The Night Walk Men (4 page)

I believed what he told
me. And, in turn, you should believe what I tell you: there is no
real art. Real art only comes by accident. And there are no
accidents. Certainly, there are compromises. There are mistakes.
But there are no authentic accidents.

I mean to say
this:

You didn’t honestly
believe that train wreck in Bolivia was an accident, did you? Or
that landslide in Northern British Columbia? Or that red light that
made you late for work on a Monday morning? Everything happens for
a reason. Gabriela knows that now. And so should you.

All’s fair. I told you I’d
have my turn. So let me ask you something further, since you’ve had
free reign to ask of me.

What if, at the age of
fourteen in 1461, Christopher Columbus had died of Typhoid in Genoa
before ever setting foot on a boat?

What if J. Robert
Oppenheimer had developed his throat cancer twenty years earlier
than his death in 1967 and perhaps one or two years before a single
atomic bomb fell on the Japanese city of Hiroshima?

What if Louis Pasteur’s
parents had never met? Or, what if young Pasteur had stayed in the
Jura region of France and pursued his first love of art instead of
his second love of science?

What if the rifle of
nineteen-year-old Slavic Nationalist Gavrilo Princip, had jammed,
not allowing two rounds to be fired on Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
his wife Sophie in 1914?

On December 9th, 1980,
what if Mark David Chapman had given into his urges? What if he had
barged in on the gay couple having sex in his neighbouring hotel
room at the YMCA instead of waiting for John Lennon outside the
Dakota, his New York City apartment.

Do you think any of
that
would have changed
anything else?

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Yes. There are mistakes. A
mistake was in letting Braille the Raille live so long. He was a
hundred and nine, that’s too long, even for you. You wouldn’t know
what to do with that much time, you would go mad. And Braille, he
nearly did. Though he did a far sight better than most would have
done, I will argue that to the end.

There are mistakes.
Gabriela’s parents taking her to Dow Lake by train, that was a
mistake. Gabriela and her brother almost not coming into this
world, that was a mistake. Gabriela falling into that long dark
tunnel filled with metal rails and crushed rock, that was a
mistake.

But, likewise, Obsidion
ignoring his orders and letting her carry on, one could make a case
for that being a mistake too.

No, Gabriela is not evil,
she surely has no bad intent. Letting her go on will not invoke a
third world war, don’t kid yourself. She will not grow to a bitter
and damaged sort who opens fire on a crowd of children (never!) nor
will she calculate the assassination of some Higher Up to change
the world order.

If you want to keep
believing me, you should go right ahead. I can’t make promises but
I can tell you some things you probably didn’t know.

I can tell you that, in
time, Gabriela is set to do something very important, very
altering, very crucial.

And I can tell you
this.

A Night Walk Man is not a
Godly sort. There are some startling contrivances which attend to
the Work that He does, but He is not holy and not divine. We are
not seers. We get no fraction-grasps, no smoldering hunks of Yet To
Come. There
are
broad strokes, mind you, large trends that are interpreted
and ordered upon, but, just like it is in your world, those
decisions happen farther up the chain than you or me or even
Obsidion. All of us, we can only wait for the Orders to come down.
And for the most part, we can only sit tight and wait to see how it
all plays out.

What I do know (and what
Obo the Hobo knew) is that there are certain souls, whether by
right or by might, that have to move in certain directions. Franz
and Sophie, the archduke and his wife, they had to be on that step
in 1914. And Pasteur’s mother and father, they
had
to fall for each other. Just had
to. The whole house of cards would have crashed down otherwise. And
these kinds of little things, these impossibly small details, they
click into place every night, every day. Even when it’s
raining.

And, surely you must know
by now that, just like that, lickity-split, our Gabriela had to
come out of that train tunnel well with breath in her lungs.
Had to
.

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Fate? A silly notion. Fate
is a man hurrying to get a can of pizza sauce from the grocery
store at rush hour. Fate is his car wreck as he dodges a bicycle
rider on the way instead of slowing down to a stop. Fate is his
head touching the windshield at 45 mph because the few seconds to
fasten his seatbelt would have made him miss the green
light.

I told you that mistakes
are made. Even up here. Even in the heavenly world of Cruithne.
What you don’t know is quite how the mistakes played out for
Obsidion and Montserrat.

So I will tell you this. I
will tell you and then you must promise to go because I will have
nothing more for you then. Nothing at all.

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Obsidion walks through a
torrent of white birds. Not doves. But sea gulls, crying as they
ascend.

On the plain, he marches
through waves of grasshoppers, among the honey-coloured staffs that
flow with a gentle breeze and His presence.

He stands now in a wheat
field in the middle of what you call the bald prairie, just an
elongated breadbasket that, at harvest time this year and most
every other, will offer up your survival.

It is the morning after
our Gabriela has fallen, the morning after she is brought out of
the dark train pit. Obsidion waits.

