The Heart of a Lion

In a rural Eden of furrowed clay and rusted ploughshares, Barney Kemper—calloused demi-god of the loam—sacrifices his own alphabet of dreams so that Dick, his flaxen-haired sibling, might conjugate Latin verbs under collegiate stained-glass; yet Dick metamorphoses into a prodigal moth who burns Barney’s hard-won gold in a bonfire of gin and roulette. Margaret Danford, physician’s daughter with a stethoscope for a diadem, adores the taciturn ploughman from the hazed periphery of hay-scented afternoons, slipping him dog-eared volumes of Keats as though they were contraband stars. A city sylph with lacquered smiles glides into the milk-fragrant hamlet, pirouettes into Barney’s yearning, then pirouettes out again on Dick’s perfumed arm. One twilight of crickets and treachery, Barney stumbles upon the pair entwined like poison ivy; his heart, once barn-red, blanches to bone. He exiles himself westward where rivers are unchained and men fell sequoias like pagan idols, trading furrows for sawdust gothic. Meanwhile Dick, chastened by ghosts, dons a collar of repentance and is dispatched to the very timber cathedral whose pews now echo with Barney’s self-exile. Margaret, unshakeable as Polaris, follows to raise a sanctuary of healing amid the resinous roar. Tex Daly, a cypress-tall demagogue of the axe, loathes the sermonizer in his saloon kingdom and, with a soiled dove as lure, rigs a scandal that ricochets into gunpowder. A bullet—meteor of karmic iron—rends Dick’s chest; Barney, summoned from the forest’s green nave, cradles the dying prodigy, then mounts the rough-hewn pulpit himself, voice shaking like cedar in a gale. Dick expires; Barney’s vengeance detonates; Tex crashes bloodied to the sawdust. In the hush that follows, Margaret’s hand finds Barney’s scarred palm, and two orphans of the same long sorrow step into a dawn that smells of sap and second birth.