The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  Cullen still hadn’t reappeared when they’d finished the meal, so Dulcinea invited Hayward and Percival upstairs to the small porch J.B. had built off their bedroom when they found they couldn’t sleep inside in the summertime.

  She opened the French doors, stepped out, and pulled the cover from the telescope stationed at the railing. Since the porch was at the back of the house, the light from the men’s bunkhouse and Frank and Vera’s did not interfere with its view of the night sky. Chance gave an appreciative chuckle. Hayward stepped closer and stroked the long brass barrel with the wonder of a child. Apparently he had not known about his father’s obsession.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A telescope.” She explained its use. “Want to see?”

  Chance stepped back as she positioned the eyepiece, moving the barrel to focus first on the moon. When its cratered surface appeared, she waved Hayward to her side and showed him how to place his eye. He gasped when he realized what he saw, quickly looking up at the distant moon, almost full, and then placed his eye back at the scope. “The shadows are canyons!”

  “And it’s not made of cheese or little green men or fanciful creatures,” Chance said. “Or lovers’ sighs or wishes either.” He smiled at Dulcinea.

  “Here, there’s something else you can see.” Hayward stepped back and she peered into the scope, moving it slightly to focus on the Archer with Orion’s Belt. In his eagerness, Hayward stepped on her foot, and looked aghast, quickly uttering an apology. She placed a reassuring hand on his back and he didn’t shrug it off. When he bent to scan the stars she pointed out to him, she rested her hand on the back of his neck, thrilled at the soft down of his hair. He was busy observing the Milky Way, so she dipped her head and caught his scent as she had when he was a babe in her lap. It was different now, a young man’s sweat, complex with tobacco, horse, and whiskey. She was caught in a terrible tide of regret. How could she have left him? Drum’s threat loomed again, and she remembered the sickening bargain she was forced to make. She wasn’t prepared for what followed, when no amount of arguing with J.B. mattered. He wouldn’t allow her to take Hayward and he wouldn’t rescue Cullen from his father. Her breath came short and shallow as she felt the lost years with her sons, and she looked up in an effort to keep from crying.

  The sky over the hills was so close tonight, as if a person could reach up and pluck the stars one by one and tuck them in her pocket for safekeeping. Somewhere close by, a coyote called, running up and down the scale like a musician opening an instrument, then another joined and another, and before long, the sky filled with a joyous, triumphant ululating that ran from horizon to horizon as the coyotes gave chase. It ended abruptly with the almost human scream of a rabbit, then silence as the animal was quickly torn to pieces. The ritual was nothing new, but it seemed to shake the group as they released their collectively held breaths and glanced at each other uncertainly. Hayward stepped back from the telescope. The spell was broken, and he mumbled, “Good night, Mother,” as he slid around her and left.

  Chance stepped to her side. “May I see?”

  He moved the telescope from place to place, then straightened. “Very good instrument. But I notice it’s positioned for the northern sky.”

  As she shrugged, she became aware of something she had not thought of before. J.B. had positioned the telescope for the northern sky, the sky over her head on Rosebud. The peddler had recently delivered a new eyepiece, too, stronger, more carefully ground, from Germany. Perhaps it was merely coincidence that he last scanned the sky over her. Next, he might have turned to the west or east, or taken the telescope out of the house for a clear view of the southern sky from the roof of the barn. She stopped the sentiment. J.B. didn’t just give his oldest son to his father, he abandoned her, too, even if she was the one who had left.

  “My husband had a curious nature.” She lifted the canvas cover from the floor and spread it over the telescope. “Let me show you to your room.”

