“Blue! Look here!”
She was lying face down, the whole back of her dress was burned away. I kneeled down by her side and after looking hard I was sure she was breathing.
“She’s alive,” I said to Ezra.
“Well what do you mean to do?”
“We can’t leave her here this way.”
I straightened up and saw John Bear pulling his travois back down the street toward his shack. I yelled at him but he didn’t turn around so I had to run and get him. The three of us picked Molly up by the hands and feet and carried her over to the Indian’s hut. The front of her dress hung down like a flag.
“Wait a minute,” Ezra said, wanting to stop, “it’s not decent.”
“You can’t cover her up,” I said, “her whole back is burned.” From her shoulder blades to her ankles, Molly was covered with blisters. We laid her down on the hard earth inside Bear’s place and then the Indian went out and drew some water from Hausenfield’s tank. When he came back he scraped a pile of earth from his floor and poured the water on it till it was a mush; then he took a tin from his pack and sprinkled whatever was in that tin — saleratus maybe — on the mud; then he spread the mixture along Molly’s back and haunches and legs and covered it up with some kind of flat weed he had. John Bear was a true doctor, there was no hesitation in his moves. By the time he was finished Molly was moaning, a good sound although I didn’t like to hear it. I stepped outside and a shadow passed over my eyes.
I don’t know where the buzzards come from but they’re never late. Three or four were making slow circles above the town, another few over the flats. I had left the Major’s body out there, lodged against a back wheel so his pony couldn’t run. But one of the carrion birds glided down, spread his big wings and perched on the buckboard and I saw the pony shy. A second later I heard his whinny and then he was rearing; the wheel rolled over the Major, and the pony was trotting free toward the town, pulling the rig with him, leaving the old man’s body exposed to the birds.
A few hundred yards to the east the little boy, Jimmy Fee, was running around his father’s grave, waving his arms as if the shadows of the buzzards were cobwebs in his hair.
I ran to the end of the street and caught the horse, turned him around and rode him back out. The birds on Major Munn spraddled their wings and flapped into the air. They had already blooded his neck. I lifted the old man on the buckboard, sitting him down among his possessions. There was a blanket and I threw it over him. Then I rode the wagon to Jimmy Fee. A few more buzzards had come up over the flats and now they circled Fee’s grave in a procession. Hausenfield had not dug very deep. The boy was huddled on top of the mound with his hands over his head, he was crying and screaming although he had hardly whimpered when Fee died.
“Come on up here, boy,” I said still holding the reins. “Come on up beside me.” But he only cried the more. I had to step down and carry him in my arms and hold him in my lap all the way back to town. He kept crying: “They’re gonna get my Pa, the birds are gonna get my Pa …” And I knew that before anything else we had better hurry up and bury the dead. Someone in the street was shooting and cursing and a coyote was running fast back to the rocks.
Ezra found one shovel from his store that was only charred along the haft, and I found a rusty pick that was lying at the foot of Hausenfield’s windmill. To give Jimmy Fee something to do I sent him looking for his own digging tool and he came on the skillet lying in the dirt where the Bad Man had flung it. Even if we had ten new shovels it would have done no good, only two of the men besides Ezra and me were willing to help dig. The rest of those who had come back to the town were packing their saddles or loading their rigs with what was left to them and riding out in ones and twos.
I chose to dig in the flats, making the holes in a line beginning with Fee’s. There is no work harder than cutting a grave. Though the rain had softened the ground, it was a few hot hours of taking turns at the pick and shovel before we had the five holes dug. The bodies we had gathered were lying under blankets. When it came time to put them down and to rebury Fee I didn’t want the boy there, I shooed him away. We stood waiting while he walked back, turning every few yards to look at us. He finally squatted down at the edge of the flats, not going as far as the town, I suppose, because the buzzards were all down in the street now eating from that dead roan.
We did what we had to and the two men besides Ezra and me got on one horse and rode off south. Everyone else had already left. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the sun was low in the west but I was warm. My foot ached and flies were buzzing around my head.
“Shall we say a word, Ezra?”
“Expect so.”
“Well what should it be?”
He took his hat off and I took off mine and we stood looking down at the fresh earth: There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I thought of Fee putting his trust in wood, and fat Avery worrying for his establishment, and crippled Jack with a one-armed interest in things; I thought of the old Major who always wore his dress blues on Sunday; and I thought of the way redheaded Flo, who had plump knees, could sometimes get interested. I had been in the town a year and I knew them all. Behind me the town was now a ruin, and who would remember in another year that it was ever there or that they had ever lived?
The Bad Man’s grinning face came back to me and I felt my shy hand choosing the glass he offered. Twenty years before I had put my young wife into the ground after the cholera took her and the same rage rose in my throat for something that was too strong for me, something I could not cope with.
Kicking a clod with his toe Ezra said: “Well the Lord says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”
We rode back in to Hausenfield’s well to wash the grave dirt off. Jimmy Fee followed us and squatted with his back against the bottom of the windmill, but he wouldn’t wash and he wouldn’t look at us.
I saw from where I stood that it would not do to leave that dead roan lying in the middle of the street. He was covered with the birds and I knew if the birds flew off he would be covered with bluebottle flies. When I finished washing I said to Ezra: “Between your mule and the Major’s pony I think they could just about pull that carcass out of here.”
“Where to?”
“Down along the rocks about a mile.”
“No sense to that,” Ezra said, “unless you’re fixin’ to stay.”
“I am.” I had hoped he was too.
He looked at me: “Town’s gone, Blue.”
“Now I don’t know,” I said. “We got a cemetery. That’s the beginnings of a town anyway.”
Ezra poured half a bucket of water over his head. Then he wiped his face and neck with a rag, and then his arms and hands.
“Blue, I came West from Vermont. They have trees in that country.”
“Is that right?”
“Water flows from the rocks, game will nibble at your back door, and if you’re half a man you can make your life without too much trouble.”
“That’s what I once heard about this country.”
“That’s what I heard too. Back in Vermont.”
Ezra was a long-faced man, taller than I was, with a stoop in his shoulders and eyes like a beagle hound. He put on a coat and turned to look at the black smoking street and the scrubby stretches beyond:
“Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”