She hurried down the hill, leaving the gelding tied on its opposite side, along with her things. She came upon the body and fired several more shots into its hulk, splitting his leathers and spitting blood onto her leggings and thin-soled shoes. She winced. The baby was screaming unlike any child she had heard before. She lifted it and tried to settle it by whispering sweet things and bouncing it, but nothing worked. She dug through the killer’s belongings and could not find much of use. The food was far from edible and his weapons or tools were crude and few. She took a blanket for the baby and investigated the corpse’s pockets. Again, nothing.
She carried the screaming baby back over the hill to her horse. Snow began to fall. It had hardly felt cold enough for snow before, but there it was, drifting along like ash at the edge of the world.
She held the baby close to her chest as she pulled herself onto the horse. She had no milk to offer the child, nothing to warm it other than the blanket, so she undid her blouse and positioned the baby directly against the warmth of her body. She did up what she could of her shirt over the baby and wrapped herself in the blanket. Again and again, the baby took hold of her nipple and tried to wrench life from it. Nothing came. It was painful, but she let the baby work at her, as much as she could stand it. It was the least she could do. She rode slowly, trying to trace the route they had taken from the town where the boy and Mary were waiting.
Soon, though, the path was indistinguishable. A thin blanket of snow covered every inch of ground, and weighted the branches of the fir trees that seemed to go on endlessly in every direction. She fired her rifle into the air and the baby screamed, but otherwise would not let up.
Then there was a whole slew of men Brooke had killed for what most would call honorable reasons. He wandered a bit after Sugar left, without a home or a town to call his own. He had no friends and no sense of needing any. He needed food and reasons to stay upon his horse, which were running out as he came upon more and more miles of nothing. Finally, he crossed paths with a group of men celebrating a recent victory over a team of bandits riding north, looting small towns along the way. They had slain the bandits, returned a percentage of their loot, and were now celebrating in the woods. They liked to drink and sing and Brooke soon learned that he too liked those things. He spent the night with them — they were merry enough to accept him as one of their own, knowing nothing about him, where he’d come from or where he was going. Soon, though, he learned that this militia was made entirely of men looking to blur their pasts. They rode nameless and unadorned. They relied on no one outside of the group, and were slow to trust on less celebratory occasions. They had their fair share of inner turmoil, but it was repeatedly squelched by an unspoken understanding that the whole thing only worked if they worked together. As soon as they turned against one another they would be back on their own again. For these particular men, the fear of that was enough to keep them riding quiet, day to day.
During that time, Brooke must have killed fifty men. Maybe a hundred. He did not remember the majority. They often tracked and killed one man at a time. Rapists and murderers. Plenty of bandits. It was more than likely they killed a large portion of innocent men. If any man felt guilt about that, he did not make it known. Brooke found himself pleasantly at ease with following the instruction of a posted sign, or a desperate sheriff, or even consistent word of mouth.
In between hunts, they would drink. Some of the men had wives and children, or mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, cousins, grandparents who depended on them. Some of them would send home money. A few even wrote letters. No one talked much about their personal lives. None seemed too satisfied with the hand life had dealt them.
They played cards sometimes, late into the night. They were not emotional drinkers. There were not many physical altercations amongst the men, and few wept or carried on, as Brooke would later witness over and over at card games in nearly every town he occupied for more than a few nights. When they played, these men were a casual kind of serious. They took each hand as it came and played and bristled slightly at a loss, but it rarely went any farther than that.
One man, an older one who called himself Grot because he “liked its sound,” used to sing the loudest at night and throughout their daily rides as well. His hair was long and gray and he wore a beard. The backs of his hands were crisscrossed with scars he’d likely dug himself. He shot animals from his horse throughout the day, for sport. Deer, squirrel, pheasant, lizard. But he did not collect them. Sometimes, another rider would, and he would laugh at them or ignore it. It was bothersome, but not unforgivable. One night, he lost his temper over a few pieces of gold and sprung on the boy who’d won them. Simple things seemed to bring out the worst in people. He plunged his thumbs into the boy’s eye sockets and scoured the sight from them. As the boy lay there screaming and clutching at his face, Grot lifted the boy’s beer in a bloodied hand and drank what was left of it. He struck the boy then with the empty bottle, shattering it and silencing him. He seemed to relax then. The other men around the fire rose and wrestled him up and over to a nearby tree. He managed a few blows across the necks and faces of these men but nothing that slowed them. They hung him and watched him kick and when he was done, they shot and buried the blinded boy.