And then Montserrat is
there. The rains don’t come--not yet. But thunder and lightning
tear the sky apart, light it up like the flashbulb behind an angry
sun. Inside a dome of quiet, however, where Obsidion and Montserrat
stand silent, there is stillness. It’s the complete calm you’ve
only ever imagined but have never found yourself. It’s like death.
But the most peaceful sort.

They stare each other
down. They do not speak for a long time.

Montserrat’s robe stands
still down to his feet in the dirt.

Then Montserrat
says,
Welcome Brother. I am sad that it
comes now to this.

I’m sad
too
, says Obsidion.
But do what you must.

I charged
you
, Montserrat says,
charged my Next In Line with taking Gabriela because she is
destined to do momentous things. Momentous things that cannot come
to pass.

And where do you come by
this knowledge
, Obsidion asks.

We are all Next In Line to
someone
, Montserrat answers.
You to me. And me to another...further up the
chain, he says. For you, Obsidion, that knowledge should be enough.
It’s always someone else’s decision to make. Perhaps even mine. But
not yours.

Obsidion cries.
Momentous things? You stand here and claim that
she will do momentous things?
Her
momentous things are to be battled for, not sacrificed, not
destroyed... They
must
pass and I know this. So why was it her?
Why
?
You
made me return her to this world at her start
, he says.
She is like a daughter to
me. You know that. I have watched over her since the beginning. In
a sense
, brother
,
I
made
her. Why
make me take her?

And Montserrat only makes
the statement he has always made.
Duty, o
brother. This is yours. And you should have attended to it. Now we
are both to blame.

No
, says Obsidion.
Duty is nothing for
me now. I have let so much go in the name of duty. I have taken
great friends because you have called it duty. I am finished with
that,
brother
. I
am finished with all of it.

And so are we with
you
, says Montserrat, a touch of sorrow
and sadness in his voice. He doesn’t want to do what comes next but
his sense of duty is intact. And with the tail of his words, a new
torrent comes out of the sky. Black and grey, churning against the
stillness of the empty night, it burns down through the darkness
from a hidden moon above the clouds. It tears across the open
plain, breaking asphalt and grid roads, approaching the meeting of
these two phantom brothers, lifting the soil and the wheat and
leaving a wide open carriage path in a farmer’s field near a town
whose name I can’t recall.

Then Obsidion is gone.
Taken.

It is punishment for
insubordination.

You want to tell me that
Montserrat was wrong, that I told you so. You want to tell me what
I’ve told
you
countless times already: Mistakes are made, Sperro, and
Montserrat was on the side of err. A train edges off the track in
Bolivia, you say. A plane goes down over the Pacific. A bomb goes
off in a crowded theatre. And a twister touches down on a hot
summer evening. Gabriela was meant to live--
you believe this
--and she lives at
this very moment. You want it to be correct, don’t you?

But let me ask you
this.

If there
is
a mistake, who pays
for it? Someone has to. Don’t you think?

And in the chain,
somewhere above us both, there is a nod of agreement. Overhead, the
heat is sucked into the atmosphere. The rains finally do come.
Thunder and lightning lock the sky in a war of light and dark,
silence and sound. The heat wave is over and a giant hand of
welcome coolness and moisture sweeps from the plains out here all
the way across to the island, to Gabriela’s home on Sheppard
Street. Out to the ends of the earth at Dow Lake and across the
roves of people we are meant to protect and to herd.

But Montserrat
was
wrong, wasn’t
He?
Or was He?

It really doesn’t matter.
He went into his brother’s flock.

He too went against the
Word.

It was Monserrat who
steered Galbraith’s hand as he threw Gabriela’s dolly, he who gave
it the distance to see it over the edge of the platform. And it was
Montserrat who took Gabriela’s hat from her head and blew it down
the track twenty paces.

So His robes are pulled
taught by the wind as it rises. He looks skyward. The fabric is
yanked. It flaps and fusses about his head. And He understands what
is coming.

Unsuccessful or not, His
punishment is the same.

Death comes to them both
because any chain of command will fail if there are hearts and
minds near the bottom.

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I told you that all Night
Walk Men have a Next In Line. Obsidion was that to Montserrat until
they were carried off into the sky by another on the chain. Fallow,
as you’ll remember, was Next In Line to Obsidion. He was our
father. And to Fallow, my twin brother, I am His Next In
Line.

It all comes down the
line, you see. Just like that. Just as it should. Just as the rains
always come after the heat has been here too long. For the most
part, things move along as they’re meant to.

I say again: was Obsidion
right? Or was Montserrat?

Who knows for certain at
this late hour?

All I can offer is that I
am the last to carry on. I am the youngest, but older than you by
at least five hundred years.

I must leave you now. I am
Sperro, a Night Walk Man. I have my own discourse to write and I
have my own Work to do.

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About The Author // Jason
McIntyre

Born on the prairies,
Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island
where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him
and coalesced into what would become his novel, "On The Gathering
Storm". Before his time as an editor, writer and communications
professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and
commercial artist. His novel,"On The Gathering Storm" is available
now.

Learn more and connect
with the author at

www.theFarthestReaches.com