Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Read online

  The Rider had sought that road for nearly a week before he’d come across a weather beaten sign naming the town in faded letters, and delineating a long, lonely path up through the cold high country.

  The storm overtook him the third day like a marauding white gang. The balmy dusk, rather pleasant after so long down in the arid desert, swiftly turned into an impenetrable night of flaking snow, which accumulated at an alarming rate and soon hid the road from his step.

  That first night he clung to the onager for warmth and slept little.

  The snow continued to fall on the fourth day. The wind that had brought it hunkered down in the valleys and blew frantically, battering against the hillsides and kicking up eddies of icy powder like a trapped animal raging.

  The Rider had not dressed for inclemency; he had not expected to see his breath at all on the journey. Yet there it was, billowing like steam from an engine in his reddened and wind lashed hands, easing them momentarily of their ache before surrendering once more to the cold air. The ends of his ears were hot to the touch and his nose ran into his beard.

  That night was terrible. He slept not at all. The snow fell steadily, and he was not inclined to lie down, for fear that he would be encased in a frosty bed from which only the Messiah could awaken him. He crouched before the onager until his shivering limbs ached, warming himself in the hot breath that puffed from its nostrils.

  In the morning, dread settled on him with the fresh layer of snow. He was too cold to get out the tefillin to pray, and knew if he did not keep moving until he found warmth, he would die. Like a fool he had not thought to gather kindling and there was none dry to be found now.

  He considered it strange that death could lurk in the beautiful, unsullied whiteness of the land. An untouched snowfield was the closest thing to the splendor of heaven The Rider had yet seen on earth. It was peaceful when the howling of the wind died. The sound of his own feet and the onager’s hooves punching through the hard snow was comforting, as though they were sharing some intimate experience, which the Lord had made them alone privy to.

  Yes, it was beautiful. But it was a desert of a different kind, with its own hazards. No sunning serpents with beadwork coats sought to strike him or the onager unawares, but instead they were both bitten constantly again and again by the unseen snakes that twisted at them in the blowing of the chill wind. Their venom was no less poisonous. It debilitated them both, slowly, with a creeping, freezing ache that promised a quiet, sleepy death. It planted the seed of sickness down in his throat and strangled the life from the ends of his fingers until they glowed red in alarm.

  Back in the desert, there had been no water, only an abundance of dry heat that siphoned the moisture of the body like a creeping thief. Here there was plenty of water, but with his soaked garments, no way to remain dry and retain precious warmth.

  Midway through the fifth day, the snow briefly ceased falling and the land continued to ascend toward a high, treed place. The onager’s lungs were rattling wetly and the creeping feeling in the pit of his throat had become a fitful cough that expelled loosened mucus with every wracking convulsion.

  Then he saw the old man waving to him from a hill off the road. It was no trick of the snow light.

  He was a thin greybeard in a red and black striped blanket coat. He wore a long white muffler with gray mittens and a black cap that covered his ears. He stood alone in the white with a twisted, outstretched staff, a snowbound Moses. The Rider stumbled toward him, pulling the onager behind.

  “Been watchin’ you,” the old man said, his voice clear and strident in the stillness.

  The Rider only sniffed and nodded.

  “Come on up to my place,” he said, “and get warm.”

  Without waiting for an answer, the old man turned and walked off, heading higher up the alabaster hills and further back, leaving a clear trail behind.

  They walked this way for a couple hours, never speaking, The Rider trusting. By dusk they had reached a squat, friendly cabin nestled at the edge of a bosque of ice gilded cedars, overlooking a nameless frozen stream. A heavy fever alighted and settled on The Rider’s brow like a perching vulture.

  They brought the donkey in with them and placed it in the back room. The old man kept a mule, and the two animals took to each other’s company, the onager relieved by the heat of the other. The place smelled of pipe smoke and hung with the spice of the unwashed, and a faint sweet odor of fruit. It was warm from a fire left smoldering in the fat iron stove, which the old man stoked with a bundle of kindling wrapped in cheesecloth. The walls were stacked with precarious towers of canned goods, like the master storehouse of an accomplished glutton. The corners overflowed with the empty tin shells, the labels recalling departed peaches and jams by their faded print and lingering sweetness. The old man propped his staff in a corner and took off his hat and muffler.

