The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  “Hayward, go outside. Tell Jorge I said you could have your new horse.” J.B. hoped she would hear what he suggested, that he meant to give their five-year-old his own horse, despite her objections, that she daren’t leave, but she only looked over her shoulder at the stairs behind her.

  “I’m ready to go,” she called and immediately the sound of a large, heavy object thumped down the uncarpeted steps. J.B. counted each one, four to the landing, ten to the bottom.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  Hayward bounced off his chair and ran to the door, pulled it open, and clambered down the three steps to the stone walk, his miniature cowboy boots clopping loudly. Her steamer trunk landed with a thud at the bottom of the stairs, and one of the men, Stubs, who later went to work for Drum, followed.

  J.B. looked at Dulcinea, her expression grim, while her hands busied themselves with a large floral brocade satchel stuffed with necessities for a long journey. After rummaging for a moment, she extricated an ivory envelope he recognized as her stationery from before they were married. She handed him the envelope but stopped his hand when he moved to open the unsealed flap.

  “You’re leaving then,” he finally managed to say. He could hear the jingling harness and creaking wood as the wagon pulled up outside the gate.

  He knew better than to ask how long she’d be gone, just as he had known better than to ask if she was staying when she arrived ten years ago. He felt something small inside him, a shard of resentment that wanted revenge, and fought to keep it silent until she was halfway to the gate.

  “Nobody’s going to water the lilacs,” he called to her.

  She brushed it off with a wave of her hand over her shoulder. She wasn’t even going to look at him?

  “Or those mulberries, nobody’s going to . . .”

  She spun and marched right up to him, the expression on her face so fierce he took half a step back before he caught himself. Staring at him, eyes filled with tears, she clasped the back of his head and pulled his mouth to hers, kissed him so deep and long he began to hope, until she released him. Did she think that would keep him until she returned? He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, worked to keep the anger out of his voice when he told her that she shouldn’t leave; though it hurt him to beg, he came as close as he could, pulling her into his arms, smelling her sweet iris perfume, willing himself to remember their first night together under the coarse wool blanket with another folded for a pillow on the ground beneath the stars.

  “I’ll bring Hayward to visit,” J.B. said. Hope jumped in her eyes before she caught herself, smoothed the front of her duster and tugged on the black kid gloves that snugged her fingers too tightly now, her hands nearly ruined by the harsh weather, rough land, and hard chores. She’d have to cut her wedding ring off someday, he thought with a pang.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you have enough money for the trip?” He half turned toward the house. “I can—”

  “You go get Cullen from your father and I’ll come back,” she said.

  She shifted her gaze to the man beside her on the wagon bench. “Mr. Stubs?”

  When he didn’t move, she lifted the whip from its holder and cracked it over the horses’ backs. Lunging forward, they swept against J.B. and pushed him backward.

  “You’ll never see Hayward again,” he yelled as the wagon left the barnyard. He couldn’t fetch Cullen and his defeat slumped his shoulders as he watched the ball of dust churn down the road, until finally they were a mere speck disappearing over the last hill on the horizon.

  Hayward rode happily around the corral on his new spotted horse, which trotted three steps for every ten it walked to keep the swaying rider on its back. J.B. watched his boy and felt both pride and sadness swell in his chest, and soon another feeling, one that made him spin on his heel and hurry inside the house, run up the stairs two at a time, and yank open the door to their bedroom, where he discovered that she’d left her perfume bottles, the silver-backed brush, comb, and mirror set he’d given her, and the glass jars of creams and powders he was helpless to understand, sitting on top of the clumsy dressing table he’d made for her. Cottonwood. He brushed the dented surface with the edge of his hand. Wood so soft it bore the impression of everything she’d ever set down too hard. Had she been so angry? He’d waxed the wood to bring out the soft yellow hue, but over the years it had darkened along certain grains, and small dark spots dotted the surface like tears. Had she wept here? Suddenly, he knew with a force that punched the breath out of his chest that if she wept, it had not been for him, anyone but her husband, who had given his eldest son to his father. Cullen, this was all about Cullen.

