James Burke: In the Moon of Red Ponies

Johnny took the flowers from Amber’s hand and spread them on Darrel’s grave. Then he drew himself to attention and saluted.

“I think he’d appreciate that,” I said.

When we came out of the cemetery, the sunshower on the hill by the river had turned itself into a rainbow. I saw Johnny’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and I wondered if, in his mind, the Everywhere Spirit had just hung the archer’s bow in the sky.

So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don’t expect those qualities. Not a great deal was changed externally by the events I’ve described here. Wyatt Dixon’s newspaper friends in Dallas published the story of Karsten Mabus’s connections to the sale of chemical and biological agents to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, but no one seemed to care. In fact, Karsten Mabus is currently underwriting legislation in the U.S. Congress that will open up wilderness areas in this country for oil and gas exploration while, at the same time, his companies are receiving contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure.

But as the old-time African-American hymn admonishes, I don’t study war anymore. I made my separate peace regarding my own excursion into violence at Mabus’s ranch, an event that left two men seriously wounded, consoling myself with the biblical account of Peter, who, after drawing blood with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, received only a mild rebuke from the Lord.

In fact, perhaps my greater sin was my presumption that violence, in this case the attempted assassination of Karsten Mabus, can change history for the better. As Wyatt Dixon suggested, Mabus cannot be gotten rid of by a bullet. Mabus is of our own manufacture, an extension of ourselves and the futile belief that the successful pursuit of wealth and power can transform avarice into virtue. His successors are legion and timeless. They need only to wait in the wings for their moment, then walk onstage to thunderous applause, their faces touched with an ethereal light.

I also knew that Mabus had a long memory and my story with him was probably not over.

But I refused to borrow tomorrow’s trouble and make it today’s concern. Our child would be born in spring, and each day Temple seemed happier and more lovely than the day before. During the fall she, Lucas, and I packed a straw hamper with supper and made a point of spending at least two afternoons a week fishing for German browns on the Blackfoot River, not far from the steel suspension bridge that led to Wyatt Dixon’s house.

The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested, bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye.