Caught up in her memory loop, sometimes Clementine would watch this happen, but not always. Sometimes she would turn away from the kitchen window, because she always hated how, afterwards, after the stud was done covering the mare, he danced away and curled his lip as if with disdain.
But whether she was looking out the window or had turned away, it is always the sound of Charlie's shrill laughter she heard next. And she realized he was no longer shooting jays from the porch. He was running, running toward the corral, where the stud was rearing and screaming and tearing at the air with scythe-like hooves. He was running and shouting something, and laughing, laughing, laughing.
And she was running as well, although it always seemed her legs were pumping through air as thick as sorghum syrup, and the world exploded into shouts and a horse's wild neighs, and the dust swirled up to veil the sun.
Then the dust cleared and Gus was on his knees in the corral. Terrible sounds were coming out of his chest, and a scolding jay was flitting from fence post to fence post, and the wind was crying wild through the cottonwoods, and Charlie wasn't laughing anymore.
And she was running, running until she hit the solid wall of her love's chest. His hands wrapped hard around her arms, holding her, and his face was the gray of the dust that still floated through the air.
"Let me go to him. I must see him," she said, and there was this coldness inside of her.
Her love tried to press her head to his chest, tried to shield her eyes with his heart. "No, darlin', it'd do no good. He's gone."
A part of her had already lived a thousand years into a future where there was no Charlie, where there was nothing but this moment, and if the memory of it had to begin with her standing at the kitchen window, then it also had to have an ending, a slip-knot in the loop. She had to see her Charlie dead to know that it was so.
So she pulled away from her love and walked slowly toward the corral. Gus had Charlie in his arms and he was rocking and howling at the sky. There was no blood, except for a small drop at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but there was no light in them. There was no light in all the world, because his chest was caved in, and he was dead.
Clementine sat in a bentwood rocker and stared out her bedroom window. The cane seat creaked as she rocked, and the curved slats rasped on the rough pine floor. The world outside was bathed in harsh sunlight, but she pulled the pretty hand-pieced quilt that Hannah had given her tightly around her. For her there was no light in all the world, and she was cold.
It had been a summer of hot sun and little rain, and now it was a dry and bitter fall. The days had grown shorter and the shadows of the mountains fell hard across the buffalo grass. The larch needles had turned color and were falling, slashing and cutting through the air like thin gold daggers. The wild geese honked as they flew low overhead, and a chicken hawk drew lassos of memory in the sky, and she thought how Charlie would never learn to fly now, how all the things she had wanted for him he would never grow up to have.
And so she rocked, and at night the moon came up big and white and hard. Her eyes followed it as it floated through the thick blackness of the night, and the coyotes mourned, wailing and howling for her, since she could not. Hour after hour she rocked and looked out the window at the brutal mountains and the sun-seared, wind-flattened grass. And at the empty, empty sky.
She rocked, and from her window she could see the buffalo hunter's cabin, the fat, flat silver ribbon of the river, and the haystacks in the shade of the giant cottonwoods. And Charlie's grave. It had been two months since they buried him. On the day they buried him she had sat in this rocker and listened to the sounds of death: the grating of saw and hammer making the coffin, the clang and ring of the shovels digging the grave... her husband's sobs. But not her own. She wouldn't cry. She never cried.
She had stood by the open grave and smelled the raw pine of his coffin and the freshly dug earth, and each breath she took was an abomination. The world was dark, the world was in a shroud, the world was being put into a hole in the ground. The world was dark, but she could hear. She could hear the creak of the rope as it lowered the coffin into the grave and a soft thud as Charlie's body shifted within it. She could hear the wind crying through the cottonwoods, and rock and dirt falling on wood, and her husband's sobs.
She rocked and looked out the window, and she hugged to her breast a photograph album with a white lace cover. She never opened it. She didn't want to look at these Charlies made from light, when the world was all darkness. When the world lay sealed in a pine coffin in a hole in the ground.
