He felt a piece of wood with his fingers and pulled out a pipe with a foot-long carved cedar stem hanging half broken off, the barred turkey feathers still fresh. The red pipestone bowl had never been used, and the stem, decorated with a line of crudely carved animals, appeared new. Tiny yellow, red, black, and white cut-glass beads hung below the mouthpiece along with the feathers. He squinted to make out the design scratched on its hard surface. Nothing that made sense, tall and short lines like a series of tipis or stars. Hayward would like it. J.B. figured he’d use it to encourage the boy to talk again.
He poked the toe of his boot into the hole, feeling for the thing he’d touched earlier. When he found the yielding mass, a chill crossed his forehead and prickled his scalp. Deer, maybe.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered and knelt, this time on his hands and knees to carefully brush away the sand.
The open mouth was filled with it, as if her last screams had solidified, the lips drawn back snarling like a wounded bobcat. She’d fought to the end. Her open eyes clotted with sand. An apron of darkness cradled her tangled black hair that had come unbound from the traditional hide strips. He wondered how long she’d been dead. As soon as the tips of his fingers touched the stained sand, he knew. Still wet. The tears in the corners of her eyes. Not long. He swiftly tried to clear her mouth, her face. Warmth lingered on her skin. Her hands were like claws stretching up. He put his finger to her throat below her ear, and could detect nothing. Then he leaned his head against her chest, listened. When he sat back on his heels, he slowly scanned the silent hills. How had he not seen the person who did this? He stilled his breath and concentrated for any sound at all. Nothing except the occasional whine from the windmill. How long had she lain here?
Then he heard it—the faint click of metal against metal and the grunting of a man in boots stumbling in the soft sand beyond the water tank. J.B. quickly looked toward his horse and the rifle in the scabbard before he stood to face the gun pointed at his chest.
“Oh, it’s you—” He held up a hand against the finger squeezing the trigger. Then a mere deep breath’s time before he felt a hot burning fist plow through his chest, opening his body to the light, first a red flare across the hills, then a whole bonfire of black sparks, then a white blanket pressing so abruptly that he fell to the side of the grave, grasping the scraper he had grabbed the moment he heard the metallic click. Cullen, he thought, reaching for the boy and his mother as darkness swallowed them all. Then the wind gathered itself and the windmill began to spin, clanking loudly enough to be heard for miles.
CHAPTER TWO
Ry Graver bent almost double into the rising wind, holding a gray, dilapidated hat on his head as the old horse plodded along the dirt road. Scrawny and ewe-necked with a rough brown coat shedding clots of hair, the horse had lost almost all its teeth and could only mouth cornmeal and pulped grass to stay alive these days—something the man took care to give it, though it often meant going hungry himself. Without the horse, he might never put this place behind him. So he cared for the horse, as hopeless as it was. If he had any money, he could anticipate a night’s lodging, food, and coffee laced with whiskey a man could get in the Cattleman’s Hotel in Hyannis or that place in North Platte, a beefsteak that filled a platter, hot fried potatoes, imagine; he sighed and stared at the empty road stretched ahead, last week’s snow already melted and dried and blown away.
Ranchers complained it was too civilized outside the Sand Hills. So much land to the south in crops these days, Nebraska was becoming a regular settled state. Too many people coming now that they’d gotten rid of the last of the Indians, moved them up to the reservations in South Dakota, then found that these hills, full of rich grass and plentiful water, would support cattle and horses. The first decade of the new century, and people poured in despite the drought the last ten years. You’d think this country couldn’t hold any more. Winter wheat, they’d sold the immigrants on the idea of planting in the fall, let winter do the work of keeping the young seeds warm and wet, then sit back and watch the field green up with the spring rain. A person didn’t have to lift a hand until harvest. Let dust be your mulch, the experts in Lincoln said. Unless it didn’t rain. Unless they made the mistake of coming into the hills with their plows. Ry Graver, the man on the failing horse, had made that mistake even though he’d known in his gut it was wrong.
He’d set up two miles behind him and watched his young family slowly starve, growing exhausted, trying to eat the rats and snakes that lived in their soddy, the children setting snares for songbirds and rabbits weak with drought. Several times Bennett or one of his cowboys had driven a dry old cow to his doorstep, dropped it with a single shot, and ridden off in the night. Despite the tales of hostile ranchers Graver heard in town, he knew that J. B. Bennett wasn’t trying to drive them out. He seemed to understand how hopeless it was. The hills didn’t take to the plow. When Graver broke the ground, the wind took the thin layer of soil and left sand that crumbled around the seed. He saw that right away, but by then he didn’t have a choice. Three little ones and a wife who looked at him with the heart torn out of her eyes. He had to keep going, if for no other reason than the hope that the work would kill him and it would all be over.
But he waited too long, waited until after the children began to die, picked off by disease, then his wife, leaving only the stubborn man, a bitter expression locked in his eyes as he hefted the small bindle of blankets and clothes tied to his battered rifle across his thin shoulders and walked away from his dream. Riding the old horse unfit to plow or work cattle, Graver planned to go as far out of the hills as the animal could travel. When it collapsed, he’d continue on foot until he reached railroad tracks where he could jump a train going east or west. It didn’t matter.
His eyes were too dry to weep anymore. There was a point past which you couldn’t, like a repeated blow to the head, you got dulled to other kinds of pain. His hand trembled as he took out the makings for a cigarette, the gray-pink tip of his tongue so dry the paper stuck for a moment. He had to pry it off carefully to keep the Indian tobacco from spilling. He rested the horse beside the road, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl into the air and vanish. At least it took the edge from the gnawing hunger in his belly. He couldn’t remember when he last ate. It didn’t matter.
When he felt the old horse’s sides swell like a bellows, he feared it was about to die. Instead it gave out a high broken whinny, ending in a long, deep cough that jostled the saddle side to side. He grabbed the saddle horn. The reply came from over the low hill to his right and was followed by another whinny, this time more worried. His horse managed a couple of short, choppy sounds before it turned and started to pick its way toward the young chestnut that now stood at the top of the rise, reins trailing.
“That’s not right.” He nudged the old horse with his heels.
“Hello?” he called and immediately felt foolish.
As soon as he saw Bennett’s body, he stepped down and tied the trailing reins of the rancher’s horse to his old horse. Then he stood still and waited for any movement or sound. Nothing but the cursed scraping of the rough, homemade windmill. He narrowed his eyes to examine the shadows, looking for any deeper shade that would indicate a man crouched there. A bird taking flight from the hay field whipped his head around, but he could see nothing that had disturbed it. When he was satisfied he was alone, he moved close enough to see the body of a young Indian woman in the hole, and Bennett’s figure curled like a boy asleep in his bed beside her with the bloody hole in his chest. He knelt, wet his fingertip, and held it in front of Bennett’s nose, then his mouth, feeling no coolness at all. He tried to pick up the man’s hand to feel for a pulse, but the body was rigid. Flies crawled in the thick black bloody spill on his shirt. A photograph with a dot of fresh blood on the corner peeked from his pocket. Graver pulled it out and wiped the blood on his pants. It was a picture of a handsome young woman who wore a smile as if she were about to burst out laughing. He’d seen her in Babylon a few months ago. Bennett’s wife. She hadn’t been so happy then, he remembered. He glanced at the man again, a man who had been lucky for so long it felt outrageous for him to die so effortlessly. Graver started to tuck the picture back in J.B.’s shirt pocket, then stopped and slipped it inside his own instead. He would have to find her, make sure she had nothing to do with this. He didn’t want to get involved, but that was the hell of it, now he was.