a Mormon of his jugular and picked the dead cultist’s pocket of a few golden coins. We hounded a trapper at the edge of that state, caught him after three day’s chase and bound him to an old tree and took his satchel, left him living but doomed and resigned to slow expiration. There was a woman I won’t speak of. And I, the timid runt of that wolfpack, dodged their snarling side-eye glances and made myself useful, fetching water and necessaries from the panniers. 

Distended wilderness stretched ever onwards, as if each day’s forward travel unraveled more land for the next. A mum country, full of stoic crags and dry spells. Hallucinations of a weird and distant beauty, each day refreshed only to fall again to the day’s pursuits. I have breathed unbelievable air, old oxygens unlunged by any other man; and yet the stale exhalation of corrupting touch made every gust miasma. Our tumorous influence. 

If angels glimpsed us from the vantage of celestial portholes then they saw most of all the long interlock of flames left in our wake, a fallen zodiacal connection, stars burning holes into the earth. In hearths, ground-bound constellations, we stored a great charge for the last conflagration, a fired line to volt us in the ultimate hunt that was purposed. 

And a parallel line running alongside us, buffalo bones. Skulls, broad phalanges, scattered and putrefied like misremembered loadstones in the expanse. Clusters of these, increasing exponential as we cornered the still-living herds. 

At last we happed upon the wooly ones. They were dwindling and fearful and lived up north in the cold, by now too schooled in the industrial hunt to much leave the top part of the country. The first I ever touched discharged the warmth of its monolung like ethereal baptism. Its eyes, like smoothed boulders, trusting despite the centuries of genetic memory that should’ve bid the beast run. Behind the girth of it I recall the tilt of a herd turning in unison around a magic animal axis, circumscribing some low hill. I pet my buffalo in a wallow tenderized by ten million trampling feet, mixed the snow of my palms with the shag of its hide, communed in a gentle way. 

Then a shot rang out and the thing did not flinch, but bled from the neck, a trickle slipping from the gullet and past its tongue, and collapsed. On the horizon I saw smoke rise from Junebug’s barrel, his sharpshooting eye unsquint. Odus was angled next to him, looking at nothing, staving hunger and shame. 

Pelts were stacked in towers of accrue, standing reserved on the outskirts of camp. The meat was salted and stored in satchels, or else sunned and dried into jerky. Odus picked the bones as he had been hired on to do. Stripped them of residues and collected them in a wagon that jostled with a death sound when it rolled. The tinkly percussion of that cart rung out in a light clanking clatter, Odus the lean troubadour steersman who wheeled it, herald of further assassinations of cousin and brother beasts further up the plains — Run from Odus, distant shaggies, run from my demented brother— He is hellbent and will not announce his coming, save for the dead timbre of his collection cart— He’s come for the slaughter— He’s a jumble of sadnesses— A wicked disposition he does not want to wrestle—Think of how he’ll hurt ya, dumb shaggie, who he does not even love, if I his brother that he does love he loves just enough to feed and keep—

Odus took to long skulks on the edge of whatever the day’s nebulous plot was, downed drink like a drowning man and waddled in dropsy back to camp, flopped to the hearth. In sleep he muttered loathesome lines, sad memento mori’s from the suppressed portions of his mind: “Aloneliness a’ways… distance hither…” and other such hieroglyphical dream speech. 

Or else his guttural nocturnes were valley howls and prairie sounds, a preemptive requiem, sufferer’s music. Bone picking had remade my brother in the image of the act. Near the end he stooped and moved like a vulture, bent in the scurrying of his deed, pecking at death and always grasping at its victuals. 

When his cart was full of marrow sopped bones, he retrieved the furnace. 

It went like this: Black obelisk, rigid linear unswerevd cubic thing, formerly the sole content of the gut cart now erected on the plains. A crude circle made it the central sigil of assembled stones, and the working commenced with a spark. The furnace’s pipe received the heat and amplified it in its red engine like Hell. Odus splashed rare tonics, elixirs of violent superheat to charge the thing up and make it scream with burning. Then the reckless engineer begun to feed the moaning metal golem, the creature he had kindled into dumb life. First came more wood chips to wet the contraption’s appetite, then bones. 