  He grabbed one of the jars, spun, and threw it with all his might at the wall over their bed. It didn’t smash and splinter into greasy shards like he’d hoped, merely thumped harmlessly and bounced across the bed she’d so carefully made, folding his mother’s wedding ring quilt at the bottom, to be drawn up in the night chill, as if she would return on the morrow, as if she would return at all—

  He ripped the quilt from the bed, yanking at the end to tear it to pieces, but heard only the barely audible pop of a stitch or two before he threw it down in disgust. She had taken nothing of their life together, he noticed, as soon as the red mist cleared his eyes. There was the lithograph of the carriage on a misty Paris boulevard, trees swept up and away over the streetlights. The coatrack in the corner where he hung his hat and jacket and she the thick wool robe he’d given her that first Christmas, when it had been so cold she fussed about getting out of bed of a morning. It still hung there, dusty, unused. They had laughed that he so misjudged her size, and the rough blue-and-black weave made her skin prickle. His face reddened as he remembered her smile, the one he mistook for pleasure, and now saw as derision. She’d been laughing at him every day of their life together.

  There had to be something he could hold as hostage against her return. She was determined, and when she put her mind to a thing it would take a train to stand in her way. That’s why he’d been surprised when she’d let Cullen leave, let Drum convince her. What had that old bastard said? Had he told her about their bargain?

  He took a deep breath, smelled the musk of the face powder encircled with its own dust, and the perfume bottle she hadn’t bothered with, as if she would change herself so completely that he couldn’t even recognize her scent should they ever meet again. He sat on her bench covered with needlepoint roses. He didn’t even know where she was going. Maybe running off with some cowboy. The thought made him gasp, and he stopped. He would never believe that about her.

  Facing her vanity table, he picked up the silver-backed mirror and laid it back down, then the brush, with silver handle wrought into twining flowers, he didn’t even know what kind, his big callused palm could barely register the texture, and he wondered if she had put her fingertips in the curves of the stems and leaves, what she had thought as she lifted the brush, as he did now, and drew it through her hair, as he did now, with long and even strokes, over and over, as he had watched her do on countless nights. Had he ever once asked if he could do it for her? Surely she would have enjoyed letting her exhausted arms fall loose in her lap, hands cupped, while he brushed and separated and finally plaited her heavy auburn hair into a braid that would last almost the entire night if they didn’t make love. He stopped, set down the brush, and looked at its fine bristles, embedded with a few of her long auburn hairs, and three of his own shorter, thicker black ones.

  Five years after she left, her old one-eyed horse began its decline and J.B. spent a week of cold nights in the corral with it. “I’m always on my way to her,” J.B. spoke aloud. “I boarded the train that first summer and got as far as Council Bluffs before I got off. It was as if I was drunk, the blow of not seeing her staggered me. She let me know she was in Chicago with her people, in case I cared to send the boys. She knew I couldn’t do that. It got so bad I couldn’t stand the ranch and found myself in town more than was right. Heard
about the business up on Pine Ridge and decided to take a look. I don’t think I much cared what happened to me and the boy, but she kept writing and messaging and reminding me to take care of Hayward, so when I went up to watch the dancing I took him, too. Thank God he was home safe the next time, in December.”

  He bowed his head to the horse’s neck and breathed in the coarse, dusty hair, tried to dislodge the pictures of bodies falling before cannon and rifle fire, red roses blooming in the snow, soldiers riding down stragglers with their guns and sabers. “She came back to North Platte the next March and sent word to come, but Hayward got the measles, and a freak late snow stopped the wagon on the way to town. Remember that? I unhitched you and rode you back in a blizzard. We were both half-froze.”

  He stroked the old horse’s neck, burying his fingers in the thick, brittle coat that hadn’t shed out the past spring, a sign the end was near. J.B. had kept the horse close the past summer, fed her special mashes when she couldn’t chew hay or grass because her teeth had fallen out. Now the horse lay wrapped in the wedding ring quilt from his own bed, its breathing labored as he spoke.

