I brought the cross in to Molly. I held it out to her and she reached up and gently took it from me with her long fingers and clutched it tight as she laid her head back down on her hands. Then she smiled. My heart jumped with that smile and I asked her would she eat something.
“Take care of me Blue?” she said softly.
“Yes Molly, if you allow.”
Still smiling she said “Mayor”—whispering so that I bent down and put my ear almost to her lips—“if I had that knife now I wouldn’t drop it. I would stick it in you and watch the yellow flow.”
For a moment I didn’t understand, I could not reconcile the words with the smile on her face. But I looked at her and saw what a sweet smile it was, full of hate, and I felt as if I had been swiped to the ground by the paw of a big cat.
John Bear was turning over his garden patch with a piece of rock and he came around to the door just as I stepped out. I pushed by him without a word. The shovel was where I had left it, over by the offal. The coyotes had scalloped out one side of the dirt mound and eaten clear down to the bone. I knew they would be back at night for the rest, but I had to throw new dirt on anyway. An awful sense of hopelessness came over me. In this ruin and desolation, the ache of all my years rose in my bones and I was ready to sit down where I was and give up the ghost. What was the use? The woman in John Bear’s shack was no longer Molly, what had happened in Avery’s saloon could never be undone. The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures, and Molly’s grin had burned the hope right out of me.
My hands were sore gripping the shovel again, they had swelled and blistered from all the grave-digging yesterday, it was only their needling distress which made me hold on tight as I could and march with that shovel over to the windmill. For no other reason than the pain shooting up my arms did I stick the blade into the ground and begin laying out a dugout.
This windmill was the one thing of value that the Bad Man had left. Hausenfield had paid to have the well drilled and then he had made back his costs by charging everybody for the water. It was either the German’s good well water or the tepid stored from a rain or a long climb to a trickle spring up in the rocks. Most people paid. Fee had met the charge by building Hausenfield’s stable, Avery had used his girls. Some others took what they needed when Hausenfield wasn’t looking. I cut an eight-foot square near the windmill and wet it down with pails of water. I dug blocks of sod and piled them on the line. By digging four feet down and piling the sod two feet high you were sure of a ceiling you could stand under if you didn’t stretch. Jimmy Fee came riding in on the pony’s back and he gave the animal a drink. He held the bridle and watched me dig.
“You makin’ another grave?” he said.
Well I felt I was. But I said, “Hitch up that pony and find us some lumber you can’t break. I’m making a place to live.”
By mid-afternoon there was a dead hot sun in the sky. I took my shirt off and put a cloth around my neck and as I worked I lifted my hat every few minutes to let the air in. There was no wind and the water in the tank went down and I had to climb the scaffold to turn those stubby mill blades. The digging and the climbing wore on me, I had worked all my life but the year I had lived in the town I had grown soft as I thought I had a right to do in my old age. I felt that year now. Luckily for me, Bear came out of his shack to take a nap in its shade side, and afterwards he walked over and without a word gave me a spell on the shovel. I guess he didn’t want me in his place any more than I wanted to be there. The digging was done by sundown.
We found a fairly good shake in the rubble and dragged it over for a ridgepole. When it was in place I laid the odd bits of lumber Jimmy had collected across from the shake to the sod walls. Then I laid other wood over the cracks. Then we went up to the rocks and brought back armfuls of scrub and covered the boards and threw some dirt on and there was a dugout, roof and all. Of course it lacked a door for the hole on one side, but that was a refinement which could wait. What I wanted now was to set up the stove inside and eat some of the apples and maybe open one tin of the milk.
I said to Jimmy: “Get in there and jump a little, tamp that floor down.” I had learned early in the morning that he was alright as long as you ordered him about. All day I had been telling him what to do and he had done it. This time he just stood with a far-off look on his face. I thought the dusk was recalling his father to him, but he pointed out to the flats and said: “There’s someone comin’.”
The clouds were red over the flats and darkness was moving in. About a mile to the south something was making dust, and as we looked it showed itself to be a canvas-top wagon.
“Jimmy get over by the Indian’s next to those things we gathered.” This time he moved. “And put that box of shells inside your shirt!” I called after him.
John Bear went inside his hut and closed the door. I put on my shirt and stood in front of the dugout, and I loosened the Colt in my belt.
We waited without moving for the wagon to arrive. It came on with a bump over the graves. When it reached the town’s edge the team slowed to a walk, a six-horse team, and I wondered what kind of covered wagon needed six horses. They were well used. Slowly down the burnt-out street they came as if the driver was taking in the sight. Then they turned and pulled the creaking rig on toward me.
“Hollo!” the driver called. He reined in just as I thought he was going to ride on past. He sat up there behind his steaming horses, a stout man, smiling widely under a bushy mustache, he might have been a smith except that he wore a striped shirt with sleeve garters. Turning in his seat he said to someone inside the wagon: “See, was no prairie fire, where is grass for prairie fire?”
“Well you’re a damn genius, Zar,” a woman’s voice came from inside, “but I don’t see no Culver City neither.” I saw her come up behind his shoulder and the thing that struck me was she had no bonnet on her head.
They both looked down at me.
“Frand,” the man said, “there is mine camp in these hills, am I right?”
“I’ve heard of one,” I said.
“Ah hah! I am right. And what has happened here?”
I said, “Well a man come by preaching hellfire.”
He laughed and I could see the glint of a gold tooth: “Frand, listen. Two days past I learn is a mining camp westward, a place of business. But westward is big, and yesterday I am lost. Is rain, is dark, and only one strange light is in bottom of sky. You see what I’m telling you? There is good in everything, what for you was a town burning was for me a lamp in the window.” The man shook as he laughed. His jowls shook, his stomach shook.
The woman said: “Don’t mind Zar, he’s a Russky.”
“I am,” the man agreed. He jumped down from the seat and I was surprised how short he was. “We make the night here, Adah, and tomorrow to the gold.”
The woman disappeared in the wagon. The man said to me: “Now frand I have thirsty horses. Is that well yours?”
“That’s right.”
“I pay of course. You are a survivor, you will need provisions.”
“Maybe.”
He looked at me then as if he was hiding some joke.
“You like beef? I carry beef.”
As he spoke something fell off the back of the wagon and then someone jumped off and although my view was obstructed I thought it was a boy. I heard some high voices. At the same time the woman appeared at the front of the wagon and climbed down easily despite a mess of skirts.
“Adah, horses to water,” the Russian said. “Others make tent in back of dugout. Like in homeland — two houses make willage.”
Without unhitching the team, the woman Adah pulled them away to the water barrel. When the wagon moved off I saw three figures standing around a square bundle of canvas. This was dusk and it took me a moment to understand that they were all women. One, in pants, whom I had taken for a boy, I saw now to be a Chinese.