Read Online The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert - Free Book Online

space and compel planets to mind their proper ellipses; a poem steers every line, every word, every syllable into circles held by the gravity of an idea beyond the speakable as is God. People circle the Lord’s presence; his power is in the circle we turn. Our lives are evidence by the sense in them, the repetition in them, birth, death, seed and earth and sprout, then harvest and tilling and the undoing of the stalks and their return to feed in the season that follows.
    He paused. “Aside from a sidewise glance or a reflection in a window, you can’t look at the sun. It will burn your eyes out. So you look at shadows and blue sky and faces, and that’s the evidence it is day and the sun you can’t look at exists. And when night falls and you can’t see these things without a lantern or electric light that, too, is evidence of the sun. Its absence proves its presence.”
    â€œThe man has a silver tongue,” Miller said.
    â€œWhite isn’t black,” The Indian replied. “That’s not Jesus talking. Sounds more like Coyote.”
    â€œMaybe they’re kin,” Miller said.
    The preacher broke for a silent prayer, and each head within the tent bent while the woman outside continued spinning an animal at the spit or stirring salads or toasting muffins upon the rocks encircling the cooking fires. One dipped a paintbrush extended with rake handles into honey-filled buckets and striped the baking pig with it. The choir commenced “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which started as dirge, built to a march and finally turned a cry for war that left the accordion player’s white shirt clinging to his sweaty skin, a kind of pink mottle as they finished.
    It was a startling reversal from the pensive to the fervent, and when Matt turned to Wendy, she appeared shaken to witness it. He took her hand without thought, and she his. She stared at them, joined that way, as did he, and it was as if they had joined every other way, as well. Past sex and ardor and lust, all of which they were vaguely conscious, past anything they could imagine and only equal to the simplicity and innocence adults could recall in their most wistful moments of awkward, sincere feeling.
    Matt gazed at those beneath, tucked in the tent, hushed, awaiting their marching orders or outside daubing the braised meat with condiment. Like drunks entering a tavern or soldiers going to war, they had enlisted individuals but turned gears in a larger contraption and now could not be separated unless to undo the wholemachine. They smoked cigarettes and nodded their head, songs and philosophy fixing one to the other a sloppy, messy paste, but adhere they did to the sway of the hymns and the minister’s voice as, refreshed by water and a biscuit, he lifted his god’s standard and continued.
    Wendy squeezed Matt’s hand. He wondered if she was seeing what he was and thinking his thoughts. He had never been alone; even the womb he had shared with a brother; they bobbed and breathed the same fluid and tapped the placenta’s feed tube in unison, hollered their first cries together, shat their first diapers. Their fights often seemed to him to emanate from a particular kind of vehemence, one rooted to separation. In anger, they returned to a single furious entity at least until the blows commenced, when each felt his own pain separately.
    Wendy squeezed his hand again, and he looked up at her face. She was smiling with a devilment that eventually interested him. She nodded to the opposite ridge, now nearly a blank against the sky. The dogs’ racket had increased. One or the other rider had loosed the rope, and the dogs instead of a line turned a crescent, then a half moon, then a broken charge as one rope end was freed. The animals hurtled toward the spits like a prairie fire with a tailwind and leaped upon the beef and hog, ignoring the women batting at their haunches and shoulders. The cooks’ screams