by Jonis Agee
He poked the toe of his boot into the hole, feeling for the thing he’d touched earlier. When he found the yielding mass, a chill crossed his forehead and prickled his scalp. Deer, maybe.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered and knelt, this time on his hands and knees to carefully brush away the sand.
The open mouth was filled with it, as if her last screams had solidified, the lips drawn back snarling like a wounded bobcat. She’d fought to the end. Her open eyes clotted with sand. An apron of darkness cradled her tangled black hair that had come unbound from the traditional hide strips. He wondered how long she’d been dead. As soon as the tips of his fingers touched the stained sand, he knew. Still wet. The tears in the corners of her eyes. Not long. He swiftly tried to clear her mouth, her face. Warmth lingered on her skin. Her hands were like claws stretching up. He put his finger to her throat below her ear, and could detect nothing. Then he leaned his head against her chest, listened. When he sat back on his heels, he slowly scanned the silent hills. How had he not seen the person who did this? He stilled his breath and concentrated for any sound at all. Nothing except the occasional whine from the windmill. How long had she lain here?
Then he heard it—the faint click of metal against metal and the grunting of a man in boots stumbling in the soft sand beyond the water tank. J.B. quickly looked toward his horse and the rifle in the scabbard before he stood to face the gun pointed at his chest.
“Oh, it’s you—” He held up a hand against the finger squeezing the trigger. Then a mere deep breath’s time before he felt a hot burning fist plow through his chest, opening his body to the light, first a red flare across the hills, then a whole bonfire of black sparks, then a white blanket pressing so abruptly that he fell to the side of the grave, grasping the scraper he had grabbed the moment he heard the metallic click. Cullen, he thought, reaching for the boy and his mother as darkness swallowed them all. Then the wind gathered itself and the windmill began to spin, clanking loudly enough to be heard for miles.
CHAPTER TWO
Ry Graver bent almost double into the rising wind, holding a gray, dilapidated hat on his head as the old horse plodded along the dirt road. Scrawny and ewe-necked with a rough brown coat shedding clots of hair, the horse had lost almost all its teeth and could only mouth cornmeal and pulped grass to stay alive these days—something the man took care to give it, though it often meant going hungry himself. Without the horse, he might never put this place behind him. So he cared for the horse, as hopeless as it was. If he had any money, he could anticipate a night’s lodging, food, and coffee laced with whiskey a man could get in the Cattleman’s Hotel in Hyannis or that place in North Platte, a beefsteak that filled a platter, hot fried potatoes, imagine; he sighed and stared at the empty road stretched ahead, last week’s snow already melted and dried and blown away.
Ranchers complained it was too civilized outside the Sand Hills. So much land to the south in crops these days, Nebraska was becoming a regular settled state. Too many people coming now that they’d gotten rid of the last of the Indians, moved them up to the reservations in South Dakota, then found that these hills, full of rich grass and plentiful water, would support cattle and horses. The first decade of the new century, and people poured in despite the drought the last ten years. You’d think this country couldn’t hold any more. Winter wheat, they’d sold the immigrants on the idea of planting in the fall, let winter do the work of keeping the young seeds warm and wet, then sit back and watch the field green up with the spring rain. A person didn’t have to lift a hand until harvest. Let dust be your mulch, the experts in Lincoln said. Unless it didn’t rain. Unless they made the mistake of coming into the hills with their plows. Ry Graver, the man on the failing horse, had made that mistake even though he’d known in his gut it was wrong.
He’d set up two miles behind him and watched his young family slowly starve, growing exhausted, trying to eat the rats and snakes that lived in their soddy, the children setting snares for songbirds and rabbits weak with drought. Several times Bennett or one of his cowboys had driven a dry old cow to his doorstep, dropped it with a single shot, and ridden off in the night. Despite the tales of hostile ranchers Graver heard in town, he knew that J. B. Bennett wasn’t trying to drive them out. He seemed to understand how hopeless it was. The hills didn’t take to the plow. When Graver broke the ground, the wind took the thin layer of soil and left sand that crumbled around the seed. He saw that right away, but by then he didn’t have a choice. Three little ones and a wife who looked at him with the heart torn out of her eyes. He had to keep going, if for no other reason than the hope that the work would kill him and it would all be over.
