Dawbs spoke with that dry growl that seemed inherent rather than a product of thirst. “Artist.”
Curly nodded. “You sure are. An’ a good ’n. You should make people pay to take a gander at your wagon.”
“Thank you.”
Phaegin still had not said a word about the bevy of carven females. She said nothing now. I asked, “What’s an artist doing out here? Kind of empty to find an audience, isn’t it?”
“Audience?” Dawbs snorted. “My audience calls me an animal and my art filth. I am the black sheep even to my family, and all because of what I find beautiful. Why? I don’t know. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Egyptians—we worship the relics of their lives, we applaud the Venus, classical nudes, kore, black-ground vases. But not my work.”
Phaegin finally spoke. “Come on. If you wanted to make art, you’d have made ’em with their arms missing, or draped with chains like that Greek slave. That makes the difference, and you know it. You are crude little boys who want to stare at dirty pictures and so call it art to make it permissible You’re not making art, you’re … playin’ with yerselves.”
Dawbs bellowed, “That isn’t art?” We men all laughed boisterously and passed the jug.
Phaegin took a drink and grinned through the guffaws. “If a person practices anything enough, I’m sure it seems like art to ’im.” She arched her brow. “You lot do, I’m sure.”
Dawbs leaned his elbows on his knees. “You know there’s three kinds of love?”
Phaegin pursed her lips.
Dawbs stuck his thumb in the air. “Moral love.” He nodded until Phaegin gave a short nod in agreement.
Dawbs stuck his forefinger in company with the thumb. “Physical love.”
Phaegin narrowed her eyes. “Uh-huh.”
Now Dawbs slowly raised his other three fingers. “And then there’s manual.” He made a yanking motion that sent us men into another fit of laughter.
Phaegin sat with her arms crossed. “Now I wonder why they call that man-ual. If any one of you was worth a woman, you wouldn’t have to resort to it, would you?”
Curly lost his grin and nodded mournfully. “’S’truth. If Sapphire was my girl, I’d never jerk off again.”
The next morning, perhaps taking pity on our hungover miseries, Dawbs offered us a partnership. “White harvest. Make yourself a stake. Stay under cover while things cool down.”
Curly gave me a pleased look, imagining, I supposed, being hauled across the plains in the erotically charged cart. But Dawbs’s offer gave me pause: I had a pledge to keep. The pause was short, for though Lill waited in Omaha, she did not wait for what I had become: more trouble. I was useless to her until my flaming life had cooled considerably. And so, when Phaegin whispered, “Beats dyin’ a thirst,” I took Dawbs’s meaty hand and shook it. “We’d be grateful to keep your company.”
Curly hooted with pleasure. “What do we do?”
Dawbs mimed the proceedings, scooping energetically with his simian arms. “Pick up bones. Put them in the cart. Dump the cart at the tracks. Train comes through, they pay us.”
Curly looked puzzled. “Why would anybody want buffalo bones?”
“Grind ’em to fertilizer.”
“They really pay?”
“Last year I worked into January, until the bad storms hit. Left the pushcart here in the canyon, walked to the railroad tracks, flagged down the train, and rode into Kansas City first class on my proceeds. Handsomest man in the world for two weeks. I owned a fine Arabian horse for about an hour, before I lost it again in a poker game. A great bed to myself, unless I chose otherwise.” He considered. “Then I shared a room with a fella, then with two fellas, then I was sleepin’ like a dog in a pack on a pile of blankets, sweepin’ floors and cleanin’ spittoons until I worked off what I owed. Riches to rags. Had some time gettin’ back to the wagon as a poor man. Long time walkin’.”
Curly snorted. “Don’t I know it.”
We finally forded the elusive Missouri. The plains drying more with each step west made me more than nervous to leave the big water and risk the desert thirst again. But Dawbs seemed to know the area inside out. He’d crisscrossed the dry earth so many times he’d lost his fear of it. After some days we began picking up bones.
