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.I’m coming, when I can.I quit the quarry, my spurt of exuberance drained, my spirit edgy and taut.The quarry path parallels Tinker Creek far upstream from my house, and when the woods broke into clearing and pasture, I followed the creek banks down.When I drew near the tear-shaped island, which I had never before approached from this side of the creek, a fence barred my way, a feeble wire horse fence that wobbled across the creek and served me as a sagging bridge to the island.I stood, panting, breathing the frail scent of fresh water and feeling the sun heat my hair.The December grass on the island was blanched and sere, pale against the dusty boles of sycamores, noisy underfoot.Behind me, the way I had come, rose the pasture belonging to Twilight, a horse of a perpetually different color whose name was originally Midnight, and who one spring startled the neighborhood by becoming brown.Far before me Tinker Mountain glinted and pitched in the sunlight.The Lucas orchard spanned the middle distance, its wan peach limbs swept and poised just so, row upon row, like a stageful of thin innocent dancers who will never be asked to perform; below the orchard rolled the steers’ pasture yielding to floodplain fields and finally the sycamore log bridge to the island where in horror I had watched a green frog sucked to a skin and sunk.A fugitive, empty sky vaulted overhead, apparently receding from me the harder I searched its dome for a measure of distance.Downstream at the island’s tip where the giant water bug clasped and ate the living frog, I sat and sucked at my own dry knuckles.It was the way that frog’s eyes crumpled.His mouth was a gash of terror; the shining skin of his breast and shoulder shivered once and sagged, reduced to an empty purse; but oh those two snuffed eyes! They crinkled, the comprehension poured out of them as if sense and life had been a mere incidental addition to the idea of eyes, a filling like any jam in a jar that is soon and easily emptied; they flattened, lightless, opaque, and sank.Did the giant water bug have the frog by the back parts, or by the hollow of the thigh? Would I eat a frog’s leg if offered? Yes.In addition to the wave breast of thanksgiving, in which the wave breast is waved before the Lord, there is another voluntary offering performed at the same time.In addition to the wave breast of thanksgiving, there is the heave shoulder.The wave breast is waved before the altar of the Lord; the heave shoulder is heaved.What I want to know is this: Does the priest heave it at the Lord? Does he throw the shoulder of the ram of consecration—a ram that, before the priest slayed and chunked it, had been perfect and whole, not “Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen, or scurvy, or scabbed…bruised, or crushed, or broken, or cut”—does he hurl it across the tabernacle, between the bloodied horns of the altar, at God? Now look what you made me do.And then he eats it.This heave is a violent, desperate way of catching God’s eye.It is not inappropriate.We are people; we are permitted to have dealings with the creator and we must speak up for the creation.God look at what you’ve done to this creature, look at the sorrow, the cruelty, the long damned waste! Can it possibly, ludicrously be for this that on this unconscious planet with my innocent kind I play softball all spring, to develop my throwing arm? How high, how far, could I heave a little shred of frog shoulder at the Lord? How high, how far, how long until I die? I fingered the winter killed grass, looping it round the tip of my finger like hair, ruffling its tips with my palms.Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish.“The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play; at the end they throw a little earth upon your head, and it’s all over forever.” Somewhere, everywhere, there is a gap, like the shuddering chasm of Shadow Creek which gapes open at my feet, like a sudden split in the window or hull of a high-altitude jet, into which things slip, or are blown, out of sight, vanished in a rush, blasted, gone, and can no more be found.For the living there is rending loss at each opening of the eye, each augenblick, as a muskrat dives, a heron takes alarm, a leaf floats spinning away.There is death in the pot for the living’s food, fly-blown meat, muddy salt, and plucked herbs bitter as squill.If you can get it.How many people have prayed for their daily bread and famished? They die their daily death as utterly as did the frog, people, played with, dabbled upon, when God knows they loved their life.In a winter famine, desperate Algonquian Indians “ate broth made of smoke, snow, and buckskin, and the rash of pellagra appeared like tattooed flowers on their emaciated bodies—the roses of starvation, in a French physician’s description; and those who starved died covered with roses.” Is this beauty, these gratuitous roses, or a mere display of force?Or is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all? There is a certain fragment of an ancient and involved Eskimo tale I read in Farley Mowat that for years has risen, unbidden, in my mind.The fragment is a short scenario, observing all the classical unities, simple and cruel, and performed by the light of a soapstone seal-oil lamp.A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent.By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts.But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy.Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon strangled by her own hair.One thing Eskimos know is skinning.The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull.When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in the tent on top of the world.But he is wet from hunting; the skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever.Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?A wind rose, quickening; it seemed at the same instant to invade my nostrils and vibrate my gut.I stirred and lifted my head [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]