To a God Unknown

  "I am sorry, my friend."

  "But I want to talk about that, Juanito, because you are my friend. For myself I am not sorry, because my father is here."

  "The dead are always here, senor. They never go away."

  "No," Joseph said earnestly. "it is more than that. My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it. Can you talk to me a little Juanito? You were born here. Since I have come, since the first day, I have known that this land is full of ghosts." He paused uncertainly. "No, that isn't right. Ghosts are weak shadows of reality. What lives here is more real than we are. We are like ghosts of its reality. What is it, Juanito? Has my brain gone weak from being two months alone?"

  "The dead, they never go away," Juanito repeated. Then he looked straight ahead with a light of great tragedy in his eyes. "I lied to you, senor. I am not Castilian. My mother was Indian and she taught me things."

  "What things?" Joseph demanded.

  "Father Angelo would not like it. My mother said how the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has life from the mother and goes back into the mother. When I remember, senor, and when I know I believe these things, because I see them and hear them, then I know I am not Castilian nor caballero. I am Indio."

  "But I am not Indian, Juanito, and now I seem to see it."

  Juanito looked up gratefully and then dropped his eyes, and the two men stared at the ground. Joseph wondered why he did not try to escape from the power that was seizing upon him.

  After a time Joseph raised his eyes to the oak and to the house-frame beside it. "In the end it doesn't matter," he said abruptly. "What I feel or think can kill no ghosts nor gods. We must work, Juanito. There's the house to build over there, and here's the ranch to put cattle on. We'll go on working in spite of ghosts. Come," he said hurriedly, "we haven't time to think," and they went quickly to work on the house.

  That night he wrote a letter to his brothers:

  "There's land untaken next to mine. Each of you can have a hundred and sixty acres, and then we'll have six hundred and forty acres all in one piece. The grass is deep and rich, and the soil wants only turning. No rocks, Thomas, to make your plough turn somersaults, no ledges sticking out. We'll make a new community here if you'll come."

  5

  THE grass was summer brown, ready for cutting, when the brothers came with their families and settled on the land. Thomas was the oldest, forty-two, a thick strong man with golden hair and a long yellow mustache. His cheeks were round and red and his eyes a cold wintry blue between slitted lids. Thomas had a strong kinship with all kinds of animals. Often he sat on the edge of a manger while the horses ate their hay. The low moaning of a cow in labor could draw Thomas out of bed at any hour of the night to see that the calving was true, and to help if there were trouble. When Thomas walked through the fields, horses and cows raised their heads from the grass and sniffed the air and moved in toward him. He pulled dogs' ears until they cried with the pain his strong slender fingers induced, and, when he stopped, they put their ears up to be pulled again. Thomas had always a collection of half-wild animals. Before he had been a month on the new land he had collected a raccoon, two half-grown coyote pups that slunk at his heels and snarled at everyone else, a box of ferrets and a red-tailed hawk, besides four mongrel dogs. He was not kind to animals; at least no kinder than they were to each other, but he must have acted with a consistency beasts could understand, for all creatures trusted him. When one of the dogs foolishly attacked the coon and lost an eye in the encounter, Thomas was unruffled. He scraped out the torn eye-ball with his pocket knife and pinched the dog's feet to make it forget the torture in its head. Thomas liked animals and understood them, and he killed them with no more feeling than they had about killing each other. He was too much an animal himself to be sentimental. Thomas never lost a cow, for he seemed to know instinctively where a straying beef would stray. He rarely hunted, but when he did go out for game, he marched straight to the hiding place of his prey and killed it with the speed and precision of a lion.

  Thomas understood animals, but humans he neither understood nor trusted very much. He had little to say to men; he was puzzled and frightened by such things as trade and parties, religious forms and politics. When it was necessary to be present at a gathering of people he effaced himself, said nothing and waited with anxiety for release. Joseph was the only person with whom Thomas felt any relationship; he could talk to Joseph without fear.

