'The Lord is upon me,' Joseph shouted, 'and I must speak His Truth!'
The hat skimmed, forgotten, through the air and crumpled against the wall. With an agility that always surprised Hendrik, Joseph leaped upon the bar and strutted like a performer upon a stage. Eddy's large, watery eyes goggled and his tiny mouth fell open. At this, even the poet's prodigious flow of talk ran dry. The coughing child – Kitty or Katie or somesuch – looked down as if expecting a thorough chastising.
The regulars at Samuel's had seen this before. Ernie was ready with his cloth to wipe any drink that was spilled by Joseph's boots, and with his leaded shillelagh to silence any unwise customer who might complain at such wastage. A few of the girls clapped; nothing so endeared Joseph to women as his ability to convince them the fires of hell were nipping at their petticoats.
Joseph sucked in a lungful of smoky air and Hendrik assumed the draught would be good for a full hour of sermon. Afterwards, Eddy might feel obliged to counter with a recital of one of his poems. As free shows went, it was one of the more expensive. Listening to rot gave a man considerable thirst.
'Sisters, brothers…' Joseph began.
His flow died and his mouth stilled. His eyes fixed upon a face in the crowd and words became ashes on his tongue. His cheeks and forehead flushed an angry crimson.
Hendrik turned to discern the object of his brother's gaze. The lump in his leg shifted sharply and he gritted his teeth at the pain.
He could still hear the crack of that rifle-shot. Then, he had thanked the Lord, for if the ball had missed his leg and penetrated his horse's ribs, Santa Anna's men would have brought him down and his pains would have been at an end. Now, he cursed the tiny scrap of dull, unreachable metal.
Standing alone, near the back of the room, was a man in nondescript clothes. His face might be carved of wood: cheekbones knife-edged, mouth a thin line. His eyes were concealed behind extraordinary spectacles, black wooden frames with silvered mirrors for lenses. Whatever Joseph saw in those mirrors, smote him to unique silence.
III
The sky was the colour of flame, scattering bloody light on wind-carved mountains and deep-etched rifts. When the canyon widened briefly to admit the light, their shadows lay before them, spindle-legged and scrawny, dark against reddish dust and rocks.
The party made its way through a narrow fissure which cut deep into the rock. A primordial blow, struck by the hand of God, had cracked the land in two. Another shift might restore the unity, and crush them all like paste between hard faces.
Hendrik had learned that everything was alive.
Brother Carey's horse paced evenly. The young Josephite's long rifle jogged against his back as he bent his body either way to avoid overhangs. Hendrik carefully kept to the centre of the path. The walls of the passage were rough. A scrape against an outcrop could take off clothes and skin.
At the head of the column, the Ute whistled like a night-bird. The sound cut the quiet like a dagger's edge. Beside the Ute, Brother Clegg, who had once been a soldier, held up his hand and whirled it in a signal.
Step by step, the party emerged from the passage and fanned out as if drilled. Their horses stood in the shadow of the mountain, at the top of a gentle slope. Below was New Canaan.
The community was a collection of rough dwellings and fragile, irrigated squares of wheat. There was little timber around; most homes were assembled from old stones, roughly fitted together like cairns.
Still-smouldering hearths allowed smoke to trickle from chimneys into the sky. The party had little time. These sod-busters would rise with the sun.
Hendrik dismounted. His leg thrilled with pain as he came down on the hard ground, but he did not cry out.
IV
The man in the mirrored glasses claimed to be of the Ute, but Hendrik knew he was no Plains Indian. He might be a native of Araby or a Chinaman or an inhabitant of the moon, but he was not from the West. He could just about pass, with his thin face and leather skin, but he had about him a quality not of the Americas.
The back room at Samuel's Tavern was usually reserved for dice or cards. If extra payment were made, one could conduct business with Molly or her sisters in the relative warmth and comfort of this place rather than in the foul-smelling alley outside. The confined space was infernally hot. The only light came from the stove, which cast glowing bars of red on faces and walls.
Fires burned in the Ute's spectacles.
The company was much reduced. Hendrik, Joseph, Eddy. And the Ute. Hendrik was in a fog as to how this party had assembled, and what bargain had been struck between them.
Now, Eddy and Joseph leaned forwards, hellfire striping their attentive faces, each fixed upon the bogus Indian as if held rapt by a speech. In fact, the Ute was silent.
The drink had burned out of Hendrik's brain, leaving behind a ruin of aches. Midnight was long past but dawn was a way off.
From inside his jacket, the Ute produced a book. He laid it, open, on a table. The pages were covered in neat symbols, cipher or foreign script. The ink must be silvered, for the writing caught firelight and seemed to waver on the page.
'Words of fire,' Joseph breathed. 'The Truth is written in flame.'
Eddy shook his head, denying something.
'Do not reject this revelation, brothers,' Joseph said.
The Ute took off his fabulous spectacles and laid them on the book. His eyes were deeply shadowed, lending his upper face the empty-socketed look of a skull.
Joseph reached out for the spectacles and picked them up. Hendrik wanted to tell his brother to throw the damned things on the floor and stamp them into fragments.
The Ute turned to look directly at Hendrik. Minute sparks shone in his eyes.
Hendrik was pinned to his chair. The heat hung heavy on him.
Joseph set the spectacles on his face and adjusted them. He gasped in amazement. Tears emerged from behind the reflecting circles and trickled down his cheeks.
'I see,' he breathed, 'I see…Truth.'
He snatched up the book and turned pages, as if absorbing paragraphs of sense in a second. He hurried on, nodding and laughing and sighing. Lenses flashed as his head bobbed.
'Lord,' Joseph said, not profaning the name, but invoking, praying…
Hendrik did not know what was happening. The room was stifling, heat squeezing the head and pinioning the limbs. Eddy was intent on Joseph, impatient for his turn.
The Ute sat as still as a stone.
Joseph had been well up on his scriptures as a child, but possessed of a wild streak. He had run with the barefoot and savage Irish. Their parents, respectably Dutch-speaking after generations in the New World, had
