Robinson Jeffers - The Loving ShepherdessRobinson Jeffers - The Loving Shepherdess
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Unable to find the gate; the sheep catching her fear
Huddled and plunged, pricking the empty wet earth with numberless
hoof-prints. But no one came out pursuing them,
The doors were not opened, the house was quiet. Clare found
the gate
And stood by it, whispering, "Dear Tiny. Ah, Fern, that`s you.
Come Saul," she fumbled each head as it passed the gate-post,
To count the flock.
But all had not passed, a man on a horse
Came plodding the puddled road. Clare thought the world
Was all friendly except in that house, and she ran
To the road`s crown. "Oh, Oh," she called; and Onorio
Vasquez answered, "I rode early in the morning
To find you and couldn`t find you. I`ve been north and south.
I thought I could find the track of the sheep." She answered
Through chattering teeth, "I thought I could stand the rain.
I`m sick and the sheep are sick." He said gravely
"There`s hardly a man on the coast wouldn`t have helped you
Except in that house. There, I think they need help.
Well, come and we`ll live the night." "How far?" she sighed
Faintly, and he said "Our place is away up-canyon,
You`ll find it stiff traveling by daylight even.
To-night`s a camp."
He led her to the bridge, and there
Found dry sticks up the bank, leavings of an old flood, under
the spring of the timbers,
And made a fire against the creekside under the road for a roof.
He stripped her of the dripping cloak
And clothed her in his, the oil-skin had kept it dry, and spread her
the blanket from under his saddle to lie on.
The bridge with the tarred road-bed on it was a roof
Over their heads; the sheep, when Clare commanded them, lay
down like dogs by the fire. The horse was tethered
To a clump of willow in the night outside.
When her feet and her
hands began to be warm he offered her food,
She ate three ravenous mouthfuls and ran from the fire and
vomited. He heard her gasping in the night thicket
And a new rain. He went after while and dragged her
Back to the frugal fire and shelter of the bridge.
VIII
She lay and looked up at the great black timbers, the flapping fireshadows,
And draggled cobwebs heavy with dirt and water;
While Vasquez watched the artery in the lit edge
Of her lean throat jiggle with its jet of blood
Like a slack harp-string plucked: a toneless trembling:
It made him grieve.
After a time she exclaimed
"My sheep. My sheep. Count them." "What," he said, "they all
Are here beside you." "I never dreamed," she answered,
"That any were lost, Oh no! But my sight swam
When I looked at them in the bad light." He looked
And said "Are there not . . . ten?" "No, nine," she answered.
"Nosie has died. Count them and tell me the truth."
He stood, bowing down his head under the timbers,
And counted seven, then hastily the first two
A second time, and said "Nine." "I`m glad of that,"
She sighed, and was quiet, but her quill fingers working
The border of the saddle blanket. He hoped she would soon
Sleep.
The horse tethered outside the firelight
Snorted, and the sheep lifted their heads, a spot of white
Came down the dark slope. Vasquez laid his brown palm
Over Clare`s wrists, "Lie still and rest. The old fellow from the
house is coming.
Sleep if you can, I`ll talk to him." "Is there a dog?" she whispered
trembling. "No, no, the old man is alone."
Who peered under the heavy stringer of the bridge, his beard
shone in the firelight. "Here," he shouted, "Hey!
Burn the road, would you? You want to make people stay home
And suck the sour bones in their own houses? Come out of that
hole." But Vasquez: "Now, easy, old neighbor. She wanted
Fire and a roof, she`s found what you wouldn`t give." "By God,
and a man to sleep with," he said, "that`s lucky,
But the bridge, the bridge." "Don`t trouble, I`m watching the
fire. Fire`s tame, this weather." The old man stood twitching
and peering,
And heard the sheep coughing in their cave
Under the road. He squinted toward Clare, and muttered at
length meekly, "Let me stay a few minutes.
To sit by the little road-fire of freedom. My wife and my sister
have hated each other for thirty years,
And I between them. It makes the air of the house. I sometimes
think I can see it boil up like smoke
When I look back at the house from the hill above." Vasquez said
gravely
"I have often watched that." He answered "You haven`t lived in
it. They sit in the house and feed on their own poison
And live forever. I am now too feeble with age to escape." Clare
Walker lifted her head, and faintly:
"Oh stay," she said, "I wish I could gather all that are unhappy
Before I die. But why do they hate each other?"
"Their nature," he answered, "old women." She sighed and lay
down.
"I shan`t grow old." "Young fellow," the old man said wearily
To Vasquez, "they all make that promise, they never keep it.
Life glides by and the bright loving creatures
Eat us in the evening. I`d have given this
girl bread
And meat, but my hawks were watching me." He`d found a stone
On the edge of the creek, the other side of the fire, and squatted
there, his two fists
Closing his eyes, the beard shimmering between the bent wrists.
His voice being silent they heard the fire
Burst the tough bark of a wet branch; the wind turned north,
then a gust of hail spattered in the willows
And checked at once, the air became suddenly cold. The old man
lifted his face: "Ah can`t you talk?