  Thomas' wife was Rama, a strong, full-breasted woman with black brows that nearly met over her nose. She was nearly always contemptuous of everything men thought or did. She was a good and efficient midwife and an utter terror to evildoing children; although she never whipped her three little daughters, they went in fear of her displeasure, for she could find a soft spot in the soul and punish there. She understood Thomas, treated him as though he were an animal, kept him clean and fed and warm, and didn't often frighten him. Rama had ways of making her field: cooking, sewing, the bearing of children, housecleaning, seem the most important things in the world; much more important than the things men did. The children adored Rama when they had been good, for she knew how to stroke the tender places in the soul. Her praise could be as delicate and sharp as her punishment was terrible. She automatically took charge of all children who came near her. Burton's two children recognized her authority as far more legally constituted than the changeable rules their own soft mother made, for the laws of Rama never changed, bad was bad and bad was punished, and good was eternally, delightfully good. It was delicious to be good in Rama's house.

  Burton was one whom nature had constituted for a religious life. He kept himself from evil and he found evil in nearly all close human contacts. Once, after a service to the church, he had been praised from the pulpit, "A strong man in the Lord," the pastor called him, and Thomas bent close to Joseph's ear and whispered, "A weak man in the stomach." Burton had embraced his wife four times. He had two children. Celibacy was a natural state for him. Burton was never well. His cheeks were drawn and lean, and his eyes hungry for a pleasure he did not expect this side of heaven. In a way it gratified him that his health was bad, for it proved that God thought of him enough to make him suffer. Burton had the powerful resistance of the chronically ill. His lean arms and legs were strong as braided ropes.

  Burton ruled his wife with a firm and scriptural hand. He parceled out his thoughts to her and pared down her emotions when they got out of line. He knew when she exceeded the laws, and when, as happened now and then, some weak thing in Harriet cracked and left her sick and delirious, Burton prayed beside her bed until her mouth grew firm again and stopped its babbling.

  Benjamin, the youngest of the four, was a charge upon his brothers. He was dissolute and undependable; given a chance, he drank himself into a romantic haze and walked about the country, singing gloriously. He looked so young, so helpless and so lost that many women pitied him, and for this reason Benjamin was nearly always in trouble with some woman or other. For when he was drunk and singing and the lost look was in his eyes, women wanted to hold him against their breasts and protect him from his blunders. It always surprised those who mothered Benjamin when he seduced them. They never knew quite how it happened, for his was a deadly helplessness. He accomplished things so badly that everyone tried to help him. His new young wife, Jennie, labored to keep Benjamin from hurt. And when she heard him singing in the night and knew that he was drunk again she prayed he might not fall and hurt himself. The singing drew off into the dark and Jennie knew that before the night was out, some perplexed and startled girl would lie with him. She cried a little for fear he might be hurt.

  Benjy was a happy man, and he brought happiness and pain to everyone who knew him. He lied, stole a little, cheated, broke his word and imposed upon kindnesses; and everyone loved Benjy and excused and guarded him. When the families moved West they brought Benjy with them for fear he might starve if he were left behind. Thomas and Joseph
saw that his homestead was in good order. He borrowed Joseph's tent and lived in it until his brothers found time to build him a house. Even Burton, who cursed Benjy, prayed with him and hated his way of living, couldn't let him live in a tent. Where he got whiskey his brothers could never tell, but he had it always. In the valley of Our Lady the Mexicans gave him liquor and taught him their songs, and Benjy took their wives when they were not watching him.

  6

  THE families clustered about the house Joseph had built. They put up little shacks on their own land as the law required, but never for a minute did they think of the land as being divided into four. It was one ranch, and when the technicalities of the homesteading were satisfied, it was the Wayne ranch. Four square houses clustered near to the great oak, and the big barn belonged to the tribe.