Four decades of wholesale buffalo slaughter was recorded on the plains, though the bones of the dead beasts were so ubiquitous they barely registered, as common as the twisted stems of sage or the heat fissures in the gumbo soil. Coyotes and wolves had dragged the bones hither and yon, so there was no sense of any individual animal, more the feeling that a giant hand had sown the skeletal pieces as carefully and evenly as a farmer broadcasting seed. Some of the bones were bleached and hollow, others chewed by calcium-hungry rodents, cracked by powerful jaws, made porous by minuscule animals beyond our sight. Others still evinced their origin with a leathery sinew, a flag of hide, a certain weight that the fauna and the weather had not yet dissipated.
In our work, the pelvis was a find, as was the femur, the humerus. The hulking skull was best of all, weighty, broad between the eyes, the fore skull two inches thick, and—though the shiny brown horn had long fallen away—the horn stem yet protruded powerfully, a fine handle. The commas of broken ribs were likely as not to be woven over with seasons of grass and not worth the effort to extricate. Tarsus, metatarsus, and the smaller vertebrae of the tail all required too much time and effort to make use of.
It was mindless but physically demanding work, the sun an inescapable sweltering blanket from nine in the morning until the gloaming breezes picked up. It seemed we walked more miles back and forth from the wagon than we had in our escape from Connecticut. Our only respite was when Dawbs would take the handcart across the prairie to the tracks to dump another load on our growing mountain of bones.
The first days were the worst for Phaegin and me. Our shoulders and elbows ached terribly. Phaegin could hardly turn her neck by the end of the second day.
Curly, however, had been suckled on hefting and dragging heavy loads. That in itself was no problem for him. Of course, his feet gave him trouble. He was still limping, and the over-large shoes did not make the going any easier, but mostly Curly resented the fact he had come west and was not doing cowboy work.
“Pick up, put in cart, dump cart. This is too much like coal work. Cowboys don’t do this. I thought I was gonna get to be a cowboy. What I need is a horse.”
I pointed at his shoes. “You can’t even wear boots, and you’re going to get a horse?”
He drew himself up. “I’ll be wearin’ my boots soon’s my feet heal up altogether. Dawbs tol’ me: soak the leather—it’ll get all soft—then put ’em on and don’ take ’em off till they’re cracker. They’ll be exactly your size when they dry.” He nodded and threw a femur into the wagon. “Gauchos strip the leather off a horse’s legs, put ’em on still wet with blood. Best boots ever made.”
“If they’re so good why doesn’t everyone have ’em?”
“’Cause you gotta be willin’ to kill a horse, that’s why. Who would kill a horse but a filthy Argentine?”
As our travels took us deeper west, it was easy to sidestep human contact. Every so often we would see the dust of wagon trains moving through to greener pastures: to California gold and oranges, to Dakota land, to the Mormon Salt Lake.
My shoulders grew stronger, and Phaegin’s neck healed. The days passed like the rails in the train track, each one virtually the same, and a whole lot of them before you might even think to get where you’re going.
Curly never let up on his complaints, his jaw exercised more than his legs. As we dogged back and forth with armloads he continued to whine. “This ain’t no good at all. I’m goin’ to Wyomin’ Territory when this is over. I’m gonna have a spread with a hunnert thousand cattle, longhorns from the south. I’ll pick out a different horse from my string ever’ single day and spend the whole day on its back. I’m gonna have a black one, a palomino, and a roan. I’m gonna have one of eve
r’ kind there is. I’ll be the fastest rider too, and a great bronc buster. There’s not a horse in the world that’ll unseat me. Why do we hafta do this, Ned?”
“Money, Curly, laying low. Don’t worry, we’ll be going before too long.”
I sympathized with Curly’s itchy feet, however. I also was impatient with the slow work, with biding time. Though we put miles and miles on our shoes, it was trod east to west to east to west, to and fro across the plains in passages of five miles one way, five miles back, so that in all the time we worked we had hardly penetrated Nebraska.
Still, as days and then weeks passed with no further excitement, I began to believe we had achieved some safety. Not only were we cloaked in this dense emptiness but the memory of men was weak, the character of the nation even weaker. There would certainly soon be another crime and another hunt to eclipse our drama. Then, perhaps, we could find names in places that would pay us no heed for the rest of our tranquil lives.
Before that sweet disappearance could happen, I reminded myself, I had many responsibilities to answer.