  It was a relief to be rid of him. She wondered if she was a cold woman. When she first returned home to Chicago, she spent sleepless nights on the widow’s walk of her parents’ house, peering west, as if her husband were a sailor adrift in an ocean of grass, and making his way to her, he could arrive at any time, and she had to be the one to catch first sight of him. She was still young then. She hadn’t realized how long it would take. She thought again of the piece of paper Drum had shown her. It took three days for her to fully understand what it meant, what J.B. had done, and what could never be undone. She thought again of Rose’s sister. Had J.B. taken solace there despite the girl’s young age? Had he been unfaithful? She pushed the thought aside and dragged their wedding quilt out to the balcony, content to spend the night as he must have, lying alone with the stars overhead, and the rush of the wind rustling the grass, and the steady throb of the peepers beating along with her heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At first light Drum Bennett slowly gathered himself for the task ahead, easing one leg, then the other out of bed and planting his feet on the floor. Cullen had helped him with his trousers the night before, and the arm was healed enough that he could discard the sling and slide into a shirt. Buttoning it took time until his shoulder, stiff from inactivity, gave with a few noticeable crunches and he worked the hand that had stayed immobile for so long. In the old days, when he was younger, he’d worked cattle with a broken arm. Now he was weak as an orphan calf. He wanted to bellow his rage at the injustice, but knew better than to wake the household. Dulcinea with her fancy-man lawyer spending the night. Oh, he’d heard them talking. He knew what they were up to. Rivers sent him a message. He’d fix her. That was number one. Number two was joining the ranches. Number three, and he knew this was a distant possibility, was finding his son’s killer. With all the time laid up, he’d had some unwelcome thoughts on the subject. Now he needed to prove himself wrong, or he’d never feel safe again.

  Drum waited for the lightness in his body to recede before he could muster the strength to pull on his boots. Last night, Cullen brought him rawhide strings to tie around the upper portion that they’d had to slit open to release his swollen foot four weeks ago, and he’d be damned if he was going to throw away perfectly good boots. He would fix them himself if he didn’t have this work ahead of him. As it was, he’d give them to Stubs to mend. Man was too old and worthless on a horse anymore, had to earn his keep mending equipment. Drum bent over to wrap the boot with rawhide, and grimaced at the way his belly had grown fat and wobbly, making it difficult to breathe at this angle. Hell, come to that he was next in line after Stubs for a bullet to the brain. Look at the shape he was in. Fat as a tick and snake-poison mean.

  He straightened and pushed his feet firmly into the boots, despite the protest they made. What did a man come to, a bag of bones and a waddle of fat, all disarranged and helpless. He glanced at the picture of J.B. on the dresser and the thick envelope that lay beside it.

  “Damn it, son, you never did amount to a pile of crap, did you?” He took a deep breath, released it slowly, and straightened his spine as he did so, then using the cane Cullen had fashioned, pushed upward, forcing the wobbly ankle to hold his weight despite the pain that shot up his leg into his back. Although the arm was still weak, he made it do its job, and pressed down on the cane to support the bad leg. It felt like the healing arm threatened to snap again, but he ordered it to get to work. With just a few more steps to the door, the words to an old-timey song started in his head. Old Joe Clark was a mean old man . . . He couldn’t remember more than the refrain, which he repeated with every step. Old Joe Clark was a mean old man . . .

  By the time he made it down the stairs, he was panting and his shirt soaked with sweat. “J.B.,” he mumbled. He had to stop talking to his son, to remember he was dead. He blamed too much time sitting around without work to wear a body out. He knew his son was gone. Some son of a bitch shot him. Just like Drum’s grandfather, in Missouri, a lifetime ago. Shot him dead, right
in front of Drum, when he was only a boy of thirteen. His father was killed by Indians out West, he was told, and his mother died in childbirth, left him to be raised by her father. After the old man’s death, Drum struggled to keep the homestead going. He was too young, and no one would help a boy his age alone. They wanted him to stay with the neighbors down the road, a large family of girls who could use another strong back to do for them. Store wouldn’t extend him credit till he could bring in the crop. He had all he could do keeping meat on the table and milking the cows. In all the years they lived together, his grandfather, another mean old man, had two things to tell his grandson: “This land is everything. Don’t ever sell, lose, or walk away from our land. And, boy, never trust nobody, not even me.” Then he’d slapped him so hard the boy wore the finger welts on his face for a week. From then on, Drum flinched every time his grandfather or anyone raised a hand. After a while, it wore on the old man until he made him stand like a stone and take his punishment. Drum hadn’t meant to lose the land. He had struggled long and hard to keep it, but there was no chance. He was fourteen when he walked away, carrying the shame on his back like a rock-filled pack.