  Perhaps because he had received the blessing, Joseph was the unquestioned lord of the clan. On the old farm in Vermont his father had merged with the land until he became the living symbol of the unit, land and its inhabitants. That authority passed to Joseph. He spoke with the sanction of the grass, the soil, the beasts wild and domesticated; he was the father of the farm. As he watched the community of cabins spring up on the land, as he looked down into the cradle of the first-born--Thomas' new child--as he notched the ears of the first young calves, he felt the joy that Abraham must have felt when the huge promise bore fruit, when his tribesmen and his goats began to increase. Joseph's passion for fertility grew strong. He watched the heavy ceaseless lust of his bulls and the patient, untiring fertility of his cows. He guided the great stallion to the mares, crying, "There, boy, drive in!" This place was not four homesteads, it was one, and he was the father. When he walked bareheaded through the fields, feeling the wind in his beard, his eyes smoldered with lust. All things about him, the soil, the cattle and the people were fertile, and Joseph was the source, the root of their fertility; his was the motivating lust. He willed that all things about him must grow, grow quickly, conceive and multiply. The hopeless sin was barrenness, a sin intolerable and unforgivable. Joseph's blue eyes were growing fierce with this new faith. He cut off barren creatures mercilessly, but when a bitch crept about swollen with puppies, when a cow was fat with calf, that creature was holy to him. Joseph did not think these things in his mind, but in his chest and in the corded muscles of his legs. It was the heritage of a race which for a million years had sucked at the breasts of the soil and co-habited with the earth.

  One day Joseph stood by the pasture fence, watching a bull with a cow. He beat his hands against the fence rail; a red light burned in his eyes. As Burton approached him from behind, Joseph whipped off his hat and flung it down and tore open the collar of his shirt. He shouted, "Mount, you fool! She's ready. Mount now!"

  "Are you crazy, Joseph?" Burton asked sternly.

  Joseph swung around. "Crazy? What do you mean?"

  "You're acting queerly, Joseph. Someone might see you here." Burton looked about to see if it was true.

  "I want calves," Joseph said sullenly. "Where's the harm in that, even to you?"

  "Well, Joseph--" Burton's tone was firm and kind as he implanted his lesson, "--everyone knows such things are natural. Everyone knows such things must happen if the race is to go on. But people don't watch it unless it's necessary. You might be seen acting this way."

  Joseph reluctantly tore his eyes from the bull and faced his brother. "What if they did?" he demanded. "Is it a crime? I want calves."

  Burton looked down in shame for the thing he had to say "People might say things if they heard you talking as I just did."

  "And what could they say?"

  "Surely, Joseph, you don't want me to say it. The Scripture mentions such forbidden things. People might think your interest was--personal." He looked at his hands and then hid them quickly in his pockets as though to keep them from hearing what he said.

  "Ah--" Joseph puzzled. "They might say--I see." His voice turned brutal. "They might say I felt like the bull. Well, I do, Burton. And if I could mount a cow and fertilize it, do you think I'd hesitate? Look, Burton, that bull can hit twenty cows a day. If feeling could put a cow with a calf, I could mount a hundred. That's how I feel, Burton." Then Joseph saw the grey, sick horror that had come over his brother's face. "You don't understand it, Burton," he said gently. "I want increase. I want the land to swarm with life. Everywhere I want things growing up." Burton turned sulkily away. "Listen to me, Burton, I think I need a wife. Everything on the land is reproducing. I am the only sterile thing. I need a wife."

  Burton had started to move away, but he turned around and spat his words, "You need prayer more than anything. Come to me when you can pray."

  Joseph watched his brother walk away and he shook his head in bewilderment. "I wonder what he knows that I don't know," he said to himself. "He has a secret in him that makes everything I think or do unclean. I have heard the telling of the secret and it means nothing to me." He ran his fingers through his long hair, picked up his soiled black hat and put it on. The bull came near the fence, lowered its head and snorted. Then Joseph smiled and whistled shrilly, and at the whistle, Juanito's head popped out of the barn. "Saddle a horse," Joseph cried. "There's more in this old boy. Drive in another cow."

  He worked mightily, as the hills work to produce an oak tree, slowly and effortlessly and with no doubt that it is at once the punishment and the heritage of hills to strive thus. Before the morning light came over the range, Joseph's lantern flashed across the yard and disappeared into the barn. There among the warm and sleepy beasts he worked, mending harness, soaping the leather, cleaning the buckles. His curry comb rasped over muscled flanks. Sometimes he found Thomas there, sitting on a manger in the dark, with a coyote pup sleeping in the hay behind him. The brothers nodded good-morning. "Everything all right?" Joseph asked.

