The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  DEDICATION

  For Ross Agee

  EPIGRAPH

  One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life.

  —WILLA CATHER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My gratitude goes to Brent Spencer, my husband, for offering a home for my imagination and my heart; to my daughter, Brenda, for coming home when it mattered most; to Nora for bringing joy and laughter to our family when we needed it; to my sisters, Jackie and Cindy B. and Cindy A.; to my nephews and nieces, who hold the future, Talbot, Travis, Mike, Ross, Blythe, Tara, Ashton, and Laura; to my friends Mollie and Terry Foster, Gillian Howell, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Tom Redshaw, Elizabeth Redshaw, Lon Otto, Jim Cihlar and Bill Reichard, Diana Hopkins, Greg Hewett and Tony Hainault, Tim Schaffert and Rodney Rahl, Dave Madden and Neal Nuttbrock, Gwen Foster and Wheeler Dixon, Carla and Randy Stout, and Sharon and Teddy Warner; to Rebecca Rotert and Bud Shaw, neighbors and writers par excellence; to Noah Ballard for encouragement; to Mad Jack Hill and Ian Rogers, who dug me out from the hailstorm so I could write; to Micah Hansen, who keeps me riding right; to Joni, whose bright smile lightens the day; and to Alexandra Kafka, who does it all at my house. A special thanks to my students over the years, who continue to inspire me with their extraordinary talent and generous spirits. Thanks to Laura Cherkas for her meticulous copyediting. Thanks to Heid Erdrich for her careful reading. I am especially grateful to my agent, Emma Sweeney, who is the best friend a writer and animal lover could have! You believed in this book. And finally, I thank my editor, Jessica Williams, for her vision and support in seeing this novel to its completion. You made it happen!

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: Where Bright Angels Have Trod Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two: And Stars Confounded Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Three: Falling Toward the Wound Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Four: The Noise of Their Wings Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Part Five: Prepare the Heavens Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  References

  About the Author

  Also by Jonis Agee

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  WHERE BRIGHT ANGELS HAVE TROD

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was midmorning in early May when J. B. Bennett crested the hill, stopped, and surveyed the little Sand Hills meadow where the windmill was slowly clanking in a wobbly circle. The metal rubbing on metal in an uneven cadence made him reach for the small tin of grease in his saddlebag, the one he already knew he’d pulled out yesterday and left sitting on the window ledge in the toolshed when he’d repacked his saddlebags for the trip to his father’s ranch this morning. It was getting to be harder to keep track of every little detail. He wasn’t that old, he reasoned, but then he had the boy and the twenty thousand acres and the men and the cattle. He lifted his hand and let it drop back to the saddle horn. It was the other thing that drove his mind these days.

  He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out the photograph he’d recovered from his son’s dresser drawer a few hours ago. God only knew where Hayward had disappeared to. The picture showed his wife, Dulcinea, as she’d been in 1880 when she came to Nebraska: fresh-faced and fiercely happy, her long auburn hair barely contained by a ribbon, her hand shading her eyes as if she could see as far down the years as it would take to find him again and punish him for what he’d done. The wind was blowing so hard that day, he remembered praying that she wouldn’t notice the fine grit from the Sand Hills that found its way into every crevice and seasoned your food. That night as they lay out in their bedrolls she teased him about the sand between his toes after they’d made love. It wasn’t their first time. That had happened when they agreed to marry at her parents’ home in Chicago. By the time they bedded their first night on their new ranch in a new land, her initial shyness was replaced by a light teasing he found delightful. He grimaced now. When had he ever used that word, but that was her effect on him: she brought a new language with her and made it his.

  He wondered if Hayward would miss the picture of his mother. This one had been lovingly preserved, wrapped in a pale blue silk scarf that must have been hers, and bedded carefully in a stack of his old baby clothes, hand-me-downs from his older brother, Cullen.

  J.B. couldn’t even think Cullen’s name without wincing, while the staggering whine-clank of the windmill seemed to grate harder on his ears. Today he was determined to find Cullen and bring him home, Drum be damned. He gathered the reins in his fist and the young chestnut horse lifted its head and pawed, impatient with the rider who paused too long.

  “Goddamn you, Drum.” J.B. cursed his father as part of the chain of thoughts that had become his burden of late. For years he’d managed to work himself to such exhaustion he couldn’t begin to think, moving from dark to dark in a state of rigid sleeplessness and pain. When Hayward cried, he was comforted by a woman J.B. hired from town, or lately the wife of his foreman. It wasn’t enough, of course. Dulcinea was the shadow beside him every minute of the day. So often as not he ended up in a place like this meadow this morning, the site of the picnic where she’d told him she was pregnant with their first child and they’d made love on a blanket slowly and carefully though she said there was no worry. His only experience the animals he’d cared for, which made his inquiries awkward and ridiculous. He blushed at the thought of how it made her laugh when he asked if she had been in heat of late. She was so happy then. They both were. He brushed the picture with his lips and tucked it safely in his pocket.

