Canyon, Helen Frankenthaler, 1965

This is Chapter 2 in my ongoing experiment with fiction writing. Chapter 1 is here.

II. Wilson

Wilson’s great-grandfather had come to this land from Ulster. Wilson knew this from the songs the parents of his parents had written, which his mother used to sing to him, and that her father had sung to her. He’d forgotten most of the words long ago; if he had any children in the future, he wouldn’t be passing along this tradition. But he knew that his great-grandfather had landed in Philadelphia, and then quickly beat a path to the Upper Savannah River. Within a decade he had sold his farm to some Germans and relocated again, to Virginia, then once more to Tennessee. All these words were in the songs. Beyond them he knew little of his family’s history before his mother was alive.

His mother had been born in Knoxville, which is where she met his father, who worked as a carpenter and an itinerant preacher. His father had seen the city burn. Wilson was alive at the time but too young to form memories. He was told later that the army had ridden all the way in from Michigan, which by then had joined the Commonwealth. Everyone knew they were coming from the reports of lookouts along the way; it was hard to keep such a large regiment a secret. But they assumed if they didn’t resist, it would be a peaceful occupation like ones in the past.

Instead, the army razed the city. Among the first places they burned were the fire stations. Then they went house to house, torching each in turn, and shooting whoever ran out. His mother had been shot through the stomach before she even got to the door. His father had to put a bullet through her temple to spare her from bleeding out slowly. He escaped with the rest of the family through the woods to the rear of the house. His older brother and sister died a few weeks later, somewhere in Arkansas. They died the way most people on the trail did: cholera. They got sick at the same time and were both buried within 48 hours.

Young Ford Wilson and his father continued on to Missouri and Nebraska, bivouacking in the forests off the trail. His father nursed him on cow’s milk, which, he was reminded often in later years, was a daily feat to obtain. When they got to Nebraska his father built a lean-to by a creek. They lived in it for five years, tilling the land and seeing no one but refugees, with whom they traded produce for coats and boots and flour and whiskey. Then one winter afternoon the lean-to was raided and burned by Churchmen. Wilson and his father fled from the raiders on horseback, with nothing but what was in their saddlebags. They made it to Wyoming, where they found the commune. That was where he had buried his father four years ago, when he was 14 years old. Like his wife, he’d been shot in the stomach. But he’d had to bleed out.

Ten days ago, from a high bluff, watching through a spyglass, Wilson had seen the wagon train passing. They were fleeing the Commonwealth. He knew that already. Caravans like this had been coming for months. Refugees from the wars in the east.

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By the time he arrived the sun hovered over the horizon. The hills that had glowed red like lava at dawn had already faded into a dull brown. Wilson swung his right leg over his saddle and dismounted his horse. He was about a hundred feet up a slope, overlooking the trail. Here the vast plain began to crumple into small hills. Another 20 miles and those hills would become mountains, with creeks and game. His oxen were recruiting on the sparse patches of grass below. There was a boulder wedged at an angle into another boulder, with enough empty space between them to crawl into. It would provide some shade to sleep through the morning.

He set up the bivouac, crawled into it, and gazed in a northeasterly direction. He could see most of the spread of the canyon from here. On the other side there were faint pillars of smoke, pencil thin from this distance. The extinguished camp fires of the sentries from the Church.

Wilson took a slug of water from his canteen, filled for the first time in days from the spring below, which trickled from the rock like a stream of urine. He lay on his belly on a flat rock and looked at the smoke through his spyglass, trying to gauge the distance. Probably about three miles.

The Church was at war. It would never not be at war. War was part of its doctrine. Wilson had heard the sermons a hundred times. And God became the enemy of the world, and he its enemy. Whenever he rode through its gates to sell hides, they would ask him to wait, to sit in the rickety pews and hear the sermon before doing business. He was a captive audience and thus an opportunity to spread the Word. The goal wasn’t so much to convert him as to warn him. The more outsiders knew of the Church’s readiness to kill, the more they would fear and respect its designs.

Wilson had always found the sermon gratuitous after the spectacle one was subjected to just to get inside the fort on the bluff. The walls were made from the logs of giant trees — bigger trees than any that grew around here. Their very presence here in this desert, transported as they had to have been over hundreds of miles, was a testament to the extent of the Church’s conquest of the land. Few visitors missed that message. If they did, a less subtle one came into view as they came closer. Strung along the tops of the wall were hundreds of crucified bodies in various states of decay. Most of them were skeletons bleached by years in the sun. Some still had flesh and meat hanging from their bones, picked apart by vultures. A few of them weren’t yet dead. These were the enemies of the Church — those who had refused to bend to its will by giving up their land. The men, their wives, and their children.

The train had secured safe passage through the territory. As long as they weren’t settling in these lands, they were no particular threat to the Church’s interests. Still, Wilson thought it prudent to keep his distance.