That was the way of things. They were men without a country, but each individual answered to the group. Brooke did not ask many questions, and enjoyed well enough their day to day to keep in line with what they seemed to expect of him. They sang a number of songs, but Brooke’s favorite was the simple one. On and on as they rode, or as they sat together and drank late into the night, they would sing :
Drink and Hang
and Drink and Hang
and Drink and Hang
and Drink and Hang
On and on until it slowly, imperceptibly shifted to :
Drinking, Hanging
Drinking, Hanging
Drinking, Hanging
Drinking, Hanging
But it was all a mess now, thinking back on it. It could just as easily have been a decade with these men as a week. His memories were insubstantial fragments standing in for a much larger whole. Like how a wedding ring is said to represent a marriage. Or an old soup bowl in the dirt, a way of life.
Bird was dragging the bodies into the middle of the street and lining them up. Mary woke on her pallet and found the room empty, but for the chairs and the dishes from the night before. She heard the dragging sounds and, from time to time, the strained clap of a swinging door. She crawled to the window and peeked out and there he was, hunched and gripping an older man by his red pajama shoulders, dragging him with one arm through the dirt toward the center of the street. Some of the bodies had thin little lines of blood twisting up to them. Others had a body’s width of displaced earth tracing their path, as if they’d crawled from their front porch and down into the middle of the street to flip onto their backs and bask in the sun. They were cooking there in the unbroken heat. But they were not sweating.
“I cannot imagine what it is you think you’re doing,” she tried to say quietly from behind the door.
Bird did not respond, but instead settled the man a foot or so from a medium-waisted woman in a frilled blue and white dress.
“What are you doing ?” she said, a little louder this time.
Again, Bird did not respond, but settled the man and turned back toward the home from which he’d drawn him.
“Bird !” said Mary. She stepped onto the porch of their home and checked either direction, up the street. “Stop.”
Finally, Bird turned.
“They’re all dead, Mary. Everyone here.”
“I know,” said Mary.
“How did you know ?”
“That man was killing them.”
“But they’re all dead. Every single one of them. He killed every single one.”
“I know.”
“We are living in a town full of bodies.”
“Don’t touch them.”
“L
ook at all of them.”
There were all of the deputies, in a line. Then several men and women of middle age or older, and two boys who might have been fourteen or so. A young girl, probably thirteen. She had been bleeding from the waist before she died. Another girl had bled from a wound in her forehead. Her eyes were open and staring and they held the pale blue coloring of the thin clouds above her.
“I don’t want to,” said Mary.
“Well, you have to,” said Bird.
He turned and moved steadily toward the next home in the row that lined the backbone of this small town. He entered and the door swung shut behind him.
Mary went back into the building with the kitchen and she grabbed two plates from the table. She came back outside and when Bird finally emerged with a fresh body, another boy, this one just slightly younger than the rest, she whipped the first plate at him and struck him in the hand.
“Ow.” He dropped the body and turned and she moved closer and whipped another plate at him.
“Stop,” she yelled. “Stop, stop, stop,” as if she were whipping an endless supply of plates at him, but she was only spinning her hands out in front of her and screaming.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You have to,” she said. “I do not want to see them.”
“You have to,” he said. “We have to do something with them. We can’t leave them stuck up in their houses like this. They’re rotting on their dinner tables. They’ve wound up in the most horrible arrangements.” He was crying and gripping the young corpse again. This time, Mary let him drag it past.
She would not help him move the bodies. Instead, she agreed to dig. Finding a shovel wasn’t hard. She took the smallest and newest looking one and set to digging a few hundred feet from the stables at the far edge of town. Beyond that, there was only desert. A sun, all but risen. Looming red rocks like giants coming to crush them for all the damage they’d done.
She was not able to dig very much of the hole at all before a break was necessary. It was hardly big enough to bury a hand. She’d brought the wine out with her, some of the bread, and a chicken leg. She did not want to go back down that road any more times than was absolutely necessary. She did not like the wine but drank it down because she knew that it was supposed to be good for upset feelings and stomach trouble. She’d already had to dig several small latrine holes, in addition to the large one she was working on. She felt like something was eating away at her insides. She did not enjoy the idea of eating, but knew she needed to. It would be the first bit of food she’d managed all day, and she was working hard and needed the strength. To get the wine down, she held her breath, took it into her mouth, then swallowed hard and fast. Then she shoved a chunk of bread into her mouth to sop up the taste. She followed that up with a bit of chicken and the taste was nearly gone. The wine was unpleasant and burned in her gut. But it was settling her a little. She noticed that when she turned her head, it took a moment for her to realize she was looking back at those rocks in the distance. Each new vision took a moment to snap into place. It was a decent feeling, but she did not exactly like it.
“You have not finished even one hole,” said Bird.
She’d seen him coming, but had not lifted herself from the dirt to take up the shovel.
“It is hard to dig a hole the size of a body, and you want me to dig twelve.”
“Fifteen,” said Bird.
“But I don’t even want to dig twelve.”
“You’ve got to, Mary.”
“I need help.”
“But you won’t help me move them.”
