Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

He grabbed one of the jars, spun, and threw it with all his might at the wall over their bed. It didn’t smash and splinter into greasy shards like he’d hoped, merely thumped harmlessly and bounced across the bed she’d so carefully made, folding his mother’s wedding ring quilt at the bottom, to be drawn up in the night chill, as if she would return on the morrow, as if she would return at all—

He ripped the quilt from the bed, yanking at the end to tear it to pieces, but heard only the barely audible pop of a stitch or two before he threw it down in disgust. She had taken nothing of their life together, he noticed, as soon as the red mist cleared his eyes. There was the lithograph of the carriage on a misty Paris boulevard, trees swept up and away over the streetlights. The coatrack in the corner where he hung his hat and jacket and she the thick wool robe he’d given her that first Christmas, when it had been so cold she fussed about getting out of bed of a morning. It still hung there, dusty, unused. They had laughed that he so misjudged her size, and the rough blue-and-black weave made her skin prickle. His face reddened as he remembered her smile, the one he mistook for pleasure, and now saw as derision. She’d been laughing at him every day of their life together.

There had to be something he could hold as hostage against her return. She was determined, and when she put her mind to a thing it would take a train to stand in her way. That’s why he’d been surprised when she’d let Cullen leave, let Drum convince her. What had that old bastard said? Had he told her about their bargain?

He took a deep breath, smelled the musk of the face powder encircled with its own dust, and the perfume bottle she hadn’t bothered with, as if she would change herself so completely that he couldn’t even recognize her scent should they ever meet again. He sat on her bench covered with needlepoint roses. He didn’t even know where she was going. Maybe running off with some cowboy. The thought made him gasp, and he stopped. He would never believe that about her.

Facing her vanity table, he picked up the silver-backed mirror and laid it back down, then the brush, with silver handle wrought into twining flowers, he didn’t even know what kind, his big callused palm could barely register the texture, and he wondered if she had put her fingertips in the curves of the stems and leaves, what she had thought as she lifted the brush, as he did now, and drew it through her hair, as he did now, with long and even strokes, over and over, as he had watched her do on countless nights. Had he ever once asked if he could do it for her? Surely she would have enjoyed letting her exhausted arms fall loose in her lap, hands cupped, while he brushed and separated and finally plaited her heavy auburn hair into a braid that would last almost the entire night if they didn’t make love. He stopped, set down the brush, and looked at its fine bristles, embedded with a few of her long auburn hairs, and three of his own shorter, thicker black ones.

Five years after she left, her old one-eyed horse began its decline and J.B. spent a week of cold nights in the corral with it. “I’m always on my way to her,” J.B. spoke aloud. “I boarded the train that first summer and got as far as Council Bluffs before I got off. It was as if I was drunk, the blow of not seeing her staggered me. She let me know she was in Chicago with her people, in case I cared to send the boys. She knew I couldn’t do that. It got so bad I couldn’t stand the ranch and found myself in town more than was right. Heard about the business up on Pine Ridge and decided to take a look. I don’t think I much cared what happened to me and the boy, but she kept writing and messaging and reminding me to take care of Hayward, so when I went up to watch the dancing I took him, too. Thank God he was home safe the next time, in December.”

He bowed his head to the horse’s neck and breathed in the coarse, dusty hair, tried to dislodge the pictures of bodies falling before cannon and rifle fire, red roses blooming in the snow, soldiers riding down stragglers with their guns and sabers. “She came back to North Platte the next March and sent word to come, but Hayward got the measles, and a freak late snow stopped the wagon on the way to town. Remember that? I unhitched you and rode you back in a blizzard. We were both half-froze.”

He stroked the old horse’s neck, burying his fingers in the thick, brittle coat that hadn’t shed out the past spring, a sign the end was near. J.B. had kept the horse close the past summer, fed her special mashes when she couldn’t chew hay or grass because her teeth had fallen out. Now the horse lay wrapped in the wedding ring quilt from his own bed, its breathing labored as he spoke.

“Then cattle prices went south, and I had not a dollar to spare. I couldn’t see her without I could pay for her dinner. The next summer she set up camp just west of the line between Drum’s and our land and sent word to meet her at the windmill by the gumbo flats. She’s different every time, but the same, too. We fight so hard I think we’ll kill each other one day. Hayward’s a handful, don’t dare leave him much. I keep trying to tell her that. He won’t come with me anymore. Doesn’t see why his ma isn’t here raising him. He doesn’t understand what losing Cullen means to her. How she’s trying to force me to make it right. But I can’t, I just can’t.”

J.B. rubbed the old horse between her ears and worked his fingers down the short neck, massaging until she relaxed and dropped her head with a sigh. He pulled the blanket off his shoulders to cover both their bodies and laid his head on the horse’s side, letting the deep lift and release of the animal’s harsh breathing lull him into a rare dreamless sleep. In his mind, he repeated the words as if they could be released into the world and travel on their own to her: “I’m always on my way to you.”

The day Dulcinea returned, she dropped her hat and coat on the bench at the end of the bed and wandered around the room, opening curtains and running her fingers through the dust on the vanity surface, wondering who had positioned the tarnished silver-backed set she had forgotten when she fled. She picked up the brush and paused before running it through her hair, shorter now, then registered what she had seen, the black strands tangled with her auburn ones. Neither of them had thought themselves to this moment.

“My God, how we are destroyed,” she whispered, a line from some forgotten drama, or maybe she had written it in her head as she entered the room where she had slept with J.B. all those years ago. She had carried on an internal dialogue with her husband for so long that his death did not alter the conversation. It merely expanded across time and space. The dusty swaths of yellow lace and silk at the windows stirred slightly despite the glass being closed.

When she first left the hills and went home to Chicago, she was maddened by grief for her sons and husband. She tried prayer and found it lacking in formality. She attended churches of every denomination—except for the synagogues of Jews, which would not have her—and found religion empty as a spring potato bin. She sought advice from every manner of psychic, spiritualist, palm and card reader, and finally discovered an entire church of spiritualists whose service consisted of any number of individuals standing in front of the congregation on wooden chairs and receiving notices, like telegrams, from the departed, with messages for random members. She received hers the last night she attended. In the form of a flowered horseshoe, the sort draped over a winner at the racetrack, or sometimes over a coffin at a funeral, it read GOOD LUCK. The message, from an uncle she’d never heard of, mentioned a journey west. The congregation clapped and imagined the best while she broke into a cold sick sweat that chattered her teeth as she hurried to her parents’ house three blocks away that hot August evening, praying her sons were safe, and never imagining that it would be J.B., despite Drum’s vow.