MacKinnon

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Ma’s dead!” Florrie shrieked.

  Gary burst into tears.

  Satan snatched Katie’s soul. “What the hell, Florrie!”

  “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” her sister cried. “She’s dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. What are you going to do … just keep her in the back of the wagon till the buzzards come?”

  “I’m digging a grave!”

  “That’s not a grave, Sister.”

  “Well, maybe if you’d climb out of that wagon and just help me!”

  “That’s Mother! That’s my mother! And she’s dead. And we’re all going to be dead … just like her.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I won’t shut up!”

  “Shut up!”

  “No.”

  Katie slapped her sister. But not just once. She slapped her with her right hand, then her left, then again, and again, and again, ignoring the blisters, the splinters, the rawness of her palms. She stopped once she realized the slaps were only making Gary wail harder. Florrie lay curled up into a ball, and she remembered how many times Tommy Truluck had beaten her, when she was younger, and Florrie, Gary … even Ma.

  Slaps would not bring back their mother. They wouldn’t help them get out of this kiln.

  Florrie sobbed. Gary bawled. Katie had nothing left inside her. She was as empty as this desert.

  Sighing, she slid over to her sobbing brother. She put her arm around the child, and pulled him close. She reached for Florrie, but her sister rolled away, dumped her supper on the sand, and stormed off several yards from the fire and the wagon. She just stood in the darkness, staring at the big empty.

  Keep walking, Katie thought. Go on. Just go. What have you done to help …?

  She made herself stop, despising herself for such thoughts. Bringing her hand down under Gary’s chin, she lifted his head. She did her best to smile, and wet her lips, before saying: “It’s all right, Gary.” Though it was anything but all right.

  “Ma …? She … she ain’t … dead … is she?” Gary whimpered.

  Katie sighed. She thought she would have to blink away tears, but there were no tears. “Yes, sweetie, I’m afraid she is.” She pulled Gary closer, and hugged him tightly.

  “But … she can’t be …”

  Letting him cry a while, she tried to think of something to say, but there was nothing to say.

  * * * * *

  “I guess I knew she was dead.”

  Katie looked down at Gary. He had stopped crying. She looked over the coals and into the desert night and saw Florrie, no longer standing, but sitting on her knees, tossing stones into the darkness.

  “Why did Ma have to die?” Gary asked.

  She brought him closer. “She was just played out, Gary. She lasted longer than anyone thought she would. She was sick before you were born. She was sick as long as I can remember.”

  “Could Pa have saved her?”

  “No.” She said it too quickly, but then the honesty of her answer struck her. “Nobody could have saved her. She was sick. Sometimes sick people get better. Sometimes.” She lifted her head toward the stars. “Sometimes … well … she’s in heaven. She’s not sick anymore.”

  “I bet Pa could’ve saved her.”

  She let go, and tried to get feeling back in her arms and legs. “Maybe,” she said bitterly. She thought: He could have stayed to help me dig a grave.

  “I don’t want Ma to be dead,” Gary said, and started sobbing into Katie’s blouse.

  “I don’t either, Gary,” she said, pulling him close. “But …”

  * * * * *

  Nudging her sleeping brother, Katie waited for his eyes to open. He raised his head toward her.

  “The coals are dying,” she said. “Want to help me put some more wood on them?”

  “All right.” He yawned.

  Gary walked on his knees to the fire, and Katie tried moving her arm, which had fallen asleep. She could see the prostrate form of Florrie at the edge of the camp. Her sister had fallen asleep, too. The moon would soon rise. The mule brayed.

  Swearing softly, she made herself stand, but had to wait for feeling to return to her legs before she could walk to the water barrel. She had not given the mule any water since this morning. How could she be so stupid?

  “Little sticks first,” she reminded Gary. She opened the lid, found the ladle, and filled a tin bowl with water. “That’s fine,” she told her brother, and set the bowl in front of Bartholomew. She stroked his mane as he bent wearily and began to drink. Should she give him more? Her eyes squeezed shut for the millionth time.

