“I’m sorry,” he said. The Cloud boys’ mother nodded. Beneath her chair’s painted wooden legs lay her leather parfleche, an envelope-shaped satchel the size of an army pack. To stripe it, she’d used vermillion and red ochre and a purple dye concocted from sage buds. A yellow and orange orb painted with birch bark drops and mountain ash looked like an unhinged head over the bright bands. In her hands, she turned a ball of string, knotted and looped to mark the years and good hunts and hard snows and the births and deaths in her family. The string had wrapped around her wrists, but she continued to make loop after loop.
“I have them,” Elijah told her.
She looked up at him, and her face twisted.
Strawl spoke up. “The bodies.”
“You can see them if you like,” Elijah said.
“Here? You brought them?” the Clouds’ father asked. He wore a bolo tie stone at his throat and his eyes looked as if he’d just awakened.
“Yes,” Elijah said. “Me and him.”
“The old sheriff?” he asked. “He is helping you?”
Elijah nodded.
“He didn’t do this?”
“No,” Elijah said.
The old Indian lifted a pistol from under the blanket in his lap, then opened the cylinder and backed out the shells. He glanced at Strawl. “You hear things,” he said.
Strawl nodded.
“You have killed others,” he said. The gun was not for evening the score. The San Poil did not believe in revenge very much. For them, time only ran in one direction.
“I understand,” Strawl told him.
The man looked at Elijah a moment, blinking his rheumy eyes, then rose and, with his wife, walked to the wagon. Strawl let Elijah take them to the bodies. They stood, gazing upon their boys. The mother rearranged a strand of hair on one. From her dress pocket she withdrew a pair of rosaries and set one on each of their chests. The old man opened one hand of each and deposited a feather, and then they returned to their chairs and misery.
Strawl checked the harnesses on the horses while Elijah spoke to them. He joined Strawl at the wagon finally. “They asked us to take care of them. They don’t want the priest finding out and requiring a mass.”
Strawl drove the horses. The bodies were close to putrid.
“They bury them in the old days?”
Elijah shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything but Christian funerals.”
“Must be something to it for folks besides exercise digging, I guess, or they wouldn’t go to the trouble.”
“Ashes to ashes,” Elijah said.
“Weren’t you arguing for ritual a few hours ago?”
“I was wrong,” Elijah said.
They rode awhile in the quiet. The horses’ clops ticked at the shortening day. Strawl was thirsty, but the nearest creek was a mile yet and a hundred feet down a steep bank. He didn’t know if a drink merited the effort.
He tired suddenly. His legs ached and the place behind his eyes hurt. He handed the reins to Elijah and put his elbows on his knees and set his head into his knobby hands and dug at his temples with his fingers. He could hear himself breathing and his heart rocking in his chest. After a mile, he asked, “Them boys have their guts still?”
Elijah said nothing.
“You wrestled them and that wire. They weigh what a man weighs?”
“More or less,” Elijah said.
“Head is ten, twelve pounds tops. Guts twice or more. That’d be near fifty pounds, a third of their body. You’d notice.”
“Neck cut would have drained them lickety split,” Elijah said. “Just raise their legs and smoke a cigarette and they’d be dry as dust.”
“But blood weighs nothing next to flesh,” Strawl said. He climbed over the buckboard seat and pulled the covering from the boys. He tugged one shirt open, splitting the buttons, then the others. Finding them unmarked, he examined the neck wounds. Their heads were broken loose with an axe, the flesh hacked and peeled back. Strawl touched their skin. It was toughening, but gave to his fingers. He sifted their greasy hair for the wounds that killed them. They were blunt and deep, likely from the same axe head that had decapitated them.
“He was in a hurry,” Strawl said. “He prettied it up, but he didn’t gut or drain them and he cut with something other than a razor.”
Elijah nodded. “Makes sense. Had to do it between the poker game and breakfast.”
“Didn’t have to do it at all. He wanted to do it enough to chance it.”
By the time they reached the old town site, the day had cooled. Elijah steered them toward the abandoned cemetery.
