Cheyenne had expected to see the face of a horrible beast. He’d expected a godless thing with a bull’s grimace and a demon’s burning eyes. Having seen a monster of the highest order, he’d thought there would be a face to match. What he did not expect to see was a familiar face, the most familiar face possible. It was the same youthful smirk that had greeted him in the mirror when he was a just a little boy.
* * * * *
For the first time in over thirty years, Cheyenne recited the Lord’s Prayer.
My face, he thought.That thing had my face, my face from when I was just a wee child.
He’d never felt such fear. Not in battles, showdowns, or duels.
The little creature had looked up at him with his own eyes and then bent its head back down to suckle at Eva’s bloody neck. As it had buried its head, red hair began to sprout from its albino skull, growing fuller with each slurp it took. Then, as another gush of snow had blown in and hammered at Cheyenne, the creature shrank away with the head in its paws, smiling at Cheyenne instead of attacking him.
It wants me to see, he thought.It wants me to understand.
And in return, he wanted to.
Despite the fear that made him shake, the curiosity was strong, and stronger still was the pull. It was like he’d been lassoed. Something was hauling him farther out into the blizzard. It was beckoning him like a siren’s song carried on the wind, the howl like an old train pulverizing the rails. He moved slowly through the knee-high snow, shuffling in a trance until he came upon it.
Below the withered sycamore where the valley opened, the snow bank gave way to a clearing. The icicles on the dead tree’s branches worked like compass needles, directing him toward the ground. The wind pushed at the snow, and it gave way gently, dissipating into the night to reveal the little pits in the hollow.
Cheyenne looked down at the nine unearthed graves before him.
He bent down on one knee and stared into them. Reaching into one, he brushed away the dirt that covered the small shape within. Bracing the fragile form with his palm, he pulled it up, it being small enough to support with just one of his hands. He used the other to brush the remaining dust away from the skeletal form.
Cheyenne realize that he had stopped breathing, so he forced himself to take a deep breath. The air felt thick and colder than death itself.
He placed the infant’s skeleton back in its shallow grave and looked into the other eight holes. He was not surprised by what he found in them.
When he made it back to the brothel, he stood in the doorway and saw Mercy standing there with great tears blurring her eyes. Her hands were clutched over her heart.
“Tell me of the bone orchard,” he said.
* * * * *
“We’ve all always tried to prevent it,” Mercy explained as she sat there at the bar, nervously fiddling with her wet handkerchief. “It isn’t easy to get our customers to just … pull out … you know. They pay good money, and they want to have a good time.”
Cheyenne was waiting for Sonny to interject, but now he was sullen and quiet, sitting there on the stool with his head down.
“But we do try to prevent it,” Mercy said, sniffling. “We’ve got sponges with carbolic acid and quinine, but in a pinch we use lemon juice. Lately some of us have been using these new beeswax caps we got. But the contraceptives are up to us. Can’t ask no paying cowboy to put on a rubber sheath.”
She looked up at Cheyenne, but he said nothing.
“Sonny keeps us in these corsets,” Mercy continued. “They ain’t just to make us attractive to the costumers, either. If one of us gets in a family way, these corsets can hide it, as well as help to … remove the … obstruction.”
“You mean …?” Cheyenne asked.
“Miscarriages,” she said. “Ain’t nobody got use for no pregnant whore. Once one of us started to go through the quickening, feeling the baby move, we had to do what we could to remove the … unwanted obstruction. Sonny had all kinds of cures to keep us working and to prevent having another mouth to feed.”
“Like what?” Cheyenne asked, looking hard at Sonny.
“Can’t afford no doctors, you know,” Mercy explained, crying. “We’d never know we was pregnant until we felt the baby kick.”
“What cures did you have, Sonny?” Cheyenne asked him directly.
“Look, McCracken,” Sonny said, “a baby ain’t like a child. A child can be put to work and earn their keep. This is a whorehouse! Ladies on their backs all day pleasing men are bound to get a blockage of their monthly now and then. So we did what we had to do.”