Shoveled bones, thrown bones, shards and splinters and long ivory ribs like tusks torn from the marrow-plush plexus of the dead. Like fearsome Moloch receiving screaming children on-top of ziggurats, like Beelzebub basking in the fleshly-fired warmth of heathen hearths, always alight for the lord of flies, the furnace raged against the air with miasmatic asthmatic stink. Odus was the engineer of that terrible machine, smelting the melt body rottenness within into a sellable commodity. Odus fetch the poker, Odus tamp the innards into bits. Odus pounds spines skulls and ribcages into finer finery until this all approximates dusts. Frantic Odus, always hollering for more bones to fry, caked in the putrefaction that he compacts into foul coagula: black patties, smoked globules of dripping dark goo. The ash assaulted him, gives him to wheezing fits, ruddy red eyes, and a coat of grey soot. At last ashy Odus glowed alien and pale and was marked out as a poltergeist among the forms. 

The image of this work was like the frontispiece to some cursed grimoire hardly read and never spoken of. Beneath the enormity of skies untouched by gaslamp phosphoresce slaved his slavish form, beneath cool lunar blue and the shine of distant bodies. These astrally laughed at Odus in diestic dispassion, swaying his fate just enough to place him, never pardon him, never gesture at relief. At quitting Odus glowed darkly, was veritable discoloration, the act embodied in a man. Just his eyes protruded from the black he blended in, red as blood and smoke strained. Still singed in his materials, Odus would lay down, pass to slumber, and scream. 

For my part, I played courier, dragging shucked skeletons from the camp pile to Odus’ own. If I lagged in that, or lost my grip on any piece, it was as if a sacred object had been profaned, and Junebug would molest me something vicious: kicking, screaming, heaving me about the camp, toss me to the ponies and spur them on a minor trample. Odus deferred me to these pervert games, never minding Junebug’s meanness. His love for me was equal to his disinheritance, and against all of my abusers Odus did not raise a hand. Yet he alone saddled his own horse, retrieved his own flasks and underclothes. I think he did not ask me on account of the omerta that was general and unspoken, that if he had and had I served him then he too would be obliged to beat his younger brother. So he blind-eyed the others, and blind-eyed me altogether too. 

Junebug’s blind eye was always turned against me. He sat me near the gut cart and bid me sleep among the foulest smelling parts of the reap. He doled more bruises than the others, and dolorous Odus abided that odium. Abiding became Odus, fit him like the draping hide he’d claimed and made his cloak. This is to say he was enveloped by a withdrawn disposition, his character all allowance and hidden thoughts. 

The carts teemed with slaughter— salted meat in the cabooses and char brimming out the back, either in so many barrels or even doubly cooking itself under the high noon sun of daily solar perigee. We were fixed for market, and the order was laid down that Odus should conclude with the char by week’s end and that we would be finished in the wasteland prairie lands and sell off in the first big town we found and visit the whores there, and that Odus had been too slow on the char to warrant future commission with Junebug’s band and that he would be decommissioned with his minor share in town and was not to be recontracted. 

It was under these circumstances that Odus enacted his prolonged execution. Moiling over the last of the bones and rapidly feeding his stove, my brother dismissed me and sent me running up a distant high hill. I surveyed the broad landscape, where the skinwalkers of the indigene traipsed in shadow, and the elementals of their lore dueled mythologic combats in the streaks of lightning that boomed far out and in the heavens. I watched a storm roll in, churning its wetness over in rolls. Like mute supplication the smoke of Odus’ furnace rose up to meet the darkening sky. There were marvels latent in that scene, quiet resplendence. I saw then Odus near the furnace kneel, saw his head go up as a flailing point, and intimated in the silence the loudness of his scream. 

I ran. Ran, fell, and ran, came into camp bruised and bearing thorns. The men had laid him out on the skimpiest sheet of bison hide they could fetch and fed him whiskey. His bad arm was steaming and the steam rose off of it where the flesh used to be, all red tenderness and nearly skinned. Somehow the stove had caught his limb and kept it, and the mandibles of that cookery had roasted Odus until the first man to reach him had set it loose. 

“Sever me, cauterize wha’s left intah lack! Lord! Just cut it ahf an’ make it nothin’!” Who would oblige? 

“Sever me!” 

“Do not yap,” was all Junebug said, “Drink the whiskey and quiet.” 

“I drunk it!” hissed my brother, holding the empty bottle up. “Feels no diff’rent! Feels, feels an’ tha’s mah trouble. Sever me, lord, sever me!” 

