No one knew his name, or where he came from, much less the man himself. He stepped down from the bus, his fingertips touching the rail so lightly as if to take a thin communion wafer, and with equal reverence.

On the ground, he stood quietly looking forward, then each way down the street. The mid-day sun lit the ragged street beneath his feet, beneath the perfect, brilliant sky, and warmed his white wispy hair in the thin cool air. He stood straight and six feet tall, looking even taller in his long white cotton turtleneck and pressed white linen trousers, and had once been taller still. The knuckles of his plain left hand wrapped over the round steel head of his straight white cane.

Behind him, the old bus started with a sigh of air from its brakes, like the sudden exhalation of a long-held breath, and slowly ground its way away, belching puffs of fading thick black diesel, leaving him in silence.

Around him stood the snow-tipped peaks of mountains, almost too bright to look upon beneath the end-of-summer sun. And across the empty road behind him, had he turned to look, he could have seen a hundred miles over desert far below. He stood before a row of modest, vacant shops, some with broken wooden porches, and turned to walk the shallow slope up which he had been traveling.

Atop its crest, the man gazed down the street ahead to see mothers buying produce in a market under amber shade of thin, translucent tents. He looked, and then his cane touched quietly beside his soft white leather shoes, as he stepped with neither confidence nor caution down the gentle grade, and to the marketplace below.

Around him lay stacked crates of melons and tomatoes, zucchini, and soft white peaches from some other place, through which women were selecting fruit to turn in one hand and inspect for bruises before returning to the pile. A man with long black hair sat behind an array of simple hand-made jewelry spread across the center of a bent but solid, too-long folding table.

The long-haired man met the stranger's gaze with no expression but a clear awareness, and some small black flies atop a crushed tomato scattered as the tall man passed to stand before the table.

He looked upon the Zuni jewelry for a long minute, and another, and finally touched a piece with an extended fingertip. He was tall above the spread, and his arm bent only slightly as he pressed the simple piece against the table. The long-haired man, whose eyes had never left the stranger's face, named an honest price.

The soft white collar of his turtleneck hung in loose folds about the taut lines of his slender neck as the old man furrowed his brow and held steadfast in a timeless moment as the market and its sounds and smells and flies faded gradually away, leaving only the stone beneath his fingertip, and the certain strength of the long-haired man's unblinking stare.

The tall man breathed, and laid his straight white cane across the table. His finger lifted from the blue-green stone, and gently worked a flat gold band from his left hand, and placed it on the table. The man with long black hair nodded once, then broke his gaze to thread the turquoise stone atop its flat, silver oval, over a thin silver chain. He stood, and the old man bowed to him, as he draped the necklace over the taller figure's humbled form.

A crying child's screeching brawl turned the tall man back into the market, where a boy of perhaps three years stood alone beside tall crates of over-ripe tomatoes, wailing, invisible to people more accustomed to a child's tears than to white peaches. With his cane beneath his broad left plam again, the old man stepped between the crates to give the child his free right hand.

They stood unmoving, the screaming child's arm stretched upward to grip the man's hand tightly. And people moved around them.

Until one woman, handling tomatoes, reached to put one back atop the stack before her, and past her outstretched hand saw a head of thin white hair. Someone near her saw the woman stop, transfixed, and followed her raised arm over the tomatoes toward the man. Slowly, people put down fruit or plastic bags of long green beans, and turned to stare, bewildered, at the silent, screaming, tall white beacon risen at the center of their small market.

Over the child's choking wail came a woman's desperate voice, Julio! A pretty, dark young woman followed others' staring eyes to round a stack of crates and snatch her child up to her wet face, crying Julio! She rocked and pressed the screaming child tight against her, and as she rocked the tall man's arm swung gently back and forth, his fingers still held tightly in the child's fist of faith. Julio loosened his grip as his mother, almost a foot shorter than the man, kissed the old man's hand, saying Que dios se lo page, que dios se lo page... He nodded slightly, with a small, uncertain look that might have been sadness and compassion, or confusion in the echo of some nearly-surfaced memory once forgotten long ago.