  “Then cattle prices went south, and I had not a dollar to spare. I couldn’t see her without I could pay for her dinner. The next summer she set up camp just west of the line between Drum’s and our land and sent word to meet her at the windmill by the gumbo flats. She’s different every time, but the same, too. We fight so hard I think we’ll kill each other one day. Hayward’s a handful, don’t dare leave him much. I keep trying to tell her that. He won’t come with me anymore. Doesn’t see why his ma isn’t here raising him. He doesn’t understand what losing Cullen means to her. How she’s trying to force me to make it right. But I can’t, I just can’t.”

  J.B. rubbed the old horse between her ears and worked his fingers down the short neck, massaging until she relaxed and dropped her head with a sigh. He pulled the blanket off his shoulders to cover both their bodies and laid his head on the horse’s side, letting the deep lift and release of the animal’s harsh breathing lull him into a rare dreamless sleep. In his mind, he repeated the words as if they could be released into the world and travel on their own to her: “I’m always on my way to you.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The day Dulcinea returned, she dropped her hat and coat on the bench at the end of the bed and wandered around the room, opening curtains and running her fingers through the dust on the vanity surface, wondering who had positioned the tarnished silver-backed set she had forgotten when she fled. She picked up the brush and paused before running it through her hair, shorter now, then registered what she had seen, the black strands tangled with her auburn ones. Neither of them had thought themselves to this moment.

  “My God, how we are destroyed,” she whispered, a line from some forgotten drama, or maybe she had written it in her head as she entered the room where she had slept with J.B. all those years ago. She had carried on an internal dialogue with her husband for so long that his death did not alter the conversation. It merely expanded across time and space. The dusty swaths of yellow lace and silk at the windows stirred slightly despite the glass being closed.

  When she first left the hills and went home to Chicago, she was maddened by grief for her sons and husband. She tried prayer and found it lacking in formality. She attended churches of every denomination—except for the synagogues of Jews, which would not have her—and found religion empty as a spring potato bin. She sought advice from every manner of psychic, spiritualist, palm and card reader, and finally discovered an entire church of spiritualists whose service consisted of any number of individuals standing in front of the congregation on wooden chairs and receiving notices, like telegrams, from the departed, with messages for random members. She received hers the last night she attended. In the form of a flowered horseshoe, the sort draped over a winner at the racetrack, or sometimes over a coffin at a funeral, it read GOOD LUCK. The message, from an uncle she’d never heard of, mentioned a journey west. The congregation clapped and imagined the best while she broke into a cold sick sweat that chattered her teeth as she hurried to her parents’ house three blocks away that hot August evening, praying her sons were safe, and never imagining that it would be J.B., despite Drum’s vow.

  She always wanted to come home, always meant to explain her bargain with his father and listen to him explain his, waiting all the while for Drum Bennett to die. The old man drove them apart. It was his fault. They had both made a pact with a devil who knew them better than they knew themselves.

  “Dear God,” she whispered. “I hate him.”

  When her fingers pushed into the familiar grooves of the brush handle, she felt a light pressure back, and wondered if the long journey remained in the nerves of her body, and made her arms tingle as if someone stroked the fine hairs beneath her sleeves.

  “You’re giving yourself the frights,” she scolded and rubbed at the tarnished silver back of the brush. She couldn’t remember why she’d left the set. She’d been so surprised when J.B. gave it to her in the middle of summer, the package arriving with canned foods and tools and barbed wire and barrels of kerosene from Babylon. He was not a man given to surprises, so she was moved beyond words when she opened the pale blue velvet half-moon box that contained the brush, comb, and mirror fitted in their watered-silk-lined berths.

  The pressure on her fingers grew. She used her other hand to pry away the handle, and dropped the brush. Then the oversweet scent of iris rose from the table. She glanced in the mirror, then at the cut-glass perfume vials. Some were empty, others reduced or dried, as if the tops had been left off for days on end. Did he spoil them on purpose?

