The Atlas

FATHERS AND CROWS

Peter returned to the mount called Olivet whenever he could, at first because he sought yet for signs of Him Whom he worshipped, but once he'd taken upon himself the first black mantle of priesthood, once he had founded his church, his craving for JESUS lost its ache and became instead a wholesome nostalgia: — This place, he said to himself, is where I became what I am. — And he meant this not out of any sinful pride, for he fully expected to die for the LORD as JESUS had done (and we know that in this he was to be gratified). So Peter walked the path of hardpacked quartz pebbles; his robe caught and tore on the gray bushes; he ascended the way his FRIEND had gone and looked up at Heaven until his face was sunburned; he sat on the spot where the two Angels had appeared, and there he rested all day, smiling with his head in his hands. In the evenings that cut like blue and ancient knives, birds pelted the sky in droves, sounding their different notes, and the Joshua trees seemed to stretch upward as their shadows lengthened; His shadow must have become impossibly, mournfully elongated as He had risen (but the silhouette of His face would have remained as it was, a face of ordinary proportions, bowed upon a great pillar of cooling shadow) — and the Joshua trees whose arms invoked all directions like the crooked legs of spiders began to tremble in the wind, and the ridges to the west turned purple with black tree-dots, while the ridges to the east, receiving the last of the sun's low-slanting rays, glowed hot and pink above the darkness.

For the sake of this same sentimental archeology, Peter occasionally returned to Golgotha, ignoring the cries of the more lately crucified because they were not the ONE; so paying them witness could only erode his recollections of that Crucifixion which he was bound to consider final. — Water, water! moaned a man on a cross. — Oh, what a cursed place this was! — But Peter's occupation must now be to overcome such impressions. Kneeling with clasped hands, he lowered his head and began to search for beauty in the ridges below him, whose tan boulders were ridden with cracks so that they seemed to be stacks of half-melted bricks from some old time, and channels and canyons of the same rough rock ran between them, all edges sandblasted smooth, but their stone-flesh was grainy with sharp quartz crystals that could scrape hands to bleeding. Yucca plants grew in fractures or little beds of sand; their shadows were very sharp. Sometimes a sandbed led between two slanting boulders that gave like a gateway onto some plain or plateau bounded by ridges of again the same rock; those places were gray with brush. Immense squawbushes shone iron-gray like tumbleweeds forged in some smithy; they bore no red berries to refresh the Savages; they bore nothing but grayness; the only green things were piñon pines or the straight shaggy trunk-posts of Joshua trees, in whose green brushes crows sat. In sunny places the heat was burning; in the shade it was cold. — Peter could see nothing beautiful there. — Sighing, he proceeded up the Road of Tears, which wound monotonously upward, not steeply but steadily, and the wind gusted colder and the shrubs grew grayer and the Joshua trees smaller, while the way went from bowl to bowl in the rocks. In each bowl the horizon was very close, being bordered on every side by a ridge of the same tan stone, and in each bowl a cross was erected, on which a man hung dying while his guards played dice; and Peter averted his eyes and strode on to the summit, from which he could see many dead black hills below, fretted with shrubs and the silvery trails of flood-washes, and then the far flat plain of bluish enigma, stained by cloud-shadows, upon which the great whore Jerusalem walled herself in to her pleasures, and the plain stretched past Emmaus all the way to the Dead Sea, which was then the color of the sky; and a great dark range of dark blue mountains made the final horizon. But where Peter sat was only reddish dirt with the ant-hollowed flute of a man's thigh-bone sticking out, and flakes of quartz or feldspar, and feeble patches of grass huddled in shrub-shadows; — so all he saw was a great anthill of decay swelling above a world of iniquity, but I am sure it was only because he was not quite high enough; had the guards considerately raised him up to the fork of a Joshua tree and nailed him thereon, he might have seen what CHRIST saw: the lovely cacti, over which the delirious CHRIST murmured and waved His hand as He blessed them (but of course His hand was nailed fast to that cross of gray splintered ironwood, so that to those watching below it seemed only that He struggled feebly for a moment, tearing His wounds a little more so that another trickle of weary black blood ran down between the hard-baked clots already on him), and He smiled at the gardens of cholla cactus which only He saw, loving them for their spines, which were as intricately whorled as rose coral; he smiled upon their greenish-orange fruits, which were like hard raspberries; He sent His affection to them on account of the beautiful green they glowed beneath the gray bushes where woodrats lived; in His greater self, which was never maimed or fettered, He kissed the hale gray buckhorn chollas; He embraced the strawberry stems of calico cacti; He smiled in such delight to the rustling leaf-music of the creosote bushes, whose waxy leaves, though olive-green and soothing like stream-plants, were nonetheless almost as sharp-edged as those cholla spines which shimmered silvery and lavender like delicate down upon their lobes and joints, which twined caressingly about each other in that dry sand and they seemed softer than hare-fur until you got closer to them and saw that each joint was like a sea-urchin and their shimmering was a shimmering of barbed spines (but cactus wrens could nest in the chollas, and the Cahuilla Indians could gather and eat the cholla-fruit); so CHRIST married the fuzzy-soft chollas, and he took to himself the detached chollas lying in the sand like fallen gray stars; and He married the pencil-chollas, whose pale green cylindrical leaves were rolled tight like promises; they too were spine-studded, but every spine was precious, and so emerged from a diamond on the leaf; He resurrected the dead gray-white cholla skeletons that decay had reduced to hollow wind-tubes; nor did He neglect the others, the jojoba and the desert senna, the ocotillo, which rose, woody, split, and spined like fish backbones, to a height of fifteen feet or more, like the upright of His cross, and its gray wood was cracked and helically green-veined; but it glowed with orange cactus-flowers. .

