The Bones of Paradise (28 page)

Finally Chance spoke. “That was something out there today, was it not?” His language and dialect was an unsettled mixture of sounds, as if he had lived in another country and forgotten how to speak his native tongue. Chance turned his back to the bar and leaned against it, propping his elbows and nodding toward the corner where the loudest group almost shouted in their efforts to out-tell each other's tales.

“That man in the middle there is my employer, Lord M. We were fortunate enough to take part in the skirmish with the red men today. He's thrilled and I received a very large bonus—in addition to other benefits.” He pulled an eagle talon necklace from inside his shirt and worked it over his head. Laying it on the bar, he said, “An Indian has to earn this. Shows his prowess and bravery. I've always wanted one, though the talons are so sharp they dig into the skin. Indians are more disciplined to endure pain, I've found.” He smiled and rubbed the back of his hand, which was raked with long scratches. When he turned his head, J.B. could see three long
marks on his neck as well. J.B. pushed away from the bar, suddenly sickened by his suspicions.
Skirmish
? He couldn't dislodge the word now that he'd heard it.

“Oh don't go—” Chance straightened and lifted his glass in invitation.

J.B. pushed his way through the crowd, unable to tolerate another second of the man's company. When he met Chance ten years later, he still remembered his suspicions and regretted not beating the man to death right there in the saloon. For the rest of his life, J.B. was haunted by the execution of the Indians, and later the mass grave where soldiers dumped 146 bodies stripped of any possible relic or souvenir, half-naked and unwashed, their forms frozen in grotesque positions by the bitter cold, handled as if they were tainted firewood.

Father Hansen had wanted a witness, but it made no difference. The true story was unthinkable, unheroic, so it was changed by the newspapers, the military, and the government. Afterward, J.B. lived on his Sand Hills land as if he rented it. He felt like he was waiting for a landlord to evict him, no matter what his father believed. And the worst part was that he had traded Cullen for a ranch that could never rightfully be his own. The events of his life felt like a spool of thread he kept trying to trace back and back, never to reach the end.

R
iding toward town, Cullen had just come from his father's ranch, sent away by his grandfather, called a bastard for the thousandth time. He believed it as he watched his mother fawn over his younger brother, making too much of him as if he were still the favored babe in arms. He used to spy on his father and brother, though he said not a word to anyone, when the loneliness swept him to the black chasm and he had to find a way to crawl back. He'd followed them to Pine Ridge Reservation during the Ghost Dance that ended so badly. His grandfather was up there, too, meddling old man, trying to secure another government beef contract since it seemed war was likely. Later, he watched his father fall to pieces as the soldiers slaughtered the people. Cullen followed two men who chased a woman and a child into the ravine. What they did to the woman made him sick, but he was still a boy and couldn't face the men. He almost froze to death waiting for them to leave the body, and then made his way back to the soldiers' camp, desperate to kill someone for what they'd done. The girl disappeared, he hoped escaped. Later still he would dream about her, and give her new lives much better than the one she lived. Sometimes he even dreamed she was his sister. It had infuriated him, so
much so he planned to stick a knife in General Colby after he paid fifty dollars for a Sioux baby to bring home to his wife like a souvenir. Instead Cullen got drunk with a couple of soldiers who found it great fun to watch him stagger around and vomit. He woke two days later alone in an abandoned tent. Then made his way back to the ranch with a splitting head, throwing up every few miles. He never told anyone what he'd seen.

Now here he was again, unwanted by his mother and grandfather, hired hand and bastard to both. He wouldn't be pushed out this time, though. He had a plan, and the thought made him smile as he nudged his horse into a ground-eating lope.

“Cullen's too old for toys,” Drum said the time his mother threw a party for his sixth birthday. The old man bent the silver flute over his knee, put his fist through the drum, and finally smashed the fiddle over the back of the kitchen chair. That set of music-playing instruments had been his favorite page in the wish book: the boys marching in a happy line filled all kinds of loneliness that dug itself a hole under his skin. There were picture books, too, and Drum pulled those apart between his ham-hock fists. Cullen thought his papa would explode, his face red as a frostbitten ear, but he stood by as Drum knew he would. Drum knew everything, Cullen realized that day. He hung the sky and cluttered the earth with cattle, and there wasn't anything the boy could do about it. He believed that for the longest time. Hayward didn't know anything, of course, except what Cullen told him—that his mother couldn't stand him, that's why she ran away. Came back with horses to bribe them. It was easy to play with Hayward's mind; he was still that little baby in his mama's lap, watching while Drum dragged Cullen away.

