He slept that night with his head against a tarred telephone pole that stabbed into the night sky like a knife searching a breast for the heart. Every vibration; moan of wind, subterranean rustle of burrowing things, cries of night birds and the squeal of prey; all fed into him and entered Ishmael’s dreams where he lay sleeping by the fire. But most of all it was the murmurings and deliriums and dreams of the silent one who hung between two dead thieves on a pole strung with rusted wire, wire which ran across the miles to where Ishmael lay.
He awoke to a leaden dawn and a dead fire, his hair stuck to the pole so tightly that he left a piece of bloody scalp hanging there when he wrenched himself free. Not a single dream was remembered, though they all remained within him.
Now he stood at the center of an abandoned switch yard and looked first one way and then another and then another. Yesterday’s mist had turned to rain and each long line of steel ran off into a gray and drizzling distance as blank as the next. He picked a way at random and began to follow his feet.
He tried to think back to the last time he had eaten but there was no such memory. He knew that it had been before his encounter with the dead men, but in putting his mind to it he found that he could not pinpoint the time or place of his last supper. He dropped it from his mind before he was able to realize that he had no memories at all of any time before that encounter, as if that had been the moment he was born.
Ishmael followed his feet for hours as they crunched along the oil spattered rock. From time to time he looked up to peer into the drizzle but the way ahead was nothing but mist and rain. The track he had chosen seemed to be leading him into a wilderness and he began to wonder if he would ever see food again. Then, as he emerged from a deep cut that had been sliced into a red hill, he spied a small dwelling.
It was a rusting trailer that sat a ways off the tracks. It looked to have once been white but was now largely the color of rust and mud. A flaming barrel stood a short distance from a door that hung crazily from its hinges as if it had been battered in.
Drunken man’s home or meth lab, Ishmael wondered, as he stood in the rain, reluctant to approach. He knew that whoever had withdrawn to such a lonely place would have done so for reasons of his own and might not welcome the company of a stranger. But his wet and shivering body demanded that he find food and shelter. He climbed down off the tracks and headed for the structure. Stopping a short ways off he cupped his hands around his mouth and called.
"Hey! In the trailer!"
Nothing.
"Hey!" he called again. "Inside!"
The only response was a cloud of sparks that rose from the barrel as something within it collapsed.
Ishmael moved slowly towards the door.
He stopped a few feet away and tried to peer through a window that was partially obscured by a sagging curtain. A feeling of foreboding began to seep into him, as if his body was absorbing some cloud of woe that flowed from the place. He could see little through the plexiglass window opaque with scratches and dirt. He softly placed a hand on the door jamb and leaned slowly forward to peer inside. As he did so a picture entered his mind of a frightened old man crouched within, pistol in hand, ready to blow the top off the first head that might slide into view. Ishmael strained his ears for any hint of sound, like the cock of a hammer, or shallow, frightened breathing. Finally he moved forward to peer fully inside.
It was clear that something unpleasant had happened here, some thing of violence. Shattered glass and broken furniture gave evidence of a struggle. A couch had been overturned along with several chairs, and the kitchen table had been broken in half. A pool of drying blood puddled on the laminated floor, and a huge dent roughly the shape of a head marred the refrigerator door. Children’s drawings lay scattered about, some of them spangled with red drops.
The only sound to be heard was the soft crackle of the fire that floated from the barrel outside.
Ishmael stood in the midst of the wreckage, his head slowly turning as he took it in. Shattered dishes, papers scattered about, a broken prayer candle of Jesus pointing to his glowing heart, the crack in the glass severing his face.
He ate the cold tamales and tripe that he found in the dented fridge, and he drank a single bottle of beer. He did not want to be like the men he had met the day before and so since he had nothing to leave in payment he took it upon himself in recompense for the food to clean up the damage as best he could. Then he took a crap in the toilet and lay down on the couch to sleep, loath to violate the bed of whomever had been hauled out of the place to be put on one of the wire wrapped buses headed South.
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The music of bells floated into Ishmael’s dream. Was it the sound of angels singing, he wondered? Or perhaps the voices of the dead sending up their final prayers.
It took some time for him to realize that it was the ringing of the phone.
