The liveryman threw open the barn doors just as one wall collapsed, pieces of burning wood already exploded into miniature conflagrations onto the adjoining buildings. Panicked horses ran out the door, one with its mane on fire, another collapsed screaming under a fallen timber.
“Chin!” I shouted, and suddenly she was there. I tried, ineffectually, to lead her out the door, hoping that in the smoke and panic we might, somehow, get through without being killed, for the folly of the blaze was dawning on the townspeople.
“The whole town’s going!”
“Get the buckets!”
Someone shouted, “Good God, the saloon!” The shriek of the storm and howl of the crowd were overshadowed for some minutes by the thunder of exploding alcohol barrels.
Chin reared as another timber fell and still she would not go through the door. I coughed uncontrollably, my lungs searing, my eyes burning. I crawled up onto a smoldering hay bale and from there leapt onto Chin’s back. There was a sharp pain in my thigh, but I held tight, flat against Chin’s neck, breathing filtered air through her dusty mane, and kicked with one leg. “Yaw!”
Chin rounded on the smoking back wall. She charged and jumped, breaching it even as it burst into flame. We galloped into the smoke-blind crowd, where anyone who had a gun seemed to be firing hopefully into the inferno and anyone with a bucket was throwing ineffective splashes of water on the consuming blaze.
As bullets sang, Chin barreled crazily through the combusting timbers of Ogallala’s mercantile center, through the rim of outbuildings and residential shacks, past the incandescent banners of the now-burning tents. The blizzard dissolved into rain in the heat of the conflagration. My back was soaked, my face awash. The fire sizzled and hissed in the melted downpour, but the flames had reached such heights, the wild precipitation was no match against them.
A hundred yards out, however, Chin and I entered the full fury of the storm, a train confronting an accelerating tunnel of frozen air. I kept my head down and could see nothing but Chin’s hooves coming into view, then disappearing into the thick curtain of snow, with each great stride. She hurtled across miles, her sodden mane and my clothes freezing stiff on our backs. The only warmth was at the junctions of my ass on Chin’s back, my chest on her arched neck. My leg, once hot with pain, had gone completely numb.
The booming roar of the fire and the screams and shouts from the town collapsing around itself were muffled, then lost, as we charged blindly on, my world reduced to the gray hide of Chin’s neck at my cheek. The only sounds were the yawl of wind, the draft of Chin’s breathing, and the boom of her great heart in my ear. The howling downdrafts were so severe, the whiteout so intense, I could no longer distinguish ground from air.
After a heroic length of time, Chin slowed from gallop to trot, and then to a walk, pitting her weight against the squall as if it were a burden to which she was harnessed. I clung to her, a monkey’s child, the terrible noise of not only the wind but my own sobs and the memory of the crowd against Curly’s piping cry thrumming through my head. I had no idea of the time that elapsed in the cloister of storm. I mumbled nonsense, my words lost in the squall, trying to stay astride and awake.
“We’re gonna be fine, girl. Just keep going. We’ll take our share of winter here, this one day, this one time, and then we will give up this cold, turn our back on these uncordial days. It’s you and me, girl, heading for the sun. Dawbs had the right idea. You and me. Mexico, or maybe swim the Pacific all the way to Polynesia. Not every horse could do that, but you could. I’ll make a raft, and when you’re tired, you can lay your head on the stern, and I’ll row. We’ll get there and eat coconuts. You step on ’em, I’ll curl the meat from the shell, the only storm we’ll ever again know. And there won’t be anyone else to lose or ruin. We’re gonna be fine.”
I drifted away and back, and still Chin kept on. But now she struggled. Her breathing ragged, a gargled inhalation and grating exhale. She slowed into an ungainly plod. I rasped into her neck, “What is it, Chin?”
She stumbled. My hands, too numb for grip, failed. I slipped, landing in the snow beside her, my leg giving way at impact.
I looked up at Chin incredulously through the blowing veil. She towered over me, a mountain. She swayed, then slowly, unbelievably, went down in the blowing drifts, a mountain giving way, a tsunami of snow exploding around her.
“Chin! Oh, God, Chin!” I passed my hands over her. A dark stain high on her neck to a river of red painted her giant chest, sprayed across her front legs and back onto her belly. I looked at my own pants, iced with Chin’s blood.
