On the theme of Epitaph
Who Would Seek to Inherit the Greatest Kingdom
[1]
On the day his wife died, the old man sought out the mercenaries. Some had cut off a finger or two for sport. Some sliced open the bodies of still-breathing venomous snakes and plucked out their poisonous hearts and plunked them in shot glasses brimming with whiskey and they drank. The old man asked for their poison. The killers asked for songs. Instead, the old man told them how his wife had at night turned into a songbird and how she flew out and how she had whispered revolutions into the minds of youth. They listened. In the morning, they gave over their poison. This will kill you in exactly fourteen days, their leader told him. If I don’t bring her back, the old man said, then let the poison deliver my body to the lord and to her.
[2]
The old man washed the body of his young wife and cleared away the dirt and wrapped her in cloth and readied to set out to find the life-giving pit that would revive her, a place told in stories by travelers and frontiersmen. He set their house aflame. He watched their once-lives burn away as he rode. In each town, he inquired about the pit. In each town, young girls and broken men laughed. Instead, they spoke of men building towers to the sun and women leading armies of wolves across the desert.
[3]
The young wife, in her melancholy at the fate of their son, had tried once to burn herself alive. She doused herself in alcohol and smashed a lantern on the ground and walked into the flame. When the old man found her, alive, she hummed the sweetest songs, crouching there in the dirt, untouched.
[4]
The old man saw ghosts in trees and doorways. He vomited into his hands and saw fortunes there in the murk. The poison made him see the young wife walking, alone, on horizons at sunset. He put leeches on his skin to take the poisoned blood, to slow his descent. He saw his death in the leaches’ blood-turgid bodies.
[5]
In the first week, the old man found nothing. He pressed bruises on his skin and suffered blindness in his right eye. He saw the sick touch the young wife’s body and he saw them renewed. God watched him from a tavern corner, playing poker. God pointed a pistol at him, then dropped it to the ground, shaking his head. He rose to leave, stopping only to grip the old man’s shoulder, to say, there is only ending in this.
[6]
The old man wandered the desert, eating rocks and cactus meat, downing the thorns. A Civil War deserter offered to help him find the pit. The old man’s left foot rotted and blackened. He carried a handful of his own teeth. The deserter tracked a coyote and cut its throat and poured its blood on the old man, hoping to heal him. Anything to slow what’s coming, he said. The old man sang the lullabies the young wife had once sung to him and there he slept.
[7]
On the ninth day, storms flooded the desert and the sun hid away. The deserter bathed the old man and the old man told a story for every day he had known with his wife.
[8]
The deserter awoke on the eleventh day to find his body covered in colorful birds. He’d dreamt, he said, the young wife alive and kissing his naked body. He said he had come to know love. The old man shouted in languages that had died one-thousand years earlier.
[9]
The men found a cave and went into the dark and damp. Inside they found only the bones of explorers and maps to places that did not exist. They descended deeper into the earth and found fish and beasts evolved without eyes. The deserter led the old man, who had become mostly blind himself. The old man scraped at the cave floor with discarded bones, trying to dig graves for the dead. They went down, down, into the dark, and the old man forgot about God as God has forgotten about him. On the twelfth day, they emerged from the cave and the old man tried to drown himself in a miraged oasis. His throat filled with sand and beetles. He spit out a scorpion and blackened blood. Choking, he cursed himself and his companion and the stinking desert and the rot and poison and the pit he would kill anyone to find and the skin-burning sun and God but never did he curse the young wife wrapped in cloth and passed on twelve days before.
[10]
The young wife had birthed a son once and that son had grown to become a man and the old man loved his wife more for the child she’d given him. And, this boy followed gold to California and there he found a plague that ate away at his brain and there he went mad and murdered his companions for he believed they had committed unforgivable sins in the eyes of God. He returned to his mother and emptied his skull with a pistol onto her white dress. The old man found his bride cradling her son, silent and blood-spattered, staring off into nothing. Holding the wife who would never again forgive him, the old man wept and fell to dreaming.
[11]
To this man who would seek to inherit the greatest kingdom. How he endured scars and blood until the end, how he held in his hands her soot-black hair, how he would trade all the world and watch it torn asunder if only to see her again, for the simple motion of this wife brushing her hair from her eye to see him, and how until the end this mad quest was given by God, and how can animals ask anything of our bodies but to take one more step?
Author Biography
Justin Lawrence Daugherty wrote Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise (Passenger Side Books) and lives in Atlanta. He tweets about tacos @jdaugherty1081. He’s published and writes and is sad that Breaking Bad is ending.