She felt her arm rise. Then, as the old man released his grip, the chanting ceased and the room snapped into focus. Her arm, still tingling but dead now to her conscious mind, grew rigid. She watched, powerless, as the arm that was hers and yet no longer hers fell to the bed and rotated as by some force unseen to ten on the clockface, her finger stiff and pointing.
She heard herself scream. She heard, as through a heavy curtain, the voices of the men in conversation. As if debating the meaning of what they had seen. Of what it foretold.
Her arm ached. She tried again to bend it, and this time it bent.
The men regarded her with detachment. There were rapid footsteps on the stairs.
What all happened? she asked, her voice a whisper.
The parson touched a hand to her forehead. My friends wished to know the whereabouts of their people who went missing in the Garden of the Gods. They asked the great spirit to enter you, that you might show them the way.
Lottie felt sweat beading on her forehead, and a sudden wave of nausea, just as Mike burst forth from the landing. She stopped in the doorway and clapped a hand to her mouth, strangling a cry.
Lottie, still oddly quiescent, followed her eyes. To the bed. To the blankets below the rise of her belly. And only by sitting upright could she see the darkly crimson wellspring as it pooled between her thighs.
PART THREE
Chapter Nine
HARD TWISTED
BY MR. HARTWELL: Miss Garrett, just so we’re clear on this, you never saw Mr. Palmer kill the alleged deceased, is that correct?
A: You mean my daddy?
Q: That’s precisely whom I mean.
A: Then that’s true.
Q: Or take an ax to him?
A: No, sir.
Q: And you never saw this skeleton that the state claims to be the remains of the alleged deceased until... when was it? Last week?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And that was with Mr. Pharr and Sheriff Newton both present?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And which of them told you that the skeleton belonged to your father?
BY MR. PHARR: Objection.
BY MR. HARTWELL: I’ll rephrase. When Mr. Pharr first took you to see the skeleton, tell the gentlemen of the jury exactly what it was he said you were going to go look at.
She called out in darkness, and after a long while the door opened and a quadrate beam of bright light climbed the wall where she lay. Within it, the black and graven silhouette of a woman. Then all was dark again.
When next she awoke, it was daylight. The door to the hallway was open and she heard the distant tapping of a typewriter. Her head was throbbing. She tried to sit up but could not, and she vaguely apprehended through an ethylene fog that her wrists were bound to the bedrails.
On her third awakening she found herself unbound and attended by a woman of middle years. The woman was seated, her hair severe and tightly pinned. She leaned and touched a hand to Lottie’s cheek.
How are you feeling, dearie?
Lottie’s tongue was thick.
I’ll bet you’d like some water, the woman said, rising and crossing to the door. Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.
The room was sparsely furnished. Other than the chair just vacated, there was a small table on caster wheels, and a painted radiator beside it. A porcelain pan resting on the table. The room’s lone window was small and without curtains, and she could see from the sunlight on the worn linoleum that the window glass was inlaid with a fine wire mesh.
The nurse returned with a tray. She set it on the table and carried to the bedside a drinking glass with a straw.
Here. Try some of this.
Lottie tried to sit, but her pain was hot and stabbing, and in its radiant clarity she remembered that she’d been pregnant, at the same moment she realized that she no longer was.
On the third day of her convalescence, the doctor appeared. He was a precise man with a trimmed mustache and steelrimmed spectacles. He set his calfskin bag on the table, and the sight of it, its familiar shape, was to her as a millstone tossed to a drowning woman.
Where’s my baby? They keep sayin I got to wait for the doctor.
The doctor shot a cuff to expose a wristwatch. He sat.
Mrs. Palmer, he began, with a demeanor whose gravity took the last of her breath. Please try to relax. You’ve had a very difficult time. You’ve lost a great deal of blood, and it’s only through God’s healing grace that you’re with us still.
The doctor rested his hand on hers where she held it balled against her thigh. His touch was cold and light, like a settling moth. Like the shadow of the angel of death she knew him to be.
Your baby was born alive, but prematurely. I’m afraid it’s very small and very, very weak. The odds of its survival are almost nil. I’m terribly sorry.
Where’s my baby? I want to see my baby!
The doctor pressed her down by the shoulder, and the sunlight from the window toggled his spectacles. Clear. White. Clear again.
I’m afraid that’s not advisable. Or even possible.
I got a right to see my baby! I got a right!
The doctor stood. Again he checked his watch.
Just tell me, please. Is it a boy or a girl?
The doctor crossed to the table and lifted his valise.
A boy or a girl, damn you!
He turned to regard her for a final time. I’m sorry, he said again.
Two days after the doctor’s visit, Lottie was encouraged to walk. Made to walk, in fact, though bent and shuffling with the nurse soothing and steadfast at her elbow. Once, twice, down the long hallway to the picture window with the view of Blue Mountain, the new snow white on the alluvial cedars like confectioners’ sugar.
The next day she was called to the telephone, where Mike’s words were hollow and distant, as though coming to her through a long stovepipe.
Johnny Rae?
Where are you?
We’re in Flagstaff, honey. We came down for New Year’s, but we’re heading home to night.