  He gazed at the hills covered with the mint green of bluestem and grama grass among last year’s taller dried stalks that would gradually collapse and disappear as spring progressed. DROUGHT OVER! the Omaha Herald proclaimed after a winter of snow and spring rains. PROSPERITY ON 1900 HORIZON! A new patch of low-lying prickly pear cactus had sprung up beyond the windmill and water tank. He’d have the men dig it out. It was a constant battle to hang on to the grass, the only thing to support the cattle that made his living. A person had to keep his eye on the smallest detail while the vast emptiness constantly tugged at his vision. You can get lost in a heartbeat out here, he’d told his wife. It took him most of his life to realize the significance of his own words. F
or some reason this morning every little thought was like a handful of nettles, stinging and chiding him as he tried to drop it and move past.

  Better to make a list of chores, keep a running tally. He took a deep breath. To the left of the tank the ragged edge of grass gave way to the pale sand beneath, where a small herd of his cattle had sheltered in the late spring snowstorm last week. Trapped by the drifts, they had eaten the grass down to its roots and churned up the sand so thoroughly nothing would grow there again unless he could anchor it.

  The sun felt good on his face, warm, not burning yet, and the wind wasn’t pushing against his skull so hard he could barely think either. He shifted in the saddle, lifted his hand again, and shook his head. Couldn’t keep his mind on business at all this morning. The horse reached around and nudged his boot toe with its nose as if to say, come on. Still he didn’t move. Something held him back, as if once he went down that hill, everything in his life would be different and he couldn’t say why, and it wasn’t only the business with Cullen. He had this feeling a lot lately, and it was beginning to worry him. Maybe it was just age, but he thought of his father, Drum, who seemed sharper, more driven as he grew older. Meaner. Old bastard. That’s what the men called him when they didn’t think J.B. was listening. J.B. called him worse than that when he didn’t think they were listening.

  It was twenty years almost to the day since J.B. married and took ownership of this land. He looked across the hills in the direction of the main house nestled in a valley and accessible by wagon from the main north-south road only during good weather; otherwise it was a long trip by horseback to go around the gumbo mudflats and low spots that made small lakes out of the road soon as any kind of weather arrived. J.B. had chosen the place with a purpose in mind—to be as far from Drum as possible when he managed to bargain the twenty thousand acres off him. The one part of the bargain he hadn’t told his wife the day he met her at the train in North Platte proved to be their undoing. When she stepped off the train, a young woman of eighteen looking for a western adventure on a real cattle ranch and willing to marry an unlikely candidate in the Nebraska Sand Hills, he decided to wait. But as soon as he held his first baby boy, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

  He and Dulcinea were always together in the beginning, overseeing the building of their brick house made from their own clay deposit on the river that ran through their land. It took more time, but they were terrified of the prairie fires that could sweep down on them with no warning. They’d lived in a rotted timber lean-to that first summer, using dried dung or kerosene toted from town in fifty-gallon drums to cook on the large stove that would eventually become the central feature of their kitchen. Maybe if he had a good year now, cattle prices held, he could offer to buy one of those premade houses out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Maybe she’d see that as a peace offering. A brand-new house. He rubbed his chin, the stubble already starting though he carefully shaved each morning in case she changed her mind and showed up again. First she’d moved to Babylon, then on to Cody, Rushville, and Chadron, towns along the east-west road across the top of the Sand Hills, then she’d come back to Babylon, gone to Chicago visiting her people, then up to Rosebud to teach. Would she stay away for good this time, furious that he refused to send Hayward to live with her in town for school as the other ranch families were starting to do?

  Once in a while, when he got the sense she might be near, he shaved of an evening, too, and would catch the reflection of his son Hayward watching him in the shadow of the doorway, face expressionless. That was another thing he had to do. Get that boy to talk to him. Two years ago when the Trans-Mississippi Exposition opened in Omaha, Hayward begged to go, but J.B. had to say no. He hadn’t the heart or nerve to admit how close to losing the ranch they were, so he said no and that was final. The boy hadn’t spoken more than ten words a year since. But boys his age—what was he now? Fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen? Was there a birthday J.B. forgot? Had his mother written or arranged to meet?

  Dulcinea would know. She kept track of details like that. To her credit, she braved the heat, loneliness, moody men, and sudden storms as well as anyone raised in the hills. J.B. spent that first summer grateful, relieved, and genuinely happy for the first time in his life. That last feeling had left him puzzled more often than not, wondering about the weight that seemed lifted. The iron hand that usually rode gripping the back of his neck simply disappeared. His own mother died when he was a boy, and he had little recollection or understanding of what being around a female meant. His father never remarried, preferred to become the old bastard he remained the rest of his life, convinced that women, the female influence, destroyed a man’s character if he wasn’t careful, and almost no man could be that careful. Better to do without, he preached to his only child, wait as long as you can before succumbing to the flesh.

