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Again Moses gestures to the church – all the statues of saints and angels and martyrs looking down upon them.
I brung him here, and I lay him down before you – and where is the arbiter to set him true or make him pay? You command tongues to hold themselves for the name of God – and now there’s a sinner, nay two, in sore need of redemption or condemnation – either one’ll do. So redeem or condemn. I keep to my order, so why ain’t you keepin to yours?
Moses, having spilled forth this liturgy of frustration, looks again to the monk Ignatius, who sits benignant with his head bowed and his hands folded in his lap – as though his were a peace that becomes stronger the more you assail it.
Finally, Moses sits back in the pew and breathes deep.
I apologize, friar, he says quietly. I’m a coarse lout who sometimes talks out of turn.
Ignatius shakes his head, as though forgiveness were too bulky a thing for two such puny beings to trade between them.
You are looking for an order, the monk says, some structure beyond your own contrivance. It may be that there is no such order.
This strikes Moses as funny, and he gives a brief, aborted chuckle.
You’re not much of a friar, friar, he says.
The laws we create for ourselves are beautiful, says the smiling Ignatius, but don’t expect the world to conform to them. You’d be lucky to find one single other person who shares your code. If you do find that person, cleave to him with ferocity. But otherwise . . .
Order’s a dancin megrim, eh?
Now Ignatius chuckles.
You have a poetry that makes me miss the words I so infrequently use.
That’s a kindness, friar, assuming you’re not makin fun.
Rest assured. Friars don’t make fun.
They sit in silence for a while, listening to the crackle of the single torch left burning in the church. The shadows move long and panicked in the orange flicker, and the statues cast phantasmagoric shadows across the frescoed walls – and the effect is of two different artforms in combat.
It’s a beautiful place you’ve got here, friar, Moses says.
It was built by the Papago in the eighteenth century under the direction of a man named Juan Bautista Velderrain.
Moses nods.
There’s been a lot of history between then and now, Moses says. The memory of a man’s name – what does it get you?
Not much, I suppose. Just a thing to collect. Like stamps or currency – things whose values used to be accepted as common. Still, not all the magics of the past have gone away. There are still some in the desert. Still some even here at the mission.
Like what magics?
Ignatius breathes in deep and narrows his eyes as though looking past the very walls of the structure.
Interesting thing about the Papago, he says. Apparently their customs lacked much of the pageantry of other tribes’. Their dances were shuffling barefoot on the earth. Their music was drumming on overturned baskets – which makes almost no noise. Everything they did was aimed downward, as though life were something that came from above and were meant to be spilled into the earth. Now everything’s backwards. You plant life in the earth – call it death if you like – but it gets spit back up. Maybe we’ve fed the earth too much. Maybe it’s lost a taste for us.
Maybe, Moses says. He’s thinking about the sound of dry palms pounding on overturned baskets in the middle of the desert. Dry, skeletal rattle, man shaking his bones.
I have a job for you, Ignatius says, if you could find terms on which to take it.
What’s the job?
Tomorrow we’ll talk. I want to show you something. But tomorrow.
*
Talk, Moses says to the caravaners. All we’ve got is talk.
He pauses in his story as if to show how great a vacuum is left in the world by the absence of speech. He gazes into the bonfire, and the others gaze with him. It is late, and the sky overhead is lightless, the stars hidden behind the blinding screen of smoke from the fire.
Talk, Moses says again. There ain’t nothin good or bad in the universe that can’t be turned the other way by talkin it around. The world, it’s all palaver. You might think different – I did too, then. But break bone and tear flesh, those are just actions that a man might do, just ways of killing time between the questions we ask ourselves in the dark. Me, I’ve built and broken in equal share – and the earth ain’t any more or any less, on the balance, as a result of my doings. But you could just sit still like we’re all doin right here and talk your way the entire journey from heaven to hell and whatever purgatory’s between.
He pauses again. No one speaks. Miles are travelled, perhaps, in their minds.
I’ve wielded thousands of weapons in my half-century of livin, Moses continues. Everything from rifle to tree branch. And I’m tellin you there’s no artillery more powerful than words. Those spoken and those un – it makes no difference.
The mute who travels with him, the one he calls Maury, suddenly howls up at the sky, an extended, inchoate keen like that of a coyote – representing not hunger nor loneliness nor anything else but some arcane and inscrutable desire cried to the unanswering heavens. One-eyed Moses turns to look at his companion with brief but solicitous care. But the mute hushes again and begins to play with his fingers quietly.
Words, Moses goes on, spoken or un, comprehensible or in, it makes no difference. I used to be one kind of man, and then I became another. And then another. And still another after that. Moses Todd, the painted man. Maybe all of us are painted, all of us circus clowns – and the act moves from ring to ring. I used to be one kind of man, and then I spoke to a monk and I became someone else. And then there was a girl, and the two of us talked, and I became someone else.
He goes silent for a moment, his eyes lost in contemplation of his own past, but then he shakes himself back into the present.
But no, that’s something else – the girl, I mean – that’s a different story. See, words are dangerous for how they proliferate. The plague of the dead ain’t nothin to the plague of language, for it works insidious at your memory and your perception of all things. This story – the one I’m speaking to you right now – it’s about holy things. But the tellin of what’s holy and what’s not – well, that’s a beautiful magic of parlance, ain’t it?
He pauses again, lowering a stick into the fire until it catches and then bringing the flaming end up to his cigar. He puffs three times to bring the weed alight, lets the smoke spill out between his lips and over his beard, and then continues his story.