How was Christmas?
Christmas was fine. We all missed you. We saved you some cake, and there’s still a gift under the tree with your name on it. Johnny Rae? Are you there?
I’m here.
Listen, honey, I can’t talk for very long. Harry and I were thinking, maybe you’d like to stay with us for a while. Until spring, maybe. Or longer. It’s really up to you. What do you think about that?
Silence.
The nurse said we could come up next week and take you home. To the trading post. Maybe on Tuesday. How does that sound? Would you like that?
Yes, ma’am.
Mike.
Ma’am?
Call me Mike, honey. Or Leone.
All right.
All right then. Are they taking good care of you?
Yes, ma’am.
Is there anything you’d like us to bring?
I don’t know. Maybe some clothes. I’m not sure what they done with my clothes.
All right then. We have to run now. Harry sends his best. And, Johnny Rae?
Yes, Mike?
I’m so sorry about the baby.
On the day next following, Lottie was asked by the nurse to sit with another patient, an elderly man who’d fallen from his roof while shoveling snow. He’d been found by neighbors the next morning, frostbitten and delirious.
Man and girl sat opposite one another on hard wooden chairs. The man wore flannel pajamas and a tattered robe of no determinate color. His nose was purple and bulbous, and he talked to Lottie in a gravel voice of the crossing at Hole in the Rock, and of Indian wars and range wars, and of the founding of Bluff City. He talked to her of horses he had owned, and dogs, and of wives and children born and buried, and he moved his tokens on the checkerboard with stubbed and bandaged fingers.
Of the baby, nothing more was said. Lottie knew it was a boy, and she knew from her conversation with Mike, and from the faces of the Mormon women, that he
r baby boy had died. Just as she knew from the old man at his checkerboard that death and childbirth were, in that cold and windswept Zion, but two faces of a coin.
Two days later, as Lottie stood at her window watching the mallards circle over the bare cottonwoods, she heard a familiar voice downstairs.
She left her room on stocking feet and crossed the cold linoleum to where she could see him leaning unsteadily, hat in hand, over the woman at the desk. And as she appeared above him, silent at the balustrade, he stopped in midsentence and turned and lifted his face.
He reeked of firesmoke, and of bourbon whiskey. They rode together in Harrison Oliver’s Model A Ford, in a silence as frozen as the black macadam, and when the pavement ended, Palmer reached for the glove box and opened it and removed a stoppered bottle. He offered it to her, and when she did not respond, he bit the cork and tilted his head to drink.
You’re skinny as a bedslat, he told her. I guess there’s that at least.
She watched the frosted plain and the white and twisted cedars, and in the bleary door glass she watched Palmer as he drove.
The winter had aged him. His skin was raw and mottled and there were crow’s-feet at his eyes and slack now in the line of his jaw. His eyes were yellowed, and bloodshot, and he had neither shaved nor bathed.
I got a surprise, he told her.
What surprise?
He grinned drunkenly. The sheep are fine, thank you, in case you was wonderin. Oh, and we got us a new horse. Only that ain’t the surprise.
What horse?
He drank again and set the bottle between his legs. Let’s just say a stray showed up one day, all cold and hungry-like, so I give him a good home. I been breakin him to the stock. He ought to be just about right for you in a couple weeks. And guess what? He’s a pinto!
He cackled crazily as he turned to regard her. Ah, you ain’t foolin me. I know you always wanted a pinto.
The snow outside Blanding was mostly gone, and what little remained had been plowed from the red-clay roadway into low drifts that appeared as the bloodied dressings of some ghastly wound laid open. Palmer leaned forward and wiped the fog from the windscreen with his shirtsleeve.
I want you to tell me somethin, she said, breaking their long silence. The truth. I want you to tell me what really happened to them Indian herders.
What?
Them two Indians was working for Harry.
I already told you. I run ’em off with the gun. Why?
Cuz they got friends down at Goulding’s was askin after ’em, that’s why.
Askin what?
Askin did I know where they’d gone to.
Christ, I already told you. They just moved on. Or maybe they fell into the goddamn river. How the hell should I know?
They arrived in John’s Canyon after dark. They parked the car by the line shack, and Palmer bade her wait as he disappeared into the frozen night. After a while returned with a lantern.
The sky outside was starless. He took her arm and led her to his old excavation, where a humped mound now rose in the yellow lamplight like some ancient tumulus. He lifted the lantern to reveal a low stone facade framing a small crate-plank door.
Surprise! he told her.
Lottie crawled forth into the bitter dawn with her blankets still around her. She stood, blinking and shivering. Frost was on the car and on the roof of the line shack, and a vast and glistening sea of frost blanketed the canyon floor, broken only by the smoking hulks of the cattle.
From the lee of the shack rose a wisp of woodsmoke, and she heard after a moment the thin and tinny melody of a harmonica.
She walked toward the sound, moving quietly, and upon rounding the corner saw the broad back of Jake Shumway, the old sheriff’s grandson. He sat before the cookfire with his sheepskin collar raised, his head wreathed in semaphores of breath frost as he played a song of delicate beauty that contrasted starkly with his brute size and with his bleak and empty theater.