By this time Lill would have heard of my troubles. I hoped so, for I could hardly bear to think of her waiting for me, whiling her days and growing further and further embittered at my hard heart. Would she finally have fled Omaha? Would she have returned to Osterlund—and to what account? I must find her. If Lill’s candle had burned low, even a wanted man might answer a need. If so, having given Lill my promise, I would stand by it.
Further, my mother haunted me. I wondered if Mrs. Quillan was right that I should not give up on her. I wondered if my mother had given up on me. Did she hope one day to be forgiven and to hold me in her gaze? For my part, I prayed someone had provided my mother a decent life and that she would not hear of what actually had come to me.
At night I counted my other debts instead of counting sleep. Not only had I made assurances to Lill, I also owed Curly. I certainly owed Phaegin whatever I could to make sure her life was in some way whole and as safe as ever it could be. By taking the partnership with Dawbs, I became indebted to him. It was a long list and with little hope, to be sure. My successes were few, my failures many. Avelina, Tilfert, Lill, Chin, Phaegin, and Curly were all certainly much worse off than before they had met me. To a lesser degree but no less certain, so were Mother Fenton, Mr. Cordassa, Phaegin’s brothers, even Chester. If I could ever clear my dishonored plate, I swore I would never promise anything to anyone again.
The pig forsook Curly and lay against me. I scratched his bristly hide. “I want you to know, Pig, you’re nothing but future bacon to me, so don’t take this as anything more than a moment of consolation.”
We continued our zigzagging for weeks. When Curly’s boils had healed, he soaked his beloved boots in a little creek then pulled on the sodden footgear. Just as Dawbs had promised, the leather stretched and dried to a perfect fit on Curly’s now calloused feet.
The morning after that, Phaegin looked out across the flat prairie. Shading her eyes against the early sun, she called, “Look, a soddy.”
Dawbs squinted across the prairie to the eyebrow hump that shimmered in the heat. “Swing station, I s’pose. Wagon stop, overpriced booze, food, maybe whores.”
Curly was immediately rejuvenated from seconds before, when he’d said he couldn’t take another step. “Let’s take a gander, whaddaya say, Ned, you think?”
I kept working. “We’d be crazy to chance it.”
Curly was hopping up and down beside me. “Been so long, Ned. Nowhere and no way’s anybody gonna know us from Adam, clear out here.”
I picked up a scythic rib and pointed it at him. “We’ve no money and you know it.”
Dawbs stared toward the soddy and stated, “I’m in need.”
Phaegin huffed. “Of what?”
Dawbs hitched up his pants and set off. “Too numerous to count. Good thing is, being so necessitous I’ll likely find something to scratch one of my itches.”
Curly was already at Dawbs’s heels, Pig at Curly’s. I wouldn’t keep them back now. I shrugged at Phaegin, who had her fists on her hips, then followed my eager friends. Phaegin shouted behind us, “For the love of Pete!” but caught up at a trot.
Soon the station came into clearer view. It was built against a short cliff and the three walls supporting the sod roof were of rough timbers from which one tiny window was cut. A plank door stood warped and permanently open. A three-legged table leaned against the outside wall, littered with open cans, partially filled bottles, and a black haze of flies that, even from a distance, sounded like a swarm of bees. The crude sign jutting from the ragged grass in the yard proclaimed LIQOR, MEALS 75¢, AMMODUDS-DRUGS, and GOODS.
As we came around the swale, we could see a coach parked along the north side of the shanty. Apart from the flies, there was not a sound to be heard. Not a voice, not a horse’s whinny, not a whistle or snore.
We approached slowly, something wrong feeling heavier and heavier in the air, though nothing but silence gave hint of it. Then I tripped, falling headlong into the grass. At my nose: a human head and, where the ear should have been, a bloody hole. I scrabbled, huffing panic, into a stand, then tripped over the dead man’s legs.
As I stumbled away, Dawbs hissed, “Lord Jesus, mother of God!”
Phaegin covered her mouth, while Curly hunkered down by the man, who stared up into the sky with fly-covered eyes, the ears, lopped from his head, neatly on his chest, his hair missing in a stripe across his bloodied skull. “Cor, he caught it all right.”
Dawbs looked north and south and walked closer. Another three bodies lay camouflaged on burnt grass, charred almost beyond recognition as human.
In the wagon another body, a corpulent man, bloating still larger in the heat, had a horrified look on his face but no marks to indicate he’d died in any way but out of terror. Behind the wagon, two women, stripped of clothing, facedown. Dawbs rolled one over. Her bodice was ripped asunder, the breasts severed from her chest.
Phaegin screamed. Pig took it as chastisement and tore into the scrub around the station. I pulled Phaegin away from the wagon, back to the soddy.
“Who would do this, why would they do this? It’s evil, it’s horrible! Oh, Ned, I want to go home, I just want to go home!”
I clutched her to me. What could I say? I wanted to go home too, but there was no home for us. I was sick of bombs and death and ugliness, of flies and heat and terror, but I couldn’t for the life of me find a way past them. All I could do was murmur it would be all right. And in the midst of my useless assurances, there came a voice.
“Help me.”
Phaegin pulled away. “My God, someone’s in there.”
I peered into the dark soddy. “Hello?”
“Hello?” came the cracked reply.
I told Phaegin to remain where she was and crept inside. It was filthy, smelling of offal. More cans and bottles littered the floor. A rat jumped from my path. In the corner, nested on a litter of rags, was a man. In the dark I could tell no more. “Are you all right?”
He made a bitter noise. “I am a long journey from right.” He coughed. “It would be a blessing if you would provide me with water.”
I stepped back out of the soddy and shouted, “Dawbs, bring the water! We have a survivor!”
When we’d pulled the man into the light, however, I wasn’t sure survivor was the right word. His eyes put out, blood crusted down his face as if he’d wept red tears. His hands had been severed across the palm, leaving his thumbs intact; his feet were removed at the arch.
Phaegin trembled like a leaf but pulled herself together to sit at the man’s side. “You poor man. Poor, poor man.”
Curly walked around him. “’E’s more ’n poor. He’s a calamity.”
The man took a long drink from the canteen. “That’s about it.”
Phaegin made him a pillow from a coat and placed it under his head. Dawbs demanded, “What happened here?”
The man turned his head toward Dawbs as i
f he were yet sighted. “Injuns.” He moved his hand, the thumb weirdly animate on the stump. “Rode in like the apocalypse. Burned a coupl’a fellows alive, tortured th’ others.” He rocked his head in agony. “Them poor wimmin, and my pard. My fault. All of it.” Incredibly, real tears leaked down his cheeks. “My goddamn fault.”
Phaegin put her hand on his chest. “It can’t be. Don’t torment yourself with the thought.”
He asked for more water. Dawbs trickled some into his mouth. When the man had swallowed he commenced his story.
“I’m Jim Harrier. I worked this swing station with my partner, did you see him? Set him on fire and poor Hitch danced like pain itself.”
He worked his mouth for some time, then began again. “There’s been trouble with the Injuns roun’ here: scalpings, horse theft. Escalating trouble. Folks, homesteaders, get tired of working ever’ hour of ever’ day to see it go up in smoke ’cause some Injuns want to get somethin’ for free. The army half the time don’t do nothin’ about it. So we set up a committee of sorts, biblical, you might say. Eye for an eye.
“Ole Severin, upriver there twenty mile, he loses twenty good head of horses, and the Mexican man who works his livery gets his head smashed in. We head out for justice. Sure ’nuff, there’s the horses way out the hell in Washoe. Sioux Indians got ’em. Sons o’ bitches are out marauding someplace else, we s’pose, but the squaws are there.
“We take what’s ourn, the horses and such, and those squaws are like the goddamn furies. They put a knife in Peterson’s leg. Little Injun boy shoots Tender’s horse with an arrow.
“Some of the men, they’re liquored up, het up, and they start shootin’ and gettin’ a little wild. These are good men, who maybe aren’t doin’ the best, on account of hard times. It ain’t right, only unnerstan’able.
“Well, during all the screamin’ I see this woman. Still as a statue, arms raised up. She’s an Injun, so I don’ know why, but I jes’ see somethin’ … right … in her. At the same time ol’ Bill Packard, he sees somethin’ in her too, and he’s off his horse and got her down on the ground.”
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