The Bones of Paradise (4 page)

Although it had pulled off its bridle, the red horse hadn't gone far. Graver reached for the headstall, forgetting about his wound, and the pain took him to his knees.

He shook his head, it felt bloated and heavy, sloshing like a gourd of water, and the weight pulled him backward, his face to the unrelenting heat of the sky. The last thing he remembered was trying to straighten his legs because he didn't want them to have to break his knees when they put him in the box.

J
.B. was found after midnight by the foreman Frank Higgs, Larabee, Irish Jim, and Willie Munday. After a hasty supper, Higgs had divided the men and searched to the east and south of the ranch for their boss, who had failed to return as he always did at the end of the day. The other men went north and west, and wouldn't return until early the next day. It was twilight as the men approached the windmill and water tank off the path to Drum Bennett's ranch and noticed the small herd of cows pawing and milling, refusing to approach the water. Then they saw the dead horse and the dark, irregular shadow of bodies.

Higgs quickly dismounted. “Willie, you and Jim go and pull some of those bulrushes from the edge of the hay meadow, make a torch, search these hills around us.” He turned to Larabee, who dismounted, and paced the ground around the bodies, peering closely at the churned sand and grass glowing white in the dim light of the sliver of moon that inched past the shoulders of the hills.

J.B. was lying on his side, eyes fixed on a half-buried Indian girl who somehow looked like a fresher kill than the man. “What the
hell, J.B.,” Higgs swore as he knelt, touched the edge of the wound that had torn a large hole from chest to back. On the face of his employer and friend he saw both shock and sadness.

“Oh damn it,” Higgs whispered and reached to rest his fingers on the cold forehead of the man he'd grown to love as a son over the years. This would kill Vera, who'd almost adopted the father and his young son as soon as she started working here. She bossed J.B. and the boy as if they were her own.

“Frank.” Larabee held out an empty brass shell casing that glinted dully in the moonlight.

Irish Jim, bearing a torch of creosote-soaked cattails, moved his horse closer and peered down. “We all carry that one.”

“Got another one over here,” Willie Munday said from the outer edge of darkness. “J.B.'s horse just wandered in, too. Must've heard us.”

Higgs brushed his fingers over Bennett's eyes to close the lids, but it'd been too long. They were stiff, unmoving. He looked at the men gathered around the small circle of light at the center of which lay a man. They'd all seen death aplenty, a couple of the old-timers had fought in the War Between the States, and Larabee back from that war with Spain, but this was different. Bennett was boss. Well-liked. The kind of man to ride the river with. His sons, Cullen and Hayward, now that was another matter. Higgs looked at the men, and then nodded toward the body. “Willie, get down and help Jim pick him up, lay him over my saddle.”

It was difficult to lift a body the size of J.B. onto a horse. Higgs and Larabee stepped forward to help, but even with four men it was a struggle. They tied him to the saddle, and the horse danced and chomped nervously. It seemed for a moment that Bennett himself refused to leave the land. Higgs peered into the blackness beyond the wavering pool of light from the torch Willie had jammed into the ground. He sorted the sounds of curious, thirsty cattle gathered to watch the men—stamping hooves, grunting as one body pushed
against another—and heard no telltale clink of metal spurs or jingle of bit, no flash of moonlight on rifle action or pistol barrel. Whoever did this was long gone.

“What about the girl?” Larabee asked.

“Hell.” Higgs swung back to the grave. “Cover that up.”

Larabee looked at the foreman, startled, then tipped his head and started kicking sand over the girl's body. Irish Jim took a folding shovel from his saddle and set to work, too, but the sand wouldn't stick. They no sooner had the body almost covered than it seemed to shift and slide off. Before long the two men stepped back, clearly spooked, their eyes on Higgs, who lifted his hat, ran his hand through his hair, and resettled the hat, tugging it more firmly in place.

“Maybe we should fetch her back to the ranch,” Irish Jim said.

Higgs shook his head. There'd been trouble again with the Sioux lately. It was only ten years since Wounded Knee, and the Indians were still pissed about that mess. No good would come from having a dead Indian girl on Bennett land. Damn it, if J.B. were alive, he'd know what to do. But he wasn't, and Higgs could only face one thing at a time.

“Leave her,” he said, ignoring the quick exchange of looks between Larabee and Irish Jim.

“Better come see this, boss,” Willie Munday called from the darkness. They followed his voice to the small pool of light from another hastily constructed torch.

As he sank knee-deep in the sand, Higgs cursed.

Willie Munday knelt beside a body dressed in rags, peering into the face. “I know him. Name's Graver, Ryland Graver. Farmer with a bunch of kids and a missus. J.B. sent me over there with a beef last fall. Heard they busted out.” Willie raised his head and looked at Higgs. “Think he did this?”

Higgs noted the dead horse beside Graver and shrugged.

“He has J.B.'s rifle,” Larabee offered. “And that's Red's bridle tied to his nag's. I think he got caught trying to steal Red and J.B. and him fought and—”

Higgs held up his hand as the man on the ground groaned, his eyes fluttering open. His lips moved and Willie leaned down to hear, and then sat back on his heels.

“He wants some water.”

The men watched Higgs deliberate and then slowly nod. If he was the killer, they'd want to hang him back at the ranch, where they could use the cottonwood trees J.B.'s wife favored when they'd built the house.

Once the man drank enough, he tried to sit, but Irish Jim held him down and bound his wounded shoulder. Graver passed out again and the men lifted and shoved him onto the horse before Irish Jim got up behind to hold him. There was something unnatural about leaving the Indian girl unburied behind them, and the four men stole glances over their shoulders as the procession moved into the darkness toward the ranch.