She listened for a long time. Until, although she’d made no sound, the playing stopped abruptly and the boy stood as though bitten and turned to face her in blank and wordless wonder.
He removed his hat.
The ground was black and trampled where the sheep stood bleating near the canyon narrows, and although their winter fleece was thick, she could see that the animals were thin, and listless, and that many of the yearling lambs were gone.
Ain’t there any better forage than this? she asked Palmer, who sat the new pinto horse with the new JP brand, smoking and watching the flock.
Yeah, he said. Right through that pass yonder.
How long have they been out here?
Palmer took a final drag and flicked the glowing butt, startling the horse. They brung the car on Friday. That makes it four days.
You reckon they’ll be goin anytime soon?
He fished his makings from his shirtfront.
They been tradin off the watch. The old man stays a few days, then Harrison, then the kid. Sometimes they overlap. They was all gone for Christmas, but now they’re back at it. He chuckled mirthlessly. I’m startin to think maybe they don’t trust me.
Lottie slacked the reins and rose from the seat of the old buckboard wagon and gathered the blankets to her chin. These sheep need water, Clint. They need food.
You think you’re tellin me somethin I don’t know? The horse backed at the rise in his voice. You think I got stupid while you was off layin in a warm bed havin breakfast brought to you on a tray?
He sawed the horse and kicked it, hazing the sheep as he went.
When Lottie woke the next morning, the Oliver car was gone. She walked behind the line shack to where the cattlemen’s firepit lay black and cold, and she shielded her eyes to count the horses moving loose among the beeves.
As she circled back to the dugout, a shape draped on the shack’s door handle stopped her. It was, she realized, a coat. A heavy, sheepskin coat.
By the time Palmer crawled from the dugout disheveled and blinking like some wild thing undenned, Lottie had already groomed their horses and built a fire and started the coffee. Now she stood looking westward, her shadow long before her on the hard and frozen ground.
What’d you do, skin a bear?
She was all but lost inside the coat, which hung from her shoulders and sheathed her hands and almost trailed the ground.
They’re gone.
He looked to the shack, then he looked to the girl.
What’s the matter? You get your heart broke?
What?
Don’t give me what. He flapped his arms over the fire. I was born of a night, but it wasn’t last night.
You don’t know what you’re talkin about.
I’ll tell you what I know. Two days you been back, and I ain’t had so much as a hug from you. He crouched and blew into his hands. I reckon that’s the thanks I get for freezin my ass out here, mindin them sheep and buildin you a nice home.
I didn’t ask you to build no home.
But you’ll sleep in it though.
Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.
By God, would you listen to this. You’d think she’d gone and growed a backbone in that hospital.
Maybe I did. Maybe when you was too busy to pay me a single visit or write me a single letter, maybe you just didn’t notice.
Write you a letter? How? With what? And who’d be mindin them sheep if I went off to go visit?
Seems like when it’s somethin you want to do, you always find a way.
I told you that baby was your own damn affair!
She turned and stalked off toward the buckboard.
Hey, where you goin? I ain’t done with you. Hey!
He grabbed her by the collar, yanking her backward. She struggled and thrashed as he pulled the coat from her shoulders and then from her grasp, walking it to the fire.
You think you’re too good for me now, is that it?
He held the coat over the flames until the shearling caught and crackled and the fl
ames rose almost to his hand. He dropped the smoking heap onto the fire.
You’re a bastard! You’re a no-good murderin bastard!
That’s right, sister. You finally got me figured out.
He kicked at the coat, and the coat flipped over, and the fire flared anew.
And I’ll tell you somethin else. You even think about tryin to leave me out here and I’ll kill you. And I’ll kill every last one of them lambs. And then I’ll kill that boyfriend of yours just for the fun of it.
You’re crazy.
He laughed. Damn right I’m crazy. I been crazy all my life.
Three days later, Palmer reined the pinto horse as twin plumes of dust rose thin and soundless from among the distant monuments. He lit a smoke and watched for a long time as the cars came into view.
Who is it?
Damned if I know.
The cars as the riders approached them had stopped on the roadside with their doors open, and three figures now stood waiting in the wind. Lottie recognized the Goulding Chevrolet and the Oliver Model A Ford behind it. She trotted Henry up beside the pinto and brought him to a halt.
Mike Goulding held her fluttering kerchief at her chin.
Hello, honey! We missed you at the hospital! We ran into Mr. Shumway on the road, and he told us you were out here!
That was right thoughtful of Mr. Shumway, Palmer said as the boy Jake removed his hat and stood a foot on the running board.
I’m sorry, Lottie said. They was supposed to tell you.
Goulding stepped forward to stand beside his wife.
How you making out with them sheep?
Fair to middlin, Palmer replied, looking again to the boy. Given the limits of the situation.
How’s your chuck holding out?
Palmer spat. Could use some tobacco.
Oh! Mike said. I almost forgot!
She hurried to the Chevrolet and returned with a package wrapped in paper that she handed up to the girl.
Merry Christmas, honey.
Lottie held the box with both hands and rested it on the pommel. She looked at Mike and shrugged. I ain’t got nothin for you.
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