Like the Appearance of Horses by Andrew Krivak

Author:Andrew Krivak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

HE WENT BACK TO WORK AT THE MILL IN THE NEW YEAR, AND IN the spring of ’49 a son was born and they christened him Samuel. And Becks believed for a time that he was not lost, that there was in the man a part of the boy who had come to the farm looking for the man named Vinich, the boy who fell in love with the girl who was the man’s daughter, the boy who became a man there on the farm. Not in the war. A part (not all) he understood and accepted, for he knew what the war had done, and he knew, too, what the land—forest and field—might undo, could undo, repair, bring him back to, and in this he hoped, and wondered if he might find Paul Younger on that land again, and just sit with him, as he had offered. The man who had said to him long ago that one day he’d have to accept the death of the old bear. And Becks wondered how he, Paul Younger, knew what nobody, not even his wife, cared to know.

But how could she or any of them here know what it was for him to be there, back on the land in which part of his blood not only flowed but was spilled. The blood of men and women their age. The blood of old men and women beyond her father’s age. The blood of children no older than their sons. Those whose memories were his blood as well, blood he had seen at their throats, as if to speak, and he knew that while all blood, like water, flowed into ground, memory did not so easily lie down. Did not pool wet and sticky on a vardo floor, or dry in the dirt of a riverbank, until it was recognizable no more. No, no number of names passed down could bring them back now. Memory, the thing fracted and upheld like a story within a story told in whole and in part, was not subject to the same loss, but, rather, partook of some immortality, and lodged there within the soul like the inhabitant of a house left alone at the top of a hill that one day would welcome the bones and muscle of the right man. A man who could keep bones and muscle and memory together, like a cobbler keeps a sole attached to the bottom of a shoe with whatever leather or sinew he has at hand. But he was not the man. Not Bexhet Konar. He missed them. The people who knew no land. And of them, he missed his grandfather most of all. And he would turn his back on them again, even the boy he had named after the old man, and go to Meska now, if he could somehow turn, or even just divert, the river of time. He knew this in his heart. He knew this when he heard the crack of the

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