  Drum stood, hands on the back of the chair at the kitchen table, bracing until the tremble left his legs and his breath returned to normal. He was the first in three generations to reach sixty and he had no idea what to expect. Usually he didn’t think about his age, and just pushed himself harder when the joints ached and the lungs felt small. The breakfast dishes were laid out, the coffeepot ready for the fire in the stove to be lit. No reason he couldn’t do that himself. Vera would be over soon. Damn, he hoped Higgs would take his offer to get rid of Dulcinea in exchange for the foreman’s house. Get things back to normal here. He lit the fire and found himself staring into the flames, something he avoided as a rule. No point in going back there. What’s done is done.

  But this morning the past wouldn’t go lie down in the corner like an old dog. The scene appeared again and again, in waves of ever greater detail. The faces at the window with the flames in the background like a painting of the last judgment, then the terrible collapse of the roof before he had time to—He always told himself he was going back inside, he was, he would fight his way through the fire and save them. He hadn’t known they were there when he went back with the kerosene and rags. Drum groaned, and then glanced around to see if anyone had heard him. The coffeepot burped and murmured as the water heated. The fire crackled and the stovepipe ticked as the rising smoke heated the tin.

  By the time he was fourteen he was skin and bones, too tired to cook, let alone eat. He could barely shoulder the pack onto his mule, and the walk to town took twice as long. He hobbled then, too, he thought ruefully. He’d lost a toe to the plow. And that was another thing he counted against the man. In town, he sat to rest behind the livery stable under a big sugar maple, and fell asleep in the dense summer heat. By the time he woke, it was coming dark and he had to hurry. Bennett Shear was just going to supper at Shadow’s Tavern to celebrate his new acquisition, which solidified him as owner of the entire valley. He’d already moved a tenant farmer onto Drum’s farm. When Shear heard his name called, he glanced at the boy without understanding that he should be afraid, then turned back to speak with a man leaving the tavern.

  The bullet caught him midsentence right through the heart, spun him slowly down the boardwalk steps into the muddy street where he lay on his side like a man gone to sleep. There was such harmlessness in the final picture that people stopped and stared for a moment, unable to determine if Shear was dead or alive. Drum had been too exhausted to move at first, then some instinct told him to walk slowly away, holding the pistol at his side, finger on the other trigger he intended to cock and pull if anyone moved to stop him. But by some magic, people were too curious about the dead man to notice a boy. When he gathered the mule’s rope, his first thought was to head west through the woods where trackers would have a harder time. Instead he went north, back the way he’d come, picturing the kerosene barrel in the corner of the shed and the rags that were his grandfather’s clothes in the other. He didn’t know about the tenant family. The five little ones on the pallet bed he’d left in the sleeping loft. He didn’t have time to warn them that it was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, that they would spend their nights hugging each other to keep warm.

  Since that time, Drum couldn’t stand the smell of kerosene. He kept coal oil lamps, candles, and cow chips for fuel at his ranch. He’d avoided civilization after that, choosing game trails and outposts. As he walked, he planned. First he changed his name to Drum Bennett, after the man who had ruined their lives. No one would expect him to take the dead man’s identity, so that’s what he did. Even J.B. didn’t know his true origins. That was fine.

