House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday Read Free Book Online Page A

terrified bird. It was then her eyes were drawn to the heavy, bloodless hand at the throat of the bird. It was like marble or chert, equal in the composure of stone to the awful frenzy of the bird, and the bright red wattles of the bird lay still among the long blue nails, and the comb on the swollen heel of the hand. And then he was past. He rode in among the riders, and they, too, parted for him, watching to see whom he would choose, respectful, wary, and on edge. After a long time of playing the game, he rode beside Abel, turned suddenly upon him, and began to flail him with the rooster. Their horses wheeled, and the others drew off. Again and again the white man struck him, heavily, brutally, upon the chest and shoulders and head, and Abel threw up his hands, but the great bird fell upon them and beat them down. Abel was not used to the game, and the white man was too strong and quick for him. The roan mare lunged, but it was hemmed in against thewall; the black horse lay close against it, keeping it off balance, coiled and wild in its eyes. The white man leaned and struck, back and forth, with only the mute malice of the act itself, careless, undetermined, almost composed in some final, preeminent sense. Then the bird was dead, and still he swung it down and across, and the neck of the bird was broken and the flesh torn open and the blood splashed everywhere about. The mare hopped and squatted and reared, and Abel hung on. The black horse stood its ground, cutting off every line of retreat, pressing upon the terrified mare. It was all a dream, a tumultuous shadow, and before it the fading red glare of the sun shone on bits of silver and panes of glass and softer on the glowing, absorbent walls of the town. The feathers and flesh and entrails of the bird were scattered about on the ground, and the dogs crept near and crouched, and it was finished. Here and there the townswomen threw water to finish it in sacrifice.
    It is somehow in keeping, she thought afterward, this strange exhaustion of her whole being. She was bone weary, and her feet slipped down in the sand of the street, and it was nearly beyond her to walk. Like this, her body had been left to recover without her when once and for the first time, having wept, she had lain with a man; and it had been the same sacrificial hour of the day. She had been too tired for guilt and gladness, and she lay for a long time on the edge of sleep, empty of the least desire, in the warm current of her blood. Like this, though she could not then have known—the sheer black land above the orchards and the walls, the scarlet sky and the three-quarter moon.
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    Afterward, when Angela had gone back to the Benevides house, Father Olguin went upstairs to his room and said his office. A few minutes past eleven he came down again and made a fire in the kitchen stove and warmed a pot of coffee. He was tired, but as usual he could not sleep until it was morning. He required only a little sleep, and he always awoke with a strange sense of urgency. It was late at night that he liked best to use his mind, to read andwrite with cigarettes and black coffee. Then, alone with himself, he could take stock of all his resources and prospects, and he could find his place among them. He had removed his soutane and put on a worn pair of canvas trousers and a sweat shirt that hung nearly to his knuckles and knees. It had grown cold in the downstairs, and he closed the kitchen door and sat down at the table. He had brought from his room a book which he had found not long after his arrival in the town among the parish records. The coffee and the heat of the fire warmed him. There was no sound in the house, save the seldom crackling of the fire, and he could hear outside the drone of the generator, not quite steady, and the yellow ceiling light of the kitchen swelled and failed to its pitch. For several minutes he savored the coffee and smoke and regarded the closed book absently, waiting for the long