Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

Chance opened his mouth, gazed at the porch, thought better of it, shrugged, and turned back.

“Stubs, you take care of the lawyer’s horse. Higgs, you make coffee. People are coming. We’ll put them to your place for now.” Drum tried to make his voice ring with the old authority, but his heart had gone out of it. Recognizing the truth, the men avoided his eye as they trudged off to their work. As if the news were carried by express rider across the hills, the cowboys returned early from their work. Hats in hand, Irish Jim and Willie Munday came to the gate, asked Drum what they should do. He sent them to help Higgs set up chairs and planks on sawhorses for the food and drink that would soon arrive.

The buggy pulled up and Judge Foote stepped down and offered a hand to Markie Eastman. Drum felt his belly stir again and it was all he could do not to horsewhip them both off the place, woman be damned. Somehow he felt it was their fault, this business distracted him when he should’ve been running cattle, his ranch, and that boy. Cullen had no business taking after those men like that, and Drum could only blame himself, and the others around him. He nodded curtly at the judge but wouldn’t look at the Eastman woman or acknowledge her words of condolence. He pointed toward Higgs’s small home, and with a brief glance at the house behind him, they turned away. They would want to see him, see the wounds, see his face in that final repose. It was a bitter thought. By heaven, he was the only one who cared for that boy all these years, he should be the last one to see his face, not these strangers, not even his mother—but there his thoughts hit a rough place, because he knew he was wrong.

In that moment Drum Bennett had his first real doubt, a luxury he had not afforded himself in years. His grandson had died a man’s death, doing a man’s job, though he was but half-grown, a job he was made to do because there was no other way. Drum had beaten it into him, and truth be known, if the boy weren’t in there lying on the kitchen table, his grandfather would still be beating it into him, one way or the other, and for that, he was, by God, accountable. Drum felt his knees buckle, as if a two-hundred-pound bag of feed dropped on his shoulders, but he wouldn’t allow that luxury either. He held the closed gate, blinked away the water in his eyes, and stood his ground, because he could go neither back toward the house, nor forward into the yard where people would want to talk.

The rest of the afternoon and into dark the yard continued to fill with wagons and buggies and horses. After a while, Graver came out of the house and for some reason, Drum yielded and allowed himself to be led inside to sit and wait in the parlor, stiff-backed, eyes cast to the figured carpet at his feet. Dulcinea would not leave Cullen’s side, so they brought her a straight-backed chair and placed a glass of water in her hands, which she held like a chalice in her lap as she stared at her son’s sleeping face. Drum took in the spectacle and wouldn’t look at anyone after that. Hayward stood behind his mother for a while, became restless and began pacing the length of the house, finally expanding to the porch and then the walk, circling like a dog on alert. No one allowed in or out. Where was Graver? Drum looked up quickly and spied him in the barnyard pointing new arrivals to Higgs’s place, telling them where to tie their horses, acting like he ran the place. He should go out there himself, but he couldn’t move—he’d send Cullen instead, and in that breath, a tide of emptiness rushed in.

He looked over at the boy, willed him to rise, but the only movement was his mother reaching out to brush a fly from his cheek. Although she would not want it, Drum rose and walked into the other room, dragged a straight wooden chair from the wall to the opposite side of the table, and sat down, placing his hand on the boy’s arm for the cold comfort of it. Later he would not remember his thoughts that long night, only his refusal of food and drink, and the annoyance at the least disruption of the short time he had left.

At dark someone lit candles around them, which guttered in the heat and filled the air with a greasy stink Drum could barely abide. Around midnight three white moths began battering themselves against the wavering shadows on the wall and hovering so close to the candle flames that they singed and dropped fluttering to the floor, leaving behind a silence all the more profound for being emptied of motion. A fly bumped lazily against the boy’s face and staggered away drunkenly whenever Drum lifted his hand, but it was the buzzing that tolled loudly in his ear. He would remember it for the remaining days of his life.

In the morning they buried Cullen in a series of broken, awkward movements with no majesty or grace or meaning, as everything was undertaken with too much haste. The coffin lid didn’t quite fit, so they bound it with rope, and the coffin itself was much too long, so the body slid back and forth with unseemly thumps that made it difficult to carry. When they set it in the ground, the hole was too shallow, so they dug deeper while the mourners waited. The body swelled in the heat and released a groan followed by a gagging stench. The gravediggers, Irish Jim and Willie Munday, opened a snake hole and had to scramble out while Jorge shot the rattlesnakes. Hayward was back to pacing with his hands on his guns like he’d been hired to tame some outlaw boom town in the Black Hills.

Drum never moved a muscle and Graver stood beside Dulcinea, and seemed ready to catch her if she fainted. Drum was so angry he wanted to shoot them all. His hands kept reaching for something, an axe handle, a rifle, a pitchfork. Keep away from my boy! rang in his head as the terrible funeral stretched in an endless series of mistakes. The preacher got Cullen’s name wrong, called him Cuthbert, and Drum started forward to beat him to the ground with his fists. Graver touched his arm and he stopped. Dulcinea’s face twisted into hysterical laughter she forced down. When they finally lowered the coffin into the hole, it tilted and everyone could hear the body thump one last time against the end of the box and that about broke Drum’s mind. A tide of red came over his eyes and he stopped seeing anyone, only the image of his grandson on that table.

The sun was setting in a slash of red-orange and purple when Larabee and Frank Higgs stepped back from filling the hole, wiped the sweat off their faces, and looked toward Higgs’s house where the mourners had begun to laugh and talk loudly among heaps of food and drink.

“Think we’re done here for now,” Higgs said and stepped away without looking at Drum.

“We can bring in more dirt tomorrow,” Larabee said. “Put some scrap iron in there to hold it.”

“You would, would you!” Drum stood and grabbed the shovel from Larabee. “Get the hell outta here!” He began to drag dirt off J.B.’s grave and throw it on Cullen’s until Higgs sprang to his side and pulled the shovel from his grasp.

“That’s enough. We’ll see to it in the morning.” He was Drum’s size and when he looked the older man directly in the eye, it was Drum who dropped his gaze, then collapsed on the ground beside the grave. What he couldn’t tell Higgs or anyone was that he had nowhere to go now. There wasn’t one damn thing he could do. So he sat there, legs sprawled out before him, hands on his aching knees, and waited.

It was all going to hell on a painted pony, Higgs thought. That son of a bitch Black Bill, he’d trusted him, trusted Vera for that matter. Now the two of them run off together. It was midmorning and nothing worth a wad of spit was happening. Drum still sat under the stunted mulberry in the cemetery where he’d been since they put the boy in the ground a month ago. Rose or Hayward hauled his meals out to him like he was bedridden again. Last week, Larabee and Willie strung up a tarp to cover him from the sun and wet if it ever rained again, then the other night the wind tore it down and Drum didn’t lift a finger. Let the old bastard bake, then.