Jonis Agee: The Bones of Paradise

My gratitude goes to Brent Spencer, my husband, for offering a home for my imagination and my heart; to my daughter, Brenda, for coming home when it mattered most; to Nora for bringing joy and laughter to our family when we needed it; to my sisters, Jackie and Cindy B. and Cindy A.; to my nephews and nieces, who hold the future, Talbot, Travis, Mike, Ross, Blythe, Tara, Ashton, and Laura; to my friends Mollie and Terry Foster, Gillian Howell, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Tom Redshaw, Elizabeth Redshaw, Lon Otto, Jim Cihlar and Bill Reichard, Diana Hopkins, Greg Hewett and Tony Hainault, Tim Schaffert and Rodney Rahl, Dave Madden and Neal Nuttbrock, Gwen Foster and Wheeler Dixon, Carla and Randy Stout, and Sharon and Teddy Warner; to Rebecca Rotert and Bud Shaw, neighbors and writers par excellence; to Noah Ballard for encouragement; to Mad Jack Hill and Ian Rogers, who dug me out from the hailstorm so I could write; to Micah Hansen, who keeps me riding right; to Joni, whose bright smile lightens the day; and to Alexandra Kafka, who does it all at my house. A special thanks to my students over the years, who continue to inspire me with their extraordinary talent and generous spirits. Thanks to Laura Cherkas for her meticulous copyediting. Thanks to Heid Erdrich for her careful reading. I am especially grateful to my agent, Emma Sweeney, who is the best friend a writer and animal lover could have! You believed in this book. And finally, I thank my editor, Jessica Williams, for her vision and support in seeing this novel to its completion. You made it happen!

It was midmorning in early May when J. B. Bennett crested the hill, stopped, and surveyed the little Sand Hills meadow where the windmill was slowly clanking in a wobbly circle. The metal rubbing on metal in an uneven cadence made him reach for the small tin of grease in his saddlebag, the one he already knew he’d pulled out yesterday and left sitting on the window ledge in the toolshed when he’d repacked his saddlebags for the trip to his father’s ranch this morning. It was getting to be harder to keep track of every little detail. He wasn’t that old, he reasoned, but then he had the boy and the twenty thousand acres and the men and the cattle. He lifted his hand and let it drop back to the saddle horn. It was the other thing that drove his mind these days.

He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out the photograph he’d recovered from his son’s dresser drawer a few hours ago. God only knew where Hayward had disappeared to. The picture showed his wife, Dulcinea, as she’d been in 1880 when she came to Nebraska: fresh-faced and fiercely happy, her long auburn hair barely contained by a ribbon, her hand shading her eyes as if she could see as far down the years as it would take to find him again and punish him for what he’d done. The wind was blowing so hard that day, he remembered praying that she wouldn’t notice the fine grit from the Sand Hills that found its way into every crevice and seasoned your food. That night as they lay out in their bedrolls she teased him about the sand between his toes after they’d made love. It wasn’t their first time. That had happened when they agreed to marry at her parents’ home in Chicago. By the time they bedded their first night on their new ranch in a new land, her initial shyness was replaced by a light teasing he found delightful. He grimaced now. When had he ever used that word, but that was her effect on him: she brought a new language with her and made it his.

He wondered if Hayward would miss the picture of his mother. This one had been lovingly preserved, wrapped in a pale blue silk scarf that must have been hers, and bedded carefully in a stack of his old baby clothes, hand-me-downs from his older brother, Cullen.

J.B. couldn’t even think Cullen’s name without wincing, while the staggering whine-clank of the windmill seemed to grate harder on his ears. Today he was determined to find Cullen and bring him home, Drum be damned. He gathered the reins in his fist and the young chestnut horse lifted its head and pawed, impatient with the rider who paused too long.

“Goddamn you, Drum.” J.B. cursed his father as part of the chain of thoughts that had become his burden of late. For years he’d managed to work himself to such exhaustion he couldn’t begin to think, moving from dark to dark in a state of rigid sleeplessness and pain. When Hayward cried, he was comforted by a woman J.B. hired from town, or lately the wife of his foreman. It wasn’t enough, of course. Dulcinea was the shadow beside him every minute of the day. So often as not he ended up in a place like this meadow this morning, the site of the picnic where she’d told him she was pregnant with their first child and they’d made love on a blanket slowly and carefully though she said there was no worry. His only experience the animals he’d cared for, which made his inquiries awkward and ridiculous. He blushed at the thought of how it made her laugh when he asked if she had been in heat of late. She was so happy then. They both were. He brushed the picture with his lips and tucked it safely in his pocket.

He gazed at the hills covered with the mint green of bluestem and grama grass among last year’s taller dried stalks that would gradually collapse and disappear as spring progressed. DROUGHT OVER! the Omaha Herald proclaimed after a winter of snow and spring rains. PROSPERITY ON 1900 HORIZON! A new patch of low-lying prickly pear cactus had sprung up beyond the windmill and water tank. He’d have the men dig it out. It was a constant battle to hang on to the grass, the only thing to support the cattle that made his living. A person had to keep his eye on the smallest detail while the vast emptiness constantly tugged at his vision. You can get lost in a heartbeat out here, he’d told his wife. It took him most of his life to realize the significance of his own words. For some reason this morning every little thought was like a handful of nettles, stinging and chiding him as he tried to drop it and move past.

Better to make a list of chores, keep a running tally. He took a deep breath. To the left of the tank the ragged edge of grass gave way to the pale sand beneath, where a small herd of his cattle had sheltered in the late spring snowstorm last week. Trapped by the drifts, they had eaten the grass down to its roots and churned up the sand so thoroughly nothing would grow there again unless he could anchor it.

The sun felt good on his face, warm, not burning yet, and the wind wasn’t pushing against his skull so hard he could barely think either. He shifted in the saddle, lifted his hand again, and shook his head. Couldn’t keep his mind on business at all this morning. The horse reached around and nudged his boot toe with its nose as if to say, come on. Still he didn’t move. Something held him back, as if once he went down that hill, everything in his life would be different and he couldn’t say why, and it wasn’t only the business with Cullen. He had this feeling a lot lately, and it was beginning to worry him. Maybe it was just age, but he thought of his father, Drum, who seemed sharper, more driven as he grew older. Meaner. Old bastard. That’s what the men called him when they didn’t think J.B. was listening. J.B. called him worse than that when he didn’t think they were listening.

It was twenty years almost to the day since J.B. married and took ownership of this land. He looked across the hills in the direction of the main house nestled in a valley and accessible by wagon from the main north-south road only during good weather; otherwise it was a long trip by horseback to go around the gumbo mudflats and low spots that made small lakes out of the road soon as any kind of weather arrived. J.B. had chosen the place with a purpose in mind—to be as far from Drum as possible when he managed to bargain the twenty thousand acres off him. The one part of the bargain he hadn’t told his wife the day he met her at the train in North Platte proved to be their undoing. When she stepped off the train, a young woman of eighteen looking for a western adventure on a real cattle ranch and willing to marry an unlikely candidate in the Nebraska Sand Hills, he decided to wait. But as soon as he held his first baby boy, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.