She rocked and watched the leaves drift from the cottonwoods into the river. She watched them being carried away to the sea. She was dead inside like the leaves, dry and brittle. She wanted to fall into the river and be taken far, far away from the mountains and the wind and the endless empty miles of grass.
Once, she had taken the heart-shaped sachet of coins out of its hideyhole. She had clutched it in her hand, intrigued by its weight, by the solid feel of it. She spilled some of the coins into her lap. Many were gold, like the cottonwood leaves. And she wondered... if she threw them in the river, would they be carried out to sea? Could she go with them?
She rocked, and the baby thrust against her belly. Her breasts felt heavy and swollen. She tried to think of this child being born, the sweet ache of it suckling and pulling the life-giving milk from her nipples. But all she could think of was its dying, of its being put in the ground alongside Charlie and the other she had lost when she was in her eighth month.
She rocked and looked out the window. Gus was across the yard, chopping wood. The ax flashed through the air and landed with a whunk, and the wood blasted apart and pieces of it spun away like shrapnel through the air. She thought how dangerous chopping wood was, how she must be careful to keep Charlie away from his father while he did it. And then she remembered. Charlie was dead.
They lived on, she and Gus, they ate and slept and did the chores that filled a day, but there was nothing between them anymore. They made words sometimes, but the words couldn't bridge the chasm, and she could not bear to have Gus touch her.
She rocked, and she watched her husband chop wood, and she heard the rasp of her love's spurs on the floor behind her. She could always tell when he entered a room; even now she could tell. He was still her love. He would always be her love. But she never spoke to him or looked at him, because she wanted to stop loving him, even though that was impossible.
He came up to her, so close she could see his jean-clad leg and dusty black boot, though she would not look at him. "I was wondering if you wanted to go for an easy ride up to the buffalo canyon," he said.
She focused her gaze on the swing of the ax and said nothing.
"You need to get out. You need to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. If not for yourself, then for that babe you're carryin'."
"In that hole where you put my Charlie there is no sun, no wind to blow in his hair. There is nothing but cold and dark."
She heard his sharp intake of breath and then the long, sad sigh as he let it out. The words had surprised her as they came out her own mouth. She hadn't wanted to say them. Words were useless, meaningless things anyway. Like his name— Charlie. She said his name over and over, but it only hung there in the empty air.
"Clementine..." He laid his hand on her shoulder. His fingers were strong and urgent as they pressed into her flesh. "You got to let it out. Cry, maybe. Or swear, or scream. But you got to—"
Anger surged up her throat, burning and bitter, and it drove her out of the chair with such force the rockers skidded and screeched across the bare pine floor, and the photograph album fell with a heavy thud. "How dare you tell me how to mourn! I carried him in my womb for nine months and fed him from my own breast. He was my baby. My baby."
He gripped her arms and gave her a small, hard shake. "Damn you, woman. You're killing Gus." She tried to twist free of him and he opened his hands wide, letting her go, takin
g a step back. "You are killing my brother."
She felt her lips peel back from her teeth in a dreadful rictus of a smile. "Do you think I don't wish him in that grave?" She pointed a stiff, shaking finger out the window. "That I don't wish you both in there in place of my son?"
He was silent for a moment, only stared at her with those uncomfortable brassy eyes. He shook his head. "You don't mean that."
She could see it in his eyes. A part of her could see the pain and devastation that was as bitter and terrible as her own. But she didn't care. He could go to hell. Yes, she wished him in hell, with her. She wanted everyone in the world to suffer as she was suffering. To feel this pain that was in her bones and her flesh, in her blood. And this vast, vast emptiness inside her.
She closed her eyes against the suffering she saw in his face and made a small helpless sound. "Leave me alone. I want to be left alone."
"Ah, Clementine." She felt something brush her cheek, and she recoiled violently away from him.
"Don't touch me. I can't bear it."
"What do you want from us?" He turned half away from her, his hands gripping the back of the rocker so hard his knuckles whitened and his shoulders hunched. "We loved him, too. We're hurtin' too. Just what the hell do you want?"