I thought you`d be gay or I`d not have stayed here, you too`ve
grown old? I wish that a Power went through the world
And killed people at thirty when the ashes crust them. You,
cowboy, die, your joints will begin to crackle,
You`ve had the best. Young bank-clerk, you`ve had the best,
grow fat and sorry and more dollars? Here farmer, die,
You`ve spent the money: will you bleed the mortgage
Fifty years more? You, cunning pussy of the world, youVe had
the fun and the kissing, skip the diseases.
Oh you, you`re an honest wife and you`ve made a baby: why
should you watch him
Grow up and spoil, and dull like cut lead? I see, my dear, you`ll
never be filled till you grow poisonous,
With eyes like rusty knives under the gray eyebrows. God bless
you, die." He had risen from the stone, and trampled,
Each condemnation, some rosy coal fallen out at the fire`s edge
Under his foot as if it had been a life. "Sharp at thirty," he said.
Clare vaguely moaned
And turned her face to the outer darkness, then Vasquez,
Misunderstanding her pain, thinking it stemmed
From the old man`s folly: "Don`t mind him, he`s not in earnest.
These nothing-wishers of life are never in earnest;
Make mouths to scare you: if they meant it they`d do it
And not be alive to make mouths." She made no answer,
But lay and listened to her own rustling pulse-beat,
Her knees drawn up to her breast. White-beard knelt down and
mended the fire,
And brushed his knees. "There`s another law that I`d make: to
burn the houses. Turn out the people on the roads,
And neither homes nor old women we`d be well off. All young,
all gay, all moving, free larks and foolery
By gipsy fires." His voice fell sad: "It`s bitter to be a reformer:
with two commandments
I`d polish the world a-shining, make the sun ashamed."
Clare Walker stood up, then suddenly sought the dark night
To hide herself in the bushes; her bowels were loosened
With cold and fever. Vasquez half rose to follow her,
And he understood, and stayed by the fire. Then white-beard
Winking and nodding whispered: "Is she a good piece?
Hey, is she sick? I have to protect my son.
Where in hell did she get the sheep?" Vasquez said fiercely,
"You`d better get home, your wife`ll be watching for you.
This girl is sick and half starved, I was unwilling
To let her die in the road." The old man stood up
As pricked with a pin at the thought of home. "What? We`re
free men,"
He said, lifting his feet in an anxious dance
About the low fire: "but it`s devilish hard
To be the earthly jewel of two jealous women."
"Look," Vasquez said, "it seems to me that your house is afire.
I see rolls of tall smoke . . ." "By God," he answered,
"I wish it were," he trotted up to the road
While a new drift of hail hissed in the willows,
Softening to rain.
When he was gone, Vasquez
Repaired the fire, and called "Clare! Come in to shelter.
Clare, come! The rain is ilm^n`oiio for you. The old fool`s gone
home."
He stumbled in the dark along the strand of the creek,
Calling "Clare, Clare!" then looking backward he saw
The huddle of firelit fleeces moving and rising,
And said "The sheep are scattering away to find you.
You ought to call them." She came then, and stood by the fire.
He heard the bleating cease, and looked back to see her
Quieting her friends, wringing the rain from her hair,
The fire had leaped up to a blaze. Vasquez returned
Under the bridge, then Clare with her lips flushed
And eyes brilliant with fever: "That poor old man, has he gone?
I`m sorry if he`s gone.
My father was old, but after he`d plowed the hilltop I`ve seen
him ride
The furrows at a dead run, sowing the grain with both hands,
while he controlled the colt with his knees.
The time it fell at the furrow`s end
In the fat clay, he was up first and laughing. He was kind and
cruel." "Your father?" he said. She answered
"I can`t remember my mother, she died to bear me, as I ... We
kept her picture, she looked like me,
And often my father said I was like her. Oh what`s become of the
poor old man, has he gone home?
Here he was happy." "Yes, had to go home," he answered. "But
you must sleep. I`ll leave you alone if you like,
You promise to stay by the fire and sleep." "Oh I couldn`t, truly.
My mind`s throwing all its wrecks on the shore
And I can`t sleep. That was a shipwreck that drove us wandering.
I remember all things. Your name`s Onorio Vasquez:
I wish you had been my brother." He smiled and touched her
cold hand. "For then," she said, "we could talk
Old troubles asleep: I haven`t thought, thought,
For a long while, to-night I can`t stop my thoughts. But we all
must die?" "Spread out your hands to the fire,
Warm yourself, Clare." "No, no," she answered, her teeth chattering,
"I`m hot.
My throat aches, yet you see I don`t cough, it was Frannie coughing.
It was almost as if I killed my father,
To swear to the lies I told after he was killed, all to save Charlie.
Do you think he`d care, after . . .
He was surely dead? You don`t believe we have spirits? Nobody
believes we have spirits." He began to answer,
And changed his words for caution. "Clare: all you are saying
Is hidden from me. It`s like the visions I have,
That go from unknown to unknown." He said proudly,
"I`ve watched, the whole night of a full moon, an army of
centaurs
Come out of the ocean, plunging on Sovranes reef
In wide splendors of silver water,
And swim with their broad hooves between the reef and the
shore and go up
Over the mountain I never knew why.
