Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

Riding 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.