She laughed, a harsh, brittle sound, like shattering glass. "What do I want? I want my son back. I want him back I want to hold him in my arms again and watch him grow to be a man, I want to hear him laugh, I want to watch him smear choke-cherry jam all over his face and get it in his hair, I want to kiss him to sleep at night and bury my face in the smell of him—" Her throat caught as the terrible, choking grief welled up inside her. "I want my Charlie alive and back with me where he belongs."
"He's gone, and we can't change that. Nobody can."
She tried to laugh again, but it got caught up with the hard ball of pain in her throat and came out as a sick, mewling sound. "Oh, no, you can't change that, certainly not you men. You men who can do everything except keep a stud horse from kicking a little boy in the chest."
She turned her back on him and waited to hear him leave. For a long time he didn't go, and she held herself stiff and clenched her jaw so that she wouldn't weaken, and then after he did leave she wanted to call after him, but she couldn't get the words past that choking ball of grief that clogged her chest and throat.
She stared out the window, at the river and the cottonwoods and the haystacks, and Charlie's grave. And then suddenly she was out in the yard, her shoes crunching on the chicken feed, walking across the yard, and Gus shouted something at her, but she didn't see him because she was looking at Charlie's grave, walking toward Charlie's grave.
The hot wind battered her and she staggered once, but she kept walking. The wind howled and shrieked in grief, and the grief tore through her, ripping off pieces deep inside her that bled and bled, ran in rivers of blood to the earth, to Charlie's grave, and then she was at Charlie's grave, scattering the wildflowers Gus had put there that morning, throwing them away in rage and hate and bitter, bitter grief, and she was tearing at the earth with her hands, and the pain drove into her like a fist, and the tears came gushing out of her, rolling and surging and swelling, great ocean waves of tears. She made a noise like a rag tearing and then a high, keening sound that was ripped away by the wind. She hugged her pregnant belly and rocked back and forth on Charlie's grave as the sobs came one after the other in crescendoing, wrenching, soul-searing grief.
Clementine had fallen to one side and was clutching at her belly, trying to curl up into a tight ball. Her sobs were thin and reedy now, like a gopher's whistle, and Gus's whole body shuddered as if those sobs were being torn from his own heart. Rafferty couldn't bear to look at her; he wondered how he was going to stand it.
"She blames me for what happened," Gus said.
Rafferty took the ax from his brother's limp hand and wedged it into the chopping block. "She blames everyone and everything, including herself and God."
"At least she's having her cry." Gus turned a desperate face to his brother. His eyes were red-rimmed and bruised. "It's a good sign, isn't it? That she's crying."
Rafferty gripped his brother's shoulder and pushed him in the direction of his wife. She was rolling on the fresh-turned earth of Charlie's grave now, and her cries were no longer human. "Go hold her. Go on, even if she fights you, but, dammit, hold her." Go on, brother, before I do, because if I do, you ain't ever gettin' her back.
Gus went and knelt beside her on Charlie's grave. He tried to gather her up against his chest as she fought him, screaming and flailing at him with her fists. But somehow he managed to wrap his arms around her and he hugged her tight, as if they both might die there. Rafferty felt his stomach ball up like a fist and he looked away.
The yard looked empty. He reckoned it would always look empty without Charlie running through it, laughing. He thought of the day he had tried to teach the boy how to rope by lassoing the chickens. Tears blurred his eyes and he blinked hard, pushing them back down.
She was still crying, but now Gus was crying too, so at least they were doing it together.
Rafferty started walking aimlessly out into the prairie. A jack-rabbit darted across his path and into a barrow pit. The dry, coughing song of the grasshoppers suddenly stopped, and a magpie flew by with a flash of white-barred wings. The wind stilled a moment, then gusted hard, bringing with it the smell of burning wood. An uneasiness prickled along his spine and he stopped, squinting into the south, from where the wind was coming, and where smears of smoke rose thick and black over the hunchbacked buttes.
