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  • With a Bible and a Gun
  • Paul Christensen (bio)

It was for a worthy cause, all the killing, the torture, the rape of the women who ran for their lives down the paths, and through the woods. We shot the children, too. And then the ponies tied to the saplings by the creek. We killed until our hands were numb, and our trigger fingers bled. That is the way the west was won, with a bible and a gun.

When we came back and drank in the saloon, and shot each other on the dirt of Main Street, eager to test our wits and eyes against a man we didn’t know, and shot him down to see if we could win, again, it didn’t stop the sun, or make it rain, or change the wind, it only shortened one man’s life. But that is how the west was won, with a bible and a gun.

And when the tracks were laid and our jobs as bounty hunters were through, and the plains closed up between the fences, the old free-ranging heart was lost again, under the rising steeples of the towns. The dead cried out for justice from the holes we put them in, in the name [End Page 205] of the father and of the son. We took the west from them, with a bible in our left hand, and in our right, the gun. [End Page 206]

Paul Christensen

Paul Christensen is editor of In Love, In Sorrow: The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg and author of seven collections of poems, the most recent being Hard Country (Thorp Springs, 2005). In 2010, Wings Press will publish Christensen’s new collection, On Being Human. He has also published studies of such poets as Charles Olson and Clayton Eshleman, and two memoirs, West of the American Dream: an Encounter with Texas (2001) and Paradise: A Memoir of Provence (2008). He teaches modern literature and coordinates the Creative Writing Program at Texas A&M University in College Station.

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