82
ED LEFFINGWELL
finally lobbed up out of the hot disturbed cornfields, harvesting their
deathcrop.
A few huts had been constructed near where the old village
must have been. A little corn grew inside the wooden fences, and
there were a few animals, some chickens. Two old nunlike women,
white hair, ribosas and shawls and skirts all black, came to the door
of a hut. Rafael waved to them and continued on.
They came to the foot of the hard rock mountain from which
the ruined church protruded. Acres and acres of ground were bleak
with the hardened flow and supported no life to speak of. "There
weren't many farmers among the old villagers," Rafael began.
"One man, the story goes, was working his field for a long
time, he notice the ground grow warm to his hand and get big like
a pregnant woman. The cone had appear, a crater quarter mile
across.
"So this old one measured the swelling with sticks. He made
new marks, measured the progress of the mountain that would des–
troy him. And then one day...."
As he continued the story, Django closed his eyes and put
his
hands to the ground, and let the pictures run on. He was the old
man now, for days he had been marking the funny pregnant corn–
field, chide it for an unwed mother, and when he pissed on the
hot ground, would offer his body water to cool its fever. Then
it
happened, the earth split open and rose up beneath him with a sick–
ening roar. The earth shifted and trembled beneath him again and
he puked and shit his terror, and then in the violence the old man's
horror was over as the liquid rock poured over him, searing his eyes
with the great heat, finally covering him, burying him under new
rock for all time.
"J esus," said Django, opening his eyes. The sun was going
down in a big way as they - Billy and Rafael - turned back to the
village and left Django in the care of the old women to attend
to
his vigil. Django figured beauty for terror, imagined above a constel–
lation of an olive tree when the stars began, and tried to will him–
self not to think. He looked back at the old women. Then he looked
up at the foothills of cooled lava, the rivulets of vegetation, green
among the bald scruffy rock, that split into the outer boundary of
the flow. The night had come without dusk really, and then stars,