  The change in the temperature made The Rider light-headed, and he shivered in his wet coat and coughed, catching himself on the table as the old man ran one long, bony finger over the labels, selecting a can from the wall.

  The Rider unbuckled his gun belt, setting the gold and silver chased pistol on the table. It would need oiling. If the old man was disturbed by the gun or impressed by its peculiar ornamentation, he showed no sign. The Rider saw no weapon in the house, not even a squirrel rifle.

  He stripped off the heavy, damp coat and shirt and spread them on the floor before the stove. Beneath his coat, his body was draped with strings of pendants, bodyguards and talismans-they were the source of the incessant clinking as he walked. The old man seemed to take no notice of that either. He gave The Rider a wool blanket and invited him to sit at the plain, wood table on an upturned barrel that was the only chair.

  Soon, the old man had a broth bubbling in a pan, and he offered it to The Rider with a wooden spoon.

  The Rider hesitated. Not only was the food bishul akum, he doubted the soup the old man offered was kosher, but he quietly asked forgiveness and that his impending sickness be taken into consideration as an extenuating attribute.

  “Praise Gawd,” said the old man, smiling. He was dirty, and one of his blue eyes wandered. He was balding and looked as if he had not shaved in many months, for the bushy grey of his beard sprung from his thin neck.

  The broth was good, and seemed to embolden The Rider’s stiff limbs. He whispered a bore nefashot for the nourishment, however unclean it might be.

  The old man prayed too, but The Rider caught only the low intonations of ‘Gawd’ and ‘sustenance.’

  “Praise Gawd, praise Gawd!” the old man said, with ever-increasing exultation. “Just you rest easy now, son. Let this fill and warm the nooks o’ your body like the healin’ power of the Holy Spirit. Yessir. I watched you comin’ up the hill. Watched you for a long while. Thank you Je-sus. Were you lost?”

  The broth purged The Rider of the memory of the bitter cold, yet the mounting fever and wind sought to remind him. Wailing outside in the black stovepipe, it cracked the stiff hides nailed across the windows and made the rafters creak as it ran barefoot and exuberant over the snow blanketed roof.

  “I was following a road...but the storm caught me. I don’t know if I’m still on it.”

  “The only road up here is the one that leads to Gadara.” The old man dragged a low crate across the floor to sit on.

  “Yes. Gadara. That’s where I’m headed.”

  The old man stared with one eye.

  “And why might you be going to Gadara?”

  The Rider thought of the boy in the well. Of the monk doubled over in his chapel, of the bodies in the sand.

  “I’m looking for someone. A man.”

  The old man clapped a wrinkled hand to his lips as if he had been struck, and his eyes widened.

  “Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name...”

  And with each ‘give,’ always there came an insistent rocking back and forth and
the punctuation of his knobby hands clapping. His knuckles and fingers were distorted from some wasting arthritis, threatening to poke through the threadbare gloves, yet still he slapped them together.

  “Praise Gawd. Do you know what the name of that prayer is, son?” He spoke excitedly, and without pause, as The Rider had once before heard a cattle auctioneer in San Francisco speak.

  “Psalm twenty-nine. ‘The Lord of the Thunderstorms,’” The Rider murmured.

  The old man’s eyes lit, and he smiled.

  “Yessir, that’s right. You know your Scripture. The Lord God Almighty is the Lord of the Thunderstorms. It is His Divine Power that makes the lightning strike, makes the clouds boil in the sky, and makes the thunder crash on the mountainside.” The old man laughed. “Yes sir! Praise Him. That’s His voice you hear when the thunder rolls and the crop-buds bust through the black soil in springtime. Glory!”

  The Rider smiled and nodded. The man hardly took a breath. He was like a preacher long without a congregation. He kept rising from his crate in his excitement.

