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no board of education.
    If you wanted your young to learn, you sent them. If they wanted to, they went. If you didn’t and neither did they, they went to work.
    There was no work. So they went to the movies. Dove had not yet seen one, but he planned to go pretty soon now. When John Barrymore and Marian Marsh came to Arroyo as Svengali and Trilby, he asked Byron to pay his way inside.
    ‘What if Eternity should come when you were on the Devil’s territory? What chance would you have?’ Byron asked for an answer, thus mocking both father and brother at once; and avoiding an admission that he didn’t have a nickel.
    Dove hadn’t yet gone to a dance either. But he’d stood in the doorway of a hall and watched and kept time like the others—
Take her by the lily-white hand
And lead her like a pigeon
Make her dance the weevily-wheat
Till she loses her religion
    Long after he had gone to bed that night the light from the bitch lamp kept him awake. The lamp had been made by fixing a rag wick to a stone and setting it in a vessel half-filled with whatever was left in the frying pan after the morning bacon was finished. Byron called it a ‘slut lamp.’ But Fitz always said ‘light the grease,’ and let it go at that.
    By its ceaseless flicker Dove would see the pair of fools going at it again and both three sheets over. He would lay there moving his lips with the longest words he could pick up. ‘Corruption.’ ‘Generations.’ ‘Burnt-offering.’ ‘Peace-offering.’ ‘Sin-offering.’ Sometimes whole phrases: ‘What meaneth the heat of this great anger?’ ‘Would it were morning! For the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.’
    ‘I can’t argue with you no more,’ Byron would surrender as the wick burned low, ‘I’m feeling the sickness too bad.’
    ‘Another name for the soul’s corruption,’ Fitz assured him.
    ‘How do
you
feel these days yourself, Pappy?’ Byron asked.
    ‘Well and contented,’ the old man replied.
    Even Dove knew the old man lied.
    Mexican and American alike, the townsfolk knew that the preacher was off his rocker and that Byron smoked too much potiguaya bush for a lunger. ‘I was born to smoke bush,’ he boasted, ‘I may die poor but I won’t die tied.’ But what to make of Dove with his hair neither red nor yellow? And brows so light he looked browless? ‘You right sure that boy got everything he’s suppose to have?’ one doubter asked another.
    If the boy bought a plug of tobacco he would lean against the grocer’s door and spit the whole morning away. If asked what he thought he was doing he would mumble, ‘leanen ’n dreamen,’ and would move a scant inch to one side. Yet sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing.
    ‘The boy is takin’ growth,’ Fitz explained uneasily.
    In Dove’s mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky – a common bush would become a glory, a bird on a swinging bough a wonder – then the light would fade and fade like a slow gray curtain dropping. Such moments were irretrievable.
    One day in March he saw a solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue, and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that he looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.
    At times he could catch his brother Byron in such strange life-glimpses. One second he would be moving about the kitchen, his useless brother about his useless tasks, and the next he would be a total stranger, doing no one knew what. A picture of him not moving but rigid; tensed with life yet still as death. In after years Dove never heard the long thunder of passenger cars across a bridge in the dark but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door – never