COYOTE SCENE

1988

(COYOTE, a man of 103 years, gaunt and weathered, sits in the doorway of a barn with a young woman,. MAGDA. She watches the sky while he pokes and stirs the dirt with a stick. There is the distant rumbling of thunder.)

COYOTE: Grandma used to tell a story about a barn...there was a packed dirt floor, you know...you could break a good sized stick on it...When the rain come, something strange happened to that floor.

MAG: What?

COYOTE: Was a change.

MAG: A change. Dirt changed to mud?

COYOTE: Mebbe. Mebbe it was mud, but not mud like you or I ever seen it. Not mud come from a leaky roof....mud red and thick as your own blood. Puddle of it, just behind and under the ladder to the loft. (pause) Every time it rained.

MAG: You’re just saying that because you hear the thunder and you want to scare me. I don’t scare easy. Take more’n a red mud puddle in a barn. Lot more.

COYOTE: Ain’t trying to scare you. Just thinking about it...

(loud thunder)

MAG: The Devil beating his wife.

COYOTE: Mebbe.

MAG: What happened when the sun came out?

COYOTE: What?

MAG: To the red mud. Did you ever see it?

COYOTE: Oh, yes, I seen it. Many a time I seen it. Take a stick and poke it in, stir it around. Sunk a stone down into it once too, hopin’ to dig it out when the thing dried up. Never found it. Puddle must a been deep, but break a stick on her when the floor was dry. When it was dry the color went away, you couldn’t tell it was there.

MAG: Somebody die there, you suppose?

COYOTE: Mebbe some poor cowboy loved a lady deep as that puddle and mebbe that lady were a false hearted love and a bullet from her other lover’s gun dropped that cowboy from the loft.

MAG: No. I don’t think so.

COYOTE: Why not? The old songs are full of stuff like that.

MAG: Cause it weren’t no bullet. Was a knife.

COYOTE: Why a knife?

MAG: Don’t you know? A knife is more romantic, more physical, like love is physical, and bodies, sweat, and blood. A heart blowed apart by a gun ain’t gonna bleed forever, heart blowed apart gonna disappear like smoke. That blood come from a knife.

COYOTE: Mebbe. (looks down, weak) Mebbe.

MAG: I know it. And no man, neither, it were a woman. That’s so. Were the woman got that knife through her bosom, through the breast that would have fed the man’s son. The very breast, mebbe already full of milk from a baby coming. A baby neither of them

would ever know. She loved the man, hated him too. And the baby she was gonna love more than she even loved herself. Wich you know she did a lot, because a heart that’s gonna bleed all them years learned how to love by loving itself.

COYOTE: Slow down. Where you get all that from?

MAG: Just know it.

COYOTE: How you just know it?

MAG: Picture it in my head, listen to what they say. I can see the future sometimes too, its almost the same, except noboby’s felt anything in the future yet, so its kind of smokey, like shadows, and quiet....real quiet, the past is different, but pretty much the same...its sorta like wood, seeing wood through dark glass, but all the feeling is there, because when you feel something it stays around in the world a long time.

COYOTE: Smart.

MAG: Not smart, just true.

COYOTE: And the father?

MAG: Who?

COYOTE: Of the baby the dead woman is--was--gonna birth?

MAG: (smiling) Oh, I reckon they all died in that barn, the three of them bleeding and growing cold together while the sky poured down rain. The barn animals just looking out of their stalls, blinking at the dead things.

COYOTE: Not a pretty story, not much hope.

MAG: There’s hope, don’t you see? The hope is in the blood that comes back each time the rain reminds that heart why it bled so much. The hope is in the blood, the love that she had for both of those men. Their hearts don’t bleed though. Just hers. They each loved her, but she loved everybody and that’s what killed her.

COYOTE: You said she hated one.

MAG: Of course.

COYOTE: What "of course"? Either she loved him or she hated him.

MAG: Haven’t you ever hated someone?

COYOTE: Hate? No, I believe that there is some things still as pure as the day God made them. And hate and love are two of them. I think that if you love you can’t hate and if you hate you can’t love.

MAG: No. Hate is love. Love that is angry, bitter, and fearful.

COYOTE: Angry bitter fearful love is just angry bitter fearful love, not hate.

MAG: (smiling) Who can say what love is?

COYOTE: Suppose this. Suppose I hated you, wouldn’t I want to see you dead as much as right now I want to see you live? I can’t hate. I don’t want to see nobody dead.

MAG: Mebbe you haven’t lived long enough then.

COYOTE: I refuse to believe that hate can come from love.

MAG: You believe it or you don’t.

(thunder)

MAG: You have to really be able to love before you can hate. Devil love, that’s what hate is. If you don’t hate anybody, maybe you never loved anybody either. (pause) Mebbe that’s a good thing.

COYOTE: I love you.

MAG: Not enough to hate me.

COYOTE: What if I told you my grandma just made up that story?

MAG: Mebbe she just remembered it before it happened. Its too good a story not to happen sometime. (pause) Don’t you think?

(COYOTE looks down, she touches his shoulder)

MAG: You’re a good man, Coyote.

(lights down)

I have these things called Ristau Readers, where I bound everything I did for an academic year, titled it Ristau Readar # whatever, and sent it off to be copyrwrited as a collected volume, so this was for the academic year 88-89. Not the festival year, I guess, and I know it was done outside Mabie, because it started with whoever did Coyote on one of those brown garbage cans and I can remember running around finding the sheet metal to use for thunder.

Anytime I say a year, its really that academic year, so if I say 88 it could be spring of 1989.