We did. We got her there.

Did they examine her?

They did. You ain’t gonna like it, friar.

My liking it is beside the point.

She’s got a disease. A hereditary one. It’s in her blood. That’s why the slugs don’t bother with her. She’s already half dead.

Ignatius nods and smiles benignly at the horizon.

So what’s bestowed on her, Moses continues, it ain’t a blessing.

Ignatius shrugs.

Disease or blessing, who can say? he asks. If a disease helps you survive in the world, then it’s no longer a disease but an adaptation. Evolution would tell you as much.

But it’s more than that, friar. The girl, she ain’t a holy woman. She put on pretences.

I know that, too. I never saw her other pretences – but the one she put on here was a righteous one, so I pretended along with her. Sometimes a thing becomes true through enacting it. Sometimes you perform faith in order to gain faith. Do you believe that?

I don’t know. I don’t believe in nothin right now.

See, now there’s a pretence you just uttered. Do you say it because you wish it were true? Because you would try to incant it?

I won’t spar with you, says Moses as he raises his hands in surrender and smiles gently, on the field of philosophy.

I would be a fool, my friend, to spar with you on any other.

They are quiet for a time. Then sun is low on the horizon now, the sky lit up all shock red and streaky white.

Then Moses speaks, this time very quiet, as though his words were really meant for the wind to carry them away.

She sacrificed herself, friar. Not her life, but in another way. She said it was for me.

Do you believe her?

I didn’t, not when she told me.

And now?

Now I think I do. We got separated. I thought – I thought she might be here. Now I don’t know what . . .

You suspect she was in love with you?

Moses does not respond. His eyes are gone far out over the horizon.

You suspect, maybe, you are in love with her?

I’m lost, friar, Moses says, his eyes gone suddenly wet. I can’t – I can’t see the colours of anything any more. It used to be I was a man, but what am I now? I lost my way somewhere.

Moses Todd looks into the face of the monk Ignatius, and the holy man smiles back. It is a smile full of blustery optimism.

Look, he says to Moses and points to the sunset. Look out there. What do you see?

The desert, Moses says.

No, you have to look wider. Open your eyes more. Do you see that? It’s America. No one’s ever lost in America. It’s all destination. Every corner of it. Even right here, on this rock, with me. You’ve arrived. Do you see it?

And then, suddenly, Moses can see it. America. The fertile fields of the republic stretched taut from ocean to ocean, populated with ambling souls, dead or alive, it makes no difference as long as they are moving, as long as their hands still work to grasp and pull and reach and tear. A destiny manifest in every rock and ruin, a loamy soil of faith where God’s work is done one way or the other – because every creation winds its way towards destruction and every destruction wipes clean a canvas for creation.

A place, indeed, poxed by calamitous treasures like Abraham’s blue-roofed pancake houses – gigging itself forward in a frenzy of speed (yes, this is what Moses hasn’t seen before – the country, not stopped dead, but spinning in such mazy motion the blur might be taken for stasis), galloping ahead of life and ahead of death too, and back into life, the two masquerading as each other, unable to keep up, as though time were a circuit rather than a line.

And if time is a circuit – if our paths only bring us back to where we begun, well then proclaim it holy, holy, because the friar is right – ain’t nothing is ever lost but it’s just on a different road, and it’s all of it, the whole country, just one big road attached to itself in different ways – and so are all travellers kin, and so are all people travellers through life.

And, yes, he can see her dancing again, naked, that white body on the sunset plain, a vision if ever there was one, holy woman and whore, never lost but she dances America to its sleep every night – and you can hear her laughter, that voice both tricksy and true, clamouring America in all its broken bells. And you are glad.

*

Was her name really Mattie? Moses says now to the caravaners, those who remain awake.

Now, in the distance, the sky is empurpled by dawn. The stars have dimmed against the lightening void, and the horizon becomes invisible as a sharp-cut silhouette – something you might trace with pencil and compass.

I like to believe Mattie was her name – that she told me it true, even if just that one time. It’s passed my lips enough times, maybe more like a prayer than a rightful name. Mattie. Mattie, you out there somewhere? Mattie – where’d you get to, girl? It’s just a word is all it is, a word spoke to the darkness. But so are all words. Goodness, purity, truth, God. You build somethin with your eyes closed. You speak it to life. Then you open your eyes – and what kind of tower? Where’s it reach to? Maybe nowhere. Maybe all the way to heaven.

He pauses. There is rustling movement among the listeners. Perhaps some of them are waking to his voice, the same voice they fell asleep to, and are now wondering what a thing is a story with just a beginning and an end. Perhaps some of them are just antic against the dawn.

We searched her out for a long time, Moses continues, Abraham and me. Sometimes we’d hear stories that sounded like they could of been her – but we never saw her again. Ten years now. Could be I’m cursed to tail women my whole life. My wife and daughter – they got away from me. Mattie the Vestal – who ran when I sent her runnin.

He stops again and seems to consider how long he has been chasing people who refuse to be found.

It was only one girl I had any talent for huntin, he says. She – well, she cost me my eye, and the price of my brother, finally, in exchange for Maury there.

He gestures with a nod of his chin to the large mute sleeping at the perimeter of the group.

Just a young girl, that one. I bear her no grudge. One thing you could say about her, she balanced the log books like a true accountant of life. She – yeah, she got away from me too.

He pauses one last time – and this time the silence feels like a bottomless chasm everyone, all the listeners and the teller too, stands on the precipice of.

But that’s a different story altogether, Moses Todd says finally. I guess this story here’s found its finish.

He and his companion travel with the caravan one more day. When the night falls again, he is silent – as though his story of the previous night has exhausted him in a profound way. One of the children, a toddler, approaches him sleepily. The one-eyed man reaches out his hand as if to tousle the child’s blond hair, but at the last moment he pulls his arm back – as though afraid his touch could never be light enough to keep the youngster from shattering harm.

In the morning, both men are gone.

The caravan continues its slow progress over the plain in the direction of many Americas – more than can be counted. Three days later, it is attacked by marauders. The caravaners manage finally to repel the attack, but not without significant losses. Half the travellers are killed, but half survive.