“He’d work us harder,” Mercy said. “Any of us ladies who were going through the quickening would get the heavy chores and longer hours on horseback. That would take care of things a lot of the time. If that failed, there was always ergot, quinine and purgatives. I will not shame myself by detailing their usage.”
She dabbed at her tears and Cheyenne stepped closer to Sonny.
“And what of the ones you couldn’t get rid of?” he asked. “What of them?”
Sonny kept staring at the floor, so Cheyenne shoved him.
“What of them, Sonny? What of the unwanted born?”
But Sonny had turned to stone, his lip buttoned for once.
Next to him, sitting on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest, was the barkeep. He’d had his face buried in his crossed arms, but now Cheyenne could hear his soft sobbing. He walked over and stood before him. The kid looked up, his face wet and pink and guilty.
“My mother is a lunger,” he said. “She has the consumption.”
Cheyenne watched him cry and waited.
“I need this job. I have to do what Sonny tells me, mister,” he pleaded. “I didn’t want to hurt them babies. He told me it was the best thing we could do. Better than deserting them in this mean ol’ world.”
Cheyenne felt something harden in his chest.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Nine of them; nine in six years. Sonny wouldn’t get no midwife. The ladies would birth them, and then he’d pass them on to me. He told me they were used to water and darkness from being in their mamas’ bellies. We have an old barrel out back that catches rain ...”
The barkeep began to sob again, unable to finish his confession, but he didn’t have to.
“Like dogs,” Cheyenne said. “Drowned ’em like little goddamned dogs.”
They all hung their heads now, the guilt weighing them down like chains. Cheyenne looked out through the cracks in the boarded window. The snow had piled up to the sill now and was falling in. In the darkness beyond, nine faces glowed. They were still out there, waiting.
He moved over to Mercy and took her hand in his. He placed his hand beneath her chin, trying to get her to look up at him. She refused, turning away, crying.
“I know now why you were so sore at me for leaving,” he said. “I left you with child, didn’t I?”
Her hair fell in front of her like a curtain, her shoulders heaving as she sobbed.
“Tell me the truth, Mercy.”
She took a deep breath, and then she did.
“I hid it for nine months, Cheyenne. I hid him until I could hide him no more. Nearly died giving birth to him on my own in the barn. When I came out of the coma, he was already gone. Gone to the bone orchard.”
The room fell into complete silence. The boards of the building stopped creaking. Even the wind outside went mute. He stared at her for a good long while, watching the grief explode through her like an electric shock. He felt the tears fill his eyes, though they did not fall. He stared at her for a long time before turning to Sonny.
“It was just another whorehouse baby,” Sonny pleaded.
Cheyenne unsheathed the Colt.
“It was the only sensible thing to do,” Sonny said.
Cheyenne knew that he had only one bullet left. He knew he should be careful not to waste it. He aimed at Sonny’s gut and fired. He enjoyed watching his body jerk as pain ripped throug
h him. A gut shot was only proper, he thought. It would hurt more, and the bastard would die slow. Sonny winced and gnashed his teeth as blood began to fill his hands, but his eyes stayed open, staring out into the nothingness beyond the window.
“Vexed by a whore,” Sonny said with a bitter laugh. “Verdie swore she’d put the voodoo on me when she woke to find I’d drowned her twins. How was I to know she wanted to keep them babies and give up on whoring?”
He coughed up blood and twitched a bit.
“Should have known Verdie was Simon pure with that voodoo stuff,” he said. “Came up here from New Orleans.”
He laughed sardonically between bloody teeth.
“Vexed by a whore,” he said again. “Up the stout by a gypsy whore.”
“Not yet, Sonny,” Cheyenne told him. “You don’t get to die yet.”
* * * * *
With the back door open, the barroom quickly began to ice over. Snow flew in with blizzard strength and blanketed everything in white powder, while the temperature formed new frost.