The time he was brought back he expected to feel the same, but Hayward was older, running around on his own two feet. Cullen stood and watched as his mother's eyes followed Hayward's every move, and his papa's face was a book of happiness—and he understood how it was like he had died. And slowly, the Cullen who had been their fair-haired boy did die, he disappeared like a shadow that
couldn't be seen at noon, all that darkness driven inside a person, nothing splashed out, and that was him. He didn't go back again until he was ten and by then it was too late. She was gone, and Hayward wandered around like a bucket calf, bellering for his mama, and Papa looked like an empty pail.

When he turned thirteen he took off and stayed out at the line shack on the edge of the Lazy SK, some homesteader's place that didn't make a cent, on the banks of the Niobrara. When the old man found him, he gave him a good hiding, but it didn't make a damn difference. Go ahead, Cullen grinned, wicked and hard as the old bastard by then. It was Stubs stopped him that time, and another cowboy who quit the next day. Don't go on my account, Cullen told him. He ran away so often, it was like Drum's house was the one he was visiting and the shack his real home, fixed up the way he wanted it. Books he gathered or stole from J.B., old magazines men left as they traveled through, new ones when he could sell something in town. Drum didn't pay him more than his other hands, so there wasn't much money for extras. He had a wall where he hung stuff: buffalo skull he'd found in a blowout; arrowheads; part of a Sioux legging, fringed and beaded, so old it crackled; fiddle without strings he found in the corner of the shack under a pile of rags; photographic picture of a family standing in front of their house—not a smile to be found among them except for the fool kid laughing it up behind them; pair of ladies' white leather gloves, so soft he'd take them down just to hold them.

By the time he was fifteen Drum couldn't see why Cullen came back so often. The boy tried living in that shack through winter to learn the lesson Drum was teaching. Frost bit his toes, his fingers, his ears, and it felt like his eyelids would never come unswole. Ran out of kerosene middle of December, and cow chips were impossible to find after the early blizzards that year. He burned the chairs, the table, the bunk, and was starting on the walls of the shack, not an easy thing to pull down those boards, when Stubs rode in to check on him. He was weak as a kitten from having nothing to eat
but canned peaches for the past two weeks, and his horse wasn't in much better shape. Stubs fed them both from the packhorse, loaded them up, and led them back. Drum didn't have much to say that time.

No beating, Cullen was too tall by then. Soon as the January thaw came, two more hands hit the trail. Guess they figured to take their chances in winter. There was the other thing that happened, of course, and to this day people around there didn't know for sure that Drum did it. They heard he did and no one would meet their eyes for a few years after that, then it was forgotten, and a pretty tale was spun and kept.

It was right after Cullen came back. He was lying around the house trying to get his strength up, because Stubs said he'd quit and take the rest of the men with him if the boy wasn't allowed time to recover. For once, Cullen didn't fight. He was too wrung out. It was one morning after the New Year, and there was a knock on the door. Drum was out with the men moving cattle closer since it looked like yet another storm was coming from the Dakotas: sky had that milky haze and the wind'd been blowing from the south melting snow, but every once in a while, there was a cold gust from the north that slid under the warm, and the birds were restless, circling and crying and grabbing what berries there were on the bushes, and the chickens ran up into their coop, then popped out again and ran down the ramp to scratch at the places where the snow'd blown clear. The dogs whined and were anxious about every little thing. The horses in the corral argued all morning, biting and kicking and turning their butts to the north wind. They could feel it coming. And the air had that peculiar charge to it, the one that made a person's skin feel like his shirt was cutting into his back where his arms came out, and the last thing Cullen was looking for was a knock at the door.

He shoved the cat aside; he wasn't about to let that thing out and have to go chasing after it in a snowstorm. Captain Jack was Drum's favorite, the only animal allowed in the house. Even the
dogs had to sneak in after the old man'd shut his bedroom door for the final time. Two people stood on the porch. It took them coming inside and peeling off the layers of clothes for Cullen to realize they were a man and woman, and she'd got something in the brown-and-red carpet satchel she was being mighty careful about. Captain Jack came sniffing and scratching around the bag until it let out a squall that sent him scurrying half across the room, back humped, hair raised, hissing. The woman reached inside for a bundle that turned out to be a tiny baby, red-faced and sick-looking, its eyes never open, like a newborn kitten nuzzling the blind world. They all looked about froze to death so Cullen gave them coffee. They had cream and sugar, and that made it easier to swallow. When he took Cullen, Drum had bought a cow for milk, and got to liking the cream skimmed off the top. More than once he caught Cullen drinking it straight from the pitcher and whipped his hide. Didn't stop him.

Another look at their faces, gaunt and burned by the wind, and he got out the biscuits from breakfast and a chunk of beef and a can of peaches, which he couldn't stomach anymore. At first they declined, and then they tucked into that food like they hadn't eaten in days. Cullen knew how that was. After a while, he realized the baby was too quiet, its breathing patchy, then hoarse, then snorting and silent. The woman ate with one hand while she rested her fingertips on the baby's skull and cheek.

