He and Dulcinea were always together in the beginning, overseeing the building of their brick house made from their own clay deposit on the river that ran through their land. It took more time, but they were terrified of the prairie fires that could sweep down on them with no warning. They’d lived in a rotted timber lean-to that first summer, using dried dung or kerosene toted from town in fifty-gallon drums to cook on the large stove that would eventually become the central feature of their kitchen. Maybe if he had a good year now, cattle prices held, he could offer to buy one of those premade houses out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Maybe she’d see that as a peace offering. A brand-new house. He rubbed his chin, the stubble already starting though he carefully shaved each morning in case she changed her mind and showed up again. First she’d moved to Babylon, then on to Cody, Rushville, and Chadron, towns along the east-west road across the top of the Sand Hills, then she’d come back to Babylon, gone to Chicago visiting her people, then up to Rosebud to teach. Would she stay away for good this time, furious that he refused to send Hayward to live with her in town for school as the other ranch families were starting to do?
Once in a while, when he got the sense she might be near, he shaved of an evening, too, and would catch the reflection of his son Hayward watching him in the shadow of the doorway, face expressionless. That was another thing he had to do. Get that boy to talk to him. Two years ago when the Trans-Mississippi Exposition opened in Omaha, Hayward begged to go, but J.B. had to say no. He hadn’t the heart or nerve to admit how close to losing the ranch they were, so he said no and that was final. The boy hadn’t spoken more than ten words a year since. But boys his age—what was he now? Fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen? Was there a birthday J.B. forgot? Had his mother written or arranged to meet?
Dulcinea would know. She kept track of details like that. To her credit, she braved the heat, loneliness, moody men, and sudden storms as well as anyone raised in the hills. J.B. spent that first summer grateful, relieved, and genuinely happy for the first time in his life. That last feeling had left him puzzled more often than not, wondering about the weight that seemed lifted. The iron hand that usually rode gripping the back of his neck simply disappeared. His own mother died when he was a boy, and he had little recollection or understanding of what being around a female meant. His father never remarried, preferred to become the old bastard he remained the rest of his life, convinced that women, the female influence, destroyed a man’s character if he wasn’t careful, and almost no man could be that careful. Better to do without, he preached to his only child, wait as long as you can before succumbing to the flesh.
J.B. told his new wife about his father on those long nights when they lay in their bed under the stars, unable to sleep for the sheer closeness of the moon, the brightness making their naked bodies glow, and J.B. came to understand how wrong his father could be. Having a woman was the most wonderful thing he ever experienced. He didn’t dare use that other word, love, didn’t even recognize it, and could not say it when his new wife turned to him and whispered the words. His face shone with shyness and joy, which she might have mistaken for satisfaction and pride, he could not be sure. At that moment, he hoped she trusted the shyness, confident that she could teach him the language that would make such a difference in the coming years. When she turned to him, eyes expectant and happy, he thought she was simply satisfied with his lovemaking or the position of the bed away from the prying eyes of the men in the crude bunkhouse beyond the cottonwood trees.
“I love you,” she said, her lips parted, forming the words for him to repeat if he could or would. He stared at her in wonder, and heard the distant voice of his own mother, a figure he could only imagine in shadow, a voice so thin and whispery it might be the wind through the hills. Women said these words, it came to him, and they filled a man, made him more than he was before. His father was right about the power of women, but he was wrong about what it did to a person. J.B. pulled Dulcinea close until he felt her chin nestle in the curve of his shoulder, her toes finding and pressing between his until they were perfectly fitted and he could not be certain which parts were his alone, exclusive of hers. If he could not say the words, it would not matter, he thought, she was the same as him, surely she felt it, too. When the time came to fulfill his end of the bargain with his father, she’d trust him, she’d understand, he reassured himself, because that had to be how it was when people loved each other.
The horse lifted his tail and dropped manure, kicked at a fly, shifted his front feet as if to turn around, raised his head and snorted. “All right.” J.B. lifted the reins and the horse took the first step down the hill, bracing its front legs while the rider leaned back and gave him his head. At the bottom, they made their way to the windmill whose noisy blades slowed to a stop as the wind died down. J.B. dismounted to give the horse a drink from the tank. While the animal plunged his nose and splashed the water, J.B. stared at the churned-up sand. A piece of stone stuck out, maybe something he could take to Hayward, who liked to collect Indian relics. He eased it out and brushed away the sand.
It looked like a hide scraper. Careless to lose such a good tool. He used the side of his boot to clear around the hole from the scraper. He usually found arrowheads in these blowouts, occasionally a broken spear or tomahawk head, sometimes used rifle shells. He hefted the scraper, admiring the balance that let it fit easily in his palm, his fingers in hollows where others had held, thumb, forefinger, until it became an extension of his hand, the sharp edge ready for scraping the fat layer from the hide. Most of the Indians used white men’s knives now, axes, guns, the old ways gone. Then his foot nudged something else, almost like an animal. He stepped back and looked down, then cautiously shoved with his boot toe. It didn’t move. The sweet scent of wood smoke and cured hide rose unexpectedly and drifted away before he could grasp where it came from.
He sighed and peered across the hay meadow and the distant hills sheathed in a faint green haze. He should get back on his horse and finish the ride to his father’s ranch. He shouldn’t spend another minute here. Cullen was waiting to come home.
A meadowlark whistled, a male calling for a mate, the black chevron on the puffed-up gold chest shiny and remarkably beautiful at that moment. The bird cocked its head and eyed him from the cattails at the edge of the marsh. Red-winged blackbirds shuttled back and forth across the meadow with the urgency of soldiers preparing for battle.
His horse snorted and shook the water from its face, worked the bit in its mouth, and gazed at the man.
A large flock of yellow butterflies bumped their way across the pasture, lighting on the blooms of flowers and tips of grass, then rising in a cloud like yellow ash sailing from a prairie fire, they continued past, on over the top of the ragged ridge of the sand hill. He had another hour in the saddle to reach Drum’s place.
“To hell with it,” he said and bent to work. His thighs and the backs of his legs ached against the unusual stretch, but he didn’t dare kneel for fear his knees wouldn’t straighten. “If I was a horse, I’d shoot myself,” he muttered. As it was, he would have to start wrapping them in strips of muslin soaked in camphor of a morning. Dulcie would have a good laugh about that when she saw him. The thought stabbed him with regret and he dug harder against the sand that spilled back into the shallow hole.