Many people smiled their thanks to him, but their eyes turned to follow the mother and her gently sobbing child as they left, and went about their day.

As the sun set, after the last boxes of unsold things had been loaded into pickup trucks or simply carried home, a voice said to the man, "Sir, you must go now. The market has closed." The tall man was sitting atop an empty wooden crate. Over him, the sun-darkened man with long black hair bent near his face, to look into his eyes. "Sir. You cannot stay."

The man looked back at him in the stillness of the waning day.

The Zuni man looked upon the turquoise where it rested on the other's chest, rising and falling softly, and said, "Well. We must make a place for you." The man took his hand, and with tired strength unfolded straight and tall. He climbed into the right side of the dark man's truck, and watched the first stars appear as they drove a gravel road.

They'd not gone far when the truck ground to a stop before an old small house. From the truck, the man watched as the pretty woman from the market emerged to talk with the Zuni man outside. She looked back at him inside the truck, and talked a moment more, and nodded. The dark man helped the guest inside, spoke with the woman, and drove away.

Inside the house was a small room with a couch, some child's toys, a sewing table and a stove. It was old, but neat, and clean, and there was fabric caught in thread, half pulled across the table through an electric sewing machine.

A heavy bathtub on short legs only made the square room behind the first seem more empty, beside a simple sink, and toilet.

To each side lay one small bedroom, one the mother shared with Julio, the other to which she took the white-haired man. Inside, he found an old small set of drawers, and a bed. The bed was low and narrow, with a thin stuffed cotton mattress, but it was dressed in neat, clean sheets and a heavy, hand-made quilt. His cane looked bright against the dark wood floor, and he stood it gently in a corner.

He heard the woman sewing late that night, as he gently tugged the chain to quell the lamp beside the bed. When he pulled his head almost against the wall, his feet just fit outstretched beneath the quilt.

There was no man who lived there, and the woman and small boy were glad of company. There was nothing at the house that the old man could do or fix that the young woman could not, but she delighted at the day the tall man showed her son to fly a kite. He would carry things in his free right hand when they went to market, and the people beamed to see him. They named him Snow In Sunlight.

He once gave a sermon, in their tiny, one-room church, when the priest came to him with that request. On Easter Sunday, he stepped up to the podium, radiant in his white, and looked out upon the people. They looked to him, their heads held high, their breaths held just as lightly. He looked, and saw each one of them, and then sighed quietly and slowly bent his head, as if in tired contemplation, more so than formal prayer.

Finally, he stepped down from the podium, his cane clicking in the silence, and then walked slowly between the pews, to throw the back doors wide and walk outside into the melting snow.

The puzzled people turned to watch him as he passed, then leaned and craned to see him go outside. And for a minute, no one spoke, or moved, until an old woman pushed herself up from the front-most pew, and followed him outside. The woman's friend, beside her, followed next, and quietly the others shuffled out, and stood in a loose crowd behind the man, who stood a few feet further, facing the mountaintops before them.

Cold water ran in trickles from the thin and icy inch of snow beneath the early morning's overcast sky, and there was no wind, or sound, but time. And when some of that was taken, the tall old man stepped forward toward the mountains, and his cane dropped softly in the snow when he threw his arms up and wide at the resurrected Earth.

Behind him, the old woman stepped forward before dropping to her knees and throwing wide her arms. And the people, in their Easter suits and clothes, kneeled behind them in the melting snow, and wept.

In time, when he no longer used his cane, the people came to see him at his bed. A young woman came to ask him, Should I marry this young man?, and beamed with joy when the old man squeezed her hand. Every mother brought her new-born child to grip the man's white fingers. The people made new clothes for him, but he would wear no color other than their turquoise where it hung against his chest.

When Julio was six, the man died quietly at dawn, and the people came to care for him. Young women with their children walked behind their husbands, and the old ones climbed along behind them all in silence. It took almost a day to carry his body to the summit of the nearest snow-peaked mountain, where they gave him back unto the setting sunlight.