“I remember you didn’t have ’em buttoned this morning.”
“That’s so,” said Bailey, impressed, “Now when did I button em?”
They chewed at the question, trying to puzzle it out.
It seemed very important to both for quite a long time.
It was night now. The column still marched. But Bailey and Ellyat
Had dropped to the rear of the column, planning escape.
There were few guards and the guards were as tired as they.
Two men could fall in a ditch by the side of the road
And get away, perhaps, if they picked a good time.
They talked it over in stupid whispers of weariness.
The next bend—no, the guard was coming along.
The next bend after—no, there was light for a moment
From a brief star, then clouded—the top of the hill—
The bottom of the hill—and they still were marching.
Rain began to fall, a drizzle at first, then faster.
Ellyat’s eyes were thick. He walked in a dream,
A heavy dream, cut from leaden foil with blunt shears.
Then Bailey touched him—he felt the tired bones of his skull
Click with a sudden spark—his feet stopped walking—
He held his breath for an instant,
And then wearily slumped in the ditch with enormous noise,
Hunching his shoulders against a phantom bayonet.
But when he could raise his head, the column had gone.
He felt fantastic. They couldn’t escape like this.
You had to escape like a drawing in Harper’s Weekly
With stiff little men on horses like sickle-pears
Firing round frozen cream-puffs into your back.
But they had escaped. Life came back to him in a huge
Wave of burnt stars. He wanted to sing and yell.
He crackled out of the ditch and stood beside Bailey.
Had he ever hated Bailey? It could not have been.
He loved Bailey better than anything else in the world.
They moved slyly toward the woods, they were foxes escaped.
Wise foxes sliding away to a hidden earth
To a sandy floor, to the warm fawn-flanks of sweet sleep. …
And then an awful molasses-taffy voice
Behind them yelled “Halt!” and “Halt!” and—sudden explosion
Of desultory popcorn in iron poppers—
Wild running at random—a crash among broken boughs—
A fighting sound—Bailey’s voice, half-strangled but clear,
“Run like hell, Jack, they’ll never catch you!” He ran like hell.
Time passed like the rain. Time passed and was one with the rain.
Ellyat woke from a nightmare and put out his hand
To touch the wall by his bed, but there was no wall.
Then he listened for Bailey’s snoring. And he heard
The gorged, sweet pouring of water through infinite boughs,
The hiss of the big spilt drop on the beaten leaf,
The bird-voiced and innumerable rain,
A wet quail piping, a thousand soaked black flutes
Building a lonely castle of sliding tears,
Strange and half-cruel as a dryad’s bright grief.
Ellyat huddled closer under the tree,
Remembering what he could. He had run for years,
He had slept for years—and yet it was still not dawn.
It seemed cruel to him that it should never be dawn.
It seemed cruel that Bailey was lost. He had meant to show
Some fictive heroisms in front of Bailey.
He had not. Bailey had saved his skin instead,
And Bailey was lost. And in him something was lost,
Something worse than defeat or this rain—some piece of himself,
Some piece of courage. Now the slant rain began
To creep through his sodden heart. He thought, with wild awe,
“This is Nibelung Hall. I am lying in Nibelung Hall.
I am long dead. I fell there out of the sky
In a wreck of horses, spilling the ball of the sun,
And they shut my eyes with stone runes and put me to sleep
On a bier where the living stream perpetually flows
Past Ygdrasil and waters the roots of the world.
I can hear the ravens scream from the cloudy roof.
I can hear the bubbles rising in the clear stream.
I can hear the old gods shout in the heathen sky
As the hawk-Valkyrie carry the stiffened lumps
Of corpse-faced heroes shriekingly to Valhalla.
This is Nibelung Hall. I must break the runes from my eyes.
I must escape it or die.” He slept. The rain fell.
Melora Vilas, rising by candlelight,
Looked at herself in the bottom of the tin basin
And wished that she had a mirror. Now Spring was here,
She could kneel above the well of a forest pool
And see the shadow hidden under the water,
The intent brown eyes, the small face cut like a heart.
She looked at the eyes and the eyes looked back at her,
But just when it seemed they could start to talk to each other—
“What are you like? Who are you?”— a ripple flawed
The deep glass and the shadow trembled away.
If she only had a mirror, maybe she’d know
Something, she didn’t know what, but something important,
Something like knowing your skin and you were alive
On a good day, something as drenched as sleep,
As wise as sleep, as piercing as the bee’s dagger.
But she’d never know it unless she could get a mirror
And they’d never get a mirror while they were hiders.
They were bound to be hiders as long as the war kept on.
Pop was that way. She remembered roads and places.
She was seventeen. She had seen a lot of places,
A lot of roads. Pop was always moving along.
Everybody she’d ever known was moving along.
—Dusty wagons full of chickens and children,
Full of tools and quilts, Rising Sun and Roses of Sharon,
Mahogany dressers out of Grandmother’s house,
Tin plates, cracked china, a couple of silver spoons,
Moving from State to State behind tired, scuffed horses
Because the land was always better elsewhere.
Next time they’d quit. Next stop they’d settle right down.
Next year they’d have time to rub up the mahogany dresser.
Next place, Mom could raise the flowers she wanted to raise.
But it never began. They were always moving along.
She liked Kansas best. She wished they’d go back to Kansas.
She liked the smell of the wind there.
But Pop hadn’t wanted to join with the Free-Soilers
And then the slavery men had shot up the town
And killed the best horse they had. That had settled Pop.
He said something about a plague on both of your houses
And moved along. So now they were hiders here
And whenever you wanted to ask Pop about the war
All he said was that same old thing about the plague.
She mustn’t call him Pop—that was movers’-talk.
She