Her breathing was sporadic. I hefted her head onto my lap, flakes stinging, the wind carrying my voice to nothing. “Oh, Chin, no. Jesus. Don’t do this, don’t go. Stay with me, please, please stay with me.” I laid my face on her forelock and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, Chin. You’re all I’ve got left.”
She blinked her big eye at me and didn’t take another breath.
They wouldn’t find us. When the snow let up, we’d resemble no more than a crest of sagebrush, maybe a cottonwood trunk, under the white blanket. Certainly not a failure of a man and an epic horse. The wolves and coyotes would find us first, have their fill, and scatter our bones. Maybe so far as to keep our demise a secret. And maybe it was for the best.
I stroked Chin’s nose, as wind hove ice and snow into a vortex around us. I could have died of a gunshot wound, could have been hanged. At one time I was sure my own physical weakness was going to be the end of me. Another time, Phaegin’s brothers. Instead, it was weather that would provide the killing blow as icy flake upon flake descended and buried me in cold. What a Westerner I turned out to be. What would Avelina say? Tilfert?
Caught in a blizzard? Clean out the gut and crawl in, they’re a goddamn dugout! Room and board. What more can you ask?
Love killed him, but Tilfert would have lived through a snowstorm.
I got tired, then tireder still. Tilfert whispered in my ear, Crawl in the gut. Then he shouted. I shook my head. I wanted to sleep. The top half of me was ready, but from the waist down, where my legs and lap were under Chin’s head, it hurt like hell. Legs pricked, they stung and burned. The more tired my head got, the more the pain below intensified and wouldn’t let me go.
Finally, Tilfert chanting, gut, gut, gut, in my head, I dragged myself out from under Chin’s head. I kissed her muzzle once, then took out my knife.
Back in Nebraska, another buffalo. A job to do. Cut from chest to belly. The blood heat reviving me to work at a furious pace I had never before achieved, cutting and scooping entrails, loosening the lungs from the esophagus, pulling the engorged stomach and intestines, the shimmering liver, the enormous heart into a steaming purple and red pile.
With the last of my strength, I spread ribs and fit myself inside the cavity, knees drawn up, arms crossed. When entirely in, the weight of Chin’s body closed the poultice ribs around me. Silent and dark, damp and hot within the odd embrace, my hands thorned with the thaw, my nose on fire. Too tired to think, to feel, Tilfert finally silent, I fell into thick sleep.
I awoke to a welt of gray light and a strange snarling. My first thought was that I was found out: Coy had tracked me through the snow. But the snarling wasn’t human. I pushed at my confines. The cage of ribs would not budge. Chin had frozen solid around me.
The snarling intensified. To my horror, a set of slavering teeth savaged Chin’s belly and pulled a strip of meat from the carcass.
I struggled mightily against my confines and cramped muscles, but I was good and trapped. A gouge of flesh was ripped from the ribs, offering a small window out. Wolves attacked Chin’s corpse, a toothy muzzle not six inches from my face.
I screamed, “Yeeeeaww! Git outta here!”
The wolf yelped and sprang away.
For a moment it was silent. Then came the growling. The wolves seemed to be circling, reevaluating their find. I shouted again. They came closer. Every time I shouted, they seemed to figure more
certainly that the noise was less something to worry about than something to eradicate. I gave up vociferation and spent all available energy trying to free myself. The writhing of Chin’s corpse effected the wolves’ all-out assault, however: snapping and howling, growling and barking, the savage biting and tearing, nightmarish. I struggled; Chin careened; the wolves went mad.
I freed one arm, took my knife from my belt, and brandished it out the ribs. One of the wolves bit at it, yelped, sprang back. Another did the same, but took hold of the skin of my hand as well, tearing it open. I jerked back and lost the knife.
I peered through the rib window. Six wolves circled, fur plastered with Chin’s blood. One pawed its gashed muzzle. I gave a tremendous yell, stretched my arms, arched my back, pushed with my legs, and wrenched Chin’s ribs open with a crack.
The wolves danced back, growling and yipping. I rolled from her belly. The wolves scattered.
