We had come across the dark country in days when the sky was not yet blackened with the dust. My father, and his father's men before him. They had broken sod with walking plow and mule team and dug their cellar in the red clay and roofed it with the sod, and there some still stood. Outside their tents, they told me, on the first night of their settling where cows brayed in the blue dust, the whistling, and the clicking of crickets thrashing in the reeds.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1934. In times farther and queerer they called it the no-man's land. The first houses they put up the years past had subsisted in some form, be they proudly withstood or the bare spines that traced about top-loose soil; in the rushes past the palisades, there would be those pieces of wood left standing, dark sentinels in a darker world, one no longer untouched by the builder of traps and kindler of fires.
My mother bore me to the dust. That spring the country had risen into the upper air and gone east, and the people of lands yet farther than these stood at their windows and watched the dust of my home settle on their shoulders like the gray ash of some dispensation they had not earned and could not undo. The black blizzard. The ashen snow. She told me she did not know whether the sun would come back when I was borne to the world or if I would live in my first days without it. Born in thin rags, gestational fluid steaming as I arose naked and red like a deer flayed. Out there, they said, no one would come for me. Beyond the rushes, beyond Boise City, the flat land and the white clouds, sometimes the deep gray and sepia, the dust.
A few went packing for California. The Joads of them. The ones whose names would not return. We watched them load their wagons in the white morning. I stayed.
At night, as I sat out front with father's gun, I would behold the sulfur orbs of the wolves, the coyotes, the Mongol hordes of them, sailing from the abyssal night.
Night of the assassination, 1968. I remember it because I had rode into Boise City for kerosene and there the newshawks had spread it even here, the man shot dead in Memphis. The hippies, they said, and the anarchists, they had risen, or maybe now they had some cause to rise from the urban conglomerations so far away.
I had thought nothing of it. They said hear, the children of Islam, hear, the acolytes of Malcolm X. Now sometimes the police had come. From Tulsa, from somewhere in-of-state. They drove the unmarked cars with the long antennas and the men at the feed store said the Program had files on every preacher and every poet and every man of consequence. I did not listen to such things.
I'd been as far as Dodge City, Kansas, and I'd seen the newshawks and the policemen even there. The talk was that the Army had begun something out of Stillwater. That there they had administered the young men some fluids or chemical of a make far unknown to me, taken unwillingly in flophouses in San Francisco and to the homeless and to merchant seamen and to prisoners. The papers would not print of it for seven more years. They would say the records had been burned by order of the director in 1973.
I had sat by myself on my property, and even through the backroads there the police still came. We spoke briefly. They asked if I had seen aircraft. They asked if I had seen lights. They asked if any of my cattle had taken sick or come into the morning with their tongues gouged away. And they would always go as quickly as the dust had come.
The wolves had not picked at them. At night I would see them emerge and look, for a moment, at the cows, lazing in their behemoth menagerie, and then they would look to the west and the north and they would disappear.
Day of the withdrawal, 1975. Our house's television had only recently arrived, on the money of my son who worked then in Amarillo for a wage and who sent the small bills folded inside the card. Long before had I seen the government men tracking the flat country to the west and the north.
They came in convoys of three vehicles, two of them dark sedans and a flatbed bearing cargo wrapped in canvas. We barely spoke. We'd sit at a great and unfiltered distance, just watching through the wavering, vapid air. At times they would come to the front door, and my son would answer, but I had no inclination to speak to them. They had called it rezoning. For a state prison, they said. But those towers, they looked like oilfrackers, like great dark candlesticks, and atop them the floodlights peering endlessly into concrete fields stretching into mouths of warehouses.
This was the year they had found the cattle of the Texas line up through Colorado and the Dakotas with their tongues removed and their eyes cored from the sockets and the blood drained. Done by some agency that left no track in the dust nor any sign of struggle, and the ranchers in those parts had taken to sitting up at the fence line with rifles across their knees and seeing nothing. They called it the work of predators.
At times we rode out in our pasture, and the cows would raise their heads, and they'd look at those towers, and they'd watch. And nothing could rouse them.
The wolves had not shown for some time.
Some years after, my son returned from the bus station in town with a paperback book a man had given him, the cover bearing the image of a soldier seated in a queer posture. The First Earth Battalion, the generals called it. He laughed and threw it on the table. The army of monks, he said.
I read it through that night by the kerosene lamp with the moths beating their faces against the chimney. I set it down and looked out the window, at the towers and at the floodlights moving in their slow patrol of the concrete, and I thought, here is a man who has seen the same dark and has chosen to dream a different dream of it. Whether he was a prophet or a liar or a fool I could not say. The ones at Stanford University, then said the papers, were already at their work.
The program had a name that changed every few years as the funding got moved between the agencies. They settled at one, the one I remember from the first time I heard mention of it in the mailhouse.
The Special Collections Program. SCP. Or so they said.
The day I write this, 2003. They have come with boxes, far larger than any box I have heard sway and cast out the sounds of footfalls from so far into the country, from the black roads they have scored through the land and the paths of the lone trees of the prairie they have sundered. The towers had bred and scoured fruitfully across the land. The sodium lamps burn steady through the night as if to illuminate some labor that does not pause for sleep nor for the cycles of the earth.
My son has taken for Los Angeles. He has brought his wife and daughter with him, and the daughter is named for my mother though she has not seen this country and may never see it. Now I yet remain here among the ghosts of my father's houses still standing. Sometimes I will look out at the remains, at the road, and the thin boards of wood coated with the dust would still sway like some recollection of the reeds that had once stood here.
Long I have stalked the plain on horseback. I now admit to you, fretfully, that I have many times found myself drawn to approach your castle on the hill. I have spent the long nights of winter peering out the window, waving the dust and the flies away as your sulphur lights gloamed far at the top of the sky. I would sometimes wonder if I needed to pray for the fact that an interlocutor was already guardant from such places of the great metal chambers of your keep.
The cows have died. In my land, in Boise City, farther on at least to Texas. I have rode the long trails that the slaughterer has left, and upon that great stinking line I found no explanations nor recollections. I would see great fires in the distance, rising like the lamps of your black towers, and they would be gone. At night in bed I would hear the calling, the thumping of wheels, grinding of rubber against packed asphalt. When it rained I would drench my face in it, for it is no good drinking water, not when it burns my eyes when I force myself to look at your towers sainted in the sky's baptism.
I write because I can see the towers, even now. I can feel whatever you have built beneath me. The dust comes still sometimes off the flat country and settles on the windows, the thin brown glaucoma setting. Beyond, the cows in my field raise their heads in the evening and they watch the towers, and we do not know what we see.
I have been here since the sun was out. I will be here when your facility rakes over my land and buries my earthly remains beneath miles of concrete and lead.
And in their wandering mass, the few last wolves will go on, somewhere else.
Leave me to my practices. I will leave you to yours.
Ink on paper. Received at Site-19 from "E. Hoffman", purported resident of Cimarron Country, OK, [ ] miles from the site.
SCP Department of Postal Inspection, Site-12