Alleluia

(Mercy)

by sklamb

His mercy is killing me. Slower and harder—much slower, certainly—than if he’d finished me with his bare hands, before he dropped them and backed away as if I were a rattlesnake. Would he be glad to know that? Probably not.

His mercy’s killing him as well; I can feel what his movement has become, over the unending hours…slow, jerky, effortful, silent. He was humming under his breath when he started, some old sea-shanty I dimly remember from my own years back east, with a hard-driving rhythm to help men take on heavy work.

He isn’t humming any more, but he’s still moving to that same rhythm—half-pace now, with shorter strides, but still moving, and still moving me. If he lets go of the travois he made for me, he’ll never be able to lift it again….

He hasn’t dropped it.

I would have, long before this.

No, that’s not so. I’d never have made a travois in the first place. I’d never have thought to try to get both of us out by myself—certainly not if I’d been through what he had in the previous week.

I wish I could understand why I did that. He wasn’t ungrateful or demanding after I’d let him drink. He knew having a second mouth to fill would (or could, anyway) be a dangerous strain on an isolated camp’s supplies. He never acted as if the fact he had wealth outside the desert should make any difference to either of us inside it.

And yet his luck—the indestructable Cartwright luck that kept his family thriving through every crisis when so many with fewer obstacles failed—was to me like a red cape to a bull. His family, quartering the desert in purposeful search, came right to the edge of my camp and didn’t see it. True enough, there isn’t much to see, but…he saw it. And made it down that breakneck, shifting scree to salvation without taking one wrong step. It never occurred to him how close he came to death right then—but then, I doubt he ever knew, in his gut, how unlikely it was that he had been offered a chance at salvation at all.

So there he was, alive when he should have been dead, expecting to be able to pick himself up and carry on as if nothing much had happened. Oh, he’d miss his rendez-vous with his brother, but in the long view of things that scarcely mattered, though he worried about it as if it was almost of life-and-death importance.

I suppose I wanted to show him what life-and-death was really all about. And then one thing led to another, and somehow….Somehow it got to the point where only one of us could survive, and whichever one did survive would have failed his better self to do it. If there is such a thing as a “better self.” Because the farther I got into our contest, and the more I found myself enjoying it, the more I began to suspect I’d discovered the honest truth of me at last. No old-school Stoic, such as I’d prided myself on being, would have found so much pleasure in anything, least of all something so destructive. I’d turned myself into a Maenad, tearing to shreds not the body of Orpheus, but his soul. I hadn’t even needed wine to make me drunk, just power.

If he killed me to survive, it proved surviving was the one important thing, worth more than any illusions of virtue or dignity. If I killed him—an innocent man who’d done nothing wrong but surviving when he should have died….

If I killed him, it put me in the trap I’d set for him.

Either way, the Maenads—indeed, Bacchus himself—would gloat over both of us.

My stepfather the preacher always warned me—at the bad end of his belt, for the most part—that trusting to pagan philosophies would be the death of me. That trusting to anything but his narrow, vengeful God was Death. He’d beat the poison out of me if it killed me, he threatened the last time…the time I decided I preferred to find death later rather than sooner, and on my own terms, not his.

And here it is. Not darkness, but light I can’t escape; not cold, but heat that’s burning all the poison out of me, up towards the sun.

All for mercy’s sake. A mercy every bit as improbable as a dying man’s stumbling across the only source of water for miles around, a source that didn’t nurture anything green or growing, but hid, fenced in from everything by jealous greed.

A mercy I’d never been able to imagine could exist.

He’s starting to stagger now, like a horse about to founder and collapse. But in the silences between the jerky scrapings of the travois rails I can hear the faint cry, as of an angels’ delegation in the distance. “Adam,” they’re calling again to us. “Adam….”

His shadow falls across my face, a final respite. My body tilts helplessly, bounces as the travois crashes to the hard earth. And then, at last, it’s over.

God embraces me.

***

End Notes:

1. This was inspired by JoaniePaiute’s “Michael Rode The Butter Shore,” and complements that story so closely that we chose to post them as a single work.
2. This chapter contains the C&S challenge words for November, 2013 (Honest, Rail, Fence, Delegation, and Crisis), is 873 words long, and is a What Happened In Between for “The Crucible,” so it fulfills the criteria for the C&S/Pinecone double challenge for the second half of November. Just for good measure, it also contains the word for JoaniePaiute’s Seedling of the week—rattlesnake.

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.