I was more stiff than I thought possible. Attempting to stand, my legs spasmed. My feet like ice, I could not make them work. On torn hands and cramping knees, I crawled through the drifts toward a tree.
The wolves reconvened. They crept closer.
I reached the tree as one of the wolves made a run for me. I grabbed for a low branch and in terror and desperation stood. The wolf stopped short, as if for the first time recognizing I was humankind. I raised my arms and shouted. The entire pack bolted.
CHAPTER 34
Covered in blood, weak, and wanted, I was also alone and had no idea where. How long had Chin run through the blizzard? In what direction? I gazed around me. Cottonwood tossed gently in a warming breeze. A small creek alongside. Scrubby juniper dotted the piebald plains, snow already melting into mud. I could be anywhere in a hundred-mile radius. My bag lay beside Chin. Miraculously, it hadn’t bounced off. I washed my face and hands with snow, stood trembling in the sunshine, with my face raised to the light and little heat. I checked my leg. The bullet wound I’d suffered the night before, although deep through the calf, was only a flesh wound.
Chin was unrecognizable as the beautiful horse of yesterday, her face brutalized by the wolves, her ribs peeled and white. Mournfully, I dragged my fingers through her mane. The pile of offal had been dragged about, Chin’s big heart glittered with frost underneath a twisted cedar.
I retrieved my knife and freed Chin’s heart from the lungs, then plunged the knife into the half-frozen dirt and began digging. The first inch or two was leaves, grass, duff, scat. Below that, clay, and below the clay, crumbling slate. I dug until I’d made an elbow-deep hole and had scraped into shallow rock. I sat back on my heels, panting, gazing at the monition that was Chin. Like a vanitas painting, she cautioned: Things will change.
But will they? I picked up a fragment of a belemnite from the pile of soil. Is what we call change the tiniest whisper along an emaciated moment, barely lighting on the surface? Then we dig down to the heart, dig down through the soil and rock, dig down to what is hard and real.
I pushed some snow into the hole, then placed Chin’s frozen heart on the white blanket and filled the hole with rock and clay and sand.
Hearts, once curious and reaching, solidify into an unforgiving form. Not so much a heart as the record of one, and a poor record at that. Closed, hardened. Rock.
I began walking. I headed for the crest of the hill, hoping to get some idea of where I was before the damp of my clothes, my exhausted state, and loss of blood gave me up to the wolves I was sure waited impatiently out of sight.
I slogged through the drifts, warming to slush, my bag slung on my back, until I was wheezing and dizzy, my old ailments haunting me once more. My leg bled; I limped and swayed forward; with nothing in my belly, my head swam.
I crested the rise surrounding the small basin I’d been in and stopped, amazed.
Chin had brought me home. The Republican shimmered in the distance. Lill’s place was a mere half mile beyond.
In an hour I was skirting the house, peering in windows, searching for some sign of Lill, of Osterlund.
There was no sign of Ry, but Lill worked at the kitchen table, rolling crust for pies, singing to herself or to the child asleep in the cradle. She was round with the new pregnancy, red-cheeked from heat emanating from the stove. She looked up at the window and, catching sight of me, went white as a sheet. I called through the thin glass, “Lill, it’s me, Ned.”
She sat down hard on a chair, then immediately stood again and opened the door.
“Ned, my God, what’s happened to you?” She ushered me in, then stepped out and looked right and left before coming back in. She led me to the table. I sat down. Pastry was sliced into lattice on the floured surface.
I backed my chair up. “Sorry, your pies.”
She gathered the dough up, mashing it into a ball and throwing it into a bowl on the counter. “Pies!” She ran her hands over my face, down my arms. “What has happened to you? I thought you were dead, the hanging, in town.”
“You heard about that?” I looked at her more carefully. Her eyes were red and swollen.
She nodded. “Of course.” She touched my bald head. “Scalped on top of it? Where has all the blood come from?”
“Most of it isn’t mine.” I pointed at my pants leg. “Only the leg.”
She attempted to check, then shook her head. From behind the curtain she pulled out a tin hip bath. Put the kettle on, then pumped water into a bucket and poured it into the bath. “First thing, we’ve got to get you cleaned up.”