What you are saying is like that." "Oh, I`ll tell you . . ." "Tomorrow,"
He pleaded, remembering she`d eaten nothing and seeing
The pulse like a plucked harp-string jiggle in her throat;
He felt like a pain of his own the frail reserves of her body
Burn unreplenished. "Oh, but I`ll tell you: so then
You`ll know me, as if we`d been born in the same house,
You`ll tell me not to be afraid: maybe I`ll sleep
At the turn of night. Onorio that`s really your name?
How stately a name you have lie down beside me.
I am now so changed: every one`s lovely in my eyes
Whether he`s brown or white or that poor old man:
In those days nobody but Charlie Maurice
Seemed very dear, as if I`d been blind to all the others.
He lived on the next hill, two miles across a deep valley, and then
it was five to the next neighbor
At Vicente Springs; people are so few there. We lived a long way
south, where the hills fall straight to the sea,
And higher than these. He lived with his people. We used to meet
near a madrone-tree, Charlie would kiss me
And put his hands on my breasts under my clothes. It was quite
long before we learned the sweet way
That brings much joy to most living creatures, but brought us
misery at last.
IX
"My father," she said,
"Had lived there for thirty years, but after he sold his cattle
And pastured sheep, to make more money, the neighbors
Were never our friends. Oh, they all feared my father;
Sometimes they threatened our shepherd, a Spanish man
Who looked like you, but was always laughing. He`d laugh
And say `Guarda a Walker!` so then they`d leave him.
But we lived lonely.
"One morning of great white clouds gliding
from the sea,
When I was with Charlie in the hollow near the madrones, I felt
a pleasure like a sweet fire: for all
My joy before had been in his pleasure: but this was my own, it
frightened me." She stopped speaking, for Vasquez
Stood up and left her: he went and sat by the fire. Then Clare:
"Why do you leave me, Onorio? Are you angry now?"
"I am afraid," he answered, "of this love.
My visions are the life of my life: if I let the pitcher
Break on the rock and the sun kill the stars,
Life would be emptier than death." Her mind went its own way,
Not understanding so strange a fear: "The clouds were as bright
as stars and I could feel them," she said,
"Through the shut lids of my eyes while the sweet fire
Poured through my body: I knew that some dreadful pain would
pay for such joy. I never slept after that
But dreamed of a laughing child and wakened with running tears.
After I had trembled for days and nights
I asked Tia Livia that was our shepherd`s cousin, she helped me
keep house what sign tells women
When they have conceived: she told me the moon then ceases
To rule our blood. I counted the days then,
Not dreaming that Tia Livia would spy and talk.
Was that not strange? I think that she told the shepherd too,
And the shepherd had warned my lover: for Charlie failed
Our meeting time, but my father was there with a gray face.
In silence, he didn`t accuse me, we went home together.
"I met my lover in another place. `Oh Charlie,
Why do you wear a revolver?" He said the mountain
Was full of rattlers, `We`ve killed twenty in a week.
There never have been so many, step carefully sweetheart.`
Sweetheart he called me: you`re listening Onorio?
`Step carefully by the loose stones.` We were too frightened that day
To play together the lovely way we had learned.
"The next time that I saw him, he and my father
Met on a bare hilltop against a gray cloud.
I saw him turn back, but then I saw that he was ashamed
To seem afraid of a man on the ridge of earth,
With the hills and the ocean under his feet: and my father called
him.-What was that moan?" She stopped, and Vasquez
Heard it far off, and heard the sap of a stick whistle in the fire.
"Nothing," he said, "low thunder
Far out the ocean, or the surf in the creek-mouth." "I was running
up the steep slope to reach them, the breath in my heart
Like saw-grass cut me, I had no power to cry out, the stones and
the broken stubble flaked under my feet
So that I seemed running in one place, unable to go up. It was not
because he hated my father,
But he was so frightened. They stood as if they were talking, a
noise of smoke
Blew from between them, my father turned then and walked
Slowly along the cloud and sat on the hilltop
As if he were tired.
I said after a time, without thinking,
`Go home, Charlie. I`ll say that he killed himself.
And give me the revolver, I`ll say it was his.`
So Charlie did.
But when the men came up from Salinas I told my lie
So badly that they believed I was the murderer.
I smelled the jail a long while. I saw the day moon
Down the long street the morning I was taken to court,
As weary-looking and stained as if it were something of mine.
I remembered then, that since I came there my blood
Had never been moved when the moon filled: what Livia`d told
me.
So then I told them my father took his own life
Because the sheep had a sickness and I was pregnant.
The shepherd and Livia swore that they saw him do it.
I`d have been let home:
But the fever I`d caught gathered to a bursting pain,
I had to be carried from the courthouse to the hospital
And for a time knew nothing.
When I began to see with my eyes again
The doctor said: `The influenza that takes
Many lives has saved yours, you`ll not have a child.
Listen,’ he said, `my girl, if you`re wise.
Your miscarriage is your luck. Your pelvis the bones down there
Are so deformed that it`s not possible for you
To bear a living baby: no life can pass there:
And yours would be lost. You`d better remember,
And try not to be reckless.` I remember so well, Onorio.
I have good reason to remember. You never could guess
What a good reason.
My little king was dead
And I was too weak to care. I have a new king.
"When I got home," she said patiently,
"Everybody believed that I was a murderer;
And Charlie was gone. They left me so much alone
That often I myself believed it. I`d lead the sheep to that hill,
There were fifty left out of three hundred,
And pray for pardon."
Sleep and her fever confused her brain,
One heard phrases in the running babble, across a new burst of
hail. "Forgive me, father, for I didn`t
Know what I was doing." And, "Why have you forsaken me,
father?" Her mind was living again the bare south hilltop
And the bitter penitence among the sheep. "The two men that
I loved and the baby that I never saw,
AH taken away."
Then Vasquez was calling her name to break
the black memories; she turned on her side, the flame-light
Leaped, and he saw her face puckering with puzzled wonder. "Not
all alone? But how can that be?"
She sighed and said, "Oh Leader, don`t stray for a while. Dear
Saul: can you keep them here on the hill around me
Without my watching? No one else helps me. I`ll lie down here
on the little grass in the windy sun
And think whether I can live. I have you, dear stragglers.
Thoughts come and go back as lightly as deer on the hill,
But as hard to catch . . . Not all alone. Oh.
Not alone at all.
Indeed it is even stranger than I thought."
She laughed and sat up.
"Oh sweet warm sun . . .
Are you there, Onorio? But where`s the poor old man
Who seemed to be so unhappy? I wish he hadn`t gone home,
For now I remember what I ought to tell him. I`m sadly changed
Since that trouble and sickness, and though I`m happy
I hardly ever remember in the nick o` time
What ought to be said. You must tell him
That all our pain comes from restraint of love."
The hail had suddenly hushed, and all her words
Were clear but hurried. "I learned it easily, Onorio,
And never have thought about it again till now. The only
wonder`s
Not to`ve known always. The beetle beside my hand in the grass
and the little brown bird tilted on a stone,
The short sad grass, burnt on the gable of the world with near
sun and all winds: there was nothing there that I didn`t
Love with my heart, yes the hill though drunk with dear blood:
I looked far over the valley at the patch of oaks
At the head of a field, where Charlie`s people had lived (they had
moved away) and loved them, although they`d been
Always unfriendly I never thought of it." Then Vasquez, for the
first time forgetting the person a moment
To regard the idea: "You were cut off from the natural objects
of love, you turned toward others." "Ah," she answered
Eagerly, "I`d always been turned to all others,
And tired my poor strength confining the joy to few. But now
I`d no more reason to confine it, I`d nothing
Left to lose nor keep back. Has the poor old man gone?
He seemed to be truly unhappy.
Wasn`t he afraid we`d burn the bridge; we ought surely
To have drowned our fire. I was sick, or I`d have done . . .
anything.
But old men are so strange, to want and not want,
And then be angry."
"He has gone," he answered.
"Now, Clare, if you could eat something, then sleep,
To fill the cup for to-morrow."
"I have to tell you the rest. Why did he go?
Was he angry at me? Oh, I feel better, Onorio,
But never more open-eyed.
"There was one of those great owly hawks
That soar for hours, turning and turning below me along the
bottom of the slope: I so loved it
I thought if it were hungry I`d give it my hand for meat.
"Then winter came.
Then about Christmas time (because I`d counted the months and
remembered Christmas) storm followed storm
Like frightened horses tethered to a tree, around and around.
Three men came in the door without knocking,
Wherever they moved, water and black oil ran down. There`d
been a shipwreck. I gave them the house, then one of them
Found the axe and began chopping firewood, another went back
across wild rain to the fall of the hill
And shouted. He was so big, like a barrel walking, I ran in his
shelter
And saw the great, black, masted thing almost on shore, lying on
its side in the shadow of the hill,
And the flying steam of a fire they`d built on the beach. All that
morning the people came up like ants,
Poor souls they were all so tired and cold, some hurt and some
crying. I`d only," she said, "a few handfuls of flour
Left in the house." She trembled and lay down. "I can`t remember
any more."
Vasquez made up the fire,
And went and drew up the blanket over Clare`s shoulder.
He found her shuddering. "Now sleep. Now rest." She answered:
"They killed a sheep. They were hungry.
I`d grown to love so much the flock that was left.
Our shepherd, I think, had taken them away mostly
While I was kept in Salinas.
I heard her crying when they threw her down, she thought I
could save her.
Her soft white throat.
`That night I crept out in the thin rain at moonrise
And led them so far away, all that were left,
The house and the barn might hold a hundred hungry mouths
To hunt us all night and day and could never find us.
We hid in oak-woods. There was nothing to eat,
And never any dry place. We walked in the gray rain in the flowing
gorges of canyons that no one
But the hawks have seen, and climbed wet stone and saw the
storms racing below us, but still the thin rain
Sifted through the air as if it fell from the stars. I was then much
stronger
Than ever since then.
"A man caught me at last, when I was too
weak to run, and conquered my fear.
He was kind, he promised me not to hurt the poor flock,
But the half of them had been lost, I never could remember how.
He lived alone; I was sick in his cabin
For many days, dreaming that a monkey nursed me: he looked
so funny, he`d a frill of red hair
All around his face.
"When I grew better, he wanted to do like
Charlie. I knew what the doctor had said,
But I was ashamed to speak of death: I was often ashamed in
those days: he`d been so kind. Yet terror
Would come and cover my head like a cold wave.
I watched the moon, but at the full moon my fear
Flowed quietly away in the night.
"The spring and summer were full of pleasure and happiness.
I’d no more fear of my friend, but we met seldom. I went in
freedom
From mountain to mountain, wherever good pasture grew,
Watching the creeks grow quiet and color themselves
With cool green moss, and the green hills turn white.
The people at the few farms all knew me, and now
Their minds changed; they were kind. All the deer knew me;
They`d walk in my flock.
"In the midst of summer,
When the moon filled my blood failed to be moved,
The life that will make death began in my body.
I`d seen that moon when it was little as a chip
Over my left shoulder, from Palos ridge
By a purple cloud.
X
"Oh, not till April," she said.
"All`s quiet now, the bitterness is past, I have made peace
With death except in my dreams, those can`t be ruled. But then,
when I first
Began to believe and knew it had happened ... I felt badly.
I went back to my father`s house,
Much was broken and chopped down, but I found
Little things that I`d loved when I was a child, hidden in corners.
When I was drunk with crying
We hurried away. The lambs never seemed able to live, the
mothers were glad to give me their milk,
We hid in the secret hills till it seemed desolate to die there.
Tell me, Onorio,
What month is this?"
He answered, "Clare, Clare, fear nothing.
Death is as far away from you as from any one.
There was a girl (I`ve heard my brothers talking:
The road-overseer`s daughter) was four or five months along
And went to a doctor: she had no trouble:
She`s like a virgin again." dare struck the earth with her hands
And raised her body, she stared through the red of the fire
With brilliant confused eyes. "Your face was like a devil`s in the
steamy glimmer:
But only because you don`t understand. Why, Tia Livia herself
. . . you are too innocent, Onorio,
Has done so ... but women often have small round stones
Instead of hearts." "But," he answered, "if you`re not able to
bear it. Not even a priest would bid you die
For a child that couldn`t be born alive. You`ve lived too much
alone, bodiless fears have become
Giants in secret. I too am not able to think clearly tonight, in
the stinging drift of the fire
And the strange place, to-morrow I`ll tell you plainly. My mind
is confused
As I have sometimes felt it before the clouds of the world
Were opened: but I know: for disease to refuse cure
Is self-murder, not virtue." She squatted upright,
Wrapping the coat about her shoulders and knees,
And said, "Have you never seen in your visions
The golden country that our souls came from,
Before we looked at the moon and stars and knew
They are not perfect? We came from a purer peace
In a more perfect heaven; where there was nothing
But calm delight, no cold, no sickness, no sharp hail,
The haven of neither hunger nor sorrow,
But all-enfolding love and unchangeable joy
Near the heart of life." Vasquez turned from the fire
And stared at her lit face. "How did you learn
This wonder? It is true." "I remembered it,"
She answered, "when I was in trouble." "This is the bitter-sweet
memory,"
He said, "that makes the breast of the earth bitter
After we are born and the dear sun ridiculous. We shall return
there, we homesick."
"No," she answered. "The place was my mother`s body before
I was born. You may remember it a little but I`ve
Remembered plainly: and the wailing pain of entering this air.
I`ve thought and thought and remembered. I found
A cave in a high cliff of white stone, when I was hiding from
people: it was there I had the first memory.
There I`d have stayed in the safe darkness forever; the sheep
were hungry and strayed out, so I couldn`t stay.
I remembered again when I went home to our house and the
door hung crazy
On a snapped hinge. You don`t believe me, Onorio,
But after while you`ll remember plainly, if some long trouble
Makes you want peace; or being handled has broken your shame.
I have no shame now." He answered nothing
Because she seemed to speak from a frantic mind.
After a moment, "No matter," she said. "When I was in my worst
trouble
I knew that the child was feeding on peace and happiness. I had
happiness here in my body. It is not mine,
But I am its world and the sky around it, its loving God. It is
having the prime and perfect of life,
The nine months that are better than the ninety years. I`d not
steal one of its days to save my life.
I am like its God, how could I betray it? It has not moved yet
But feels its blessedness in its quietness; but soon I shall feel it
move, Tia Livia said it will nestle
Down the warm nest and flutter like a winged creature. It shook
her body, she said." But Vasquez, loathing
To hear these things, labored with the sick fire
In the steam of the wet wood, not listening, then Clare
Sighed and lay down. He heard her in a moment
Miserably sobbing, he went and touched her. "What is it?
Clare? Clare?" "Ai, when will morning come?
