Some Letters to Cabeza De Vaca, Shipwrecked on the Texas Shore, 1528

1 2 4 Y S O M E L E T T E R S T O C A B E Z A D E V A C A , S H I P W R E C K E D O N T H E T E X A S S H O R E , 1 5 2 8 K E V I N H O N O L D Letter #19 The bank towers downtown gaze like tungsten-eyed idols over the city as the poor bus’s worn-out struts bottom on the broken pavement. Nobody wants to cut each other’s hair anymore, Cabeza, no one wants to sing the old songs. I got this bad feeling but everyone else just goes about their business re-enacting the lives they lived when their bodies still parted the light. One man buried alive in a Steelers jacket hasn’t even bothered to shave. See the first tokens of spring: three bullet holes in the bus window like crystal florets in arrested bloom, unnoticed by the nice old lady who doesn’t speak but sits so quietly, so contained, who ventures now and again to catch the eye of someone else’s child, merely to convey a smile, and see how her smile 1 2 5 R lingers over that fidgety and oblivious boy. How was it, brother, we failed to recognize the ticket agent in his sorry disguise, the way he peered at us from the gap between his coat collar and hat brim, pretending he was one of us, just some guy just trying to get someplace? 1 2 6 Y Letter #20 I was walking down the street and passed a woman with a cross of ash between her eyes and then I saw a man and a child, then couples, old folks, whole families marked like Cain. The Emperor’s sentence hung over the city like a sword by a horsetail hair so I stopped at a diner for a final cigarette and a co√ee. Months of plowed snow flecked with halite lay piled like ranges of busted masonry along the gutters and I wondered, my friend, who’s going to care for all the animals and flowers now? Who will scatter grain at Christmas-time on the sidewalks for the sparrows, in memory of us when we’re gone? As I write this letter to you, three girls sit laughing at the lunch counter, perched on turntable stools, heraldic patches on their blue parochial school sweaters, sipping milkshakes through pink straws. Their composure in the face of extinction is devastating. They must think I’m barbaric. ...