The Last Western (7 page)

“Then why is he still here?” the other guard asked.

The king drew near the cage.

“Why?” he whispered.

“I do not know the answer myself,” the Eagle said. “Only the Great Spirit knows.”

“I must give the order now. The sun is set in the western sky.”

“I forgive you,” said the Eagle.

The enemy king felt his heart turn at the sight of the Eagle as the guards led him away.

“Why did you not escape?” the guards asked.

“We must learn to love,” the Eagle said.

He was in a daze.

“Don’t you know that you must die?” the guards asked.

“The Great Spirit will protect me even in death,” said the Eagle.

“Fear has made him crazy,” said one of the guards.

Then the Eagle was led to the top of the mountain that towered over the river, just opposite the mountain from which he had made the great leap that made him king.

On both sides of the river, the people of the warring tribes stood watching.

At the top of the mountain, the Eagle was bound hand and foot by two braves. There was no hope now of escaping death.

When the sun touched the rim of the horizon in the west, the braves cast the Eagle off the cliff.

Down, down, down he fell, heavy as a stone.

His body fell upon the hardest rocks in the river, then slipped beneath the waves.

Some of the people on both sides of the river cheered as the body fell upon the rocks.

Some gasped in horror.

A few wept: the four prisoners, the enemy king, one of the guards who had thrown the Eagle from the cliff, and a handful of other persons of both tribes who had seen the goodness and innocence of the Eagle.

After a few minutes the people withdrew from the banks of the river.

It was just then that the strange thing occurred. (Cool Dawn now spoke more slowly; Willie and Clio leaned forward.)

In the water where the Eagle fell, there was a whirling and purling among the rocks. The people went back to see what this commotion was.

Suddenly, out of the water, a great golden bird appeared. A gigantic, marvelous creature no man had seen before, with great wings and flashing dark eyes.

For a few seconds he seemed content to ride on the waves of the river, flapping his huge wings in the last rays of the sun.

Then slowly he lifted himself above the water, and slowly flew up out of the steep canyon above the upturned faces of the people.

Swiftly, more swiftly still, he flew straight into the pale air until he disappeared into the blue space.

“The Eagle King!” said Willie in a dreamy, yet excited voice.

“According to some,” said Cool Dawn. “On the other hand, many of the people who were there said they saw nothing.”

“Who saw the bird?” Clio asked.

“Only the four prisoners, the enemy king, the one guard and the few tribespeople who had thought the Eagle innocent.”

Cool Dawn paused. She put one hand on Willie’s red hair and the other on Clio’s shoulder.

“So you like the story I have told you?” she asked.

“It’s a wonderful story,” said Willie.

Clio only nodded. He was looking at the red, white and blue sign of the Nagasaki Zero.

“Is there more?” Willie asked.

“A little,” said Cool Dawn. “After the death of the Eagle, the people fell back into warfare. But the four prisoners and the few others who had loved the Eagle went to the enemy king and to the guard who also had seen the goodness of the Eagle and who had witnessed the miracle of the Eagle, and together they entered into friendship. This little group of people formed a special tribe.

“Each year, at the time of the feast of the Eagle, the tribe would gather to make the toast and proclaim the words,
We must try to love one another
.

“Young people from other tribes would inquire about the meaning of this custom, and there was always a follower of the Eagle to tell the story of the Eagle’s short reign. So little by little the tribe acquired new members.

“Even now,” said Cool Dawn, “scattered across the face of the earth, this tribe still lives.”

“Is this the tribe you come from, grandmother?” Willie asked.

“Yes,” Cool Dawn replied.

“Then I am a member as well,” said Willie. “And Clio, too, if he wants.”

Clio said nothing. He was still looking down at the strange sign.

As Clio went down the stairway to go back to his own tenement, Willie called after him, “Have courage, Clio. It will be all right.”

But Clio did not answer.

That night Willie dreamed of a golden bird floating in the thin blue air above the great city of Houston.

Early the next morning Cool Dawn awakened him.

“Are you prepared then?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Willie.

Through still, dim streets they went to a strange church called The Church of Saint Stephen the Martyr, and there Willie made his First Communion.

When he came back from the table of Eucharist, having swallowed the body of the Lord, Cool Dawn whispered, “We must try to love.”

Willie replied, “We must try to love.”

Outside, the morning light had come to the earth. The city was blue and magical, like a town in a children’s story or a dream.

Walking alongside his grandmother, Willie felt that he too might be in a dream.

BOOK TWO

Mr. Thoreau brought in a fugitive slave this

night, gangrenous in both legs and

advanced in tuberculosis. He asked me to

deliver a letter to his mother in

Mississippi. As Mr. Thoreau commenced

to take his dictation, the man observed

that his mother could not read. He then

expired in my arms. I buried the body in

the embankment near the Monument

where, I fear, it will surface in the

Spring. Mr. Thoreau in the meantime

retired to his Pond.

From the diary of Thomas Felder, M.D.

November 24, 1845

Concord, Massachusetts

Now, as he grew older
, Willie learned many things. He learned that the capital of the state of Maine is Augusta.

He learned that the great planet Earth has five oceans and seven seas.

He learned that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

He learned that George Washington did not tell lies and that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

But for each thing he learned in his slow fashion, there were ten things, twelve things, twenty things he could not learn or understand.

In the world there were lovely things and there were terrors. But neither the lovely things nor the terrors were anything like what the teachers said in classrooms or what men wrote in books or what was shown on the desk-top TV screens.

In the city of Houston, in the neighborhood of the William McKinley Arms, there were strange and terrible things that people did to one another, and then there were even worse things that people did not do out of not caring or paying any attention to one another.

