Michael Blake - The Holy Road

After he and Kicking Bird clasped hands, the Quaker pulled the Comanche aside and showed him into the place he called a "house." Passing over the threshold, Kicking Bird was astounded to find that a single footstep could transport him into a foreign, confounding world.

As he stood fixed to a floor of wood, his head turned slowly, allowing his uncomprehending eyes to absorb fully the numbing wonder of what he saw. This was the box that Lawrie Tatum lived in, and the sight of four walls, a roof, and a floor sent a tremor of horror up Kicking Bird's spine.

How a person could exist in such a place was difficult to believe. The Quaker was completely sealed inside the box. The air inside did not move, and although the things called windows admitted the moon's light, they seemed completely unnecessary. The whole world was only a few feet away! Who could possibly want to look outside when the opportunity of being outside was as easy as walking?

Tables and chairs were placed in the room, as if in wait for a large child. A heavy piece of soft material obscured much of the floor's planking. The fire was hidden in a metal box, where it could not be enjoyed. But most startling of all, macabre images of hair-mouths hung in several spots on the walls. For a beat or two of his leaping heart Kicking Bird thought they might be living beings whose faces had somehow been manipulated onto the sides of Lawrie Tatum's box. Then he thought they might be representations of slain enemies, but he quickly realized that Lawrie Tatum could not be capable of killing anything more than a rabbit. . maybe a deer.

The blur of visions was further complicated by the little white man's frenetic behavior. The moment he entered his box, Lawrie Tatum began gesturing and talking in a vain effort to explain every item to a man who had never seen them before, nor even knew of their existence, and what little Kicking Bird learned of the objects the Quaker was describing was canceled out by the haste with which he drew his visitor across the floor to a far wall, where a tall, dark box, fronted by a similarly colored chair, stood.

His host sat in the chair, reached up, and opened the box. The inside was littered with pieces of paper stuffed into holes that had been carved into the box's top. The Quaker reached down, took hold of something with two fingers, and pulled out another, smaller box. As he began to dig through it, Kicking Bird interrupted his search to ask what the tall box might be.

"Oh," chirped Lawrie Tatum, looking up earnestly. “Forgive me. . desk. . this is a desk. Make words here."

Still unsure what it might be, Kicking Bird could manage only an affirmative grunt as the Quaker laid out several small cases on the desktop and began to inspect them. Inside were the glass discs suspended by wire and, as Kicking Bird stared down on them in awe, Lawrie Tatum suddenly turned to him again.

“The man. . old. . Ten Bears. . Ten Bears."

"Uhhh," Kicking Bird snorted. "Tin Bares."

"For his eyes," Lawrie Tatum said eagerly, pointing to his own.

“Eyes. . Ten Bears."

"Uhhh," Kicking Bird answered, lifting a finger to one of his eyes, “aye.”

"See far," Lawrie Tatum asked, holding a cupped hand at arm's length before drawing it quickly to his face, "or close?"

He repeated the motion and a moment later Kicking Bird took the Quaker's hand and brusquely stretched his arm straight.

“Thisss,” he said, shaking his head.

“Ah, nearsighted!" Lawrie Tatum grinned. He turned once again to the desk and went on with his examination.

The Comanche and Kiowa warriors rode far onto their beloved prairie that night before finding a shelf of sandy soil where they could stretch out and sleep a few hours in the shadow of a looming cut bank.

Wrapped in a blanket, his head resting on the occasional bag he used for a pillow, Kicking Bird lay awake, his mind crowded with all he had heard and seen. It was thrilling to think of the surprise for Ten Bears wrapped in deerskin just behind his skull but, as he watched the orange trails of stars streak across the heavens, he gave the surprise the same passing attention that other, vivid impressions of the previous day received.

They were pushed aside by a single, overwhelming question. It was a question about the whites he had long contemplated and had always believed a firsthand encounter like the one in the Quaker's home would provide a simple answer to. Instead, a hundred different potential answers whirled in his mind, while the question itself continued to float in his consciousness, heavy and persistent as a pendulum.

How could Lawrie Tatum, or any other man, in exercise of free will, eschew the sun and stars and wind, spurn the earth itself, to sleep and eat and laugh and cry and bathe and smoke and procreate in a box?

Kicking Bird thought to himself, I am glad I have never dreamed of such a thing.

But then he thought, Now that I have seen it, perhaps I will dream about it. That would be bad.

He shut his eyes and tried to push the possibility of dreaming out of his head.

The nightmare came in stormy weather and clear. It came in good health and bad, and it came with every sleep. There was a box within a box and people were trapped inside. People slept in the box. Often they defecated and urinated in the box. The stale air they breathed was hard to filter and made them cough.

A small square had been cut in one of the box's walls and glass had been sized to fit the square. Thin, metal spikes driven into the outside held it fast so that the glass would not open.

On the opposite wall another, larger square had been cut then filled with a large, similarly shaped plank that reached to the floor. Attached to this plank was a round, metal knob below which a small hole was visible. Every night, as the sun started behind the earth, measured footsteps sounded outside the box within a box, and moments later the sound of metal on metal was heard. Something turned and clicked and, no matter how much the knob was turned, the plank would not open.

Footsteps came again when the sun's light began to reveal the world. The metal in the plank turned and clicked as it had before; then the plank opened and the dream reached its chilling climax as an expressionless white man or woman appeared.

What made the nightmare especially horrible was not that it came each night. What gave the nightmare its terror was that it was not a nightmare at all. Everything in it, as far as she could tell, was real, and as the bad dream nights began to pile up behind her, Stands With A Fist feared that her mind was no longer able to tell her what was real and what was not. Sometimes she smiled inwardly at the irony, and when she did, those whose custody she was in would purse their lips in sympathy at the poor woman who had been so diminished by her lifelong ordeal that she smiled when there was no reason.

They were allowed out in daylight, and Stands With A Fist tried to work as often as possible in the garden beside the big box where she lived. Though she was always watched, her captors were often out of earshot when she was in the garden, and she could talk to Stays Quiet in hushed Comanche. She could fill her nose with earthly things as her hands worked the rich loam in an effort to coax flowers and vegetables to life. Despite her inexperience she was extraordinarily successful, and the luxuriant Gunther garden growing at the hands of Christine, the former captive, quickly became a regular topic of conversation among the survival-minded citizenry dwelling in the rough-hewn settlement called Jacksboro.

But the talk about Christine ranged far beyond her skill at gardening. The presence of one so unusual — and famous — held the town in continuous thrall, and no day passed without reference to the other-worldly woman who had landed in their midst. The hem of her dress, the tone of her skin, the way she threw her hands around in the rare moments when she uttered words, the wild-born child constantly at her side. All these things and many more were discussed through every waking hour. A lion caged in the center of town could not have evoked more interest.