  “But He’s not just Lord of the Thunderstorms, no sir. He’s the master of every storm. Everything sleeps in the winter but the Lord. Good Gawd! He already had His seventh day of rest, y’see. Yes sir! Even this old snowstorm blowin’ outside. He brought that with a cool blast of his nostrils. Praised be His Name!”

  “I almost wish....” The Rider whispered, trying out his weakened voice and blinking back the discomfort of speaking. “I almost wish He hadn’t.”

  The old man laughed and clapped his hands indulgently again.

  “Well but, I don’t know about that.” The old man went on. “The storm is the chariot of Gawd. He’s out tonight, a’visitin.’ The King is out among His servants in the guise of the storm, visiting His subjects like the king in that Shakespeare story. Blowin’ their doors and their shutters shut, so’s they’ll stay safe tonight.” With that, he made the gesture of doors swinging shut with his twisted hands.

  The Rider supped, and listened to the wind. The old man watched him and seemed to take pleasure in the sharing of his hospitality. The Rider’s head felt as if it weighed forty pounds, and lolled on his neck if he let it.

  “Praise Him,” the old man ejaculated again. “But every once in awhile there’s a stray lamb what loses his way.” He grinned pointedly, and there was a sparkle in his anxious eyes. “Every once in awhile, He waylays a traveler—just like He sent the fish to waylay Jonah, and when he knocked Saul down off his horse on the road to Damascus. Glory.”

  The old man dipped his clouded chin with each heavenly intonation. Once The Rider had seen a man who would curse uncontrollably, as though he were sneezing out profanity, but here was an old man who convulsively spit salvation.

  “Jonah was diverted from his course because God had work for him,” he muttered, finishing the soup.

  The old man’s face became suddenly solemn, and he rose to stand by the open door of the stove and looked at the fire inside.

  When he turned toward The Rider again, the stove glow danced portentously across his weathered face, like lamp light on old parchment. He motioned towards the barred front door with his still-gloved hand.

  “That He did, boy. That He did. You say you’re lookin’ for a man. Medgar Tooms.” The old man raised his eyebrows, laconically. “That’s his name, if you’re headed for Gadara. You give thanks you didn’t run into him out there. Not in the state you’re in. Oh, he’s out there, don’t make no mistake. He’s the only man headed up there. But The Lord of Storms is watchin’ out for the faithful tonight.”

  The old man uttered a final “Praise Him!” and took the empty bowl from The Rider and set it on the stove.

  * * * *

  Medgar Tooms crossed the blowing landscape and a herd of pigs marched behind him. They squealed at the biting cold, and shouldered to be near him and take part in his unnatural warmth.

  The snow swirled around Tooms and cut into his face, but he did not flinch. The wind whipped at his long gray coat and tried to knock the broad brimmed hat off his head like a rambunctious schoolboy. Tooms was not amused. He didn’t shiver and he didn’t blink, even as the white flecks scraped at him like icy grains of iron birdshot, desperately trying to penetrate the slot thin slashes of his dark eyes.

  One of the lagging little shoats behind him gave a high, shrill cry and stopped in its tracks. It nosed the snow up to its belly, then gave a shudder and collapsed. Several of the larger hogs circled around it and began to worry it immediately, tearing its wind burned flesh.

  Tooms did not stop. In all, there were about thirteen pigs following him. Blue hogs, wire-haired shoats, and pot bellied pigs, their pink skin flushed red from the winter storm. They scuttled along in a milling herd like piper’s rats, their swirling breath like the smoke of thirteen little fires. Tooms did not wait for the ones who fell behind. They would catch up or they would die.

  Though the storm would surely impede him, it could never stop him. He walked on, letting his long legs break holes in the dunes of bright white and piston methodically, carrying him surely northward. He did not hasten, nor did he slow. His breath puffed like the steam of a black engine. The big Whitworth rifle was propped over his right shoulder, while his left arm hung loose at his side. Broken manacles, and their long lengths of chain, rasped metallically and cut shallow furrows in the tramped snow, first one, then the other, monotonously. Their iron was cold against his wrists, yet he did not hug himself for warmth, as if he disdained its comfort.

  The storm assailed him with another gust, pleading with him to turn aside from his course. He shrugged it off as he would an entreating woman clinging to his greatcoat.

  There was killing to be done.

  * * * *

  “Who is Medgar Tooms?” The Rider asked. He felt cold suddenly, although it was warm enough in the little cabin, and fever sweat trickled down between his shoulders.

  “I heard you before I saw you,” the old man smiled faintly. “All them doodads you got on. The clinkin’. I thought it was him. Medgar Tooms,” said the old man, wistful, as he ladled more broth. He looked up at the ceiling then, and closed his eyes.

  “And they went into the country of the Gadarenes,” the old man recited. “And when He came up out of the ship, immediately there met Him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.”

  The Rider put his elbows on the rickety table. He ran the back of his hand across his sweating forehead. He was not overly familiar with the Christian Testament, though he had read it.

  Still the old man intoned, blind in the blissful trance of recall, or so it seemed to The Rider, for he sighed pleasantly between passages;

  “And no man could bind him, no, not with chains. Because that, he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken into pieces.”

  The old man looked over at him from the stove.

  “You’re an Israelite, aren’t you, son?”

  The Rider nodded slowly.

  “Then you’re not saved?”

  The Rider’s eyes fluttered, and his forehead began to blossom with sweat. He tried to answer, but forgot the question. Something slurred and unintelligible stumbled from his dry lips, like the yammering of an excessive imbiber.

  The old man looked at the Hebrew at his table. The stranger was flushed with the fever, and his slight shoulders shivered beneath the blanket. His eyes fell to the leather belt curled like a black serpent in repose on his table. Here was a man of violence, with a gun and with the mark of the gun upon his pale flesh.

  ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ said the Lord’s Holy Law, and the old man said a low ‘amen’ to that. The Bible spoke of those who lived by the sword dying in a similar manner, and the old man nodded a solemn ‘hallelujah’ to that, too.

  Seized with the impulse, he got down on his old knees, though they cracked like busting twigs, and clasped his twisted hands fiercely together, as if to generate the power of his pray
er between his two palms until he could no longer stop it from soaring up to heaven. It pained him, but he squeezed.

  “But Lord,” said the old man, “when Joshua led the Israelites into Jericho, surely there was slaughter, and when Samson confronted the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass at Ramath-lehi, it’s written that he slew a thousand men.

  “Lord, now I can tell from the look of this fella he’s a killer. I knowed it the minute I seen him leadin’ that donkey through the snow. But You led him to me for a reason, Lord. Now I believe, and You can go ahead and give me a sign if my thinkin’ be otherwise, I believe that reason is to stop Medgar Tooms and free me of the sin I have born these many long years.”

  He stopped in his prayer and opened his eyes and listened for awhile, but there was no sound save the popping of the wood in the stove, the howl of the wind, and the raspy breathing of the stranger, whose head lay on the table.

  The old man closed his eyes and continued.

  “Now, I don’t know if the way is to be by the sword or by the Good Book, but You know in your Heavenly Wisdom that I ain’t hardly a keen enough sword to be wielded in your Blessed Hand. If this man a’settin’ here, this killer Jew out of the wilderness, if he be the instrument You have prepared to set against Medgar Tooms in the comin’ conflict, then Good Lord, give me stay to save this man’s life. I’ve done all in my power, but by the look of this fella, it ain’t enough. The fever is upon him. I need your touch, Blessed Jesus.”

  With that, he unclasped his hands and raised them high to the ceiling.

  “I need your Heavenly touch, praise Jesus, to heal this man,” the old man said loudly, making the Hebrew jump and blink his eyes. “Hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my supplications: in Thy faithfulness answer me, and in Thy righteousness. Enter not into judgment with Thy servant: for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified.”

  His eyes still clenched tight, his arms still outstretched, he rose unsteadily, moving along the edge of the table with one hip for guidance, and came to stand over the stranger.