David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

Ratoncito lets out more sail, eases off on the brake. When the wind hits the canvas, the wagon lurches forward, nearly throwing him out, yet he keeps control of the helm.

Behind the wagon and riding fast to catch up with it comes a small band of Kiowas. Katie turns, sees them giving chase. “Luther! Look what’s coming after us! A bunch a’ Kiowas.”

“The scalpin’ist bastards there is. Gimme the helm, Ratoncito!” He draws his gun. “If they git close, let ‘em taste some lead.”

Katie clasps her hands in prayer. “Lord, I beg your forgiveness for all my transgressions. Mostly I’ve been good and decent. And when I wasn’t, it wasn’t my fault.”

The Kiowas draw even with them, but show no signs of hostility. One of them laughs. “White man fly like a bird!”

Fascinated with the strange wagon, the Kiowas try to keep up with it at first, then attempt to pull ahead.

Peppard takes the helm. “They want a race.” He holsters his gun. “There ain’t no horse ever bounded as fast as the wind.”

The Kiowas kick their ponies and the race is on.

The open prairie. A strong wind blows as a storm approaches. After hours of hard riding, Jonah stops to rest. He walks off a bit to urinate. As he stands there looking toward the setting sun, the wind wagon’s sails appear on the horizon. Disbelieving his eyes, he rubs them and looks again, now realizing he is in a direct line with the wild race. He mounts his horse, but it rears up, throwing him to the ground. The prairie dog cages come loose from the travois and break open as they fall, allowing the prairie dogs to escape. The wind wagon roars past, barely missing Jonah, who falls to the ground. In a moment he sits up in shock, dusty but unhurt. He watches the wind wagon/Kiowa race until it disappears and quiet returns.

The homestead, nightfall. Wind rattles windows in their frames. James, on his pallet in the dark, moans feverishly. Nelly, looking fevered, cuts Dewey’s beard with a razor. Still in a diaper, hat and boots, he sits at the dining table, continuing to feign a semi-conscious state.

Nelly feels her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m taking the fever.” She gets into bed. Later, she sleeps fitfully. James is delirious. Moonlight pours through the window, a dying wind outside. Dewey awakens on the table, the dog curled near his feet. He sits up, pets the dog to keep him quiet, puts on his boots and hat.

He walks unsteadily to Nelly’s bed. The moonlight enhances her sickly look. “Ma’am?” He feels her forehead. He feels James’ forehead. “Looks like I done passed on the plague to you folks. I’m awful sorry. I sure do hope you git better soon.” He exits the house with a lantern.

Disoriented by the collapsed barn, he isn’t sure where he buried the gold. He lifts a board, lifts another, clears a space and digs while the little dog watches. The first hole yields nothing. He chooses another spot, clears it, and begins digging.

Early the next morning, while most of the house remains in shadow, a shaft of bright sun enters through a small window above the bed where Nelly lies delirious. James looks bloodless, stiff on his pallet, probably dead.

Dewey pours himself a cup of coffee, spoons some beans into a tin bowl.

He eats voraciously, glancing toward Nelly now and then with his mouth full.

Outside, the windmill creaks and shrieks and rattles as the wind picks up for the day.

Jonah rides along the trail at an easy pace, slumped a little in the saddle, not well. Face crimson, soiled trousers, he brings the horse to a slow stop, slides out of the saddle, vomits, crawls to the travois and ties himself on. He lifts his arm with every bit of strength he has left, and pulls the horse’s tail as hard as he can. The horse bolts as Jonah falls unconscious.

An old buffalo wallow, mud the consistency of pudding. The wind wagon’s wheels are stuck two feet deep. While Ratoncito tries to adjust the sails for maximum push, Katie nods out on a tincture of opium and Peppard grunts away at the hand crank. He holds his stomach, as if having abdominal pain, lets out a long, orchestrated belch. “I got me a spell o’ dyspepsia like I never done had before. Gimme some o’ that tincture, Katie.” She hands him the bottle and he has a healthy swig. She opens the Poe book and reads aloud. “We passed to the end of the vista, but were stopped by the door of a tomb — By the door of a legended tomb; /And I said — ‘What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended tomb?’ She replied — ‘Ulalume — Ulalume — Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’ Ain’t that the prettiest name you ever heard? Yoo-la-loom…. When I have a child, that’s gonna be her name. Ulalume.”

Early morning. Peppard and Katie sleep in one another’s arms in the bed of the wagon. Ratoncito, pissing over the side, sees a horse and travois in the distance. Reaching the edge of the wallow, the horse hesitates, assesses the situation, then plods out to the stuck wagon, dragging Jonah through the muck. Ratoncito climbs down to the wagon’s axle, just above muck level, and has a close look at Jonah, pale, mudcaked and dead, flies carpeting his face. Peppard and Katie stick their heads over the side and look down.

Peppard says, “Is he Muerto?”

Ratoncito swats the horse on the flank with his hat. It trots off a few yards, where the strap holding the travois breaks under the strain and it falls into the muck, submerging Jonah’s body.

Katie says, “Sure ain’t the world’s nicest burial place.”

“A man can go to Heaven from anywhere, girl.”

Katie has another swig of her tincture.

Thunder rumbles in the west. A notable increase in wind flaps the sails. Peppard takes the helm. “Finally gettin’ up a decent wind. Come on, Ratoncito, let’s sail out of this damned mudhole.” The two pull the sails up to full, the wagon begins to move, gradually building up momentum in an ever-increasing wind, then rolls out of the muck and off into the open prairie again, blown along just ahead of the storm.

Nelly sits at the table in her white nightgown with a straight-ahead, unfocused stare. Dewey feeds her mashed beans. She eats slowly, mechanically. When she drools, he wipes it from her chin. “Where the hell is that husband o’ yours? I need to talk to him. What kind of a man would leave his wife alone out here in the company o’ somebody like me?” Nelly doesn’t answer. She’s not fully conscious.

The storm has passed. The wind wagon has come to a stop atop a hill, its sails torn in places. Ratoncito, high on the mast, repairs them with a needle and thread. Jonah’s horse drinks water from Ratoncito’s hat.

Peppard and Katie sit under the only tree in sight, a young hedge-apple with bright green fruit. She leans against one side of the tree, Peppard against the other, such that they face in opposite directions, she east, he west. From these positions, they reach around with both arms and interlock fingers.

“Luther?”

“Yes, sweetheart, what is it you want?”

“What if we get sick and die? What if we catch the cholera?”

“I ‘spect that’s in the all-powerful hands of the great provider, Katie. I do have a thought, however. I love you more than I ever loved any other woman in my whole life, including my sainted mother, Laura Lee. And, that’s sayin’ a damned lot.”

“Are you going to marry me, Luther?”

“Soon as we git back to Hays. And then we’ll pack up this wagon and we’ll roll all the way to Denver for the honeymoon.”

“Luther? Come here and show me how much you love me.”

Peppard scurries around and they begin to kiss passionately, until Katie looks over his shoulder, sees Jonah’s homestead in the distance and breaks off the kissing.