Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  “I told you those crows we saw yesterday were bad luck,” Harve said finally as they shared the last of his whiskey. “I know now why they were flying so low and fast … they were trying to outfly that storm.”

  “I’d at least like to find my hat,” Teddy Green said. “My head’s beginning to broil under this hot sun.”

  With the passing of the storm, the sky had turned to a pure blue without a single cloud and the sun had turned fierce. Another mile on they found the horses. They were dead, piled one atop the other in a small arroyo, their bodies twisted, their legs stiff and sticking straight out.

  “Well, least we found them,” Harve said. “If we had a knife among us, we could cut us some horseflesh and eat it like the Apaches do when their horses is kilt or they’ve run them to the ground.”

  “Well, we’ve no knife, nor wood to build a fire to cook with,” Teddy Green said. “Unless you want to try and eat those animals right off the hoof.”

  “I ain’t walked that far or gone that long without a meal that I’d eat a dead horse raw,” said Harve.

  They moved on. Another mile and they found a single boot, but it wasn’t one of theirs.

  “Who do you reckon this boot belongs to?” Harve said, trying it on, only to learn that it was too small and wouldn’t fit.

  “Maybe, if we’re lucky, it belongs to Gypsy Davy,” Teddy Green said. “Maybe the storm caught and killed him like it did our horses.”

  “Have you taken inventory of our luck lately?” Cole asked.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Green said. “We wouldn’t be that lucky, would we?”

  “Well, whoever it was had mighty small feet,” Harve said. “I’ve always prided myself on the size of my feet, but this feller’s got me beat.” He tossed the boot aside.

  “We’re in a tight here,” Green said. “We could walk a thousand more miles and not see a living soul. I guess the government didn’t give away enough of this free land, or else we would have come across one human being by now.”

  “We could always walk back to Sweet Jesus,” Harve said. “It can’t be more than fifty or sixty miles.”

  “If that cyclone hit through there,” Cole said, “it would be a wasted walk. Best we keep moving south, forget about finding any more of our camp.”

  “Poor Naomi,” Harve said. “She was a sweet woman, even if she was a whore.”

  “Well, we can only guess whether the cyclone blew that town off the map or not,” Green said. “Your lady friend aside, it would be no great loss to the world if that big wind blew Sweet Jesus clean to Texas, which is where I wish I was right now. In fact, if that cyclone blew away all of Kansas, it wouldn’t be any great loss in my book.”

  “Too bad we ain’t cows,” Harve said. “We could eat some of this grass.”

  “And if we had wings, we could fly,” Teddy Green said sourly. “Like those crows.”

  “I wish I was a crow,” Harve said. “I’d fly and find us a place to get some grub and buy some horses.”

  “I guess we can complain all the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” Cole said, “but that won’t make the trip any shorter.”

  They fell into silence after that and continued to walk due south, considering that, if they walked long enough and far enough, they’d end up in Texas. Late that afternoon, as the sun was beginning to angle low and cast their shadows into long dark shapes over the beaten grass, they espied a soddy, black smoke curling up from its lone stovepipe. There were two sorry-looking horses staked nearby—a bay and a swayback stud.

  “We’ve been saved,” Harve said. “I never thought I’d be saved by folks who lived in a dirt house.”

  “We’re not saved yet,” Teddy Green declared. “Those folks might not be friendly, and, if they are, they might not be friendly to three half-dressed and shoeless men. Look at us. We look like bums.”

  “But we ain’t bums,” Harve said. “I’m a rich man, thanks to my late wife.”

  “You don’t look rich,” Teddy Green said. “You look like a bum of the worst sort.”

  “Well, I ain’t no bum.”

  They approached the soddy to within fifty yards and Cole helloed the house. After walking all day, there was no sense taking chances of getting shot by a nervous sodbuster.

  “What you boys want?” came a man’s voice from behind the long barrel of a musket poking through an open window.

  “We were caught in a bad storm last night!” Cole called. “It swept away our horses and gear, left us afoot as you can see!”

  “How do I know you ain’t those Canadian River boys that’s been raiding all over Kansas?”

  “Mister, take a good look at us,” Teddy Green said. “We don’t even have a single horse among us or a pistol, neither. How you figure we’d be raiders?”

  “You look like trash to me,” the man said.

  “We ain’t trash, either,” Harve said. “I’m a rich man from Denver.”

  “Shit,” the man cursed. “You a rich man, then I’m Ulysses S. Grant and I got old Abe Lincoln in here and we’re discussing the Congress.”

  “Look,” Cole said, “we just need some grub, maybe buy a horse or two if you have some you’d like to sell.”

  “Nearest town’s forty miles one way, sixty the other. You came from the north, you went through Sweet Jesus … that’s the one’s sixty miles. The other’s south of here … Hump Dance … outside of Dodge City. It’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of Kansas. Full of cut-throats and painted whores and whiskey dens. I’m betting you can buy all the grub and horses you want once you get there, or steal them. Better move along before you miss the party.”