  I am nineteen years old, she thought to herself. I should be on my own by now. Not playing nursemaid to a kid sister and a stepbrother. Not being an undertaker. Not being stranded in the middle of Hades with no luck, no future, no hope …

  No chance.

  She stopped. She could have, should have, struck out on her own years ago. But then who would have looked after Ma … after Florrie and Gary? Tommy Truluck? Not hardly. So Katie had sacrificed her future for her family. She’d be an old maid … if she didn’t die in this desert. This, she kept reminding herself, got her nowhere. She let the mule drink, and returned to the fire, which Gary had flaming again.

  “Florrie!” she called out.

  “Let me go,” Gary said. “I’ll kick her till she wakes up.”

  “Feed the fire,” she said, and called Florrie’s name again.

  The figure moved, rose off the ground, looked one way, then at the fire.

  “Come on. We all need some sleep,” Katie said.

  But where?

  Florrie was walking groggily, in no particular hurry, but at least coming back to camp. Florrie stumbled, stopped, turned, cursed, and bent. As she straightened, she hurled something into the darkness. Katie heard the thunk.

  Florrie said: “Stupid rock.”

  That gave Katie the idea.

  Chapter Seven

  Florrie called the idea stupid.

  “Well, what do you think we should do?” Katie spat out the words. She closed her mouth tightly. Her head had filled with blood and venom, and she could feel it about to explode. Her fingers and wrists began to throb, and she realized she had them clenched so tightly they shook.

  “We bury her,” Florrie said.

  “That’s what we’ll be doing,” Katie managed to say without spitting out froth or more curses.

  “You’re talking about covering her with rocks. That’s not how you bury people.”

  Katie shook her head in disgust. How many rock-covered graves had they seen in towns like White Oaks and Chloride? She said as much, and when Florrie rolled her eyes, Katie painfully balled her hands into fists again.

  “They cover the graves with stones after they’ve buried the dead six feet under.” Florrie’s tone sounded like that schoolteacher, Hazel Ebenezer, they’d tolerated back in Silver City.

  “You see that!” Katie pointed at the shallow trench just beyond the mule and wagon. “That’s what I’ve managed to dig all day.”

  “Maybe if you were stronger.”

  “Maybe if you’d help me.”

  “I’m looking after Ma.”

  “Ma’s dead!”

  “Stop yelling!” Gary wailed.

  Katie spit in the fire, scooped the boy up into her arms, and brought him to her shoulder. She didn’t know how she managed that. As she weakened, Gary seemed to be getting bigger and heavier, and a million pins pricked her hands and fingers.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. She kissed his sweaty, dirty neck. “It’s all right.”

  “Don’t fight with Florrie,” he sobbed.

  She glared at her sister. “It’s bedrock,” she told Florrie. “Even if you helped, we couldn’t get much deeper.”

  “We take her to town,” Florrie
said. “To a real cemetery. Have a real preacher read over her. Folks could sing a hymn. We could put a cross … no, a real tombstone, made of marble … over her grave with everything on it. Even an angel. I’ve seen tombstones like that, bigger than monuments. Her name. That’ll be on it, too. She was born in 1842.”

  “In March,” Gary said. “Same as me.”

  “But not the same day,” Florrie said. She even smiled.

  “How do we get her to a town, Florrie?” Katie tried to sound patient.

  Florrie turned and started to point at the wagon, sighed, and looked at the mule.

  “Is that what you want, Florrie?” Now it became Katie’s turn to sound like Miss Ebenezer, or as the kids in Silver City had dubbed her, Witchhazel. “Throw Ma over Bartholomew like a bedroll? We don’t even know how far it is to Roswell.”

  “There was that church we passed west of here,” Florrie said.

  “Ma said it was pretty,” Gary sobbed. “It had a pretty name.”

  “La Iglesia de San Patricio,” Florrie said. Only Katie’s kid sister could whisper a name and make it sound like she was singing a hymn.

  Katie shifted Gary’s weight. “It was a Catholic church,” Katie said. “With a Catholic cemetery. Ma was … we are … Presbyterian.”

  “It’s a church,” Florrie said.