“I can’t stay. They’ll be looking for me.”
She poured another bucket. “They’re not looking for you, Ned. The word is, you’re dead. Burned up in the fire. Ry told me last night that the reward’s petitioned to Coy Hayes. Man’s got gold for eyeballs.”
I slumped back, waiting to feel some relief. They thought I was dead. They thought I was dead. But relief did not come. Curly was dead. I was free, but Curly was not. “Phaegin.”
Lill poured boiling water into the bath. “Some innkeeper in Missouri says you strangled her and left the body in his shed.”
I put my hands up. “Of course not.”
She tightened her lips. “I would never have thought so, Ned.” She motioned toward the bath. “Clean yourself up. I’ll turn my back and work on these pies or Ry will wonder what I’ve been up to.”
I eased myself into the water. It felt like stepping into heaven. The water pinked around me. When I was submerged to my chin, my mind finally came to. “You were in Omaha. What happened?”
Lill didn’t say anything for a while, cut a slice of bread and ham and handed it to me, then slapped dough on the table and rolled it energetically with a bottle. When she’d placed the dough in the pie plate she dusted her hands. “I waited for you to show up and rescue me from my poor decisions. But you didn’t come.”
I shifted in the water. “I’m so sorry, Lill. I—”
She laughed shortly. “Don’t say that. I’m the sorry one. I waited in Omaha for two weeks, having paid for two days, expecting every moment to be turned out of my room. I was desperate, pregnant, hungry, humiliated, sneaking up and down back steps like a thief, though the landlord never said a thing, as if he had absolutely forgotten I owed him rent. But it was Ry. Ry followed me to Omaha. Paid my room. And after a time, he knocked on my door.
“I was never so glad to see anyone in my life, no matter what I had coming. I thought he’d be mad, maybe divorce me, and I would beg him to take me back. Instead he told me to come home and write my poetry if I needed to.”
She shook her head. “And I told him no. It wasn’t enough. I told him I despised him. I couldn’t bear to cook another potato. I told him I wouldn’t waste another moment on his tedious life.”
I stuffed the last of the meat and bread in my mouth, then slowly scrubbed the dried blood from my arms as she continued. “Oh, Ned. His face: wounded. Every word out of my mouth: a mirror.” She slapped the dough on the table. Rolled another crust with energy. “Plus, I’m not st
upid. What else was I going to do? So I came to my senses and apologized. I came home.”
She shook her head and filled the pie with sliced apples. “It hasn’t been bad. I would never have chosen this life for myself, but now … Ry adores Lucy. Watching him adore her”—she smiled—“like rivers on a floodplain, all into one. So I have that, pies, and poetry.”
“Are you happy, Lill?”
“At times. But more, I am … content. I never felt that before, and it’s good. Very good.” She exited the room and came back with a set of Ry’s clothes. “Get out of there so I can take a look at your leg.”
Lill didn’t ask questions, not about Phaegin, not about Curly. She didn’t ask about the bombing, or my expectations or sorrows. I understood she required a distance between us, from now to forever. She’d made peace with her life and didn’t need mine.
She salved my scratches, wrapped my leg in cotton sheeting, pulled the pant over the bandage, and regarded me. I could not read her face.
The baby commenced crying and she picked the child up from the cradle. The cradle had a looping L carved on it. Rhylander must have made it. Lill cooed into the baby’s neck, kissed her cheeks. “Isn’t she beautiful, Ned?”
The baby, while hardly beautiful with a moon face and wispy hair, was wreathed in smiles. Lill blew indelicately into her neck.
I smiled. “I’ve got to get going.”
Lill looked sad. “It wouldn’t do you any good to be raised from the dead, would it?”
She pulled a jar off the shelf, pulled out a couple of coins and some papers. She put a number of the envelopes back in the jar but tucked the coins into the bib pocket of my overalls and handed me a fat envelope. “This came for you, weeks ago, forwarded from Fenton’s Boardinghouse.”
Mother Fenton had sent on the packet from the weasel-faced clerk. I turned the brown envelope over, weighing the artifact of the late Ned Bayard’s hopes, then pushed it into my pocket as well. I thanked her and fished for the coins. “I can’t take your money, though.”
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