“You are a lazy son of a bitch,” Strawl said.
Elijah grinned. He clucked Stick to an open grave. He took the boy nearest the tailgate by the feet and tumbled him in. The head unloosened and Elijah lifted it in his hands and looked into its face a moment.
“So long partner.” He tossed it into the grave, then stood, staring. “I only guessed which head went with which body. Only way to be sure is to bury them together.”
Strawl took the ankles of the second boy and Elijah the arms, and they swung his body into the grave. The head, his or not, lolled and the slit throat opened like a meaty, toothless mouth. Strawl and Elijah gazed upon the boys lying back-to-back like two halves finally rejoined.
“Family asked us to stop, coming out,” Elijah said.
Strawl didn’t reply.
“We’ll have to eat.”
“Suppose.”
“And get drunk, likely.”
“Do our manners know no bounds?” Strawl asked.
Elijah climbed aboard the wagon. “I remember when drinking was for pleasure,” he said. “Now it’s j ust another goddamned chore.”
ten
A dozen cars lined the road into the Cloud house. Elijah lifted a metal loop and dragged a barbwire gate open. They drove through a pasture, then opened a wooden fence to let themselves into the corral and set loose their horses. The animals rolled in the dirt while Elijah deposited an alfalfa bale taken from those that lined the far wall in a manger. Next to it, he added two buckets of oats. Strawl pumped the spigot outside, filling the trough. He and Elijah listened appreciatively to the horses feed and water.
From the house, talk hummed and laughter roughened by liquor. A few stone-faced girls in bright dresses traded a group of boys turns dangling from a rope on an elm branch. Strawl rolled a cigarette and smoked it.
“I’ll fetch you a plate of food,” Elijah said.
“You hiding me?” Strawl asked. “I’ve done nothing today but carry home their dead.”
“Not many whose memory ends at today,” Elijah said.
“I never harmed that family in all my years of work.”
“You exist. That’s damage enough.”
“The Great White Devil.”
“Devil doesn’t have a color,” Elijah said. “How do they know you aren’t behind all this murdering, their boys included?”
Strawl pawed the air.
Elijah stayed quiet awhile. “I just thought I’d save you the trouble of a crowd,” he said. “You’ve never been partial to them. No one wants to settle with you.”
“That so?”
“You are an IOU nobody can redeem.”
“You cashed me out pretty good,” Strawl said.
Elijah sat on his haunches and chewed a grass stalk flat. Strawl finished his cigarette. “ I’d have a plate,” he said finally.
Elijah nodded and Strawl watched him go. In the barn’s loft, Strawl constructed a pallet from loose straw and put out his heavy blanket. He brought the saddle from the wagon up the ladder to pillow his head. He wished he’d thought to add a book to his poke, but his bags held only the agency files and he had neither the patience nor light left for that kind of study.
In the late afternoon heat, the crowd milled at the house’s near end on a wraparound porch. On a mound in the yard, Cloud stood like a doleful mustang examining his brood. He doffed a genuine Stetson. He’d c
ombed his straight black hair to one side with his hand, though it retained the shape of the hat. His starched canvas slacks would have held their crease in a tornado, and his turquoise shirt buttons matched the stone cinching his bolo tie.
“I want to tell a story,” he said. Slowly those around him quieted. “Seems we were living in the old place on Desautel. A bad wind blew the shingles off the roof, so I sent those two boys up with tar paper to keep the rain out. The roof was steep and they were worried to fall. So they got two lengths from my good hemp rope and tied one end to their belt loops and the opposite to the truck bumper. Then I went to town for shingles.”
Someone scuffed his feet in the hard dirt. Two others looked down at their boots.
“They didn’t hear the motor go, so the first they knew, they were sliding over the top and down the other side. One fell into an old elm and the other onto the roses.
“When I went back, both were only about half there. One, I don’t remember which, cried, ‘Don’t wake me, I’m dreaming I am a bird.’”
Cloud turned his hat in his knobby hands. He lit a cigarette. “Seemed funny to me,” he said finally.
