Jonis Agee: The Bones of Paradise

His eye was drawn to the revolver on the top of the big oak wardrobe in the corner. What the hell—the boy wasn’t supposed to use handguns. Higgs was in midstride when a door slammed shut downstairs followed by hurried boots on the stairs. He slid into the hallway, just in time to face Hayward.

“What—” The boy drew up short and stepped back, his raw-boned face, a younger version of his father’s, darkened.

Higgs took in the jacket and pants stuck with burrs and bits of grass, the dirt caked on elbows and knees. Was that guilt on his face? Or merely surprise? The boy had inherited his mother’s eyes, small, quick, capable of hiding things in their flat stare.

“Where you been, boy?” Higgs hadn’t meant to question him, and it came out like the boy’s father would have said it.

Hayward shrugged, glanced at his dirt-rimed nails, and spread his right hand and rubbed the back as if it ached. The knuckles were raw. He’d been in a fight.

“Fighting?” Higgs raised his eyebrows. “Your pa know you’ve been—” Then he remembered.

“He don’t care.” The boy dropped his hands to his sides and straightened his shoulders as if his father watched. “What’s it to you?” His voice had all the harshness of the young trying to sound brave in front of a man who knew what his tone really meant. Higgs remembered being that age. He stepped back and held up his hands in deference.

“Hayward, son.” His voice shook and the boy noticed. His head jerked up and his eyes darted past Higgs, then swept into his room.

“Your pa’s dead.” Not once through the long hours of searching for, then finding, Bennett, then carrying him back and sitting with him in the parlor, had Frank Higgs felt the finality of those words. Now it was true. Now he’d told someone to whom it mattered. It was taken away, the fact, and made over, refashioned, then it would be remade, over again, until the J.B. he knew was in little pieces, vanished as surely as this afternoon when they would place him in the ground he had fought and loved and toiled for. This thought came and went in the seconds that it took the boy in front of him to blink, shrug, shake his hands at his sides, and then blink again.

“He’s gone, son, J.B.’s gone.” Higgs felt a cleaver sever the thought from the rest of his mind and patch it onto the side of his heart, where the weight made it hard to catch his breath.

“Where is he—where’s my pa, Higgs, where is he?” The boy’s voice rose into an anguished cry as he turned and rushed downstairs, stumbled, almost fell in the middle, caught himself with the railing he rode in a kind of free fall until the bottom, where he regained his feet, then bent in the middle, heaving bile and snot and tears while Higgs watched from the last step.

“He’s on the sofa there.” The man tried to steady his voice, and Vera charged in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

“Oh my Lord,” Vera moaned. “Oh my sweet Jesus.” She reached for the boy, forced his head into the soft padding of her shoulder and bosom. Together they sank to the floor, Vera’s one arm cradling the boy, the other clasping J.B.’s jacket sleeve, stiff with the shawl of dried blood.

There was a knock on the door, the handle rattled, and Larabee poked his head inside. “Boss?”

Higgs glanced at his wife’s stricken face and went to the door, opened it enough to slide outside and shut it. The men gathered on the porch and brick walk, hats in hands, faces somber.

Following a dreary breakfast no one could stomach, Vera cleared the long table in the kitchen, and Willie, Larabee, Jim, and Higgs deposited Bennett’s body on the bare boards. The three hands took one last look at their boss, bowed their heads, and left. Before Vera could do more than sniff away the tears and fill the dishpan with soapy water to bathe the naked body, Higgs took the washrag from her hand and sent her to find proper clothing to dress him for the burial. As he worked his way from the feet up the legs, Higgs imagined he was washing down a newborn calf or colt, rather than this other thing, but when he reached the genitals, shrunken, negligible, he paused, questioning the whole purpose. No wonder women did this job—what man could stand to see his kind so utterly useless, destroyed, and not despair?

“Jesus, J.B.,” he murmured, “I mean, what the hell happened to you?” The body Higgs had always known as powerful, as heavily muscled as that big red horse he rode, looked almost frail without clothing, drained, without purpose. It didn’t look capable of any of the feats of strength and will for which J.B. was known. Was it will, then, that first fled for the dead? Then purpose and desire. The body was remarkably without yearning now.

Higgs scrubbed the dried flakes of blood from the torso of the man he had loved, then mopped at the pink water on the table, and watched as it ran over the edge. It puddled on the pine plank floor Vera kept so clean the wood was bleached light gray and so porous the blood-tinged water quickly soaked in a stain that would never disappear, although he would not know that.

While he scrubbed the left hand, separated the fingers, worked the dirt and blood out from under the nails, he wondered if he should try to find J.B.’s wife. He wiped the empty ring finger clean. She’d never make it back in time, he thought, even if he knew where she was. Last he’d heard, she was teaching Indian school up on Rosebud Reservation. Before that, she moved from town to town in the Sand Hills, circling Bennett land but never stepping foot on it. The body wouldn’t hold for her to be found. The rigidity was starting to leave the limbs and there was a distinct spicy, sickening sweet smell.

Maybe she’d finally gone home to her people out East. He remembered she was the daughter of a patent medicine manufacturer from Chicago, that was the place, with enough new money to have been wooed and won by a western rancher. He had to hand it to her, though, she stuck. No matter how the town women treated her because she was a Bennett and after her own father-in-law pronounced her too weak to be a good broodmare, she stuck. Made a good marriage and built the kind of family J.B. never had . . . until the day Cullen was taken.

Higgs grimaced and worked his way up the shoulders to the neck.

“Lift his head,” Vera interrupted. She draped the suit over the back of a kitchen chair and held a comb and brush for his hair.

“I wouldn’t—”

She elbowed him aside and lifted the back of the head with one hand, comb poised in the other. The flopping skull stretched the skin and groaned—Vera lurched backward. The head landed on the kitchen table with a resounding thump that sounded too much like a pumpkin being squashed. Higgs stood frozen, watched as a fly found the blackened flesh of the wound and tentatively probed the ragged hole with its front legs. Vera stared at the hole for a moment, and then backed farther away, shoveling the air with her empty hand.

“Turn your head,” Frank ordered.

He quickly tied the flour sack he’d used to dry the body around the wound as if Bennett were readying himself for a duster. Higgs stepped back and surveyed his work. Most of the blood and dirt were gone. He took the comb and brush from his wife, wet the hair with the pink water, parted it down the middle, and flattened it as he’d seen his friend do for as long as they’d known each other. It felt more intimate than bathing him had—the last thing a man could manage to do for himself if he were still breathing and had at least one working arm.

With Vera’s help, he dressed Bennett in the one suit he owned, the one he wore to meet bankers and to get married all those years ago. The black wool sleeves were moth eaten, the lapels faded, the collar dark with grease and dirt. Vera adjusted the high standing collar so it sat straight.