by Jonis Agee
Dulcinea said, “I’ll sign. If you let us live.” Chance grabbed the knife from the table, sliced through the rags holding her arms, and dragged the chair so she sat before the papers. He uncapped the bottle of ink and handed her the pen, keeping his eye on the other two. Dulcinea dipped the pen, scratched at the edge of the paper he’d used to practice their signatures, dipped and tried again, this time producing ink. He tapped his forefinger, indicating where she should sign, and she leaned over the paper. Despite the wind and crackling fire, the slow scratch of her signature whispered along the cabin walls.
As she finished, and he leaned down to inspect it, Rose sprang to her feet, pounced on his back, and pressed her skinning knife against his throat. They staggered and fell, breaking Dulcinea’s chair into pieces. Chance grabbed at Rose’s arms, and she steadied the tip of the blade with her left hand, hacking and sawing at his throat as if castrating a bull. Dulcinea flew at him and struck him in the chest to no effect, while his arms flailed and dropped and his struggle against the knife slowed. Then with one last burst, he yanked at Rose’s arms, pried one away and loosened the other. Dulcinea hit him in the face with the chair’s leg, which only enraged him more. Graver slid closer, drew back his legs, and kicked him in the knee, dropping him, his shirt an apron of blood from the deepening cut as Rose rode his back.
“You can’t kill me!” he rasped, a bright bubble at the corner of his mouth.
Rose leaned close and whispered in his ear, “Why not? You’re already dead.” Her right hand on the hilt, her left, gloved in red, wrapped around the blade’s point, she hauled hard on the knife. There was a pop and a bright hissing spray. “Hestovatohkeo’o,” she murmured as he fell forward into the blooming pool of his own blood.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Dulcinea sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and her first attempt at doughnuts. The pastry was so heavy it thunked against the saucer after she took a bite.
J.B. was gone, she knew from the shifting gravity of the air, a missing weight, as it was when someone left a room, like a veil torn for an instant, and a sharpness appeared around the objects and people, then slowly dissolved again.
Despite the early blizzard, the winter had been mild with the right amount of snow and then spring rains brought the hills alive again with wildflowers and new grass. She woke early on these fine May mornings to watch her two mares graze with their foals in the pasture. One of the old cottonwoods behind the barn fell when the rains softened the ground in spring and settled across the creek, forming a natural bench at the far end that Hayward would lie on late afternoons when the work was done. The small purple knobs on the mulberry trees offered a fine harvest and a sparrow hopped down a branch a few feet, tested one, then another, and let them drop to the ground where more trees would sprout. In years to come a large grove of mulberry trees would provide pleasure to children and grandchildren, who would take handfuls of ripe berries and smear their faces and arms and run to show the adults. There would be Bennetts, as well as the families of the men who worked among them. J.B. always said they would prosper, and as she watched her son and Graver work horses that evening, she believed him.
Rose sat beside her on the porch while, in the corral, Graver showed Hayward how to halterbreak a filly without roughness. Her son let Graver rest an arm across his shoulders as they watched the long-legged bay filly gambol about wearing her new halter. When she had finally explained to her son about his grandfather’s bargains with both J.B. and her, he took a few days then decided to try to forgive.
Some Horses lifted Lily onto the spotted pony’s back and led her up and down the barnyard while Rose smiled at her daughter’s cajoling to be turned loose.
“She needs her own horse,” Dulcinea said.
“I’m sure she’ll have it, too, with all these men spoiling her,” she said with a laugh. Rose was her friend, the bravest woman she knew. They never spoke of it, what happened at the line shack. Rose’s family lived in the foreman’s house in the winter, and spent summer in the tipi behind the house.
Rose placed her fingertips on Dulcinea’s arm. “I have to go home,” she said. “It’s my sister. It’s time for her to go home, too.” Her eyes filled, and she bit her lip and looked out across the ranch yard to the hills beyond. “Jerome will come if Lily can stay with you. It won’t be long.”
Dulcinea reached over and squeezed her hand. “She’ll be so spoiled you’ll be sorry,” she said. Then she hesitated, not wanting to make a mistake because she didn’t fully understand the Sioux ways, and said, “I hope your sister finds peace on the red road with Wakan Tanka.”
Rose nodded. “She already has.”
They sat in silence as the men finished with the horses, and the hands drifted to their bunkhouse. Rose went to meet her husband and daughter, and Dulcinea stood on the porch, watched as Graver and Hayward started for the house with the gait of tired, satisfied men who’ve worked a hard, long day.
Graver had moved into the main house, and slept in the extra room upstairs for now. The past months brought her the strength that was in him, his firm hand under her arm, his back broad enough for the work that lay ahead. He would not replace J.B., but she felt sure he would stand beside him someday.
Dulcinea could not leave this land. She finally understood how the wind out here made a place for itself in your ear, in your mind, and in your heart, stilling your thoughts, making everything you see one vast wholeness: the swan gliding across the silent marsh, the mossy turtles climbing like ancient men out of the water, their claws gripping the soil with great effort to drag themselves despite the tangled water plants that dragged their yellow-scaled legs back, their ragged beaks parted with effort. She couldn’t think without the Sand Hills wind hushing the great world around her as she pushed herself into its embrace. Maybe a bad thing never died, as the men were fond of saying, and good lived but for a moment. This was a thing she could accept.
In early November, she had been able to ship cattle and pay the men some of what she owed. They’d made it through the winter, though money was short. She watched as Hayward led J.B.’s chestnut out of the barn. They were teaching the horse to work cattle, and Graver showed her son how to ride in concert with the animal, not against it. She saw that was the way a person must move through the world, while across the hills, the evening fog drifted like an exhaled breath and the peepers began their rhythmic chirring music as the night horses pulled the dark curtain across the sky until they slept and awakened once more, rising like dreamers out of the mist to claim the world again.
REFERENCES
Jensen, Richard E., R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Lavin, Stephen J., Fred M. Shelley, and J. Clark Archer. Atlas of the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
Peavy, Linda, and Ursula Smith. Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier. Rowayton, CT: Saraband, 1996.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JONIS AGEE has been praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape.” She is the award-winning author of twelve books, including the New York Times Notable Books of the Year Sweet Eyes and Strange Angels. Her awards include the John Gardner Fiction Award, the George Garrett Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in fiction, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, and two Nebraska Book Awards. A native of Nebraska, Agee teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY JONIS AGEE
Novels
The River Wife
The Weight of Dreams
South of Resurrection
Strange Angels
Sweet Eyes
Collections
Acts of Love on Indigo Road
Taking the Wall
A .38 Special and a Broken Heart
Bend This Heart
&n
bsp; Pretend We’ve Never Met
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BONES OF PARADISE. Copyright © 2016 by Jonis Agee. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780062413499
ISBN 978-0-06-241347-5
16 17 18 19 20 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
