To Sing the Song of Acceptance

The boy sat on the horse for a long time. He blacked out for a while - he didn't know how long - but when he came-to he was still enveloped in a thick, velvet dark. He was losing circulation below the waist and his crotch and legs were numb; partly from the saddle, but it had become so cold he was shivering violently. When he had opened his eyes there was only the soupy darkness to greet him - a long, black worm stretching eternally into an even deeper caliginosity. Primeval darkness. Starless and moonless - bereft of sight, his eyes darted around for some point of contact, some form that would give comfort and ease the panic that sent waves of terror though his mind. His eyes strained until burning. There were no familiarities here in the dark New Mexico desert. No comforts or reliefs. Especially for a killer.

There had been a girl in La Palotada with warm, light-brown skin. He had kissed her damp brow and loved her. Possibly. He did not know. How could he? He was all of nineteen and full of the bravado of youth that stomps from a body too small to inflict the damage that it threatens. Too nervous and unsure and shaking, touching a soft body for the first time after a life of touching only rough, ugly things.

The rope around his neck had become as familiar to him as his own body. At first, when The Man with the Green Eyes had placed the rope tenderly over his head, he had squirmed and fought the unfamiliarity of the tightness. He had wanted to tear the rope from his neck and curse the texture of the hemp and how it had abrade his skin. Now the rope was part of him, it sank into his neck like a familiar friend comforting him with an embrace. It assured an end. Before the rope there was uncertainty. Now there was a goal; a steadily-approaching final chapter that had sang a song of acceptance into his ear. It was an exquisite sound - like a band of angels - which had brought a tear and sank his heart.

He was eight - before the anger of The Man with the Green Eyes - when he had helped his father track a missing calf on the ranch where they were hands. They had found it, crying and up to its crops in the swollen flood-waters of La Cinta Creek. He had felt the cutting embrace of the frayed hemp on his hands then, as he and his father roped the calf and tried to pull it from the violent waters. They had not succeeded. This is the last thought he would have before he died.

The horse strayed forward slowly at first, almost as if testing the tensile strength of the rope in the preparation of being the unknowing executioner of a nineteen-year-old murderer. The rope, for all the closeness it had shared with its new friend, bit severely into the boy's neck as it pulled taught - tied securely to the highest, sturdiest branch of an acacia tree - and restricted the air entering his windpipe. The horse stopped, almost knowingly, and then started a hard trot West. The boy's legs went wide, he fell backward, kicking and swinging around violently for a moment and fighting for a breath of air. Then the boy hung lifelessly from the acacia tree.