by Jonis Agee
J.B. was lying on his side, eyes fixed on a half-buried Indian girl who somehow looked like a fresher kill than the man. “What the hell, J.B.,” Higgs swore as he knelt, touched the edge of the wound that had torn a large hole from chest to back. On the face of his employer and friend he saw both shock and sadness.
“Oh damn it,” Higgs whispered and reached to rest his fingers on the cold forehead of the man he’d grown to love as a son over the years. This would kill Vera, who’d almost adopted the father and his young son as soon as she started working here. She bossed J.B. and the boy as if they were her own.
“Frank.” Larabee held out an empty brass shell casing that glinted dully in the moonlight.
Irish Jim, bearing a torch of creosote-soaked cattails, moved his horse closer and peered down. “We all carry that one.”
“Got another one over here,” Willie Munday said from the outer edge of darkness. “J.B.’s horse just wandered in, too. Must’ve heard us.”
Higgs brushed his fingers over Bennett’s eyes to close the lids, but it’d been too long. They were stiff, unmoving. He looked at the men gathered around the small circle of light at the center of which lay a man. They’d all seen death aplenty, a couple of the old-timers had fought in the War Between the States, and Larabee back from that war with Spain, but this was different. Bennett was boss. Well-liked. The kind of man to ride the river with. His sons, Cullen and Hayward, now that was another matter. Higgs looked at the men, and then nodded toward the body. “Willie, get down and help Jim pick him up, lay him over my saddle.”
It was difficult to lift a body the size of J.B. onto a horse. Higgs and Larabee stepped forward to help, but even with four men it was a struggle. They tied him to the saddle, and the horse danced and chomped nervously. It seemed for a moment that Bennett himself refused to leave the land. Higgs peered into the blackness beyond the wavering pool of light from the torch Willie had jammed into the ground. He sorted the sounds of curious, thirsty cattle gathered to watch the men—stamping hooves, grunting as one body pushed against another—and heard no telltale clink of metal spurs or jingle of bit, no flash of moonlight on rifle action or pistol barrel. Whoever did this was long gone.
“What about the girl?” Larabee asked.
“Hell.” Higgs swung back to the grave. “Cover that up.”
Larabee looked at the foreman, startled, then tipped his head and started kicking sand over the girl’s body. Irish Jim took a folding shovel from his saddle and set to work, too, but the sand wouldn’t stick. They no sooner had the body almost covered than it seemed to shift and slide off. Before long the two men stepped back, clearly spooked, their eyes on Higgs, who lifted his hat, ran his hand through his hair, and resettled the hat, tugging it more firmly in place.
“Maybe we should fetch her back to the ranch,” Irish Jim said.
Higgs shook his head. There’d been trouble again with the Sioux lately. It was only ten years since Wounded Knee, and the Indians were still pissed about that mess. No good would come from having a dead Indian girl on Bennett land. Damn it, if J.B. were alive, he’d know what to do. But he wasn’t, and Higgs could only face one thing at a time.
“Leave her,” he said, ignoring the quick exchange of looks between Larabee and Irish Jim.
“Better come see this, boss,” Willie Munday called from the darkness. They followed his voice to the small pool of light from another hastily constructed torch.
As he sank knee-deep in the sand, Higgs cursed.
Willie Munday knelt beside a body dressed in rags, peering into the face. “I know him. Name’s Graver, Ryland Graver. Farmer with a bunch of kids and a missus. J.B. sent me over there with a beef last fall. Heard they busted out.” Willie raised his head and looked at Higgs. “Think he did this?”
Higgs noted the dead horse beside Graver and shrugged.
“He has J.B.’s rifle,” Larabee offered. “And that’s Red’s bridle tied to his nag’s. I think he got caught trying to steal Red and J.B. and him fought and—”
Higgs held up his hand as the man on the ground groaned, his eyes fluttering open. His lips moved and Willie leaned down to hear, and then sat back on his heels.
“He wants some water.”
The men watched Higgs deliberate and then slowly nod. If he was the killer, they’d want to hang him back at the ranch, where they could use the cottonwood trees J.B.’s wife favored when they’d built the house.
Once the man drank enough, he tried to sit, but Irish Jim held him down and bound his wounded shoulder. Graver passed out again and the men lifted and shoved him onto the horse before Irish Jim got up behind to hold him. There was something unnatural about leaving the Indian girl unburied behind them, and the four men stole glances over their shoulders as the procession moved into the darkness toward the ranch.
“Frank?” Willie Munday, their newest cowboy, rode up beside Higgs and leaned over in a whisper. “Looked around, noticed another set of tracks out there. Small-footed horse and a man in moccasins.”
Higgs searched the man’s face. “Keep this quiet. Soon as we take care of J.B. and this Graver fella, you, me, and Larabee’ll come out here and God willing find something.” Although he didn’t know much about Munday, Higgs thought he could trust him. Man did his work. Wasn’t hard on the horses. Good tracker. Kept his mouth shut, not like Irish Jim or a couple of others who wore a man down with their constant yapping.
It was eight miles back to the ranch but it seemed a thousand to the men flanking the foreman’s horse, burdened with its double load. The sky had dropped into the darkness of extinguishing stars when they finally entered the ranch yard. Tired horses shuffled and sighed as they made their way to the barn. Jim and Willie stepped down with Higgs and Larabee outside the main house and unlashed the body, and while Willie held the gate, J.B. was borne up the brick path. They hesitated at the door. Higgs reached to rap his knuckles, and then realized the person who granted permission to enter was dead in their hands. He turned the knob and pushed it open. The room was dark. The boy asleep upstairs, Higgs’s wife, Vera, likewise asleep in the foreman’s house, some four hundred yards away.
“Wait.” Higgs turned and felt his way through the dark to a kerosene lamp on the small table between the sofa and reading chair, found the sulfurs beside the lamp, and lit the wick. As soon as the gold glow pushed back the shadows, Higgs gestured, and the men brought the body to the brown-speckled cowhide sofa and carefully lowered it. Later the hide would bear the dark smudge of Bennett’s blood, but it never occurred to anyone to get rid of it.
The men stood looking around the room, hats in hands, clearly uncomfortable to be in their boss’s good parlor and in the presence of his body.
“Go on. Irish Jim, you take care of Graver’s wound, but make sure you tie him to the bunk. Late call tomorrow; get some sleep.” Higgs grimaced, laid his hat on the table beside the lamp, and promptly picked it up again. Larabee let the others pass, then looked over his shoulder at Higgs, who nodded.
At first, Higgs thought about going upstairs and waking Hayward with the news, but he thought better of it. You always knew bad news soon enough. Best to sleep while a body could. He glanced at the dead man, startled by the fact that the eyes had closed, as if he could finally be at peace now that he was home.
“Okay.” Higgs breathed deep and sat in the big, overstuffed chair upholstered with a burgundy plush that had worn thin and dark on the arms and back where J.B.’s head had rested for years. The wife’s doing. Something called “Turkish Victorian,” all done up with tassels and fringe the dogs and boy had taken turns pulling off until the furniture sat like aging relatives, fat and old-fashioned, beside the dainty mahogany table with claw-and-ball feet and carved foliage up the legs. An heirloom from her family, J.B. had noted with a touch of humor one night. That, and the whatnot corner thingy that held Hayward’s Indian relics and the silver belt buckle he’d won riding goats at the ranch rodeo when he was ten.
Higgs glanced back at th
e body, examined it more closely in the light now that he was alone. The chest wound was ugly. They were always ugly. He pulled up the lace antimacassar pinned to the chair arm, leaned over, and placed it across the wound. “Look like a damn preacher now,” he said. “Sorry, J.B., Jesus,” he hastily amended, his eyes filled.
“That’s enough,” Higgs whispered as the wet on his grizzled cheeks dripped down to darken the collar of his flannel shirt. “Sorry.” He looked at his scarred hands, the permanently swollen knuckles, the index finger he couldn’t straighten, beset with a trembling that wouldn’t stop as it made its way up his arms, into his chest, his shoulders, and down his legs until he felt like he was about to shake into pieces, but still he held the great sobs within, releasing only the faint hissing sound of boiling water as he wept.
It was almost seven the next morning when the door opened and shut, waking Higgs to his wife’s light tread. She looked straight toward the kitchen, and thus missed the figure of her husband next to the body of their employer.
Higgs considered calling her, but she was already banging pots, starting the coffee, firing up the woodstove, humming softly, with the occasional chiding word for her own mistakes. Soon there was beef frying, biscuits rolled, and eggs whipped. She’d stop cooking once she heard. He knew she would. So he kept quiet. The men needed to eat. First and foremost, you fed stock and men.
The parlor was much the same as it had always been, Bennett being a simple man and his wife, while she’d lived there, not a fussy woman. There was lace on all the chairs and it hung in the windows—though it didn’t do a damn thing to keep out the cold. Rather than newspaper and catalogue pages covering the walls for warmth as in the bunkhouse, the parlor walls were papered with garden flowers and framed pictures of sour-looking people from her family out East. Chicago, was it? Cleveland? Higgs couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she taken her pictures with her, he wondered. And the kerosene lamp—he looked over, it had long since burned out—with the big pink cabbage roses on the two globes. He understood about the furniture—except maybe the little table between the two hulking pieces. The table’s rich, dark finish glowed from the beeswax Vera rubbed into the wood.
But the rest of the stuff—even the piano covered with that tasseled scarf—why hadn’t she shipped it home? Unless she planned on coming back or came from a place with things twice this good. He glanced at Bennett. That was probably it. It was sixteen years ago when that bad spell of luck came along and they damn near lost the place the first time. Cattle got screwworm, blackleg, scours, and every other damn thing they could think of, horses colicked or broke legs, and it stopped raining. Grass didn’t green in spring. They were bleeding money and stock, J.B. told him. But in the middle of it Bennett and his wife went off for a month, then came home, a load of furniture and junk in a wagon behind theirs. Within a couple of months they were buying stock to replace what they’d lost and eating store-bought food when the garden died. The younger son was born six months later.
As other spreads went under, Bennett’s thrived, with enough money to buy surrounding land at rock-bottom prices. It didn’t take a schoolteacher to figure out the arithmetic. Even after the past years of drought proved almost fatal for the ranch, these days any number of men nursed a healthy dose of envy and dislike for Bennett. What would happen to Hayward now? At fifteen he still acted the boy, no hand at all with the stock and a joke to the men. Damn Bennett for getting himself kilt. Higgs sought the end of his mustache and brought it to the corner of his mouth to chew, a habit he’d developed of late since he gave up whiskey and tobacco for his wife.
He thought again of the boy asleep upstairs. He sighed and rose, straightened stiffly and held the small of his back until the grabbing pain reluctantly released. Best get this done before the men came up for breakfast.
Opening the bedroom door slowly didn’t stop the hinges from squealing. Higgs froze in the hallway, waited to see if the boy would say something. Surely he was awake now, but when he pushed the door open the rest of the way and looked inside, the room and bed were empty in the dusty light. The lace window curtains were flung up over the rod, and the window gaped. A brown moth, stranded in the rising sun, fluttered weakly and tried to climb the inch from the frame to the sill. Upon closer inspection, Higgs realized the bed hadn’t been slept in, although a body had at some recent time dented the blankets and pillow. The thought wormed into him that maybe he should be worried.
It was a boy’s room to the extent that it contained the dusty trophies of hunting trips—antlers, brushes of rabbit, squirrel, fox, and deer, tail feathers of pheasant and turkey, and the two-foot span of an eagle’s wing nailed to the wall. Higgs remembered that one—the boy shot the huge bird accidentally, he said. Bennett made him nail the wing to the wall over his bed so he had to endure the sweet rot as it slowly decayed to teach him a lesson, and Hayward never said a word. He kept the window open for the next year, even when it was thirty below zero last winter, so cold your snot froze your nose shut and stung your eyes, then froze the tears to your lashes. Maybe the boy was more like his father than either imagined.
