E. Doctorow: Welcome to Hard Times

A few hundred yards to the east the little boy, Jimmy Fee, was running around his father’s grave, waving his arms as if the shadows of the buzzards were cobwebs in his hair.

I ran to the end of the street and caught the horse, turned him around and rode him back out. The birds on Major Munn spraddled their wings and flapped into the air. They had already blooded his neck. I lifted the old man on the buckboard, sitting him down among his possessions. There was a blanket and I threw it over him. Then I rode the wagon to Jimmy Fee. A few more buzzards had come up over the flats and now they circled Fee’s grave in a procession. Hausenfield had not dug very deep. The boy was huddled on top of the mound with his hands over his head, he was crying and screaming although he had hardly whimpered when Fee died.

“Come on up here, boy,” I said still holding the reins. “Come on up beside me.” But he only cried the more. I had to step down and carry him in my arms and hold him in my lap all the way back to town. He kept crying: “They’re gonna get my Pa, the birds are gonna get my Pa …” And I knew that before anything else we had better hurry up and bury the dead. Someone in the street was shooting and cursing and a coyote was running fast back to the rocks.

Ezra found one shovel from his store that was only charred along the haft, and I found a rusty pick that was lying at the foot of Hausenfield’s windmill. To give Jimmy Fee something to do I sent him looking for his own digging tool and he came on the skillet lying in the dirt where the Bad Man had flung it. Even if we had ten new shovels it would have done no good, only two of the men besides Ezra and me were willing to help dig. The rest of those who had come back to the town were packing their saddles or loading their rigs with what was left to them and riding out in ones and twos.

I chose to dig in the flats, making the holes in a line beginning with Fee’s. There is no work harder than cutting a grave. Though the rain had softened the ground, it was a few hot hours of taking turns at the pick and shovel before we had the five holes dug. The bodies we had gathered were lying under blankets. When it came time to put them down and to rebury Fee I didn’t want the boy there, I shooed him away. We stood waiting while he walked back, turning every few yards to look at us. He finally squatted down at the edge of the flats, not going as far as the town, I suppose, because the buzzards were all down in the street now eating from that dead roan.

We did what we had to and the two men besides Ezra and me got on one horse and rode off south. Everyone else had already left. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the sun was low in the west but I was warm. My foot ached and flies were buzzing around my head.

“Shall we say a word, Ezra?”

“Expect so.”

“Well what should it be?”

He took his hat off and I took off mine and we stood looking down at the fresh earth: There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I thought of Fee putting his trust in wood, and fat Avery worrying for his establishment, and crippled Jack with a one-armed interest in things; I thought of the old Major who always wore his dress blues on Sunday; and I thought of the way redheaded Flo, who had plump knees, could sometimes get interested. I had been in the town a year and I knew them all. Behind me the town was now a ruin, and who would remember in another year that it was ever there or that they had ever lived?

The Bad Man’s grinning face came back to me and I felt my shy hand choosing the glass he offered. Twenty years before I had put my young wife into the ground after the cholera took her and the same rage rose in my throat for something that was too strong for me, something I could not cope with.

Kicking a clod with his toe Ezra said: “Well the Lord says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

We rode back in to Hausenfield’s well to wash the grave dirt off. Jimmy Fee followed us and squatted with his back against the bottom of the windmill, but he wouldn’t wash and he wouldn’t look at us.

I saw from where I stood that it would not do to leave that dead roan lying in the middle of the street. He was covered with the birds and I knew if the birds flew off he would be covered with bluebottle flies. When I finished washing I said to Ezra: “Between your mule and the Major’s pony I think they could just about pull that carcass out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Down along the rocks about a mile.”

“No sense to that,” Ezra said, “unless you’re fixin’ to stay.”

“I am.” I had hoped he was too.

He looked at me: “Town’s gone, Blue.”

“Now I don’t know,” I said. “We got a cemetery. That’s the beginnings of a town anyway.”

Ezra poured half a bucket of water over his head. Then he wiped his face and neck with a rag, and then his arms and hands.

“Blue, I came West from Vermont. They have trees in that country.”

“Is that right?”

“Water flows from the rocks, game will nibble at your back door, and if you’re half a man you can make your life without too much trouble.”

“That’s what I once heard about this country.”

“That’s what I heard too. Back in Vermont.”

Ezra was a long-faced man, taller than I was, with a stoop in his shoulders and eyes like a beagle hound. He put on a coat and turned to look at the black smoking street and the scrubby stretches beyond:

“Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”

He walked over to his mule, fixed his saddle and climbed on. With his hunched shoulders and his long coat and sad eyes Ezra was not much of a sight on muleback.

“There are other towns westerly,” he said. “A man’s a fool if he don’t know when to move on.”

And I said: “Ezra, all my life I have been moving along. I have trailed cattle from Texas to Kansas, I have whacked bulls for Russell and Waddell, I have placer mined for myself through the Black Hills, I have seen minstrel shows in Cheyenne and played poker in Deadwood and Leadville and Dodge, I have moved from one side of the West to the other, like a pebble rolling in the pan, and if you think this place here is not much country I can tell you none of it is.”

He was looking down at Jimmy Fee: “Come with me if you like, sonny. I’ll teach you to storekeep.”

Jimmy sat there on his haunches, poking a twig in the dirt.

“So be it,” Ezra said. He kicked his mule and rode off.

Well I couldn’t waste time watching Ezra go, I had only an hour’s light to do something about that stinking horse. I couldn’t move him with just the little rig pony, it seemed the only thing to do was throw dirt on and make him a hill. So I did, piling ashes and dirt alongside his back and building up from there. Overhead the buzzards were turning, not too happy, and each time I threw a spadeful on the carrion, a horde of flies buzzed up around me.

I finished by sundown and my back was sore. I rubbed it some and that’s when I realized the gun in my belt was gone. At first I thought I had dropped it but then I noticed little Jimmy was nowhere about. I walked over to the Indian’s shack.

John Bear was on his knees making some more medicine pack, and Molly was crying on the buffalo rug. An oil lamp was in the corner but the boy was not there. I went outside and looked up to the rocks. Sure enough, there he was scrabbling along, waving the gun in his hand, he was going after the Bad Man from Bodie.

It was something to bring him back, I had to do it so he wouldn’t shoot himself or me trying to get along that trail. I caught up with him and grabbed him from behind and carried him back down while he kicked and clawed. He was light but he fought hard, and he didn’t begin to whimper until I threw him down in a corner of Bear’s shack.