The Road Was Dark

THE ROAD WAS DARK, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn't have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead.  Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone.  Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount's hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea.  Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive.  The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed.  She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself.  She'd talked till her throat went dry as they'd left town in the declining sun and he'd done his best to keep up though he wasn't naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they'd fallen silent.  She resigned herself.  Rode on.  And just as she'd given up hope, a light appeared ahead.


from the short story "The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight's Journey to New York, 1702"
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle

Prospect Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC