Read Online Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter - Free Book Online

the stone floor and hurtling in headlong panic past the men pressed against the staircase walls. From below them came a frantic whinny followed by a single shot as the horse reached the sanctuary.
    Bert stood at the bottom of the stairs, the officer’s pistol dangling loosely in his hand. The horse lay a few feet away, nearly dead, its tongue tasting the dusty marble of the floor, its eyes watching the heavens painted above them.
    They all stood around it dumbly until Sergeant Carlson stepped forward and shot the horse in the head. The animal lay still. He looked down at it, rasping a hand across his face. “Well,” he said, raising his eyes and looking around him at the others, “we’re not leaving a dead horse in a church.” He removed his helmet and ran a hand through his hair. There were the beginnings of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Anyone see anyplace to get a drink in this town?” he asked. Then the smile disappeared and he stepped back to survey the problem of the dead horse. “I’m buying for anybody who’s ever moved a dead horse before.” Bert was still standing by the door, the gun swinging slightly back and forth like a pendulum.
    “Bert,” he said, but Bert’s eyes were far off beneath his yellow hair, as if he were looking at reflections in the pooling blood there on the checkered slabs.
    “Bert!” Carlson stepped between the boy and the dead horse. “If I
ever
see that Kraut gun of yours again, I’m going to kick your teeth in.”
    It took ten of them to push and drag the horse by its legs and neck across the blood-slicked marble floor. Finally they got itdown the nave and from there pulled it bruisingly down the steps and out under the full ominous weight of the afternoon sky. Then there was nowhere else to drag it, and so they all straightened and looked around at one another and then around at the shattered village, unsure of what to do next.
    Bright took off his helmet and walked back up the steps and into the church for a last look at the girl on the ceiling, but the light through the transept windows had begun to fade and he had to squint now to read her features. Then, hearing the sergeant call his name, he turned and walked out past the immense wooden doors to rejoin the company. He had just replaced his helmet when the air above them screamed and the church exploded.

15
     
    Back in the sunlight, a sack of rag diapers in his arms, a new box of matches in his pocket, and his son clean and dry in the sling on his chest, Bright watched the girl named Margaret as she glided down the street above her throng of children.
    “The Future King of Heaven needs that woman, Henry Bright.”
    Bright said nothing, tying the bundle of diapers to the saddle pommel, where they would hang next to the bucket of goat’s milk.
    “The Future King of Heaven needs a mother,” the angel said again.
    He untied the goat and then swung the animals around in the direction from which they’d come into town.
    “She will suckle your child. Your son needs a mother or he will die. He will starve.”
    “He ain’t gonna starve. I been feeding him, haven’t I?”
    “Your child cannot live long on goat milk. See how skinny he is. How slight.”
    Bright ignored the angel and began to lead the party up Main Street. Off in the distance the smoke from the fire painted the sky a sulfurous gray. The wind picked up, its hot tail whipping against their faces as it sucked past them.
    “Bithiah,” the angel began.
    “You’re talking nonsense and I don’t want to hear it,” Bright said as he watched the darkly spreading wings to the west. “Did you see that car? A girl like that, and all them kids dressed up so pretty, ribbons in their hair? Did you see her?” He coughed. “What would a girl like that need with my boy and me?”
    “Bithiah,” the angel continued, “was the daughter of the Pharaoh. She found a baby boy floating in a basket of reeds and she raised him as her own. This child was the