  J.B. told his new wife about his father on those long nights when they lay in their bed under the stars, unable to sleep for the sheer closeness of the moon, the brightness making their naked bodies glow, and J.B. came to understand how wrong his father could be. Having a woman was the most wonderful thing he ever experienced. He didn’t dare use that other word, love, didn’t even recognize it, and could not say it when his new wife turned to him and whispered the words. His face shone with shyness and joy, which she might have mistaken for satisfaction and pride, he could not be sure. At that moment, he hoped she trusted the shyness, confident that she could teach him the language that would make such a difference in the coming years. When she turned to him, eyes expectant and happy, he thought she was simply satisfied with his lovemaking or the position of the bed away from the prying eyes of the men in the crude bunkhouse beyond the cottonwood trees.

  “I love you,” she said, her lips parted, forming the words for him to repeat if he could or would. He stared at her in wonder, and heard the distant voice of his own mother, a figure he could only imagine in shadow, a voice so thin and whispery it might be the wind through the hills. Women said these words, it came to him, and they filled a man, made him more than he was before. His father was right about the power of women, but he was wrong about what it did to a person. J.B. pulled Dulcinea close until he felt her chin nestle in the curve of his shoulder, her toes finding and pressing between his until they were perfectly fitted and he could not be certain which parts were his alone, exclusive of hers. If he could not say the words, it would not matter, he thought, she was the same as him, surely she felt it, too. When the time came to fulfill his end of the bargain with his father, she’d trust him, she’d understand, he reassured himself, because that had to be how it was when people loved each other.

  The horse lifted his tail and dropped manure, kicked at a fly, shifted his front feet as if to turn around, raised his head and snorted. “All right.” J.B. lifted the reins and the horse took the first step down the hill, bracing its front legs while the rider leaned back and gave him his head. At the bottom, they made their way to the windmill whose noisy blades slowed to a stop as the wind died down. J.B. dismounted to give the horse a drink from the tank. While the animal plunged his nose and splashed the water, J.B. stared at the churned-up sand. A piece of stone stuck out, maybe something he could take to Hayward, who liked to collect Indian relics. He eased it out and brushed away the sand.

  It looked like a hide scraper. Careless to lose such a good tool. He used the side of his boot to clear around the hole from the scraper. He usually found arrowheads in these blowouts, occasionally a broken spear or tomahawk head, sometimes used rifle shells. He hefted the scraper, admiring the balance that let it fit easily in his palm, his fingers in hollows where others had held, thumb, forefinger, until it became an extension of his hand, the sharp edge ready for scraping the fat layer from the hide. Most of the Indians used white men’s knives now, axes, guns, the old ways gone. Then his foot nudged something else, almost like an animal. He stepped back and looked down, then cautiously shoved with his boot toe. It didn’t move. The sweet scent of wood smoke
and cured hide rose unexpectedly and drifted away before he could grasp where it came from.

  He sighed and peered across the hay meadow and the distant hills sheathed in a faint green haze. He should get back on his horse and finish the ride to his father’s ranch. He shouldn’t spend another minute here. Cullen was waiting to come home.

  A meadowlark whistled, a male calling for a mate, the black chevron on the puffed-up gold chest shiny and remarkably beautiful at that moment. The bird cocked its head and eyed him from the cattails at the edge of the marsh. Red-winged blackbirds shuttled back and forth across the meadow with the urgency of soldiers preparing for battle.

  His horse snorted and shook the water from its face, worked the bit in its mouth, and gazed at the man.

  A large flock of yellow butterflies bumped their way across the pasture, lighting on the blooms of flowers and tips of grass, then rising in a cloud like yellow ash sailing from a prairie fire, they continued past, on over the top of the ragged ridge of the sand hill. He had another hour in the saddle to reach Drum’s place.

  “To hell with it,” he said and bent to work. His thighs and the backs of his legs ached against the unusual stretch, but he didn’t dare kneel for fear his knees wouldn’t straighten. “If I was a horse, I’d shoot myself,” he muttered. As it was, he would have to start wrapping them in strips of muslin soaked in camphor of a morning. Dulcie would have a good laugh about that when she saw him. The thought stabbed him with regret and he dug harder against the sand that spilled back into the shallow hole.

  He felt a piece of wood with his fingers and pulled out a pipe with a foot-long carved cedar stem hanging half broken off, the barred turkey feathers still fresh. The red pipestone bowl had never been used, and the stem, decorated with a line of crudely carved animals, appeared new. Tiny yellow, red, black, and white cut-glass beads hung below the mouthpiece along with the feathers. He squinted to make out the design scratched on its hard surface. Nothing that made sense, tall and short lines like a series of tipis or stars. Hayward would like it. J.B. figured he’d use it to encourage the boy to talk again.