  “The only thing that cyclone didn’t blow away was my pants with my lucky gold piece in them. I’ll give you that twenty-dollar gold piece for a pistol and some bullets and one of those sorry-looking horses,” Harve said. “We could at least protect ourselves from road agents and the like if we had us a pistol.”

  The man snorted. “Road agents? What would road agents want with you bums?”

  “Now look here …” Teddy Green started to say.

  Cole cut him off before he could rankle the man further: “Mister, we’d be grateful to you for something to eat. This man’s a Texas Ranger and we’re after a pretty bad actor. And maybe, if you’ll help us, we’ll catch him before he comes along and kills you and whoever else lives here with you.” Cole was hoping to play to his sympathies, and if not his sympathies, then his fears. There was a slight pause while the man thought.

  “He’ll cut your ears off, if you ain’t careful,” Harve said. “He likes to cut the ears off folks and wear them on a string around his neck.”

  “Anybody comes around here trying to cut off my ears, I’ll give him a gutful of lead,” the man said. “Now git along afore my finger gets itchy and I start shooting you boys to ribbons.”

  Cole saw the scowl on Teddy Green’s face. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”

  They walked until dark, then stretched out on the open prairie with nothing but stars for a blanket and the ground for a pillow, but at least they weren’t having to sleep in a creek or in wet clothes.

  “We walked a damn’ long way today,” Harve said.

  “Farthest I’ve ever walked at one time,” Green said. “And I don’t aim to walk this far tomorrow. I might just go back and confiscate that man’s horses.”

  “Then you’d leave him in the same condition we’re in,” Cole said.

  “I know. It’s all that kept me from doing it in the first place.”

  “How far did that man say it was to Hump Dance?” Harve asked.

  “Forty miles,” Cole said. “Less what we walked since then.”

  “Forty miles.” Teddy Green said it like a curse.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Noon two days later they saw something.

  “What is it?” Harve wondered.<
br />
  Someone was moving across the prairie on foot, pushing something.

  “Without my hat to shade my eyes,” Teddy Green said, “I can’t hardly make out who or what it is.”

  Cole helloed and the figure stopped and seemed to look in their direction, then after a moment or two sat down.

  “Let’s go,” Cole said.

  When they reached her, the woman looked like she’d walked as far as she was going to go. She was old and thin and wore a dirty gingham dress and a Mother Hubbard bonnet from which peered a pair of the most forlorn eyes Cole had ever seen. She had a plain and simple face that was long and narrow, and reflected, no doubt, every weary, mournful year she’d spent on the prairies. The thing she’d been pushing was a wheelbarrow with a dead man in it.

  The man was as thin as she, dressed in faded denim coveralls and a cotton shirt that was frayed at the collar and cuffs. His brogans were dusty and his skin was grayish. His bony limbs hung over the edges of the wheelbarrow.

  “Madam,” said Teddy Green, “why in God’s name are you pushing a dead man around in a wheelbarrow out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Her eyes flicked white in the shade of her bonnet as she took in the Ranger. She seemed almost too weary to answer, but then said: “Taking him to town.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Taking him to his harlot,” she said.

  “Harlot?” Harve asked.

  “He loved her, not me. Let her bury him. I won’t.”

  The three of them looked at each other.

  Teddy Green was shaking his head. “Strange country, John Henry. Must affect people’s minds.”

  “How far is this town, ma’am?” Cole asked.

  She turned her head and stared into the distance, toward a horizon that offered little but grass and sky. The wind ruffled her bonnet.

  “Another mile, maybe two. It’s hard to say when you’re pushing a heavy load like Judiah here. He may appear slight, but he’s all deadweight. You ever try and push deadweight more than a mile or two?”

  “No, ma’am, not in recent memory,” Cole said.

  “Well, ’tain’t no easy chore, I can assure you that. God damn and son-of-a-bitch, I don’t believe we should have ever left Indiana and come to this country. This is a god-damn’ useless place that just eats up a body’s soul. And now that harlot has eaten up Judiah and she can god damn’ well have what’s left of him.”

  It was rare to hear a woman use such language, but she did a right smart job of it.

  “What he die of,” Harve said, “your mister?”

  “Syphilis is what the doctor said he had,” she said. “I reckon it was that. It wasted away his brains. The last few days he talked all sorts of crazy talk, tried to jump off the roof to kill himself, only the roof wasn’t high enough to even break a leg and all he done was jam his knees and complain about that. Tried to drown himself in the well, but only managed to get stuck and I had to winch him out. Night before last found him standing on a pail trying to screw the milch cow, calling it Jezebel and slapping its flanks. I had to strike him with a shovel to get him to stop. Milch cows is hard to come by this far out … almost as hard to come by as husbands.”

  There were four bloody dots on his shirt front.

  “Looks like buckshot holes,” she said. “But they ain’t. I didn’t shoot him. What finally happened was he rammed himself into a pitchfork and that finished him. Judiah never had that much sense to begin with. The screwing disease poisoned what little mind he had. Pitiful way for a man to come to his end, but that’s what sin will do to you … bring you to a pitiful end.”