But he waited too long, waited until after the children began to die, picked off by disease, then his wife, leaving only the stubborn man, a bitter expression locked in his eyes as he hefted the small bindle of blankets and clothes tied to his battered rifle across his thin shoulders and walked away from his dream. Riding the old horse unfit to plow or work cattle, Graver planned to go as far out of the hills as the animal could travel. When it collapsed, he’d continue on foot until he reached railroad tracks where he could jump a train going east or west. It didn’t matter.
His eyes were too dry to weep anymore. There was a point past which you couldn’t, like a repeated blow to the head, you got dulled to other kinds of pain. His hand trembled as he took out the makings for a cigarette, the gray-pink tip of his tongue so dry the paper stuck for a moment. He had to pry it off carefully to keep the Indian tobacco from spilling. He rested the horse beside the road, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl into the air and vanish. At least it took the edge from the gnawing hunger in his belly. He couldn’t remember when he last ate. It didn’t matter.
When he felt the old horse’s sides swell like a bellows, he feared it was about to die. Instead it gave out a high broken whinny, ending in a long, deep cough that jostled the saddle side to side. He grabbed the saddle horn. The reply came from over the low hill to his right and was followed by another whinny, this time more worried. His horse managed a couple of short, choppy sounds before it turned and started to pick its way toward the young chestnut that now stood at the top of the rise, reins trailing.
“That’s not right.” He nudged the old horse with his heels.
“Hello?” he called and immediately felt foolish.
As soon as he saw Bennett’s body, he stepped down and tied the trailing reins of the rancher’s horse to his old horse. Then he stood still and waited for any movement or sound. Nothing but the cursed scraping of the rough, homemade windmill. He narrowed his eyes to examine the shadows, looking for any deeper shade that would indicate a man crouched there. A bird taking flight from the hay field whipped his head around, but he could see nothing that had disturbed it. When he was satisfied he was alone, he moved close enough to see the body of a young Indian woman in the hole, and Bennett’s figure curled like a boy asleep in his bed beside her with the bloody hole in his chest. He knelt, wet his fingertip, and held it in front of Bennett’s nose, then his mouth, feeling no coolness at all. He tried to pick up the man’s hand to feel for a pulse, but the body was rigid. Flies crawled in the thick black bloody spill on his shirt. A photograph with a dot of fresh blood on the corner peeked from his pocket. Graver pulled it out and wiped the blood on his pants. It was a picture of a handsome young woman who wore a smile as if she were about to burst out laughing. He’d seen her in Babylon a few months ago. Bennett’s wife. She hadn’t been so happy then, he remembered. He glanced at the man again, a man who had been lucky for so long it felt outrageous for him to die so effortlessly. Graver started to tuck the picture back in J.B.’s shirt pocket, then stopped and slipped it inside his own instead. He would have to find her, make sure she had nothing to do with this. He didn’t want to get involved, but that was the hell of it, now he was.
The Indian girl looked much the same, only she appeared to be a more recent kill. Her eyes still moist in the corners, a silvery tear s
treak visible on her cheek, a fly drinking from it.
Graver waved away the fly, rocked back on his heels, and lit another cigarette, smoking it to the brown nub, the glowing tip pinched between his filthy broken nails. He remembered the day in March when Bennett had brought a mule to his soddy, and dropped the lead rope at his feet.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Use him or eat him,” Bennett replied.
“No.” Graver had to swallow the spit rising in his throat at the thought of roast mule haunch. He could imagine his sick, starving children, sitting listlessly in the dirt, unable to muster enough energy to play.
Bennett put his spurs lightly to his horse and was trotting away before Graver could thank him. The mule brayed once, a long sucking roar that made Bennett’s horse twitch its ears and bunch up like it might decide to buck and run. He reached down and patted its neck.
