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Thewhether to consurandaze is not on the boy Instead, it stays fixed on the void, as though netized by darkness

I ain’t got to believe in him, the one-eyed man says I see him everywhere I look

The boy glances behind hie from the dark like a vaudevillian from behind a curtain

No one speaks He is a rand and grimy oratory, and they wonder at this curious preacher who seees from some Bible scripts lost centuries before

He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, the bristles of his beard loud as the cicadas He is quiet for a while longer, as though his speech were a byproduct of silence, requiring effort to form itself out of that drear material Then he does speak

More’n a half-century old, he says For the hire and salary of a few hearers, I could res on the topic of God

No one says a word, and their silence is a contract, an acquiescence

And then are they all mute, and all slow And then are they all his companions in journey

And this is the story he tells

Two

Brothers " Las Cruces " A Contract and Its Fulfils

It is a time of vision, a time before the loss of his other eye Any cyclopean will tell you: there is a clarity even in broken things – the way things fall is governed by laws so immutable they could be inscribed on the earth by the ink of rivers and streams So too the way people fall

It is a ti of it, twenty years since society itself fell down, forty years after the birth of the bear-like man himself These measures of time, they eddy and flow, capricious In truth, there are only two states: before and after – and even those only relative to arbitrary points Pick one point and call it zero – you ht as well count the motes of dust in an abandoned room

Moses Todd, for that is his na companion Not the mute – who he doesn’t yet know and won’t even er brother, Abrahaerous of appetite They travel the wide open spaces, and though they are brothers, they seek very different things

Theythe day and hole up after the sun sets In whatever bastions of civilization they coers, sometimes welcomed, sometimes suspicioned, sometimes reviled

Moses Todd has been s in his life – father, warrior, thief, wastrel Abrahaenerate Moses watches his brother as apenned in his own backyard

Once in the course of their vagabondage they stop at a s residents are in need of supplies, and they speak to the brothers of euns, ammunition, then they will be co as they would like to remain