  “You don’t look like you’re going to be able to wheel him to town,” Teddy Green said. “Better just leave him right here and go back home, ma’am.”

  She sat there, staring at the horizon.

  “This is the bitterest place I’ve ever been,” she said, then began to weep.

  “Where is your place, ma’am?” Cole asked.

  She pointed over her shoulder and they saw the soft rut that the barrow’s wheel had cut, leading off toward the east.

  “Let us help you take your husband back there and bury him proper,” Cole suggested.

  “I wanted her to have him,” she said. “His Jezebel.”

  “Well, the dead deserve our respect,” Harve said. “Even if they strayed in life. Which one among us has not strayed along the path of life?”

  The woman looked up at Harve, her dirty cheeks now stained from her tears.

  “Are you a preacher?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. Long ways from it. Maybe your husband done wrong by you, but this ain’t no way to get even with him, hauling his carcass to a whore. Best let the good Lord sort out such matters. You’ve done about all you can for him.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “But I just couldn’t scrape out a hole and drop him in it. You know what they say about a woman scorned. Me, I am right proper feeling scorned. Now Judiah’s dead as last winter’s skunk cabbage and I’m left alone out here in this god-damn’ nowhere. All alone with naught but the wind to keep me company.” She looked at the dead man and gave him a bitter stare. “You did me wrong, Judiah, and I shall never forgive you for it. May your soul burn in the lake of fire!”

  They walked the mile or so back to the woman’s homestead—a soddy in the middle of nowhere. A milch cow was staked nearby with not even a chicken or a horse to keep it company.

  “If you’ll bury him, I’ll fix you men something to eat, if you don’t mind eating corndodgers and slab pork, that is.”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t mind eating anything,” Harve said. “You got a spade?”

  Teddy Green and John Henry Cole set to digging the grave, while Harve looked on, overseeing the burial. “Better go deep with him so the coyotes and wolves don’t come along and dig him up,” Harve said. “That poor woman probably couldn’t take seeing him make an appearance again. I’m sure she’s glad shet of him. Imagine how she’d be affected, was she to come out some morning and find him lying there, dug up by wolves, gnawed on and such.”

  “You want to dig this grave, you’re welcome to it,” Green said, a bit irritated at all the advice. “I’ve buried lots of men and I’ve never yet had to have anyone tell me how to do it.”

  Harve said: “I’d have a hard time digging a hole with having only this one arm. If I had two, I’d pitch in and help you boys. Someday I intend to go find my other arm, or what’s left of it. I reckon the coyotes and wolves et everything but my arm bone, but, still, it would be good to have it, so when they bury me, I’ll have all my parts. I’m a firm believer in departing this world with all that the good Lord gave you when you came into it.”

  “You think having all your parts in the hereafter is going to make a difference?” Green asked.

  “Well, it can’t hurt,” Harve returned. “Suppose I have to end up wrestling the devil to fight my way into the pearly gates?”

  When they finished planting the man, they washed up in a barrel of rainwater before going inside and eating the corndodgers and slab pork she’d prepared for them. They sat at a small handmade table in the dim light and ate ravenously while the woman sat and watched in stony silence. Finally they finished what had been set before them, then shoved back from the table, feeling as though they’d just dined at the finest establishment in seven states.

  “There’s some cider,” she said, pointing to a jug. “You boys might as well have at it. Judiah sure ain’t going to be missing it, and I’m a teetotaler and would never allow hard liquor to pass my lips. Whiskey steals a body’s brains. The raw frontier has stolen about everything from me there is to steal, and I’ll be hanged before I let my brains get stole, too.”

  Harve looked at Green and Cole and then, with a shrug, reached for the jug and pulled the cork with his teeth. “Well, let my brains get stole,” he sa
id, and took a long pull and smacked his lips.

  “You gents look poorly,” the woman said after they’d finished passing around the jug. “What happened to you and how come you’re out here without so much as a horse among you?”

  Cole explained to her about the storm.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I heard it howling a couple of nights ago after I hit Judiah with that shovel to get him off the cow. I thought for sure the wind was a sign from the Almighty and would blow all this dirt down on us and kill us. Maybe I’d be better off if it had. Least I wouldn’t have to live with the shame of a straying man.”

  “I guess there’d be nobody to know that but you,” Teddy Green said. “You’re the first person we’ve seen for nearly two days.”

  “It’s high lonesome, that’s a fact,” she said.

  “We were trying to get to that town, Hump Dance,” Green said. “Is that where you were headed with your husband?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The most sinful place in God’s creation. Full of syphilitic whores and evil spirits. I hope that storm went through there and blew it to Kingdom Come. It is a blight of humanity and maybe, if it got blowed away, some decent folks would come through and build a new town where a woman could walk the streets without being molested by tramps and liquored-up men, and a husband could go without getting drawn into the lair of harlots.”

  “Well, we best get started,” Green said. “We’ve a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Judiah’s clothes are in that trunk yonder. You gents are free to help yourself to any that will fit you. What need do I have of a dead man’s clothes?”

  They thanked her for the offer but none of them really had need of a dead man’s clothes, either. They headed for Hump Dance.