The roads needed room. They stretched. They roamed and conquered. Past the open ranges. The deer and the antelope. The buffalo. Past the tribes pushed to the sides under the watch of the cross, for this nation has its reservations. They kept pace beside the railroad, that great steel spine of progress, backbone of industry. The cicadas’ song joined the song of the steam-train whistle, the shrill signal of the redbrick factories as they released the sweat-stained workers at five, then took them in again at seven. The coal miners hacked and hauled their load deep underground, one eye ever on the canary. Out west, oil spewed from hard earth, staining everything in money. In the cotton fields, the weeping left their harps upon the trees.
The roads reached the cities. The gleaming cities frantic with ambition, rich in the commerce of longing, a golden paradise of businessmen prophets, billboards advertising the abundance augured on Wall Street, promised by Madison Avenue: “Physicians say Lucky Strikes—they’re toasted for your pleasure!” “Move with the times! Imperial Airways.” “Of course you want Colgate’s Ribbon Dental Cream!” “Studebaker—the automobile with a reputation behind it!” The people sculpted monuments to great men, men who had built the nation, led the armies, their beliefs safely ensconced in marble and granite. The people made idols and tore them down again, baptizing them in ticker tape parades, blessing them in long tears of profit and loss, throwaway tributes tossed with abandon from tall windows, a celebration of the good times that seem as if they will never stop, the land a fatted calf.
The wheel of sky turned toward dusk; the stars were not yet lit. An anxious wind worried the tops of trees into a fretful sway. From back doors, mothers called children in from games of hide-and-seek and kick-the-can to wash up and say grace before supper. The children complained mightily, but the mothers remained firm and the games were left with promises of tomorrow. Street lamps flickered on. The factories, the schools, the halls of justice, the churches fell quiet. A soft evening fog rolled in like a balm of forgetting.
In the graveyards, the dead lay sleeping with eyes open.
The gray man in the stovepipe hat stepped from the mist and surveyed the land. He had not stood there for some time, and much had changed in his absence. Much always changed. His skin was the mottled gray of a moth’s wing. His eyes were narrow and black, his nose sharp, and his lips thin as a new thought. His raggedy coat lay upon him like an undone winding sheet. He shook the dust from its many folds. Crows flew out and up, cawing, into the sky now tinged with the ominous clouds of a coming storm. He spoke to the crows in a whisper. Then he spoke to the trees and the rocks, the rivers and the hills. He spoke in many tongues and in a language beyond words.
In their graves, the dead listened.