He started violently and sat up on the couch. The old phone, probably as old as the battered trailer, continued to ring where it hung on the kitchen wall. Without thinking, Ishmael stumbled towards the summons that all of contemporary humanity has been trained never to ignore. He lifted the receiver off the hook and leaned his head against the cabinet.
The caller did not even wait for his hello.
"You have found shelter, food, and rest." the voice said. "Now leave your bed and walk over the hills and into the valley of the innocents."
Then the line went dead.
Ishmael stood in the dark of the bare kitchen, the receiver still grasped in his hand. He did not know if what he had heard had been real or a dream. Perhaps the phone had rung, perhaps it had not. Maybe the words he had heard had been spoken by someone at the end of the wire, or maybe they had come out of his own head. Either way, he knew that he had to get out.
Quickly he gathered up his few possessions, lying now in a small pile on the newly swept floor, and headed out into the night.
*************************************************************

The ridge which he had been told to climb ran upwards through naked trees and over rocky ground. It was not steep, though the slick of the incline under the sheen of rain made his feet slip from under him from time to time, bringing him to his knees.
When he crested the ridge he saw that he had not been so far from civilization as he had supposed, for below him, scattered across the floor of the wooded valley, he saw a gathering of shacks, beaten shot gun houses, and rusting trailers like the one in which he had found shelter. A trail ran along the top of the ridge and he took it as it wound among the trees, finally dropping down to circle towards the dwellings. Just as the trail had begun to make its descent someone had raised a sign: plywood, two by fours, and blood red paint meant to announce the existence of the place.
"Rachel" it said.
From below, he heard weeping.
It rose from the floor of the valley like a cloud and Ishmael was reminded of the feeling that had seeped out of the trailer before he had succumbed to hunger and entered. The cloud of weeping rose to him now and surrounded him. The low moans of woe seemed to fill the air and possess the trees. The rain continued to fall and Ishmael tilted his head back and felt the drops on his face. He opened his mouth, ran his tongue along his lips, and tasted water as salty as tears.
Ishmael made his way down through the scattered village, following the winding trail that circumambulated among the shacks and shotgun houses and rusting trailers. The door of every dwelling hung open as if shattered by jack booted feet. Black and empty windows stared out like soulless eyes and doorways were toothless mouths crying in the rain.
Voices everywhere but no one in sight. Then Ishmael circled a huge tree that stood at the center of the settlement, its great limbs arching uselessly, seeking to protect the dwellings. At its base, seated in a chair of thick and twisted vines, was an old man.
He was dressed in a black coat, white shirt, and wide brimmed brown hat. His hair was white, long, and unkempt, and it jutted from beneath the hat like a shock of straw. His beard too was long and white. A strong nose centered a face as brown as a sharecropper’s. His left hand rested in his pocket, while with his right he pointed off into the distance, index finger aimed at a spot just below the far horizon. But as Ishmael moved closer he saw that rather than pointing off into the distance the old man was examining a butterfly that had landed on his finger.
There beneath the spreading oak the two of them were safe from the rain.
Ishmael approached and stood where the tremendous trunk kept the rain at bay.
"Don’t see butterflies this time of year. Wonder how this one came to be?" said the old man, perhaps to Ishmael, perhaps to himself, maybe to the tree. He stared closely at the beautiful thing there before him, as if it were a tiny bit of truth in a land of lies.
"What do you think?" he asked, turning to address Ishmael.
"I don’t know. Sure seems strange." is all Ishmael could think of to say.
The old man nodded in agreement and then turned his attention back to the rare thing that perched upon his finger.
"What happened here?" Ishmael asked at last.
"They came and took the young ones. " the old man replied. "Never seen ‘em do that before. Usually leave the children and take the others. This time they only took the littlest."
"Who took them?"
"Same one’s as always do. Men with badges."
Ishmael turned and looked out into the descending dark. With the rain and sound of wailing that came from the dwellings it seemed as if the whole valley of Rachel was weeping.
"Why?"
"Why what?" asked the old man.
"Why did they take them?"
"Oh, that. Don’t know. Three fella’fellas came and paid a visit to Joe and his woman. Then last night the raid came. Don’t recall anybody tellin’ us why."

MORE TO COME