His eye was drawn to the revolver on the top of the big oak wardrobe in the corner. What the hell—the boy wasn’t supposed to use handguns. Higgs was in midstride when a door slammed shut downstairs followed by hurried boots on the stairs. He slid into the hallway, just in time to face Hayward.
“What—” The boy drew up short and stepped back, his raw-boned face, a younger version of his father’s, darkened.
Higgs took in the jacket and pants stuck with burrs and bits of grass, the dirt caked on elbows and knees. Was that guilt on his face? Or merely surprise? The boy had inherited his mother’s eyes, small, quick, capable of hiding things in their flat stare.
“Where you been, boy?” Higgs hadn’t meant to question him, and it came out like the boy’s father would have said it.
Hayward shrugged, glanced at his dirt-rimed nails, and spread his right hand and rubbed the back as if it ached. The knuckles were raw. He’d been in a fight.
“Fighting?” Higgs raised his eyebrows. “Your pa know you’ve been—” Then he remembered.
“He don’t care.” The boy dropped his hands to his sides and straightened his shoulders as if his father watched. “What’s it to you?” His voice had all the harshness of the young trying to sound brave in front of a man who knew what his tone really meant. Higgs remembered being that age. He stepped back and held up his hands in deference.
“Hayward, son.” His voice shook and the boy noticed. His head jerked up and his eyes darted past Higgs, then swept into his room.
“Your pa’s dead.” Not once through the long hours of searching for, then finding, Bennett, then carrying him back and sitting with him in the parlor, had Frank Higgs felt the finality of those words. Now it was true. Now he’d told someone to whom it mattered. It was taken away, the fact, and made over, refashioned, then it would be remade, over again, until the J.B. he knew was in little pieces, vanished as surely as this afternoon when they would place him in the ground he had fought and loved and toiled for. This thought came and went in the seconds that it took the boy in front of him to blink, shrug, shake his hands at his sides, and then blink again.
“He’s gone, son, J.B.’s gone.” Higgs felt a cleaver sever the thought from the rest of his mind and patch it onto the side of his heart, where the weight made it hard to catch his breath.
“Where is he—where’s my pa, Higgs, where is he?” The boy’s voice rose into an anguished cry as he turned and rushed downstairs, stumbled, almost fell in the middle, caught himself with the railing he rode in a kind of free fall until the bottom, where he regained his feet, then bent in the middle, heaving bile and snot and tears while Higgs watched from the last step.
“He’s on the sofa there.” The man tried to steady his voice, and Vera charged in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was.
“Oh my Lord,” Vera moaned. “Oh my sweet Jesus.” She reached for the b
oy, forced his head into the soft padding of her shoulder and bosom. Together they sank to the floor, Vera’s one arm cradling the boy, the other clasping J.B.’s jacket sleeve, stiff with the shawl of dried blood.
There was a knock on the door, the handle rattled, and Larabee poked his head inside. “Boss?”
Higgs glanced at his wife’s stricken face and went to the door, opened it enough to slide outside and shut it. The men gathered on the porch and brick walk, hats in hands, faces somber.
CHAPTER FOUR
Following a dreary breakfast no one could stomach, Vera cleared the long table in the kitchen, and Willie, Larabee, Jim, and Higgs deposited Bennett’s body on the bare boards. The three hands took one last look at their boss, bowed their heads, and left. Before Vera could do more than sniff away the tears and fill the dishpan with soapy water to bathe the naked body, Higgs took the washrag from her hand and sent her to find proper clothing to dress him for the burial. As he worked his way from the feet up the legs, Higgs imagined he was washing down a newborn calf or colt, rather than this other thing, but when he reached the genitals, shrunken, negligible, he paused, questioning the whole purpose. No wonder women did this job—what man could stand to see his kind so utterly useless, destroyed, and not despair?
“Jesus, J.B.,” he murmured, “I mean, what the hell happened to you?” The body Higgs had always known as powerful, as heavily muscled as that big red horse he rode, looked almost frail without clothing, drained, without purpose. It didn’t look capable of any of the feats of strength and will for which J.B. was known. Was it will, then, that first fled for the dead? Then purpose and desire. The body was remarkably without yearning now.