  “I don’t think they would let us …” She sighed, and set Gary back on the ground. “We’d still have to get her there.”

  “Bartholomew,” Florrie said. “We can make one of those … um … um … I can’t … It begins with at.”

  “Travois,” Katie said.

  “Yeah.”

  A hollow chuckle came out of her throat and mouth, and Katie looked at the mule, and the wagon. “So we drag Ma to that little church or to Roswell.”

  Florrie said. “What choice do we have?”

  “And the water?” Katie asked sharply. “The only thing we have to carry water in, thanks to that black-hearted bas—” Biting her bottom lip, she looked away from Gary, and stared across the dark, empty land. “A tea kettle, a coffee pot, and some cups. Do we load those with Ma’s body on the travois, too? I don’t know how to rig a pack saddle out of what we have that we could strap on Bartholomew’s back. I don’t know if that old mule’s strong enough to carry that load.”

  “We can fix the wagon,” Gary said. “I bet I could fix it.”

  She made herself smile, and tousled the boy’s hair. “I bet you could, Gary,” she said. “But even if we got the wagon fixed, Bartholomew couldn’t pull it alone. It’s too big. He’s too small. And he’s as tired as all of us. Maybe even more so. He’s worked hard.”

  The wind picked up. The flames in the fire pit danced.

  “Someone’s bound to come.” There was little hope in Florrie’s voice, though.

  “We’ve been here two days,” Katie reminded her. She grimaced, remembering the family in the buckboard that had stopped on the first day, before Tommy Truluck abandoned them. The old man with the beard like Abe Lincoln’s had asked if they wanted any help, and Tommy Truluck, who had been drinking from that stoneware jug of his, had cursed them and run them off.

  “It will be hot tomorrow, too,” Katie said.

  She did not have to explain what she meant. Florrie wiped her eyes, sniffed, and stared at her shoes. “Ma …”

  “Ma never cared for fancy funerals,” Katie told her. “She said it wasn’t how many people came to see you off, wasn’t even how many people remembered you, it was how they remembered you.”

  Her sister lifted her head. “She also said funerals weren’t for the dead, but for the living.”

  “Exactly,” Katie said.

  * * * * *

  She hadn’t realized how hard it would be to get her mother’s body out of the wagon. Margaret Anne Roberts Callahan Truluck had always been frail, thin, weak, but in death she had become nothing but deadweight. The back of the wagon felt cramped enough—not that they ever owned much—and all Gary did in trying to help was get in the way of Katie and Florrie.

  Somehow they managed to bring the blanket-wrapped body to the back of the wagon. Gary climbed down, they opened the tailgate, and Katie stepped onto the ground. She took the feet end, Florrie lifted the head-and-shoulders part, and Katie backed up till Florrie told her to stop. The redhead gently settled the torso on the gate, climbed to the ground, and caught her breath.

  “Do you want to switch places?” Katie asked.

  “I’ll be all right,” Florrie said.

  “Shouldn’t we wait till morning?” Gary said. “It’s dark now. Real dark.”

  “It’ll be hot in the morning,” Florrie told him. “And hotter carrying rocks. We’ll need a lot of rocks.”

  Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Katie shook her head at the thought.

  Florrie gripped the woolen fabric and gave Katie a terse nod.

  “Can I help?” Gary asked.

  “Walk ahead of me,” Katie told him. “I won’t be able to see. You tell me where I’m going and don’t let me step into the fire.”

  Now that they were out of the claustrophobic wagon, the bundle felt lighter. Katie kept backing up, relying more on Florrie than her kid brother. They passed the fire, the busted wheel, the front wheel, the wagon tongue to which Bartholomew was tethered. The mule pulled back, his ears signaling his fear, and brayed loudly. The rope strained. The girls stopped.

  “Easy, boy,” Katie said. “Easy. Eaaaa-sy, Bartholomew. It’s all right.”

  “Animals can smell death,” Gary said. “Pa told me.”

  “Gary,” Katie said, “ease up to Bartholomew. Let him know he’s all right. Don’t get behind him. Just take hold of the rope with one hand, and rub his nose. Let him smell you. Not …” She stopped. Gary’s footsteps led toward the mule.

