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Show Blue Run/98 flashing teeth, action and reaction; man is animal and animal commits no wrong. Isn't that how it goes? Freedoms are either abandoned or carried out in secret places like Tri-County Coon Club, out in the dark where bottles pass and the fire's stoked and the ancestral circle is rejoined in the season of blood sport The truth before truth was named. I gazed on them as if staring into a den where rattlesnakes dance upright-the firelight on their faces, their voices mingling with night noises. I don't know how long, maybe this all a dream, and I was only a girl sleeping, dreaming of a man like my daddy among men by a fire near the mouth of the deep, dark wood. Maybe I was dozing when the noise started, the high shrieks rising louder and louder, so I was afraid the owl had come back to life, all of us infected with owl mojo for the rest of our lives. It was, of course, a woman. The fire was iri her face. She shook her head the way women with long hair have of shaking their heads, and I could see both white breasts and the light on the men's faces The truck door was open on Daddy's side. I could hear all of it. Maybe that woman out there by the fire, whose face was like a girl's face, maybe she screamed out for help, so far back in the woods that no ear on earth would ever hear Maybe she pleaded for mercy. Who can say? Who would deliver her? Daddy? Some dark God who'd have Abraham lay his own son's sweet neck on the table rock while the sword came down? What on earth could she have been ^ thinking, this girl-woman out on the Trail of Tears at that time of night? What sort of mother would raise her daughter to end up that way? How can such a thing happen? How to explain? Oh lord of hosts, if I'm not dead yet, please tell me how it can be? How? Is the dream just a dream? Or maybe, instead of stoppering my ears against those piercing cries, something else? I soar on owl's wings, bloodstained in the wind, up and up until the man-high fire fades; the blue earth opens its black swan's wings so that no man will ever take me from behind and the girl |