Cheyenne dragged Sonny out by his collar. He was still alive but too weak to resist. He didn’t even argue. Then Cheyenne went around the other side of the bar and fetched Sonny’s double-barrel peacemaker. He had expected more of a fight from the barkeep, but the kid was still in a strange state of shock. When Cheyenne ordered him up, he did as he was told, and Cheyenne had no trouble marching him out the back door.
They stood in the pounding snow over Sonny. Cheyenne noticed that his blood was turning into red ice. He put the shotgun into the small of the kid’s back.
“Pick up your boss, boy.”
The barkeep lifted Sonny in his arms, cradling him. Expanding before them was the blackness, surging into infinity. But the valley remained, ending at the hollow where the dead sycamore drooped.
“Take him to the bone orchard,” Cheyenne said, and the barkeep began to walk.
When they reached the shallow graves, Cheyenne saw that they were brewing with black tar. It seeped out and bubbled like lava. The blackness was consuming everything now, turning everything into an endless, churning oblivion.
They rose from the molasses like vapor, forming again out of nothing. Their umbilical cords lashed out like whips, wrapping around Sonny and the barkeep. They pulled them closer and encompassed them both in their freezing tar limbs. Sonny’s bloody ice began to cover his body like a giant scab, coating the barkeep’s arms that held him. Cheyenne stepped back as he heard them both begin to scream.
Rapid frostbite overcame them, and Cheyenne watched as their bodies bruised and cracked away. Their noses fell in oily drops, their limbs broke away like autumn leaves, and their mouths overflowed with black water that froze solid in their throats. The barkeep collapsed as his spine snapped in half, and his legs shattered like porcelain as he hit the ground. Sonny’s remains tumbled forward and stuck in the crude of the graves. The unwanted shadow children gathered around him and the barkeep, and began to feed.
Cheyenne could see their faces now. One looked like Mabel, another like Nelly. Two of them looked like Eva. There was a set of twins as well, tiny and ghoulish. His boy was there too, his familiar face buried in the barkeep’s stomach, so that all Cheyenne could see of him was Mercy’s red hair.
He heard footfalls in the snow behind him, and he turned.
Mercy had left the saloon, which was just as well. The blackness had begun to consume it. The roof was gone already, and the walls were dripping as the old whorehouse was devoured by the night. She seemed to drift forward like a lovely ghost. When she reached him, he saw that her tears had frozen to her rosy cheeks. She leaned forward and kissed him goodbye.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the children had surrounded them.
His boy had taken his mama’s hand now, and black ice was already climbing up to her elbow.
“Don’t, Mercy,” he said.
“I have to,” she said. “I feel it in my heart, Cheyenne. I belong with them in this purgatory.”
“You’re not responsible for what happened, Mercy. You tried to keep him.”
“But I knew about the bone orchard. I knew what was happening to the unwanted. I turned my head, Cheyenne. Turned my head while they drowned babies in potato sacks. We all knew, and we all let it go on.”
Her face began to blister as the snow grew dark around them.
He wanted to turn it all back somehow, and make them young enough again to feel what they had felt before. He wanted to right the wrong of his leaving. But he could see in her face that there was no chance of happiness for Mercy now. There was simply no coming back from the guilt and sorrow that now led her into the chasm.
They took her gently into the falling snow, the vortex opening like a new wound. Cold shadows embraced her, and he looked on helplessly as she disintegrated into the void. The last thing he saw was a few strands of red hair dancing on the slope of one pale, freckled shoulder, and then it too was gone.
Cheyenne fell to his knees there in the hollow. It was all that remained. The whorehouse was gone, as was all of White Willow. Even the sycamore had vanished into the black. There was only this small patch of snow-covered valley. He was alone within it beneath the raging cyclone, until they came to join him.
He looked up at his boy’s gray face.