Junebug looked on the pitiful crumple of my brother. “No, I will not amputate. Our association is nearly dissolved. And besides, I hired on a man with two arms. You’ll still attend the char tomorrow. The sting will keep you diligent.” 

Night was an agon. Odus vaulted vague curses to heaven and wept intermittently among the din of card games and trail songs. 

I dreary drifted into sleep and conjured unreal and ungrounded memories along the ambiance of talk and whimpers. I saw my Pa in a regiment march to the edge of Virginia and fade there, I saw Odus hold me kindly in a way he never did. I saw a face sneer in Sirius, smelled a burnt-offering fade. I heard a shot ring out and slept, another and slept still. I was ensconced in penumbras of pre-placental dream, returned to the preconscious being of my primordial before. I rose off the continent and ascended into supralunar planes on the lift of a chariot. I passed Mars and Jupiter, was halted at the rings of Saturn and accosted by a guard of celestial spaces. The praetorian demanded a password. I spoke no shibboleth, and turning to the planet saw its hexagonal spot extend in shapeliness, become a box with depth and breadth. A radiant heat assaulted me; then a voice called up elemental powers, and unsealed seals: “Ye’ve jellified me! I’m jelly-eye’d! Ye’ve jellyized my jelly eye!” 

Vicious limerick. In a gasp I rose like a lever and was in the company of dead men, wetted with rain. 

Corpses lay all about like unreasoning animals. Some bore a slice across the neck and these slices were marked with the gush of burnt sienna hue, still wet and glistening and falling in the just-so motile movement of dead flesh’s blood. Others were spread in pink chunks of brain and cranium, bits adhering to the thick reeds and waving in the whistle of wind like lost souls gripping the last material thing they could find. These had awoke at the sound of successive death rattles, hastily armed themselves in twilit discombobulation, staggered still-drunk and bleary until the daemoniac Odus reached them in hateful ecstasy and shot. And like titans before me and illumined in the heroic light of flames from the raging pit, there struggled Odus and Junebug in a grapple. Through shadows I saw Junebug’s crushed eye now more crushed, smashed to gross liquid by the butt of Odus’ emptied gun and leaking unmedical goos from the socket. He had Odus’ right hand in his, and his left arm met Odus’ also, reeking flesh and injurious rot, baring subcutaneous layers, and Odus did not give a damn about the state of that limb, but through unbelievable pains grimaced and pushed back as if he would never use the arm again and had to concert all its store of strength now, now in decrepitude against the devil Junebug. 

I, stunned and witless, mute watched the contest. In mud, one pushed the other and was repulsed back two paces, would make a gain of three and almost overcome his enemy and then was countered into a near submission, and on and on this went in carousels of human worth, strength and fruitlessness, round the smoulder in the earth and in a deluge. 

Odus spoke in tongues unanswerable, brute grunts without syntax, de-declensioned, conjugating hate. He was the living gerund of all curses; the force, vector, and pulse of pain. In a last blast of volcanic missiling energy Odus shoved the adversary and the man slipped and fell so that his back was engulfed by burn. And Odus did not let the man up. He saw to it that Junebug stayed, reeked, flitted up in heat; and this he did with the thrust of his own gimp arm into the pit. 

Yes, Odus burned his crispy flesh into a further crisp, further turned his left side into a skillet. He ensured the deed was done before he let up, scorching mess of a man, dripping skin and silent. 

He looked well past me and did not seem to care. Then he turned to the tall grass, walked aways into it, flame spurting off his incendiary bod. The grass received this, as if nature, parched and withered, would sooner quench itself by way of immolation than with the still heavy rain. And against that rain the fire grew, more tremendous than its counter, and soon there was a spreading. A magic link jumped the flames from the plains to the pit, to the cremated Junebug, and then the air received that linked inferno and raised it higher up and shot it out in tongues until a pillar of fire, broad as the long basins of the rugged country and higher than the Appalachias, was the only thing left before me. 

Through the holocaustal shade I saw the figure of my brother unlatch his kiln, crawl up in it, reach out, shut it, die. Like cannibal oblation to the unfeeling cosmic maw of the god that demanded him, the invisible anthropomorph in the sky, the cruelest cowboy, hemming all ranges into barbwire fetter. I ran from that revelation, the muteness I could not unreveal, ran in fiery flotsam, Hell-heeled all the time, even unto this word.