Read Online Winter Count by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online

lists of, so he would be sure to look them up. His therapeutic attempt to reclaim his self-possessed and undisturbed self was mirrored for him in the gardens he tended; he made judgments on his state and wondered at his progress by studying the movements of his hands among the flowers. How deft? he would ask himself. How portentous? he would ask, and so continue in his own self-destruction.
    One afternoon he was cogitating over a word he had encountered that morning and become enamored of immediately because it was a word he felt caught for a moment in its definition the meaning of his condition: sharawadji, a graceful disorder. As one fans a deck of cards he fanned this notion in his mind until in the farrago of ideas he saw himself as metaphysically disheveled but still presentable (even more conscious now of being Mexican), and saw as well the irony of neat gardens, deeply rooted, surrounding the houses of superficial people in moral disarray (thus did he tap his own bigotry). On another day, after he had entered a period of self-pity, he dwelled on the word ahimsa, the doctrine of respect for all living things. And thus did he develop scruples about the rights of aphids and the crying of mown grass. And one evening after work, taking a chance that would not have occurred to him a month before, he entered a guest house and with his list of words began paging through a large dictionary which lay inert on a wrought-iron floor stand. The owner stepped in on him; he was apologetic and properly obsequious, but it was clear almost immediately that something else was required. He attempted an explanation. His nervousness, his clothing, his accent all undid him; what he hoped would pass for erudition suddenly seemed only stupidity. As he held out the list in desperation he realized it resembled something cribbed and illegal, and he felt the penetration of a sense of injustice. Tact held him to a sense of irony. His rage precipitated only a wry smile.
    The loss of other jobs that followed he saw as predictable, a result of the moral and metaphysical overlaying he had indulged. He had never, to his mind, indulged himself before. But he was now bereft of that innocence and he besieged himself with endless mental explanations, and scruples that seemed silly even to him, which made him angrier.
    In this state he allowed himself, as it were, to sleep with the devil. He accepted unemployment checks and argued with his neighbors, cursing their Mexican traits and otherwise giving evidence of self-directed anger and, of course, his pain. Concern over the state of his deprivation, the collapse of his virtue and the lassitude that accompanied his depression no longer occupied his mind.
    What saved him principally was his belief in physical equivalents, his intuition that under another set of circumstances, contrived but sincere, he could set himself right. For this single reason he went to his father. The father regarded the son as dangerously imaginative and was suspicious of his impenetrable privacy. For years he had thought his son a homosexual. He projected impertinence on him and accused him sharply of cowardice. All this flew over the son as would have the release of so many frantic doves. He sought his father’s idea of a place he might go. He explained that he had to get away. He didn’t mean to be taken cryptically and was sure after he had said it that his father would interpret the request perversely. Nevertheless, it was a son and a father. His father told him to visit an uncle in Yuma, a clerk in a motel.
    The father hugged his son, abruptly but firmly, when he left.
    He expected to be gone a while, to find a job, to spend a few weeks in the mountains to the north. He was fortunate in that he took none of these plans seriously; he simply expected to do whatever was necessary to obliterate a sense of himself. The repressed bigotry in Yuma gave him an edge to work against. His uncle went out each evening dressed with a Mexican