  The scent of iris grew stronger, like the flowers were in the room. She leapt to her feet and rushed to the window to scan the ground outside: nothing but weeds in her old gardens. Then she remembered, she’d left when the dark purple iris heads had started to break open, the air heavy with their syrupy-sweet scent. The memory was like a blow to her back. She bent double and wept as she had when Rose first told her of J.B.’s death.

  For two weeks, Dulcinea waited for word of her surprise to arrive. When Hayward burst into the house that morning with a message from the train station about the horses from Kentucky, gifts she’d bought for her husband and sons, she pushed aside her chores and ordered the runabout readied. She was sick to death of the constant thumping of Drum’s cane on the floor above with one damned demand or another, an hourly reminder that she had done nothing to remove his presence from her home and worse, to find her husband’s killer. The sheriff hadn’t made an appearance at the ranch either, and she intended to see him. She had interviewed the men and made Graver take her to the site of the killings, yet still had no clues, no place to start, while Drum’s lewd assertion about J.B. and the Indian girl sat like a jagged rock in her chest. Rose said ignore him and that he was a crazy old one, not worth the piss in his pants. But Rose wasn’t getting anywhere with her spying either. Apparently, no one on the ranch knew a thing. With spring roundup under way, the men had little time to devote to a mystery. Cow work always came first. That was going to change, the two women vowed. Rose had sent for her husband and daughter to meet them in Babylon, and Dulcinea had plans of her own.

  The boys jumped at the chance to go to town, and with Graver along to bring back the wagon, she would arrive with her sons at her side to answer all the questions in the eyes of those who knew her story. She was home now. She was a mother again. She ignored the nagging reminder that the boys still showed no interest in her. Today at least, she could pretend. She glanced at the boys riding on either side of the runabout, their heads up, necks and shoulders stiff as they imitated the solidity of grown men—and her heart pumped wildly for a moment. They would be lovely, strong men like their father, she thought with a smile. He would have been proud.

  As the horses trotted smartly under his hands on the reins, Graver pointed out items of interest as if Dulcinea and Rose hadn’t spent years riding these hills. Eventually
the land flattened and houses staked out the road as they turned north down the main street, where the mercantile center was framed by a raised plank sidewalk on either side. Driven cattle herds had left the road splashed with sloppy green manure. Dulcinea glanced at Graver’s grim face. Did he expect her to raise a lavender-scented silk handkerchief to her nose, as her sisters or mother would? Instead she took a deep breath, shook her shoulders and head, and declared, “It’s a lovely day, is it not?”

  He raised his brow and, in that moment, reminded her of J.B.—it was like a punch to her stomach. It happened that way. In the midst of a pleasant scene, she would be tossed back into a pool of grief. She breathed deeply and kept her eyes on Cullen, who was a small, wiry version of his father, but quicker, more agile. She had to get to know him better. Anything to keep her mind off the way Graver’s long fingers contained a certain beauty as they handled the reins with confidence. He was considerate of every creature, she observed, as she let her gaze drift to the profile of his sun-browned face framed by thick gray-streaked hair that hung unevenly below his black hat. His quick brown eyes caught every detail, and she saw the muscles in his neck and shoulders shift in response. A wheel of the runabout sank into a hole and briefly tilted her against him. She felt his arm tense to hold her upright as he whistled for the horses to pull harder. She leaned the other way and he let out a breath, and she knew right then that despite everything a time was coming for the two of them.

  The livery stable and rail yard were a block west, then north again, but she had to visit the Cherry County Emporium first and pointed toward the massive storefront. Two ladies stopped and stared as they pulled up to tie the horses. Dulcinea glanced around; they were the only runabout or conveyance of any stature other than the ranch or farm wagons along the street. Single horses were in plenitude, ridden by men who appeared in striking similarity regardless of whether they were ranch hands or bosses, attired in worn pants and high-heeled boots, ranging from those with soles held to the foot with twine or wire or strips of rawhide to those whose scuffed appearance indicated they’d never made the acquaintance of polish. Graver’s tall, shiny boots were an exception.