Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

“He needs to be helped to his bed and watched the next few days,” she said.

The men looked at the heft of the man, then the stairs leading to the set of rooms over the blacksmith shop, and finally at the ground.

Someone in the crowd said, “Might be best to leave him here till morning. We can take turns setting with him. Don’t think we can get him up them stairs in the dark, ma’am, that’s a mighty big man.”

She inspected them, not skipping a single one with her singeing gaze. “Make sure you tend to him. He dies, it’s on you, and you, and you—” She nodded at several of the men. “He wakes up, you get the doctor to give him some morphine for the pain. You have to go find him, you do it, and you don’t let this man suffer, you hear? Part of his survival depends on the pain not overwhelming his body. Understand?”

At the sternness in her voice the men straightened their shoulders, lifted their chins, and resettled their hats.

Graver cupped her elbow as the men parted for her. “You and Rose did good, Mrs. J.B. Real good.”

She stopped next to the stallion, who dozed hipshot at the rail, and said over her shoulder, “And you make sure Haven Smith lets him see his leg if he asks.”

In the days to come, she was never told the town wags passed the withering, rotting leg between them like an artifact from a carnival freak show, leaving it on one man’s doorstep in the middle of the night, dropping it on another’s lunch table at the café, and strapping it to a saddle as if the rest of the body were invisible as the horse was led through town. Tom Farr never knew that his leg continued its journey into the larger world, made it all the way to Leadville and the Black Hills gold camp of Deadwood, then back again. Tom never asked for the limb, and it was finally lost on a deer hunting trip when the men got so drunk they thought it was driving away the animals. They took it out to the Badlands and threw it as far as they could, watching the hard blackened flesh topple end over end as it descended into a mudflat that later would yield the skeletons of animals so ancient they no longer walked the earth. Eventually, it ended up on the shelf of an amateur Sand Hills archaeologist/rancher who spent the rest of his life searching for the animal large and odd enough to possess such a severed limb, despite being told by the experts at the Museum of Natural History in Lincoln that it was from the remains of a human, possibly killed by a wild animal or Indian raid judging by the violence done to it.

Rose, Dulcinea, and Graver made their way down the street, looking for the other men. The bonfires were dying with only a few torches set here and there in the dirt. It would take daylight to determine the rest of the storm damage. When they reached the ranch horses, they found Larabee, Irish Jim, Black Bill, Jorge, and Some Horses sober, tired, and eager to be shut of the place.

“Best Saturday night I ever had,” Larabee declared. He spread his hands wide to show he was untouched by fight or liquor or loose women.

“Now ya got no excuse for lying about the bed come Sunday morn,” Irish Jim said.

Dulcinea stood beside the stallion holding the high stirrup of the English saddle, and leaned her head against the leather flap.

Irish Jim started to step forward, but Graver shook his head, bent over, and placed the cup of his clasped hands at her knee. “I’ll give you a leg up.”

She glanced at him, surprised and relieved, placed her foot in his hands, and allowed him to hoist her into the saddle as he used to do for the exercise riders at the Kentucky racehorse farm. She nodded her thanks, exhaustion so deeply etched on her face her eyes seemed sunken into darkness and her mouth was a thin line. He noticed when she was tired a frown deepened on her brow, making her look stern when she was merely in need of sleep. He felt a wild urge to climb up behind her on the horse and hold her in his arms so she could lean back and rest after the night’s ordeal. There was much more to this woman than he had imagined. She had real bottom and in no way deserved the poor treatment of Drum Bennett and her boys. He untied J.B.’s chestnut, grateful she had brought the best horse in the string for him, and led it out of the way of the others to mount. When he turned the horse back he realized Rose seemed to follow him. He was about to ask her why, then thought they’d had enough drama for one night. He couldn’t forget what Some Horses had said. On the long ride home, he glanced at her when her attention was elsewhere, and saw that a deep sadness showed when she thought no one was looking, and he understood how the two women were so close, and he wondered what would happen if the Bennett boys were guilty.

Rose woke at dawn, looked at Jerome and Lily asleep in the tipi, dressed, and walked outside, since it was the only time she would have all day to be alone. She passed the graveyard on the side of the hill, where the big spotted dog joined her, and kept walking. Across the new green pasture lay hundreds of webs that tented the Sand Hills grass with tiny silver beads, so many spiders, invisible, at work all night long to capture the equally tiny insects, a speck or two the meal until the hard hooves of cows and horses trampled the morning, breaking trails in long, dark lines. The dog padded through the grass, meandering as if a straight line could not be found in his mind. The webs so fragile they tore without a whisper, the slightest contact shredding the light.

“Iktomi,” she whispered to the spiderlike man, the trickster who might be watching. Perhaps this was his doing, this field of webs. Her mother appeared to her as Rose had last seen her ten years ago, a serious person who cared for her elders and raised two daughters despite a husband who was lost in the past among white people. Rose remembered her mother shading her eyes and watching as the priests took her children away the first time. She thought her mother would fight, slash the throats of the men and free them, but she didn’t. It was years before Rose understood. Years to forgive her, and just as she had, her mother was swept away forever. Star was the lucky one, she thought bitterly as she ran her hand across the webs until her palm was wet and sticky. No, Star wasn’t lucky. That was a terrible thought. Star was brave, braver than her. She was going to find the man and punish him. Rose thought of her daughter, Lily, and hoped she was never given such a task. She would have to tell Some Horses that no matter what happened to her, he was to keep Lily from following her path. She wouldn’t allow the daughters in her family to be sentenced to vengeance forever, barring their restless spirits from the red road. This crime must be settled in her lifetime.

She made a list of every man who might have killed her sister, and her mother. First, the man had to be part of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Then he had to recognize the locket on the chain Star had worn that Rose now kept in the hidden pocket of her skirt, where she could feel it burning even now. Sometimes at night she wondered it did not scald her husband when he lifted her skirt. Last, he had to meet Star at the windmill on Bennett land, which meant he had to know the place. She didn’t include the fact that he had to be capable of killing. She assumed every person was, given the necessity. She watched as the sun dried the webs and they gradually disappeared as if they had never been. And he had to be clever, a trickster.

“Help me, Iktomi,” she prayed, even though it was dangerous to enlist his aid. He could easily help her enemy first.

Dulcinea awoke early, too, restless after the excitement of the storm and its aftermath. She rose, grabbed the wedding ring quilt, and went to the balcony, where the telescope waited like a falcon under its hood. She wrapped the quilt around her shoulders, sat in the wooden chair, and thought of that morning years ago when she saw the figure ride up the long road to their ranch. It was a memory she replayed constantly, wondering what she could have done to make their lives turn out differently. Now that she was back at the ranch, the memory had become especially painful. At first the figure was merely a speck floating in a ball of dust, but as it grew near, the old man was revealed, sitting rock hard in the saddle, unbending with the horse’s motion, as if the saddle and the man were welded in a permanent iron fixture. She saw that he led another horse, saddled.