It is horrible to lie still," she said, "feeling
The black of April . . . it`s nothing, it`s nothing . . . like a cat
Tick tick on padded feet. Ah let me alone, will you?
Lying quiet does it: I`ll have courage in my time."
A little later she asked for food, she ate,
And drank from the stream, and slept. She moved in her sleep
And tossed her arms, Vasquez would cover them again,
But the fever seemed quieted. He crossed the stream by the
stones in the dull fire-glimmer
And fetched armfuls of flood-wood from under the opposite
bridge-head. The fire revived; the earth turned past midnight;
Far eastward beyond the coasts of the continent morning troubled
the Atlantic.
XI
Vasquez crouched by the fire
And felt one of those revelations that were in his own regard
the jewels and value of his life
Approach and begin. First passed as always
Since Barclay was gone, whom he had taken for incarnate God
ancestral forms against the white cloud,
The high dark heads of Indian migrations, going south along the
coast, drawn down from the hungry straits and from Asia,
The heads like worn coins and the high shoulders,
The brown-lipped patient mouths below vulture beaks, and burnished
fall of black hair over slant foreheads,
Going up to the Mayan and the Aztec mountains, and sowing
the coast. They swept the way and the cloud cleared,
The vision would come: came instead a strong pause.
A part of his mind
Wished to remember what the rest had forgotten,
And groping for it in the dark withstood the prepared
Pageant of dreams. He`d read in his curious boyhood
Of the child the mother is found incapable of bearing
Cut from the mother`s belly. Both live: the wound
Heals: it was called the Caesarean section. But he, fearing
Whatever thought might threaten to infringe his careful
Chastity of mind, had quickly canceled the memory;
That now sought a new birth; it might save Clare
If he could think of it.
That revived part
Made itself into the vision, all to no purpose,
His precious dreams were never to the point of life.
Only the imperial name, and the world`s
Two-thousand-year and ten-thousand-miles-traveled
Caesarean memory appeared. He imagined at first that the voice
Cried "Ave Maria," but it cried "Ave Caesar."
He saw the firelight-gilded
Timbers of the bridge above; and one of the ewes lifted her head
in the light beside Clare sleeping;
The smoke gathered its cloud into a floating globe and these were
forgotten. On the globe of the earth
The aquiline-headed Roman, who summed in his one person the
powers and ordered science of humanity,
Stood and possessed his orb of empire, and looked at the stars.
Then the voice cried
"The pride of the earth."
But Vasquez laughed aloud, for the
earth was a grain of dust circling the fire,
And the fire itself but a spark, among innumerable sparks. The
swarm of the points of light drifting
No path down darkness merged its pin-prick eyelets into one
misty glimmer, a millstone in shape,
A coin in shape, a mere coin, a flipped luckpenny: but again
Vasquez
Laughed out, for who was the spendthrift sowed them all over
the sky, indistinguishable innumerable
Fish-scales of light? They drew together as they drifted away
no path down the wild darkness; he saw
The webs of their rays made them one tissue, their rays that
were their very substance and power filled wholly
The space they were in, so that each one touched all, there was
no division between them, no emptiness, and each
Changed substance with all the others and became the others.
It was dreadful to see
No space between them, no cave of peace nor no night of quietness,
no blind spot nor no deaf heart, but the tides
Of power and substance flood every cranny; no annihilation, no
escape but change: it must endure itself
Forever. It has the strength to endure itself. We others, being
faintly made of the dust of a grain of dust
Have been permitted to fool our patience asleep by inventing
death. A poor comfort, he thought,
Yet better than none, the imaginary cavern, how we all come
clamoring
To the gates of our great invention after few years.
Though a cheat, it works.
The speckled tissue of universes
Drew into one formed and rounded light, and Vasquez
Worshiped the one light. One eye . . . what, an eye?
A dark mountain with an eye in its cliff? A coal-black stallion
Eyed with one burning eye in the mid brow?
Night has an eye. The poor little vision-seer
Groaned, that he never had wit to understand visions.
See all and know nothing. The eye that makes its own light
And sees nothing but itself. "I am seeing Barclay again,"
He marveled, as who should say "I am seeing God:
But what is God?" He continued gazing,
And beads of sweat spilled from his forehead into the fire-edge
Ashes. He saw at last, neither the eyed mountain
Nor the stallion, nor Barclay, but his own eye
In the darkness of his own face.
The circuit was closed:
"I can endure all things," he thought, "forever. I am he
Whom I have sought.
"And Clare loves all things
Because all things are herself. She has killed her father
And inherited. Her old enormous father
Who rode the furrows full tilt, sowing with both hands
The high field above the hills and the ocean. We kill steers for
meat, and God
To be atoned with him. But I remain from myself divided, gazing
beyond the flaming walls,
Not fortunate enough, and too faint-hearted."
He continued gazing
across the wane of the fire at the dark
Vision of his own face turned sideways, the light of one eye.
Clare turned in her place and awoke and said,
"How awfully little. Ooh, Ooh," in a dove`s voice,
And then, "I forgot I wasn`t alone, Onorio:
And here are the sheep. Have I slept a moment?