Peter loved none of these weeds. But he loved to look down the mountain Golgotha at a certain ridge-fold where a single green tree rose; that was where he and the guards went to drink at a certain hour because there was a tiny oasis there; in the oasis it was cool and a wide shallow stream trickled through a muddy tunnel between the great cottonwood palms, whose bleached fronds stirred about their trunk-waists like the grass skirts of dancers, and the sky fluttered blue as turquoise between their green fan-fingers, and they spread ever so many happy green hands all around themselves in thankfulness, and cattails made a wall against the heat, and the water glittered in the darkness and the palm-trees rustled and between them it was so dim and cool; it was almost like being in a forest, but not quite, because there were not enough trees and their scales were sharp plates like reptile-scales; but at least the fronds were soft; they did not cut your hands. — Peter felt contented when he thought upon that grove. And he said to himself: My CHRIST is in the grove, not the grave. — And the guards made a covenant with Peter that neither party would molest the other, for each was but rendering service and allegiance as he was called upon to do.

The hills were like green breasts. In the vast mounds of forest blue and green rose skinny white birches so needy for someone to embrace them. Sky-blue massifs rose ahead and behind. The Baie Saint-Paul was wide and blue, pale blue like a sea. The far shore was but an uncertain congealment of haze.

The priests were Peter's sons. When they saw the immensi.y before them they whispered: We shall make no covenant with you.