The smoke blanketed the sky within minutes as the prairie fire raged their way. It grew so dark the lamps had to be lit. Curled, feathery ashes brushed softly against the windows like snow. Clouds built up, but they were empty of rain, and the wind blew so hot and thick that the very air seemed to ache and burn.
The men loaded butts filled with water and piles of blankets and gunnysacks that had been soaked in the river into a hay wagon and drove it out to fight the fire. They were back for more water within an hour, their faces scorched, their hair singed, their eyes full of worry. The third time they came back to fill the barrels, Clementine pushed Gus aside and climbed onto the wagon and took up the reins herself. Gus was too tired and scared to stop her.
She drove the wagon into a boiling cauldron of heat and smoke. They met animals fleeing ahead of the encroaching flames. Thick flocks of birds flew with the blistering wind, the flap of their wings sounding like hundreds of whipping flags; jackrabbits, grouse, and quail darted in frenzied circles as if they'd lost their heads; herds of deer and antelope galloped through the crackling dry grass, white tails flashing their alarm. And their own cattle stampeded through the brush-choked coulees and draws, tongues lolling and eyes white-ringed with fright. The fire ran with the unceasing wind and everything it caught in its path, it burned.
The flames licked through the tall grass like a thousand greedy, hungry tongues. Great columns of black smoke rolled up to meet the clouds, reflecting the fire back on itself like the copper bottom of a frypan. The sky rained burning cinders, and ashes seeped down like sifted flour.
Many of the other men of the RainDance country were at the front line of the fire. The Rocking R was the first of the homesteads threatened, but they knew the voracious flames would not be satisfied with only one family's land. They spoke about how the grass had been like tinder for weeks, how when it got that dry and hot, a spark from a campfire or the discharge of a gun could set the whole world ablaze. One man joked about how they could use a few Indians to do a rain dance right about now, but no one laughed. A couple of the valley's new sodbusters brought plows, and they dug a wide furrow to create a firebreak. But the flames spread too fast, the wind blew too hard, and the grass was too dry.
Gus ordered Clementine back to the house, but she stayed. The choking black smoke burned her throat raw and seared her eyes, the stench of burning grass stung her nose, and the falling cinders bl
istered her skin, but she stayed. And she fought the fire, standing beyond the firebreak with the men, flailing at the flying sparks with a water-soaked saddle blanket. She hated this country too much to let it beat her, and she loved it too much to let it be destroyed.
The fierce wind sent glowing cinders flying, swirling, jumping over the firebreak to spark dozens of small, flickering fires. They ran from one to the other, trying to tamp them down with the wet blankets and gunnysacks. Rafferty lassoed one of the fleeing cows, slit it open, and dragged it by his lariat along the ground, spilling its wet blood. Clementine thought he had never looked more like the devil come up from hell than in that moment, with his soot-blackened face and fierce yellow eyes and his dark, wind-tossed hair.
Fight fire with fire, the men said. Rafferty and Gus tied ropes soaked with coal oil to their saddle horns, set the ropes alight, and dragged them through the grass of their hay meadow, sacrificing their own land for the greater good. But the wind blew hard and gusty, and the grass everywhere around them was too dry.
By late afternoon the fire had spread into the timber. With an immense roar, it jumped into the crowns of the great larches and pines. They exploded like gunpowder, and the sky erupted into a volcano of burning cones and falling branches streaming death.
"We ain't ever stopping her now!" Rafferty shouted against the roar and crackle of the flames. Through shimmering heat waves, his tall frame loomed black against the wall of red light. "We're going to have to run for it!"
The rest of the men had already fled back to their own ranches and farms, wanting to save of theirs what they could. Clementine slapped at her smoldering skirt with her scorched blanket. "No! We can't let it beat us!" A burning twig landed in her hair and she carelessly brushed it aside with her blistered hand. The heat from the fire had enveloped her for so long that she felt seared, as empty and dry as a seed husk. "I won't let it beat us!"
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