Walter Miller, Jr.: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

Grass. It stretched unbroken to one horizon, and meandered among the low, dark trees on the other. The little mountains called Winding Stare were lit with fires, whether of celebration or mourning, Blacktooth couldn’t tell.

He rode unchallenged past the first log outposts of the gleps. He hoped the Valley of the Misborn would take him in, and it did. The Valley, or the Watchitah Nation as it was now called, had grown to be a network of valleys, up and down the low mountains called the Old Zarks. Blacktooth wandered until he found a little community of bookleggers and memorizers, called Post Cedar. He traded his mule for a g’tara much like the one his father had given him, and lived on the mountainside above the abbey, swapping his services as a scribe and a tutor for food.

He found shelter in a rockhouse cave, very like the cave where Amen had lived, except that these eastern caves were broad and open, like a mouth. They provide protection against the rain, and some against the cold; but none against the years.

And so, Blacktooth St. George grew old, reciting the Divine Office and meditating on The Rule of Saint Leibowitz, which enjoined him to the humility he was surprised to discover had been waiting for him all along. It was a sister to the deep loneliness he treasured, a loneliness he no longer wished filled. It was an emptiness as tangible as love. Some nights, though, he found himself praying to whatever might answer such a prayer that Ædrea would come to him. He had heard that a blond spook who wore a nun’s robe practiced medicine in the next valley. The local priest called her a witch; sometimes she healed minds the priest had cursed, and because of this, the priest feared her.

Blacktooth needed his mind healed, but that was not what he feared in her. He feared the gateway beneath the clitoris, torn open by the black god and the white god he had seen riding with the Day Maiden on her rubriauricular white mule. Or had the old Jew done that to her? It was just over the hill waiting for him, the world gateway of the Lord Jesus and of all the saints, and he was a coward. Sometimes he stroked himself into a moment’s ecstasy thinking about it, and he did not hide his shame from the Holy Mother Day Maiden Fujæ Go who watched him from the corner of the hut of his mind. Neither did he mention it in his annual confession to the Leibowitzian priest who visited him every Maundy Thursday. The priest always wanted to wash Nimmy’s feet on behalf of the abbot on that occasion, but the hermit refused.

“You won’t acknowledge your poverty? Isn’t that your pride?”

Blacktooth signed and let the man wash his feet and give him communion.

He had given up Jesus several times, as Amen Specklebird had advised, when the Savior became an occasion of sin for him: but he always came back, and so, it seemed to him, did the Savior. Well, how have you been doing lately, Lord?

For three hours every weekday, he taught thirteen children of various ages how to read and write their own dialect; he also taught them a little music, and taught them—sometimes to their parents’ disbelief—a few things about the geography of the continent, and as much as he knew about the history of the world and the fall of the Magna Civitas. Some of the children believed him, and others believed their parents; but the laughing parents brought him food in payment for their urchins’ literacy, and they mended his clothes, furnished him blankets, and occasionally brought him a hemina of wine for his weakness.

When he was alone, he opened himself. Sometimes the ecstasy of God came through the opening, but more often it did not. He decided to stop leaving an opening for God. That was what Meister Eckhart advised: to be so poor that he had no place for God to come into. When God had no place to come into, He was in every place. There was nothing else.

But Blacktooth did not consider himself a religious man. He did not know if God was the Father, or the maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. He couldn’t see that it mattered, since God Himself, when He became manifest as a whirlwind bush, never bothered to tell him; never said, “Blacktooth, I am your Almighty Father, and I made this Earth you’re kneeling on and the sky you are kneeling under.”

JUST OVER THE MOUNTAIN FROM POST CEDAR was a convent, where there lived a nun known as Sister Clare. She awakened one morning with one of her “feelings,” and knew that the hermit who lived in the next valley was dead. She had known of him for years but had elected to leave him in peace, knowing the difficulty of the journey he was on. No one told her he was dead; no one besides herself knew it yet, and she only knew because of the feeling, not unlike joy and yet not unlike sorrow either, that wouldn’t leave her. She welcomed the feeling. The hermit had few enough left in this world to miss him.

With the abbess’s permission, Sister Clare packed a loaf of bread, a little cheese, and then, as an afterthought, a freshly dead mouse from the trap in the kitchen. She walked over the steep and little-used trail to Post Cedar. On the far side of the valley, across from the monastery, she found the narrow path to the dry cave, just where she knew it would be.

The old man hadn’t been dead long. It was not his death but his age that filled Sister Clare’s eyes with tears. She had expected somehow to find a handsome young man, even though she was herself an old woman, bent and spotted with years.

Blacktooth was sitting against a stone with the head of a small cougar in his lap. The animal lifted its blue head when she approached. It was Librada. Ædrea waited but the cougar wouldn’t leave, and finally had to be coaxed away with the mouse so that she could bury Blacktooth and place at the head of his grave the little cross she had carried with her all these years.

The rosary that was clutched in his hand, and the crude g’tara he had left leaning a gainst the back wall of the cave, she took with her.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., grew up in the American South and enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor. He spent most of World War II as a radio operator and tail gunner, participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. Fifteen years later he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz. The sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, followed after nearly forty years.