I did have a strange dream. I went out across the starlight
Knocking through flight after flight of the shiny balls
And got so far away that the sun and the great earth
And beautiful moon and all the stars were blended
Into one tiny light, Oh terribly little,
The flame of a pitiful little candle blown over
In the wind of darkness, in the fear of the night. It was so tiny
I wanted to be its comfort
And hold it and rock it on my breast. One wee flicker
In all the wild dark. What a dream." She turned anxiously
To touch the sheep, fondling their heads and naming them.
"Dear Fay, dear Fern. And here`s Captain Saul. Ah bad little
Hornie
Who taught you to be so bold?" Suddenly she cried
"Did Leader and Frannie go out did two of the sheep
Go out lately?" But Vasquez, caught in his vision,
Answered "You also have broken
The fire-studded egg of heaven and we`re together
In the world outside." "Ah Ah," she cried desolately,
"Did you lie when you counted them? When I was sick
And my eyes failed?" She ran into the darkness outside, calling
their names;
The flock that remained stood up, in the edge of firelight, tremulously
crying. Then Vasquez: "I hear a multitude
Of people crying, but why do you lament and cry? You particles
of the eye of light, if some of you
Endure evil, the others endure good, the balance is perfect. The
eye lives on mixed light and darkness,
Not either alone. And you are not many but one, the eye is not
glad nor sorry, nor the dark face
Disquieted: be quiet, voices, and hear the real voice." Clare
Walker came in from the dark with wide strained eyes,
In each iris the fire reflected made a red stain, and she cried:
"Onorio, for Christ`s sake tell me, were they not with me?
Or have they slipped out?" He turned slowly an unanswering face
Of cool, dark and deaf stone, tempered to the mood
Of what he imagined ... or perhaps perceived. And Clare:
"If I have slept and been dreaming while they`re in danger
Or die in the dark: and they cried for me
In the dead night, while I slept and ate: I hope that all the
miseries I ever feared for myself
Will come doubled, the rain on my hair be knives of ice, the sun
whips of fire, the death I must die
Drawn out and dreadful like the dream of hell: Onorio, Oh come,
Help me to find them!" He rose, passively under command in
the shrill of her voice, muttering: "I can`t
Imagine what further`s to find: yet I`ll go along.
Is there another light or another darkness?"
"Oh," she answered, "it`s black," and snatched the most eager brands
Out of the fire for a torch. He with deft fingers
Mimicking her act, but with a sleepwalker mindlessness,
Bound fire into a bundle of sallow twigs,
And calmly, twirling his torch to flame, followed
The red glow of her rod-ends. They ran on the bridge and wandered
Up the wet road, Clare calling her flock around her
And sobbing the names of the lost. The useless torches
Flared in the puddles and ruts of water, and ruddied
The plump backs of the sheep; so sanguine-outlined
The little ridiculous procession strayed up the road
In the lane of the trees, the great-trunked wood like storms
Of darkness on either hand. The torches died soon,
Then Clare stood still, desolately calling; weak dawn
Had washed all the world gray.
The heads of the little flock
Suddenly and all together were turned one way, then a limping ewe
Came out of the wood. Clare screamed with joy, and ran and
dropped on her knees to embrace the lean neck. "Oh Leader!
Leader! She`s safe, Onorio. Oh Leader where`s Frannie?" But
then the wound was discovered, the flap torn back
Red from the flank and hanging from the rump, and the blood-caked
wool. Clare moaned awhile with no words, and said,
"When I forgot you because I was sick, when I forgot to call
you and count you in the rain in the night:
I wish I had died. I have nothing but these,
Onorio, to take care of, and lose and lose. She used to go first
always, I called her Leader:
And now she`s hurt." Onorio heard Clare`s teeth clacking together
in the thin cheeks, and her breath
Hissing between them, he answered calmly, still caught in his
vision: "The five claws of a lion. Look, Clare.
But don`t grieve, the great river of the blood of life is always
bursting its banks, never runs dry,
Secret inexhaustible fountains feed it." She stared at his face and
turned on the forest her desert eyes
And wrung her hands. "Leader is hurt; and Frannie I think has died."
They searched long; the fourth hour
Of daylight they found the half consumed body. The head was
not mangled, Clare fell beside it
On the wet earth and kissed the half open eyes,
Weeping and self-reproachful, but yet she lamented
Less violently than Vasquez had feared. At length
He said, "If you wish, Clare, I will fetch tools
And bury it here." She answered faintly, "No matter.
She feels nothing to-day, darkness nor light,
Teeth nor the grave. Oh, I loved her well: but now, see,
She`s not living any more, Onorio . . . isn`t that your name?
What a stately name! . . . this is the one that fed me with milk
Long after the others were dry, she was like a mother to me,
when I might have starved.
She loved me, I know.
But even the udders are torn. Her name, Onorio, was Frannie."
She turned and said, "Poor Leader. Can you come now?
Come Fern, come Fay, come Tiny, we have to go on.
Come Saul."
Vasquez begged her to turn again
And stay at his father`s place in the canyon
Until she was well. She had to go on, she answered.
And Vasquez: "My father is withered up with old age but he`d
be kind; and my brothers
Would be your brothers. There`s pasture for the sheep. We`re
only a sort of Indians but we can be kind. Come, Clare.
The place is pleasant and alone, up the deep canyon, beside the
old quarry and the kilns where they burnt the lime.
A hundred laborers used to live there, but now the woods have
grown back, the cabins are standing empty,
The roads are gone. I think the old masonry kilns are beautiful,
standing like towers in the deep forest,
But cracked and leaning, and maidenhair fern grows from the
cracks. The creek makes music below. Come, Clare.
It is deep with peace. When I have to go about and work on
men`s farms for wages I long for that place
Like some one thinking of water in deserts. Sometimes we hear
the sea`s thunder, far down the deep gorge.
The darkness under the trees in spring is starry with flowers,
with redwood sorrel, colt`s foot, wakerobin,
The slender-stemmed pale yellow violets,
And Solomon`s seal that makes intense islands of fragrance in
April." "Oh, April," she said trembling,
"How exactly it follows. How could I rest? Ah, no,
Good-by, good-by, Onorio. Poor Leader, I am sure
We can go a little way before dark. Come, Saul, Saul."
She ran a few steps, panting hard.
Vasquez perceived
No hope of staying her: "Then I`ll go back to the bridge
And fetch my horse and my coat. I`ll not leave you, Clare."
He went slowly, heavy and amazed. His horse
Had broken tether in the night, stung by the hailstones.
Then Vasquez, still drunken with the dregs of his vision
To fatalist indifference, went hunting the horse
And found it late. He followed Clare the next morning,
But met another vision on the road, that waved
Impatient white hands against his passage, saying
"If I go up to Calvary ten million times: what is that to you?
Let me go up." Vasquez drew rein and sat staring.
He saw beyond the vision in the yellow mud
Prints of bare feet, dibbled about with many
Little crowding hoof-marks; he marveled, feeling no sadness
But lonely thoughts.
XII
Clare Walker had crossed the ridge and
gone down
To the mouth of Cawdor`s Canyon. Japanese tenants
Now kept the house; short broad-faced men who planted
Lettuces in the garden against the creek-side
And beans on the hill. The barns were vacant, the cattle
Were vanished from the high pastures. The men were friendly,
Clare begged at their hands a little oil to soften
The bandage on Leader`s wound; she`d torn her spent dress
In strips to bind it, and went now without clothing
But the long brown cloak.
She went northward, and on a foreland
Found vacant cabins around a ruined saw-mill;
And finding sacks of dry straw with a worn blankec
In one of the cabins, slept well and awoke refreshed
To travel on slowly northward in the glad sunlight
And sparkle of the sea. But the next day was dark,
And one of the wethers died, she never knew why,
She wept and went on.
Near Point Lobos, by a gate
Where Tamar Cauldwell used to lean from her white pony
To swing the bars, the lion-stricken ewe, Leader,
Groaned and lay down and died. Clare met much kindness there;
She was nursed in the house, helpless, for many days,
And the sheep were guarded and fed. The people clothed her
And calmed her wild mind; but she was not willing to tell them
Her griefs nor her cause of fear. They kept her by watchful force
Until she escaped, a great night of moonlight, and fled
With her small flock.
Far up the Carmel Valley
The river became a brook, she watched a salmon
Row its worn body up-stream over the stones
And struck by a thwart current expose the bruised
White belly to the white of the sky, gashed with red wounds,
but right itself
And wriggle up-stream, having that within it, spirit or desire,
Will spend all its dear flesh and all the power it has gathered, in
the sweet salt pastures and fostering ocean,
To find the appointed high-place and perish. Clare Walker, in
a bright moment`s passage of anxious feeling,
Knowing nothing of its fate saw her own fate reflected. She
drank, and the sheep drank; they went up the valley
And crossed, the next day, among the long-needled pines, the
great thirsty sky-ridge.
In the valley beyond
Clare journeyed northward again, anxiously avoiding
The traveled roads and hiding herself from people
In fear that some one`s force or kindness might steal her
From the helpless flock; and later in habitual fear.
She was seen much later, heavily swollen
Toward child-birth, cowering from a thin April rain
By a little fire on the San Joaquin river-bank,
Sharing a camp of outcast men; no sheep
Remained with her, but when she moved in the morning
She called the names of many, Fern, Fay and Leader,
Nosie and Saul and little Hornie and the others,
"Dear Tiny, dear Frannie, come on, we have to go on."
The toothless tramp bandaging his foot by the fire
Looked up with a flicker of light in his slack face,
And the sickly sullen boy on the other side
Smiled without mockery. Clare had gone half a mile
And felt a grinding pang in her back, she clung to the fence
And saw the poplars planted along the road
Reach dreadfully away northward. When the pain ended
She went on northward; but after the second pain
She crept down to the river and hid her body
In a willow thicket. In the evening, between the rapid
Summits of agony before exhaustion, she called
The sheep about her and perceived that none came.
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