Père Jean de Brebeuf made no covenants. But he followed the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and being thus directed (according to the limits of his strength) up the great river of prayer called Time, he came at last to the Seventy-Second Rapid— viz.; the Thirteenth Apparition of CHRIST, Who manifested Himself to Saint Paul, and also to the Holy Fathers in Limbo, from which state He freed them. Around this Rapid rose the blockily fractured cliff-faces covered by trees standing one below the other, thii crowns of those spruces and aspens shadowing the bases of those above them; they went down and down, until began the rock that dropped sheer to the brown river below. At first he saw the river flowing far down below him, between trees on which autumn and evening already shone with a pale yellow light; he seemed to stand with JESUS CHRIST, Savior of the World, atop the faded cliffs gray and: ool that rose to crickets, resin, ferns, red maples, forest shade, crowned by sky still luminous as in afternoon; but this position Brebeuf considered highly presumptuous considering his unworthiness, and so his soul leaped into the river, allowing itself to be borne back down the Three Falls of Humility, where he was much bruised and scratched by the river-rocks, a mortification which afforded him some consolation for his many faults. Now he permitted himself to clamber back up the Sauk of Election, to ascend to the Current of Patience which again washed him back to the commencement of the Third Week, to rise from the Sixteenth Rapid to the Third Isle of Prayer, to swim from the Twenty-Third Rapid back up to the Seventy-Second, which he pulled himself up by great might and main, wedging his feet between boulders to brace his climb as the cataract spewed down upon his body and the walls shimmered high and narrow above him like rocky-hued rainbows.

In fact the weather was rather grise—viz.; dull and gray. It chilled him but he would make no covenant with his loathsome body, no matter how much it shivered.

A sick woman saw in dreams a man dressed in black like Père Brébeuf, whom they called Echon. In the dream it was Echon who touched her with fire, at which her fever became much worse. When Tehorenhaennion was called, everyone in that long-house greeted him most respectfully.

The dogs must not howl, he said. I make my cures only in silence.

A girl took the dogs out, and also a bear-cub in its cage, which had begun grunting.

It is my rule to require the sick one to be carried into the woods, to see the Sky, said Tehorenhaennion after a pause. But today there are clouds. This cure will be difficult.

He bent over her and began to blow upon her and suck at her body where she was most swollen. Very soon he had found five hairball charms which Echon or some other witch had sent into her.

The case was most serious, and he had little hope that she would live. However, he turned to her relatives who were there and showed them the witch-charms before he burned them in the fire, concealing his doubts, for sometimes belief alone would assist a patient to recover. Now he gave her a potion to drink which would open the way to her navel — the seat of her disease — and said to her: Have courage! and she smiled most gratefully and replied: Even now I feel eased. . and her lodgemates began to be very happy, although for fear of him they did not show it, but then the potion mounted to her ears, which began to swell, and so she died.

You tricked us, a man said to him. Why did you fail?

Tehorenhaennion regarded him calmly. — You did not give me all the presents which I asked you for, he said. Where is my pipe of red stone? Where is my tobacco pouch?

The truth was that Echon had used magic which he did not know. Echon was the most Powerful and malignant witch whom he had ever fought. He would make no covenant with him.

Corn hung yellow and bright. The pigs wanted it. They were grunting pigs with huge pink ears and dirty faces and there were flies on them. The flies wanted pigsweat and blood. Not far away, udders hung. The brown calves wanted them. And the mooing black cows with swollen brown udders, they wanted to be milked or sucked. They had great glistening eyes; they lowed loudly in the hay.

The furnace eye was uneasy. The flames curled back.

Priests stared from the open casements, knowing the furnace eye, wondering when their covenant would be burned. They watched the aqueduct drain down to the South Compound. The water continued through the narrow canal, just a canoe's width; it exited the lock all gray, narrow, a little waterfall through the square arch; and then it left the tables, candles and beds to become again the river it had been, deep and black, streaming with white reflections of palisade-poles like bones. Across the river the Iroquois crouched in hiding. They wanted everything they saw. They wanted to make everything scream and burn.

The flies came and came; they got everything. Then some corn dropped down to the pigs at last, and the pigs got it. Milk jetted from udders into pink mouths, the mouths of calves. Now practically all that's left of those days is Québec's Chapelle des Ursulines with its rose window and rose-windowed arch; but if one looks into space as one reads or rather recites from one's Bible (the eldest daughter looking up at one, the other children eyeing each other silently), it's possible to see how the furnace eye blinked and widened. But the priests never succumbed, never made any covenant, even when they canoed fleeing from their burning Mission. Yes, the fire came, and the Iroquois also gained their own desire, singing: Hé é é é é. .