And in the great world beyond Houston, there were brutal, violent, ugly things that were happening, like the wars that were reported on the nightly telenews. Wars in Africa. Wars in India. Wars in the Philippines. Wars in the Middle East. Wars in Latin America.

“The sad wars of freedom,” a TV man in a dark blue suit said one night, “where the brave men of JERCUS fight on for you and me.”

“Who is that man, grandma?”

“The President.”

“What is JERCUS?”

“An alliance, it is called.”

“What is an alliance?”

“An agreement between nations.”

“Why is it called JERCUS?”

“J is for Japan. E is for Europe. R is for Russia. C is for China. US is for United States.”

“They are all fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Who do they fight?”

“The others.”

Besides the wars, there were what people called civil disturbances going on in certain cities of the United States.

These disturbances were strange happenings that took place at night, usually in the summertime, and the TV men were grave and sad-eyed when they spoke of them.

One summer there was even a civil disturbance in Houston, not far from the area of the William McKinley Arms, and a man named GoPaw North was killed.

The books did not speak of these matters, of the wars that were reported on the telenews or the civil disturbances that were going on, nor did the teachers.

When the tele-teachers on the desk-top screens talked of the lands where the wars were going on, it was to point out the minerals that were in the ground or what they called the natural resources or sometimes to tell what the annual rainfall was.

It was the same with the cities. The cities were important for having railroads or certain industries or for having large populations. The school cities were not connected with the civil disturbances or with anything else that was going on in the real cities.

Willie could not make sense of what the teachers said. He could not make sense of the books of the school. He could not make sense of the tele-lessons. So he continued to do poorly in his studies.

“He is a little retarded,” said one of the Sisters to Willie’s mother when he was in the sixth grade.

“His mind is not right?”

“According to the testing computer,” the Sister said. “It is a birth accident perhaps. He is not abnormal but he will have trouble even technically passing his high school work.”

Willie’s mother, working at the Rib N Rum Room, would weep when she thought of her son’s slowness. But Cool Dawn told her that though he was slow, he was learning many things all the same and that he was good, which was more important than being bright.

In the mornings Cool Dawn and Willie went to the Saint Martin de Porres church, and there Willie found those certain signs that made sense to him and heard readings from the one book he came to trust.

And when he was in the seventh grade, Cool Dawn took to reading this same book to him after supper in the evenings, and Willie listened to the stories that were told. He did not understand all the things that were told in the stories but he trusted this book to be a true sign because of the things he believed. He learned especially the Book of Gospels and came to love the Book of Gospels and put his confidence in it.

Still, he wondered about the things he saw and heard and he wondered especially why people did not choose to be the way that the signs showed them to be and why people did not seem to care one way or the other and why so many preferred to be nothing.

One winter in Willie’s last year at Martin de Porres, Cool Dawn came down with a bad cold and he had to go to Mass alone. That was the winter that he began to see the men lying in the streets, in certain doorways, where they had fallen—men who had preferred to be nothing rather than choose to be whatever they might have been.

Willie would try to speak to them, but usually they would only mumble and turn over on the pavement and go back to sleep. Sometimes they could not even mumble, and the police, responding to the phone call Willie would make, would come in their shiny black truck and cart them away like dead dogs.

“Dust to dust,” Officer Harlowe Judge would say. Or sometimes, “In the father’s house, Sam, there are many mansions,” or “If at first you don’t succeed, Sam… .” That Officer Harlowe Judge for no reason at all took to calling Willie Sam rather than Willie was one of those unfathomable things no book could teach but was all the same a true fact of the world.

In Willie’s first year at George A. Custer Memorial High, a boy from his class took a powerful drug so that he could fly, as he told a friend, and the drug killed him, and the vision of the boy lying in his coffin haunted Willie’s dreams and presented another fact that the book-school teachings did not present, yet it was a thing that had happened, and was a terror and truth that had to be reckoned, like the wars and the civil disturbances.

Once when he was sixteen he came across a copy of a news photo magazine. In the magazine there were pictures of children, babies even, with swollen stomachs and enormous white eyes. They were starving in some small country in Africa.

Willie carried this magazine around with him for days, asking his teachers to look at the pictures.

“Something has to be done,” he would say.

But his teachers told him there was nothing he, Willie, could do—the government was doing all it could.

“They are starving,” Willie said to Clio.

“What did you expect?” Clio replied. “They’re black. They’re poor. Who gives a damn what happens to them?”

“You do and I do,” said Willie.

But Clio said that rich people did not care anything about poor people, how it went with them or if they ate or starved.

Then Willie would tell Clio of certain priests and Sisters and ministers of the church who spent their lives bringing food to starving people and he would tell him of certain doctors who worked hard in strange places helping people get rid of diseases that were taking the lives of children. He had read of these ministers and doctors in a magazine called
Mission
that he found one day in a pew of Saint Martin de Porres.

Clio would say, “How can you believe that jive?” And then he would make a speech saying that the church was a lie and religion was a lie and Willie was crazy to believe what he did.

What Clio thought, the way he felt, saddened Willie. But still Clio was his best friend, and Willie knew that suffering and anger made him say the things he did.

Clio’s brother George was in jail now and his father had died in prison and Clio spoke bitterly of the way things were arranged in the country.

“Look at their houses, their cars, their clothes,” he would say, referring to white people. “Look at us. Where are you, man? In a dream world!”

It angered Clio that Willie was not angry, only puzzled. He did not know how much Willie got from the trusted signs of the book and from things that were not in the book but were in the world because of what had happened and what was still happening.