The crowd said nothing until Elijah, who could not purposely abide anyone’s embarrassment, shouted, “Well, we were just waiting to hear if the house was one story or two.”
The gathering rollicked with laughter, and one of the boys’ sisters rose and hugged her father, and his story was rescued as simply as that.
An hour later, Elijah delivered Strawl a plate filled with venison and potatoes and turnips and wild onions, a piece of fried bread atop it all, along with a pitcher of cold tea.
“Thank them,” Strawl said.
“I have,” he said.
“For me,” Strawl said.
“All right,” Elijah told him.
He returned to the family, and Strawl ate in the hayloft. Through the open hay door, he watched them pick over their plates stoically, like ants culling their mound. Inside the house, the tables were loaded with casseroles and plates of meat and vegetables. The children ate on the wide windowsills or short parlor tables and the mothers on the floor next to them, while the men bent over porch rails or sat three abreast on the steps. A door shut and, in the backyard, Strawl saw the boys’ parents exiting the house. They were silhouetted in the ebbing light, pointed toward the big river and setting sun. They didn’t touch, but to Strawl they appeared more attached than if they were stitched together. She bent and lifted a flat board and he turned to face her. She clouted him on the shoulder with the board awkwardly. He bent his legs to maintain his balance. She struck him once more, on the other side, then alternated again. His silhouette shuddered then stilled after each blow, the only sound her labored breath and the board upon his flesh. She went on until she was too tired to lift the wood. He took it from her and placed it next to the back steps, where, Strawl recalled, she had found it. Their behavior had the emotionless trappings of habit and the conviction of a ritual not predicated by the deaths of their sons, but confirming the event nonetheless.
Strawl finished his meal and walked to a mound in the pasture to watch the sun set. He saw Marvin and Inez among the mourners by their voices, as the twilight blanketed the house and its visitors in ashy shadows. Marvin sang a song and the rest put their drinks down until he had finished. Strawl watched a trio of shadows separate from the main group and hurry toward the barn. He lost them in a copse of aspen lining a creek between him and the house. One was Elijah.
Strawl heard two women singing in much the same way Marvin had.
I will never forget you, my people.
I have carved you in the palm of my hand.
I will never forget you, my people.
I will not leave you orphaned.
I will never forget my own.
Does a mother forget her baby?
The child in her womb?
Yet, even if these forget,
I will never forget my own.
Strawl heard Elijah’s voice, still in the trees, as the song faded.
“This is our blood, shed for thee,” he said. Two female voices repeated the words, then he heard them pause—to drink whiskey, Strawl decided after hearing the women cough.
Elijah announced, “This is our body, broken for thee.” Strawl found them on the creek bank. Each pulled at a piece of bread and ate. Their heads bowed as if in prayer. Elijah rose before the women. He stood over them and appeared to bless each with a cross-like gesture. They gazed up at him like animals waiting to be fed. Elijah tugged off his shirt and unbuckled his belt and the women helped each other with their dresses. The sun set on the coulee’s lip. A brilliant yellow light lay upon the rock, and the figures were for a moment as precise as drawings. One lay in the cool grass below the trees and Elijah joined her. The woman whined and yipped like a coyote until, finally, Elijah roared as if he were his own peculiar breed of animal; then they stopped and after ten minutes of lying quietly in the grass, the women traded places and Elijah and the other repeated the act and the sounds. After, they rested once more, until the women stirred and dressed Elijah and then themselves. Elijah let them lead him back to the funeral party, as quietly as they had come.
In the stock corral, Strawl rinsed his plate and pitcher under the pump. The dusk had deepened, when he returned to his pallet. He lay and tried to think of nothing. Evenings when they were first married, Dot’s mother used to read to him from her Shakespeare volume. Lear was his favorite. He enjoyed Edmund, so thoroughly convinced by a philosophy that he behaved as thought itself, hurtling into other people as if they, too, were simply notions and murder just a rhetorical flourish. She favored Hamlet. The play disturbed Strawl. Revenge could not have been a motive for such a man. It was simple-minded and bloody and useless against the citadel of time. The man had climbed past the primitive drum of anger but danced to the tune it called anyway.
Strawl regretted the barn roof and beams over him. He’d barter cold against a roof anytime after the snow backed off. Under an open sky, sleep could take a person without his knowing it, but a roof put you straight up against the notion. As a child he’d dreaded his father’s last breath upon the lantern. Strawl had woken each morning crying until he was nearly seven, and, though his parents had figured him just a crabby riser, his sobs had been more relief at navigating the night alone. Though his wailing had ended long ago, closing his eyes and abandoning himself to himself still demanded more effort than he was comfortable with.
Elijah woke him past midnight.
“Bless me father for I have sinned.”
Strawl blinked his eyes.
“I seen you watching,” Elijah said.
The boy handed Strawl a bottle of grape soda. Strawl drank from it. “ Isn’t much of a transgression,” he said.
“It was the boys’ wives,” Elijah said.
“That is a dicier proposition.”
“They wanted me to bring their men back. It was all I knew of to do.”
Strawl lay back. He was unwilling to press the boy further. He saw no profit in it.
“I think men have done worse for poorer reasons,” Strawl told him.
Elijah lay down in the hay across from Strawl. Soon his breathing turned regular and slow and he was asleep. Strawl sipped the last of the soda and wished he could rise and piss all the venom he possessed into the glass bottle, then replace the cap and bury it someplace he might forget in a day or a month or a year.
Strawl rose and washed his face at the pump. The musty hay filled his nose, and the dew burning off the spring wheat added a doughy dampness. He smelled fresh coffee and could not keep himself from wandering toward the aroma. Cloud sat on the steps smoking from a corncob pipe. He nodded, then invited Strawl to join him. Strawl drew his tobacco from his pocket and started a cigarette. The Cloud woman brought her husband coffee, and upon seeing Strawl, returned with a second cup. Strawl thanked her. He sipped the coffee. It was better than he had hoped, with chicory and a thimble of whiskey enhancing it.
>
“I thank you for allowing me to bunk in the barn.”
Cloud nodded. He sipped at his coffee. His shirt was unbuttoned, and a bruise yellowed his chest.
“I’d like to find who did this to your sons,” Strawl told him.
“I thought you would arrest my sons.”
“They hadn’t done anything,” Strawl said.
The old man put a finger over the pipe bowl and drew hard until the ash in it smoked.
“Anyhow, I’m not in the arresting business, anymore. The government is just paying me to find the one doing this killing.”
“Killing has not been unusual here,” Cloud said. “It is not unlike before, so much.”
“It’s how the killings occur,” Strawl said. “That’s what scares them. More than Indians, even.”
Cloud smoked. “We scare no one.”
Strawl filled his cigarette papers with tobacco, then licked one edge, then rolled it over the other. Cloud struck a match, and Strawl bent toward him and lit his cigarette. He decided to forego technique.
“Your boys know the others that have been killed?”
Cloud said, “The young ones all know each other.”
“You have seen those others?” Strawl asked.
“They visited. They slept in the barn, like you.”
“All of them?”
“Were there four?”
Strawl nodded.
“They all have been here. The first one baled the last of the fall hay. Another cut wood for meals. He stayed a month. The last two, they were wild. Nowhere was home for them.”
“How are they the same? Like your boys?” Strawl asked him.
“They are dead,” Cloud said.
Strawl sipped his coffee and smoked. Cloud did the same. A few early risers joined them on the porch. They stretched and yawned and watched the sun pour over the Okanogans.
“Those other boys. They Nez Perce?” Strawl put his finger to his nose.
“I think yes,” Cloud said. “Though not from Joseph’s band. Maybe Whitebird’s.”
Strawl thanked the man. They finished their smoke in silence, and when the Cloud woman took his empty cup and returned with it freshened a moment later, he was happy to accept the coffee and remain where he was.
Lonesome Animals Page 11
