Tara > Recent Status Updates

He turned his back on me and he fell in with his people, riding west for the Backbone, and within a few paces, the storm had folded the nachzehrer into itself.
No, not the vampire.
The Blackfeet.

Everyone in the column was drinking just to stay warm, Major Baker the most, I believe, as leaders of course lead by example.

The bolt-cutters I bought at Murdoch’s will get me through the gate—— the site of the massacre is on private land, some ranch, and it requires special permission to visit.
Fine.
I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.
2/2

And now, hours later, which I should measure either in gallons of coffee or complete lack of sleep, it’s dawn of the 23rd, everything frozen and blowing and white, and we’re here: the Marias River, as Lewis and Clark named it once upon an expedition. Just east of the Blackfeet Reservation.
1/2

That parsonage is going to be a battered women’s shelter now, I read.
Good for it. Good for those women. Good for Miles City—for all of Montana, and it’s hard-handed men with their oh-so-fragile egos.
I hope every egg that breaks on the kitchen floor of that shelter is bright yellow.

But, too, it will be dark out in the prairie, I know.
As it is in my heart.
My pipe is empty, now.
I believe it has been since January 23rd, 1870.

… or is there no effort that could wring the sin from my past?

… meaning I wake each morning affrighted with certainty, knowing that it will be this day, and then the next, and the next, and suchwise do all my remaining days become polluted with a mix of certainty and narrow escape, which, in accumulation, serves to grind my frailty into dust, which I cough up continually, and wipe on the lower portions of my robes.
2/2

While it would have been simple for one so young and vital as he to dispatch this pastor, it’s, to him, more fitting torture to instead leave me endlessly mulling over my misdecisions. Either that or, having strongly suggested my coming execution, he denies me the day it’s actually to occur, …
1/2

Would but that I could equally take my memory down to the grain as such. But so says this whole nation, I know.

… and I daresay our screams harmonized, at least in how much they pained us.
This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.

… and I daresay our screams harmonized, at least in how much they pained us.
This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead listening.

I would tell you that my pipe is empty now, but you know now that it’s been empty for half of my life.
If that’s what you call this.

💔

… I hold Cordelia close and whisper to her that we’re safe in the House of the Lord.
When she opens her mouth back to me, I can smell plundered open mice on her breath. But she is warm and solid, and her purring is a comfort I don’t deserve but hoard all the same, as it fills me with life, and satisfaction, and wards away the loneliness, which I would have previously termed solitude.

* Spoiler *

What I am is the Indian who can’t die.
I’m the worst dream America ever had.

I wanted to go back to those days. I hadn’t watched them with the right eyes, when they were happening.

Were Good Stab and I to rush out, I knew, there would be no cat, no mouse. Or rather, I suppose, there would be one of each there, now that Good Stan and myself were outside.

To err may be human, but to err in such a way as to make your own efforts grandiose, that, dear poet, is hardly divine, is perhaps the most human.

… so I waded deeper into the cold pond, humming to myself to try to make this holy and right. I can see that you understand this. That you have beaver pelts like this im your life, too.

My father used to tell me that I needed to pay attention to where I was instead of looking farther away than I could see, and I know he was right, but knowing and doing aren’t the same thing.

Now that we’ve shared private and extended discussion over things so fabulous as to themselves be fables…

… and for a moment I didn’t want, my back straightened, because the floor had creaked behind me, exactly as if Arthur Beaucarne had heard me just thank him for what he left me —his journal— and had decided to step out of the ether, start mumbling a prayer in some dead tongue.
I didn’t look around, though. You can’t look around, every time you think you’re not alone.
Once you start, you never stop.

… and for a moment, I was in my thirties again, and my forties, and the first part of my fifties, swimming in such a bottle as this, looking out at the world, distorted into abomination by the irregular glass, and my own failing eyes, and the syrup be quality of my thinking. And my guilt.
2/2

The grin spread among the regulars until California Jim shook his head in mirth and extended the bottle to me. After ascertaining no Puritanical eyes were trained on us, I took the bottle, tipped it up, and let that familiar fire into my chest for the first time since donning these robes, …
1/2

“Forgiveness comes at a price, and none among us is immune to sin,” I returned back to him, shrugging my thin shoulders, and holding his eyes steady in mine, such that more words would have communicated less.

The depravity of a man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what finds us one to the other.