  And Thomas--"Pigeon has cast a shoe and cracked his hoof. He shouldn't go out today. Granny, the black devil, kicked Hell out of her stall. She'll hurt somebody some day if she doesn't kill herself first. Blue dropped a colt this morning, that's what I came out to see."

  "How did you know, Tom? What made you know it would come this morning?"

  Thomas grabbed a horse's forelock and pulled himself down from the manger. "I don't know, I can always tell when a colt will drop. Come and see the little son-of-a-bitch. Blue won't mind now. She's got him clean by now."

  They went to the box-stall and looked over at the spider-legged colt, with knobby knees and a whisk-broom for a tail. Joseph put out his hand and stroked the damp shining coat. "By God!" he cried, "I wonder why I love the little things so much?" The colt lifted its head and looked up sightlessly out of clouded, dark-blue eyes, and then moved away from Joseph's hand.

  "You always want to touch them," Thomas complained. "They don't like to be touched when they're little like that."

  Joseph withdrew his hand. "I guess I'd better go to breakfast."

  "Oh, say," Thomas cried, "I saw some swallows fooling around. There'll be mud nests in the barn eaves, and under the windmill tank next spring."

  The brothers had been working well together, all except Benjy, and Benjy shirked when he could. Under Joseph's orders a long truck garden stretched out behind the houses. A windmill stood on its high stilts and flashed its blades every afternoon when the wind came up. A long, unwalled cowshed arose beside the big stable. The barbed-wire fences were edging out to encircle the land. Wild hay grew rankly on the flats and on the sidehills, and the stock was multiplying.

  As Joseph turned to leave the barn, the sun came over the mountains and sent warm white streaks through the square windows. Joseph moved into a shaft of light and spread his arms for a moment. A red rooster on the top of a manure pile outside the window looked in at Joseph, then squawked and retreated, flapping, and raucously warned the hens that something terrible would probably happen on so fine a day. Joseph dropped his arms and turned back to Thomas. "Get up a couple of horses, Tom. Let's ride out today and see if there are any new calves. Tel
l Juanito, if you see him."

  After their breakfast, the three men rode away from their houses. Joseph and Thomas went side by side and Juanito brought up the rear. Juanito had ridden home from Nuestra Senora in the dawn, after spending a discreet and polite evening in the kitchen of the Garcia home. Alice Garcia had sat across from him, placidly watching the crossed hands in her lap, and the elder Garcias, guardians and referees, were placed on either side of Juanito.

  "You see, I am not only the majordomo for Senor Wayne," Juanito explained into their admiring but slightly skeptical ears, "I am more like a son to Don Joseph. Where he goes, I go. He trusts only me with very important matters." Thus for a couple of hours he boasted mildly, and when, as decorum suggested, Alice and her mother retired, Juanito made formal words and prescribed gestures and was finally accepted by Jesus Garcia, with a comely reluctance, as son-in-law. Then Juanito rode back to the ranch, quite tired and very proud, for the Garcias could prove at least one true Spanish ancestor. And now he rode behind Joseph and Thomas, rehearsing to himself the manner of his announcement.

  The sun blazed on the land as they rode up a grassy swell looking for calves to notch and cut. The dry grass made a whiskering noise under the horses' hoofs. Thomas' horse skittered nervously, for in front of Thomas, perched on the saddlehorn, rode a villainous raccoon, with beady, evil eyes looking out of a black mask. It kept its balance by grasping the horse's mane with one little black hand. Thomas looked ahead with eyes drooped against the sun. "You know," he said, "I was in Nuestra Senora Saturday."

  "Yes," Joseph said impatiently, "Benjy must have been there too. I heard him singing late at night. Tom, that boy'll be getting into trouble. Some things the people here will not stand. Some day we'll be finding Benjy with a knife in his neck. I tell you, Tom, he'll get a knife some day."

  Thomas chuckled. "Let him, Joe. He'll have had more fun than a dozen sober men, and he'll have lived longer than Methuselah."