When they'd eaten all the food, the man cleared his throat and said, “We'd be beholden for a place to sleep. Baby's too sick to travel and my wife's all in.” He laid his big raw-looking hands flat on the table and shook his head once, trying not to glance over at the baby, who was mewling now, too sick for a proper cry. The man was about to the end of his rope and his eyes teared. He wiped them away like he got something caught in them.

His wife laid a hand on his arm but didn't take her eyes off the baby.

“What's wrong with it?” Cullen asked.

The couple looked at each other and something like guilt passed between, which made Cullen nervous. Finally the man heaved a big sigh and pushed away from the table. His long, angular face looked hand-built from scrap wood, a person could read the bones so clearly and they didn't exactly line up as they should. There were smallpox scars on his cheeks and the thick thatch of red-blond hair was cut in an uneven bowl around his face. He had yellow-brown eyes that offset everything else. Made Cullen wonder if the baby had the same eyes.

“Diphtheria, might be the diphtheria,” the woman spoke for the first time in a soft voice filled with the kind of yearning that sent a shiver down the back. The boy stared at her and she stared right back. She had a plain oval face, the features set up so regular the eye passed right over them, but the longer he looked the more was revealed. Like the unremarkable nose turned up at the end, the medium brown eyes red-rimmed, and the cheekbones starting to show. A person could tell that when she lost the puppy fat she would have one of those high-toned faces except for the chin that hadn't decided yet whether to shove out or sink in, or maybe it was the way she didn't lift her face. She was always looking down at that baby, even when it wasn't there. She'd been chewing her cracked lips, there was a scab in the corner of her mouth, and her skin was blotched red and white. Cullen spent all that time noticing the details, like the fact there was no wedding band on her finger, and that her nails were rimed black with dirt, and that her clothes were actually ragged layers, men's and women's both, and her feet bound with rags to keep the man-sized boots on, as if they'd shared the contents of his wardrobe. Cullen tried not to think of that word she'd used.

“We took off soon as it hit the ranch,” the man said with a sigh. “Thought we'd made it away safe.” He looked at him with those yellow-brown eyes, like a dozy cat's almost, and Cullen couldn't look away.

“Don't mean to bring harm,” he whispered. Cullen nodded and
said they could stay. The baby mewled and coughed and its lungs grew thick and it couldn't seem to bear more than the touch of the woman's fingertips. When she tried to pick it up, it contorted weakly and bloody spit gurgled from its mouth and nose.

At noon Drum came stomping into the house, slammed the door against the wind, took one look at the couple, and jerked his thumb at the door. They silently gathered themselves. The woman picked up the satchel and held it against her chest as they shuffled out the door. Cullen wanted to send food along, at least a can of peaches, but Drum was there, removing his coat, impatient for them to leave. When the door shut behind them, he gestured toward the dish-strewn table. “Throw it all out.” Later Drum made him scrub the table with salt and lye soap and burn the clothes he wore.

Deep in memory, Cullen didn't realize how close he was to the one-room church the Sand Hills families shared. He halted his horse and looked to the east where the church stood two hills over.

That spring he'd heard the couple had made it to another ranch and left the baby, which died, and nobody ever had a name for any of them. Cullen sat with them that whole morning and never thought to ask. A storm came up, and it was a miracle the baby lived long enough to die in a house. He hoped the couple didn't perish until they found safety again. Stubs later told him that Drum heard about the epidemic in town and was terrified when he saw the strange horses. Cullen didn't speak to him for six months after that.

When the owners of the ranch where the baby died built the church on their land and invited all their neighbors, he and Drum were the only ones who didn't show. Then they buried the baby, and again, Drum wouldn't go. Cullen went later. It was spring and the hills were dotted with brown-and-white cows and new calves, a pretty sight. After all that snow the wildflowers came busting out, and the wind was soft and warm without being hot. It was that kind of spring day when the sky didn't seem close enough to bother and
the horse felt good but not too good. Cullen wished for a person to ride along with. It was a different feeling than being in the line shack, where his anger kept him company. Out in the hills, the land was so endless a person felt himself slipping away if he wasn't careful. There was so little to butt up against, to give a person shape, to stop or start him or make him turn away. A person in the hills could do just about anything he wanted. Besides that, there was so much to see, to point out to another person in a way that made it better to see it. That was what he remembered, before Drum took him, how his mother would show him a brown-and-yellow butterfly in the grass and stop him holding it too tight before he set it loose. Or a big yellow-and-black spider in a web drawn between the sunflowers she watered. Sometimes he'd say to his horse, Look at that, and point out the flock of red-winged blackbirds turning like a hand, palm up, palm down, then shaking loose over the hillside like pepper.