Red Prophet Page 0,38

but - "

"I wouldn't call him a savage, Reverend Thrower," said Eleanor. "I think in his own way he's civilized."

"You might as well call a badger civilized, then," said Thrower. "In his own way, anyway."

"I mean to say," Eleanor said, her voice even quieter and meeker-sounding, but therefore carrying all the more weight, "that I saw him reading."

"Turning pages you mean," said Thrower. "He couldn't be reading."

"No. He read, and his lips formed the words," she said. "The signs on the wall in the front room, where we serve customers. He read the words."

"It's possible, you know," said Armor. "I know for a fact that the Irrakwa read just as good as any White men. I been there to do business often enough, and you can bet you have to read the fine print on the contracts they write up. Red men can learn to read, and that's a fact."

"But this one, this drunk - "

"Who knows what he can become, when the likker ain't in him?" said Eleanor.

Then they went away to the other room, and left the house for a while, walking Thrower home to the cabin he was staying in before the rain got so bad he had to stay the night.

Alone in the house, Lolla-Wossiky tried to make sense of things. Baptism alone hadn't wakened him from his dream. Nor had White man's clothes. Maybe going without likker for a night would do it, like Eleanor suggested, though it made him crazy with pain so he couldn't sleep.

Whatever happened, though, he knew that the dream beast was waiting somewhere near here. The white light was suffused all around him now; this was the waking place for Lolla-Wossiky. Maybe if he stayed away from the church hill today, maybe if he wandered in the woods around Vigor Church, then the dream beast could find him.

One thing was sure. He wasn't going to spend another night without whisky. Not when he had a keg out in a crotch of a tree that could take away the black noise and let him sleep.
* * *

Lolla-Wossiky walked everywhere in the woods. He saw many animals, but they all ran from him; he was so drunk or so bound up in the black noise that he never was part of the land, and they ran from him just as if he were White.

Discouraged, he began to drink more than four swallows, even though he knew he would run out of whisky too fast. He walked less and less in the forest, more and more along the White man's paths and roads, showing up at farmhouses in the middle of the day. The women sometimes screamed and ran away, carrying a baby and leading children off into the woods. Other women pointed guns at him and made him leave. Some of them fed him and talked about Jesus Christ. Finally Armor-of-God told him not to visit the farms when the men were away, working on the church.

So there was nothing left for Lolla-Wossiky to do. He knew he was close to the dream beast, but he couldn't find it. He couldn't walk in the forest because the animals ran from him and he stumbled and fell all the time, more and more, until he feared he might break a bone and die of starvation because he couldn't even call small animals to feed him. He couldn't visit the farms because the men were angry. So he lay on the commons, sleeping from drunkenness or trying to endure the pain of the black noise, one or the other.

Sometimes he worked up the energy to go up the hill and see the men working on the church. Whenever he got there, some man would call out, "Here comes the Red Christian!" and Lolla-Wossiky knew that there was malice and ridicule in the voices that said it and the voices that laughed.

He was not at the church the day the roof-beam fell. He was sleeping on the grass of the commons, near the porch of Armor's house, when he heard the crash. It startled him awake, and the black noise came back harsher than ever, even though he had drunk eight swallows that morning and ought to be drunk till noon. He lay there holding his head until men started coming down from the hill, cursing and muttering about the strange thing that happened.

"What happened?" Lolla-Wossiky asked. He had to know, because whatever it was, it had made the black noise worse than it had