The Sanding of Men

Some men you find out there on the flats, and some men you don’t. And there are days you ride and wonder if God Himself has turned His face from the world and left the sun in his stead to let it burn, and the wind and wipe the memory of things that won’t be buried.

I came upon him lying half in the salt and half out, as if he’d crawled out of the earth and was deciding whether to go back under. His face was burnt nearly black, and his mouth worked like a broken machine left discarded. A rifle lay across his chest, and a locket around his neck that glinted sharply in the light.

I dismounted and knelt. The salt creaked under my boots like powder. I set my hand on his shoulder, and he blinked up at me. The sun was in his eyes and mine and in everything else.

“Ain’t dead yet.”

His running mouth and flickering eyes are not proof enough of consciousness. I unstoppered my canteen to let him drink. It ran over his lips like it would the rocks. I reached for the locket and opened it, and for a minute, I felt the earth tilt under me.

It was a picture of a woman I once knew and a child I’d not seen grown. Beneath it, a single name was carved small.

Carrow.

A man would live well for leaving his faith to the future and using has past for his knowledge. I’d been watching my future dawn like a meteor everfalling and leaving me pale beneath its eclipse. Here before me lay its crater, where the knowledge of it alone leaves me to fall. My name had once been Carrow.

The wind was brushing the flats, and it seemed for a moment there wasn’t anything else left in the world but me and him and the murderous Sun.

“Where’d you get this?”

He tried to speak but could not, instead gulping up the sounds of suffocation. His eyes rolled up, and I thought him gone, but after a time, his breathing simply continued.

I slung him across my horse, leaving the trots to pump the wind into his lungs, and we turned west. The sun shone high, and the earth lay white and still and the bleached bones of some ancient beasts that had tried to dig through the surface to the other side where life remains.

This place forces men’s hand as either vendor or merchant. You square your debts, receipt your transactions, or become the property of such interest. The men who don’t know this all fall in one category. By the time of revelation, the debt attached to you has accrued more interest than a man is worth, and he runs, both victim and perpetrator. Becoming square with himself and any merchant becomes mutually exclusive.

I’d thought I’d be only the better for having saved myself. Perhaps one cannot.

…….

He stirred once as we rode, and I thought he meant to speak, but he only sagged against me, his head lolling. A man’s weight changes when he’s half in the next world. It’s like carrying a child of lead.

When the heat dropped some, we stopped among burnt rocks. I tried to get him to eat, but he’d no mind for it. The locket hung between us, and I kept looking at it, though I wished I wouldn’t.

“There was a day I left my father’s house and never set foot in it again. I thought I was right in doing it. Men do things they call right and then lie awake forty years wondering if that was so.”

The wind shifted and brought only the smell of farenheit. I thought about Jacob. I’d not seen my brother since the morning I left. I thought I’d hear from him one day, as men of the same cloth always find their like. Having not, I’d always wondered which of us may have strayed, or if it is in the grand design for our like to perish, leaving all the better.

“You could be him. Guess I don’t know how I’d know the difference. The years have carved us down, but we’d still be chipped from the same boulder.”

He lay animated, but unintelligible.

Stars hung low enough they seemed to scrape the horizon. The desert was a radiated brimstone under deep night. His breathing was inconsistent. I could not sleep.

Come sunrise, it was clear he’d his wits about him, buried under in his dry and burnt body.

“Welcome back. This place is worse than wherever you just were.”

We stopped when the sun was high. He was shivering through the pulsing heat. I poured water on a rag and set it to his forehead. His lips moved. I shook my cantina to the high pitch of a shallow fill. I wrung the rag over his mouth to conserve what was mine. His lips guppied the twisting stream.

“Name?”

His breath came ragged. His eyes rolled back.

“If you ain’t my brother, how come you got his locket?”

He opened his eyes, and I saw nothing there. Just two pale stones staring back at me. His mouth worked, but no words came.

……..

A man gets to fearing the things he’ll never know more than the things he does. I believe ignorance killed as many men as intent thereto.

The horizon held the shape of a town in the heat. I felt the pull of it like a hook in my flesh. At this distance, anything you approach only seems to slip further into the horizon.

Each step closer, I thought about what waited for me there. If this man wakes, his life may take the place of my own, or it may change its course in this rung of the cosmos.

The desert won’t remember your name. The salt doesn’t keep record. It just takes back what was lent to you and leaves the rest to wander. And in my purgatorial unknowing I grew fond of the wandering.

…….

The horse stumbled, and I reined up

“Brother?”

He gave a small shake of his head. I couldn’t decipher his cognizance. I thought I’d go mad from wanting to believe it. Or not believe it. My mind will invent any hell it must to settle itself.

“Well if you ain’t him… You got somethin’a his.”

He just closed his eyes.

We rode on. I reckon I felt the weight of every mile I’d put behind me since the day I left home. All of it coming back around. The wind hissed over the flats like a thing alive.

Justice isn’t what a man thinks it is. It isn’t punishment or mercy. It’s just the knowledge that what’s done is done. man may carry that weight or be crushed under it.

The man shifted and murmured something I couldn’t hear. His face was waxy. I saw in his eyes a kind of fear I recognized.

…….

We rode under a sun the color of hammered brass. The man slumped against me, breath feathering my sleeve. The horizon quivered like heat off a forge, and there was nothing in it but mirage and the pale ghosts of mountains drawn thin as smoke.

I kept glancing down at him. His weight shifted, small tremors running through his ribs like the ticking of a clock. His skin was leather-dark, and in places it cracked as though the sun had baked fissures into him. I thought how easily a man’s face might be burned past knowing, how the years and the desert might sand away the features of guilt or innocence.

A notion took hold of me. It whispered that I could be saving the very man who’d laid hands on my brother. Or worse—the man who’d set himself to finish the killing of my whole bloodline, myself included. A man who’d watched my family sleep and pondered how to end the line clean, so no man rose from it again.

The thought burrowed into me like a thorn. My mouth went dry. The locket swung between us on its chain, catching the light like the glint of a knife.

What if this man’s silence was no fever but cunning? What if he was playing at weakness to earn my pity and my water and my horse? And what would he do when we came into town, and he could stand beneath roofs and shadows again? Would he call my name to men I’d long tried to outrun?

If I knew he’d murdered Jacob, could I set him off this horse and leave him for the sun and the birds? And if I did, would that not make me a murderer too? I’d be the same as the man I feared him to be. Blood for blood, and all debts paid in the same red ledger.

I felt the weight of it press on me. A man spends half his life guarding himself from the evils of other men, and the other half discovering he might be the worst of them. I thought how quickly fear becomes pretext, and how righteous a man can feel while twisting the knife.

And then another thought came like a splinter in my mind:

What if it is my brother? Burnt and changed by years and deeds and the sun’s own cruelty. What if I cannot see him in this face, but he is there all the same? And what if I abandon him here, and learn too late whose hand I cast away?

I gripped the reins hard enough to make my knuckles white. The wind crawled over the salt in low hisses, like voices speaking secrets I could not hear.

If this man is my brother, then killing him would be killing myself. But saving him—if he’s no kin at all—might be the end of me just the same.

And I did not know which fate was worse.

The sky stretched infinite and cruel above us. The man moaned low in his throat. The sun scalding the flats, sanitizing the earth of its convictions.

…….

When we were near to town, maybe a mile off, I felt something in me give way, as timber splits unseen until it cracks through to air. The desert lay white as bleached paper, scrawled over by the tracks of wind, and I thought how every man’s life rides on two rails: the one he walks by daylight, and the one he dreams in the dark. And how one day they come to the same crossing, and a man must answer to both.

A man can live without forgiveness, but he cannot live without a brother. I wanted someone beside me so the world wouldn’t feel so wide, nor the silences so deep. Yet the world remains wide, and silence swallows every man in his hour.

The horse’s hooves whispered through the salt. Mason shifted in the saddle, and for a breath he seemed gathered to himself. He opened his eyes, dry and rimmed with salt, and his voice came low and rough as gravel under water.

“Do I know you?”

It near stopped my heart. Before us hung the shimmer of the town, wavering like a promise in the heat, full of men and reckonings and the weight of laws. Behind us lay the desert, bare as the truth, and the graves of every man I’d ever been.

A man can come to a place where he does not know if he is meant for punishment or mercy. But he is sure he deserves both.

“I believe you do.”