  The day he came for his grandson, the past was wound around his insides like a tapeworm, eating itself full while the man starved, belly distended. Drum had rebuilt the family fortune, seized the land from Indians and other settlers, fought fiercer than any animal could to hold on to it. When his place was secured and his son’s also, he started thinking toward the future. He couldn’t be sure J.B. was strong enough to make the boy into a man who could hold the land against the Bennett Shears of the world. Sending J.B. to his wife’s folks in Missouri to be raised hadn’t worked out so well. His son was too soft, too generous when he should hold the line against others. That woman he married was evidence of what happened when the right stamp wasn’t put on a boy. No, Drum knew how it had to be. That day he got up, told Stubs to fix a pallet bed for the boy in his own room, saddled two horses, and set off for J.B.’s. He hadn’t reckoned on the disturbance she’d make. Drum’s own wife had been a sullen, quiet woman who obeyed him without speaking, had done so until the day she disappeared, just like that, off the face of the earth. He found no tracks, no evidence that she had walked, ridden a horse, or driven a wagon. Within days, it was as if she’d never been there, and he felt enormous relief. Since she was a poor cook anyway, he was happy to eat the victuals prepared by Swensen the Swede, who had lost a foot in a blizzard and needed other work after a winter of lying around eating. Over the years, Swensen had perfected the plain food Drum preferred, neglecting salt and pepper even. It was food meant to toughen the boy, he’d explained to Swensen. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew better than to baby a male child. Make them sleep on the ground, without clothing, teach them to take the blows without speaking.

  The coffee began to boil and Drum hobbled to the bread safe to cut a couple of slices. The saucer of butter had been left on the table without a cover and bore the impression of a tiny mouse paw and the twin gnawed furrows of teeth. Waste. It made him so mad, he smeared over the soft surface, obscuring the disturbances, and positioned the plate so no one would suspect. He’d eat his bread with mulberry jam. Another of J.B.’s fancies. If he’d paid more attention to the future, and less to every little comfort, he might be alive today. Drum cursed under his breath and knocked his fist against the table. Goddamn it.

  He poured a cup of coffee and hobbled outside to the porch to sit and wait for Vera, Higgs, and the men. Something about this morning reminded him of the day he’d come for Cullen. Except then, he rode with his back to the sunrise, and the gray-blue around him gradually turned rose, then yellow, and finally full color at almost the same moment the full bright heat began to warm the back of his shirt. Today, the sun took its time, stabbing the bunkhouse windows with light that seemed to sink, then bounce back, sharp and brittle, like a signal sent one place to another to another. He’d read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey the first winter he’d spent in the hills living in a tipi on the Niobrara River. He’d found a spit of land with an artesian well that never froze and the river itself only took a skim of ice in places, and he’d found an old tipi he patched and used. It was cold as the dickens, but the wild plum, willow, and burr oak kept off the worst of the wind. Sheltered in the lee below the hills to the south, he learned to drive the tipi poles deep into the ground, t
o keep a fire going, and to not touch the sides of his tipi with his body. He would have starved except for the river, which drew deer, antelope, and turkeys during the long cold months, even when the snow was deep. He came close to eating coyote, too, but didn’t. Once he found a stray cow and, nearly starving, was torn between killing it and trapping it to begin his own herd in the spring. His stomach hurt so bad he chewed willow bark and boiled grass to drink the broth that played havoc on his bowels, but he kept the cow alive, and come spring he would turn it loose and track it to other cattle it would find. On one particularly cold, still night when the tree limbs crackled as the sap froze and he could make out the pad of coyote paws circling the camp, he coaxed the cow into the tipi with him. When he woke in the morning, the animal was lying by his side, providing the warmth he had dreamed about.

  It was right at the end of that bad cold spell when he and the cow almost died that he found the Indian woman mired and exhausted in a chest-deep drift she’d plunged into coming off the hill on a little buckskin mare. Try as they might, it was clear they couldn’t free themselves and were doomed when darkness fell. Drum watched their feeble struggles for a few minutes, and then waded through the deep snow toward them. His own horse had taken off the night of the first snowfall, and he wore snowshoes he’d fashioned from strips of willow branches and bark. The churned-up snow made it hard to keep from sinking, but he managed to get close enough to grab the war bridle and pull the horse’s head. Although she stretched her neck, the game little mare didn’t have the strength to raise her forelegs high enough to strike out into the snow in front of her, so Drum went around to the side and lifted the nearest leg by hand, placing it ahead of the horse, then repeated the action on the other side, then went to the haunches and pushed and swatted until the horse was driven to a desperate lunge. In this way, he half dragged, half pushed the horse out of the drift. The woman, sunk into the snow beside the mare, he dragged to safety.