  “Be careful,” Florrie told the boy.

  Katie breathed in the cool desert air. Gary offered some soft coos at the mule, and Katie nodded at her sister, and they began the last few yards.

  When the body lay in the slight depression Katie had managed to dig, she wiped her hands on her filthy skirt, and strode to Gary and the mule. She took hold of the rope, knelt, and untied it from the wagon tongue.

  “I’m tying Bartholomew to the back of the wagon,” she told Florrie and her brother. “Just till we’re done. I don’t want him spooked any more than he already is. You two start getting rocks.”

  “Shouldn’t we cover Ma some more?” Florrie asked.

  Katie paused. The two other quilts and the bedroll would smell like death.

  “Yes,” she said. “By all means. Get the stuff out of the wagon and cover …” She stopped. “Hurry. I’ll keep Bartholomew here until you’re done. Then start with the rocks.”

  * * * * *

  The quilts, bedroll, and blanket served as a shroud. Katie thought about putting the bedroll down first, but that would have meant lifting Ma’s body up and out of the pathetic grave. Besides, Gary surmised that all that cloth would keep the dirt and sand and rocks out of Ma’s eyes. So they began getting rocks.

  That took longer and proved harder than Katie had figured. At a glance, she thought rocks were everywhere, within easy reach, and figured they could have this done in a matter of hours.

  Hours had passed, and they had barely got a small wall around the grave.

  Then, Gary came racing around the wagon, and tripped over the tongue. He sprang up, screaming, and Katie dropped the rocks she had gathered and rushed toward him.

  “What is it?” she cried, and let the boy leap into her arms.

  Florrie came running out of the darkness.

  “S-s-snake!” Gary stammered.

  Snake. Katie sighed. She cursed her stupidity.

  “It didn’t bite you, did it?” Florrie asked.

  The boy’s head shook.

 
“Where was it?” Katie asked.

  “I didn’t see it. I just heard it. It sounded like a million rattles.” Katie patted Gary’s head. “It scared me.”

  “You scared it,” Katie said softly. “That’s why it rattled.”

  “We shouldn’t do this in the dark,” Florrie said. “There are likely more rattlesnakes out there.”

  Katie nodded. For the big sister, the one in charge, she made some pretty stupid suggestions.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she suggested, and then said to Gary: “Can I let you down now? Are you still afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid,” Gary said. “Just wanted to warn y’all.”

  “Thank you,” Katie said.

  “Yes,” Florrie agreed. “You saved us all.”

  Katie smiled. Her sister sounded almost like a human being again.

  “What about Ma?” Gary asked.

  Katie lowered her brother to the ground and looked at the grave.

  “She’ll be all right.” Florrie doesn’t want to move Ma’s body back into the wagon, Katie thought. Well, I don’t blame her for that.

  “I don’t want that mean snake to eat Ma,” Gary said.

  “He won’t,” Katie said. “Ma’s covered with blankets. Florrie’s right. Let’s go to bed. We’ll get up early, and finish Ma’s grave.”

  And after that …?

  She shivered.

  Grabbing Gary’s little hand, Katie led her brother to the back of the wagon. The boy pulled away. The mule looked up sleepily.

  “I ain’t sleeping back there!” Gary said. “Ma … died there.”

  “Sleep on the ground then.” Florrie lost that sound of humanity. “Maybe that snake won’t eat you.”

  “Florrie,” Katie said sternly, but she smiled down at her brother. “Would you like to sleep on the driver’s bench?”

  “Would I!” Gary grinned.

  “Go ahead and climb up. I’ll hand you a pillow and some blankets, after I tie up Bartholomew to the wagon tongue again.”

  Chapter Eight

  They were hanging him.

  Sam MacKinnon kept screaming, begging for mercy. Already he had wet his pants. They just laughed at him, and tightened the noose, which wasn’t a noose but a trace chain. The metal bit into his neck. Dropping to his knees, a snot-nosed kid held the Remington .44 in his face. The carved initials—SM—had been painted gold and sparkled like diamonds.