“I know,” Cheyenne told him, nodding. “I know, son.”
He felt his tears leave his eyes at last.
“I wasn’t wanted either,” he said. “Mama wasn’t no whore, just promiscuous, I guess you’d say. Daddy was a mean old hard case. Beat and whipped me, and worked me like a mule before he ran off. Mama wanted a girl, see, a little princess to name Cheyenne. Even when I was born a boy, she kept on with that.”
The snow fell down into his hands as they began to crack and bleed.
“She tried to sell me after Daddy ran off,” he said. “But I was malnourished and weak. No good for laboring. So when she realized she couldn’t sell me, she left me at a railway. She told me to stay put, that she was going to fetch us some cornpone. But she just hopped a train and never looked back.”
He felt his lips chapping and his feet going numb.
“My own mother done gave me the mitten,” he said. “Couldn’t find shelter no place, neither. Not even at the gospel mill. That’s how I started into stealing, then robbing.”
He looked up at them, but the snow blindness was making them fade away.
“I know, son,” he said. “I know what it is to be unwanted. The only time I was wanted was on a sheriff’s poster.”
He huddled inward and collapsed. On the ground, he saw their feet backing away.
“I’m ready to stand the gaff,” he said. “I’ve been hellbound for a bone orchard of my own anyway.”
He closed his eyes, ready for them to shred him apart and pull him into that terrible nothingness. But all he felt was the chill of the snow as it continued to float down, covering him in a chilling veil.
* * * * *
Cheyenne awoke with a gasp that hurt his lungs.
He sat up and let the snow fall off his chest. He blinked the frost from his eyes and gazed into the piercing blue sky. From behind one solitary cloud, the sun shot down Jacob’s ladders of golden light that shone upon the valley.
The graves behind him had been repacked with dirt.
He slowly got to his feet and looked past the whorehouse to the town of White Willow. It was snowbound but all there. A carriage went by in the slush, and a few shop patrons dodged its spray as they moved on.
He began to walk up the embankment, noticing the bits of black ice that were still melting away, the final traces of the nothingness. The doorway to the back of the saloon still had some of the tar clinging to it, but he figured that it too would soon vanish. Inside, all of the bodies were now gone, and he paid little attention to the blood that caked the walls. He just went to the bottles at the bar and upended the entire stock, giving himself a swig of the bourbon before he dumped the rest across the coun
ter. He took his one remaining stogie from his pocket, and then his box of matches. He lit up the cigar, and then lit up Sonny’s whorehouse.
He walked out into the street as Sonny’s began to billow smoke. The warmth of the fire felt good, but he wanted to get out of the shade, so he left the porch. The sun was full in the sky now, having moved away from that last lingering cloud. Even on this winter morning, he could feel its generous warmth. He walked with his face turned upward, smiling at the light. He basked in it, enjoying the sunshine now on behalf of all the unwanted that never could.
Soon There’ll Be Leaves
I’d decided that I wanted to die of a heart attack.
I was alone in Ron’s beaten Chevy Malibu that I’d borrowed — sitting there amongst his pawnshop CDs ’n’ fast-food wrappers, just fermentin’ there in the parkin’ lot of the hospital and bakin’ in the sun. Mama was in that hospital, dyin’ — fallin’ apart like a swing set in the rain. At that moment she was having her dialysis done. Between all them treatments, it was hard to get any time with her ’t all — and even when I did, she was doped up, overtired, or vomiting.
I decided that a fatal heart attack was the way to go for me.
Awful as it may be, it would be quick. Your life would just end, I s’pose. All that wasyou would go: hopes, dreams, and memories — your damned everythin’. Gone in the flick of a Bic. The downside of modern medicine is that it can really drag out a dyin’. Some people think it’s better to have time to accept death and deal with the many emotional stages that it comes with. But as I sat in that rusty turd, I couldn’t think of anythin’ more horrible than to milk a death. It was like the tearin’ off of a bandage.
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