“So dig with me then move them and I will go to bed. I can’t stand today and I can’t stand what you have done.”
“What have I done ?”
“You have made this place horrible and made me feel frightened and taken away my sense of security in our building with the kitchen while we wait for Martha.”
“Martha is not coming back.”
“Yes, she is.”
“That man killed everyone, Mary.”
“So ?”
“Not one of them survived.”
“Stop it, Bird. We survived.”
“Because we were hidden,” he said.
“I’ve been looking,” he said, “and I’ve found no one.”
“I cannot dig fifteen holes,” said Mary.
“Then I will dig them,” said Bird.
He took the shovel from where she’d set it and he bent toward the small hole she’d started. She drank more of the wine. He plunged the shovel into the dirt and leveraged it against a bent leg to extract the shovel-full. Again and again, slowly, he unearthed handfuls of dirt. A considerable amount was lost back into the hole, but he kept at it and it began to make a distinguishable difference.
After an hour or so, he had nearly completed a hole long enough to set a body in, but far too shallow for it to stay set. Mary was still to the side of the grave. The chicken and bread were gone. The wine too. She was alternating between sitting and watching and resting on her back to stare at the clouds moving past.
“You could get a second shovel,” said Bird.
She lifted her palms and showed him that they were spotted with blisters.
He lifted his palm and showed her the same.
“We cannot dig fifteen holes,” she said.
He nodded. He was sweating and sore and there were still more houses to check, more horrors to discover.
“We could dig one big hole,” he said. “We could put them all together.”
Mary liked it. Both as an idea, the whole town together like that, and because it meant the level of the digging left to do was greatly reduced.
Bird found her a second shovel and they set to widening the hole. She wrapped her hands in the hem of her dress. Bird removed his shirt and wrapped his wounded palm in it. It was already bleeding slightly, and it stained the shirt as he worked. He seemed less and less present to Mary. More and more focused elsewhere.
“Do you know any digging songs ?” she said.
He shook his head.
“I know a working song,” she said, “but not a digging song.”
He nodded, plunged his shovel into the dirt and pressed it with his foot. Things were coming up more easily now. The air was cooling off too, which made it only slightly more pleasant to work.
She sang her working song and a few minutes passed more easily. The song was about farming, but there was a little bit in there about the earth and working the dirt and the sun bearing down on you.
Later in the afternoon, the clouds moved in from over the mountains. A light snow began to fall, but it melted as it pressed into the ground. They would dig and dig, then take a break. Bird fetched water from the well and wine from the kitchen, at Mary’s request. He set the bottle in the water in its bucket, and carried a loaf of bread in his armpit. The snow kept falling. A thin blanket covered the bodies of the townspeople. Bird felt better already, to see them covered so peacefully. He recommitted to their plan, which was beginning to feel less and less possible.
He gave Mary the wine and bread and re-wrapped the shirt around the palm of his hand. Mary sat down to enjoy all he’d gathered and he set back to work.
“We are doing the right thing,” he said.
“Do you think they will come back to haunt us ?” said Mary.
“Maybe if we had left them in their houses like they were,” said Bird.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Do you believe in ghosts ?” she said.
“Yes,” said Bird.
“Why ?”
“Because it is better to believe in them and never see one than not to believe in them when one decides to set upon you.”
“You are forever concerned with protection,” said Mary. She began to laugh. She was brutally exhausted and giggling.
“It’s my hope to be prepared for whatever it is that comes at me next.”
“Do you think your arm will come to you as a ghost ?” said Mary. “Do
you think one morning you will wake and find it there, settled into place as it once was, only blue or white and sort of drifting between this world and the next ?” She laughed again. She drank and ate.
“I do not think that,” said Bird. He plunged the shovel and leveraged it against his leg again. His strength was not fully in the gesture though, and the dirt rose up but fell back into the hole, rather than to its side. “You could help. You could add depth to the hole as I draw out its side.”
“It is important to break and restore your strength. You are going at this like a mad man with only a day to get it done.”
“I’d like to get it done.”
“We have time.”
“You’d like to sleep with those people in the street like that ?”
“It’s snowing,” she said.
“Only slightly,” he said.
“Still, they will be covered.”
“But what about the ghosts,” he said.
“There is no such thing,” she said.
Bird removed a knife from his belt and considered it.
“Do you have a knife ?” he said.
She did not.
“But you can get one ?”
She could.
“We’ll take their teeth,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We’ll bury their teeth. Bury their ghosts.”
“That is horrid and I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Will you help or not ?”
“I will not,” she said.
As the sun began to set and the evening grew cool, they retreated to their building with the kitchen. The bodies lined up in the street were nothing more than row after row of raised snow, like a plowed field in winter. The blood was only faintly visible beneath the thinner layers, and it was vanishing with each passing moment.
Haints Stay Page 14