It was too late, of course. The mule made them all so sick it finished off the youngest the first night, and his wife lasted long enough to see to the other two as they passed, one by one, starving, stomachs bloated with indigestible meat. He was the only one who fought off the cramps and runs, eating his way through the nausea to a newfound strength. Enough to burn the few goods they had in a little bonfire that served to smoke and dry the rest of the mule meat in long strips for the trip out of the hills. With every bite he tasted the clothing, bedding, even the rag-stuffed dolls his girls made, tasted the peculiar bitterness of the bone button nose, the sharp, scalding paint of the blue eyes and red mouths.
Graver shook his head and looked at the midday sun in the cloudless sky. He wanted nothing to do with that Indian girl and whatever she was to Bennett. He walked back to the horses, stood staring at them for a minute, considering the value of the saddle and bridle, the rifle still in its scabbard, and finally the sleek, high-bred horse that could carry a person quick as fire out of the hills. Then there was the picture of the wife, Dulcinea, he remembered now, and the sharp edges of the photograph scratching his chest.
He reached to untie the reins to Bennett’s horse, only to stop and start to bend when he saw something that looked like the red pipestone Sioux used.
The shot passed through his old horse’s nose and plowed into its chest with the sound of a fist punching a sofa, the noise echoing under the delayed boom of the gun as the animal simply dropped like a tree felled by an axe. Bennett’s horse screamed and tried to break away, but the knotted reins held, and Graver used its frantic motion to grab the rifle off the saddle and slither over the crest of the ragged hill.
He lay there panting, gorge rising to his mouth, before he remembered to check the load in the rifle and chamber a round. He’d be damned if he was going to get left in these hills by some coward ambusher. He looked for the shooter. Judging from the bullet that took the old horse, the shot came from the north, which meant the shooter was somewhere beyond the windmill and tank. Maybe he’d been lying in wait the whole time and Graver should have paid more attention to the shadows. He did a quick estimate of distance and figured it was twenty to twenty-five yards. He’d be ready if the man showed himself.
After a few minutes the gnats and flies found him, and he was brushing them out of his ears when the bullet took him, spun him half away. He almost blacked out, but gritted his teeth and used the wounded shoulder to brace the rifle on the hill, aimed, and fired at the spot where he figured the gunman was holed up, then ducked at the barrage of fire that followed. Bullets thudded into the ground around him, but nothing touched him. If he kept down he’d be fine, as long as he didn’t give in to the dizziness. He looked at his shoulder leaking blood through the thin cloth of his shirt. Damn it, that was the last shirt his wife had made him. Now this son of a bitch had ruined it.
He raised the rifle above his head and quickly squeezed the trigger. The bullet pinged off the windmill. This time the gunman only returned a couple of shots before the silence grew around them.
“I can wait you out,” Graver called.
“You ain’t got the bullets,” a young man’s voice replied.
“I’m saving the last one for you, my friend,” Graver said. There was another angry spray in rapid succession, but nothing hit home. Bennett’s big red horse had apparently grown used to the situation because he was busy eating grass now.
“Gimme the horse,” the young man shouted.
“This about a horse then?” Graver said.
“This ain’t none of your business.”
Graver focused on the low mound behind the windmill. “What kind of gun you got there?”
“Remington.” There was pride in the voice.
“Clean shot on him, but you were off on me.”
Graver heard him curse. The voice sounded younger than he’d originally thought. Was he going to be taken down by some damn kid? After all he’d gone through? God had to be a real bastard.
“Is he dead?”
“You and him got into it over the girl, then?”
This time neither the young man nor the gun replied. Graver had to remind himself to keep his eyes open, to watch for an ambush, to not get distracted. His head felt cloudy, like it was full of milkweed seed, and he was beginning to find the buzz of flies collecting on the dead horse tolerable. There must be a lot of happy cows out there this afternoon, not a fly in a hundred miles. They were all here feasting. He watched the small pool of blood from his shoulder blacken with their bodies. Next the beetles would show, and if he didn’t stay awake, he could end up eaten from the inside out. No, he knew that wasn’t right. He shook his head to clear the downy logic. And that gave him an idea.
“Hey, kid,” he called.
“Yeah.”
Graver was right.
“Made a mess, didn’t you?” There was another long silence, which a meadowlark took up with its calls.
“Maybe.” The answer finally came.
“Look, I don’t owe these folks nothing. Let’s you and me saddle up and ride on outta here. Go our separate ways. I’m headin’ south.” Graver quieted his breath in case the kid made a move that could be heard above the whining windmill.
“What about the horse?” The kid sounded sullen.
“Well, son, seems to me you shot my horse. How am I gonna ride outta here without I take the red horse?”
“It’d be horse stealin’.” The kid seemed to find humor in this idea.
“Take my chances on that one.” Graver didn’t point out that murder was a sight worse crime.
“Fine by me.” A shot burned past Graver’s right ear, reminding him to keep down. “That was just by way of farewell.”
Graver checked his urge to charge. “Can’t say I want to meet again.” He kept his tone casual. “You go first, son, otherwise I won’t feel right about it.”
This time the kid laughed bitterly. He didn’t sound as crazy as Graver expected. “You won’t shoot me in the back?”
“You won’t circle back and shoot me?”
“I get your point.” A shot thudded into the ancient saddle on the dead horse. “And I ain’t nobody’s son!”
“I can see that.” Graver grew drowsy in the escalating afternoon heat, could feel his eyes drift shut with the distant sound of hoofbeats.
When he opened them again, the sun had shifted so it poured right into him, and the damn blackbirds were all over the hay meadow, and the flies—there had to be thousands now, more than he could count—his eyelids started to drift down again, but he caught them with a shake of his head.
“Kid? You there? Hey, kid?”
Graver waited a long time; he might even have passed out again, he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t remember what he was doing there, what time he’d started out that morning. He knew his wife would be worried if he was late for supper. And he was so thirsty, that surprised him, how his tongue felt swollen twice the size so he couldn’t quite close his mouth, but breathing that way made his throat all the drier. He thought about calling the kid to bring him some water, but decided against i
t when he remembered that the kid might be sneaking up on him. He heard a clink of metal nearby and turned so quickly his shoulder gave a vicious stab of pain, almost knocking him flat. He peered over the crest of the hill and saw a turkey vulture tear at the dead horse’s face, pulling the eyeball from the socket so viciously the head lifted an inch and resettled. Graver looked at the sky to figure the time. It seemed so long ago, all the earlier events. He braced the rifle on the ground and staggered to his feet.
Although it had pulled off its bridle, the red horse hadn’t gone far. Graver reached for the headstall, forgetting about his wound, and the pain took him to his knees.
He shook his head, it felt bloated and heavy, sloshing like a gourd of water, and the weight pulled him backward, his face to the unrelenting heat of the sky. The last thing he remembered was trying to straighten his legs because he didn’t want them to have to break his knees when they put him in the box.
CHAPTER THREE
J.B. was found after midnight by the foreman Frank Higgs, Larabee, Irish Jim, and Willie Munday. After a hasty supper, Higgs had divided the men and searched to the east and south of the ranch for their boss, who had failed to return as he always did at the end of the day. The other men went north and west, and wouldn’t return until early the next day. It was twilight as the men approached the windmill and water tank off the path to Drum Bennett’s ranch and noticed the small herd of cows pawing and milling, refusing to approach the water. Then they saw the dead horse and the dark, irregular shadow of bodies.
Higgs quickly dismounted. “Willie, you and Jim go and pull some of those bulrushes from the edge of the hay meadow, make a torch, search these hills around us.” He turned to Larabee, who dismounted, and paced the ground around the bodies, peering closely at the churned sand and grass glowing white in the dim light of the sliver of moon that inched past the shoulders of the hills.