“Frank?” Willie Munday, their newest cowboy, rode up beside Higgs and leaned over in a whisper. “Looked around, noticed another set of tracks out there. Small-footed horse and a man in moccasins.”

Higgs searched the man's face. “Keep this quiet. Soon as we take care of J.B. and this Graver fella, you, me, and Larabee'll come out here and God willing find something.” Although he didn't know much about Munday, Higgs thought he could trust him. Man did his work. Wasn't hard on the horses. Good tracker. Kept his mouth shut, not like Irish Jim or a couple of others who wore a man down with their constant yapping.

It was eight miles back to the ranch but it seemed a thousand to the men flanking the foreman's horse, burdened with its double load. The sky had dropped into the darkness of extinguishing stars when they finally entered the ranch yard. Tired horses shuffled and sighed as they made their way to the barn. Jim and Willie stepped down with Higgs and Larabee outside the main house and unlashed the body, and while Willie held the gate, J.B. was borne up the brick path. They hesitated at the door. Higgs reached to rap his
knuckles, and then realized the person who granted permission to enter was dead in their hands. He turned the knob and pushed it open. The room was dark. The boy asleep upstairs, Higgs's wife, Vera, likewise asleep in the foreman's house, some four hundred yards away.

“Wait.” Higgs turned and felt his way through the dark to a kerosene lamp on the small table between the sofa and reading chair, found the sulfurs beside the lamp, and lit the wick. As soon as the gold glow pushed back the shadows, Higgs gestured, and the men brought the body to the brown-speckled cowhide sofa and carefully lowered it. Later the hide would bear the dark smudge of Bennett's blood, but it never occurred to anyone to get rid of it.

The men stood looking around the room, hats in hands, clearly uncomfortable to be in their boss's good parlor and in the presence of his body.

“Go on. Irish Jim, you take care of Graver's wound, but make sure you tie him to the bunk. Late call tomorrow; get some sleep.” Higgs grimaced, laid his hat on the table beside the lamp, and promptly picked it up again. Larabee let the others pass, then looked over his shoulder at Higgs, who nodded.

At first, Higgs thought about going upstairs and waking Hayward with the news, but he thought better of it. You always knew bad news soon enough. Best to sleep while a body could. He glanced at the dead man, startled by the fact that the eyes had closed, as if he could finally be at peace now that he was home.

“Okay.” Higgs breathed deep and sat in the big, overstuffed chair upholstered with a burgundy plush that had worn thin and dark on the arms and back where J.B.'s head had rested for years. The wife's doing. Something called “Turkish Victorian,” all done up with tassels and fringe the dogs and boy had taken turns pulling off until the furniture sat like aging relatives, fat and old-fashioned, beside the dainty mahogany table with claw-and-ball feet and carved foliage up the legs. An heirloom from her family, J.B. had noted with a touch of humor one night. That, and the whatnot corner thingy that
held Hayward's Indian relics and the silver belt buckle he'd won riding goats at the ranch rodeo when he was ten.

Higgs glanced back at the body, examined it more closely in the light now that he was alone. The chest wound was ugly. They were always ugly. He pulled up the lace antimacassar pinned to the chair arm, leaned over, and placed it across the wound. “Look like a damn preacher now,” he said. “Sorry, J.B., Jesus,” he hastily amended, his eyes filled.

“That's enough,” Higgs whispered as the wet on his grizzled cheeks dripped down to darken the collar of his flannel shirt. “Sorry.” He looked at his scarred hands, the permanently swollen knuckles, the index finger he couldn't straighten, beset with a trembling that wouldn't stop as it made its way up his arms, into his chest, his shoulders, and down his legs until he felt like he was about to shake into pieces, but still he held the great sobs within, releasing only the faint hissing sound of boiling water as he wept.

It was almost seven the next morning when the door opened and shut, waking Higgs to his wife's light tread. She looked straight toward the kitchen, and thus missed the figure of her husband next to the body of their employer.

Higgs considered calling her, but she was already banging pots, starting the coffee, firing up the woodstove, humming softly, with the occasional chiding word for her own mistakes. Soon there was beef frying, biscuits rolled, and eggs whipped. She'd stop cooking once she heard. He knew she would. So he kept quiet. The men needed to eat. First and foremost, you fed stock and men.

The parlor was much the same as it had always been, Bennett being a simple man and his wife, while she'd lived there, not a fussy woman. There was lace on all the chairs and it hung in the windows—though it didn't do a damn thing to keep out the cold. Rather than newspaper and catalogue pages covering the walls for warmth as in the bunkhouse, the parlor walls were papered with garden flowers and framed pictures of sour-looking people from her family out East. Chicago, was it? Cleveland? Higgs
couldn't remember. Why hadn't she taken her pictures with her, he wondered. And the kerosene lamp—he looked over, it had long since burned out—with the big pink cabbage roses on the two globes. He understood about the furniture—except maybe the little table between the two hulking pieces. The table's rich, dark finish glowed from the beeswax Vera rubbed into the wood.

But the rest of the stuff—even the piano covered with that tasseled scarf—why hadn't she shipped it home? Unless she planned on coming back or came from a place with things twice this good. He glanced at Bennett. That was probably it. It was sixteen years ago when that bad spell of luck came along and they damn near lost the place the first time. Cattle got screwworm, blackleg, scours, and every other damn thing they could think of, horses colicked or broke legs, and it stopped raining. Grass didn't green in spring. They were bleeding money and stock, J.B. told him. But in the middle of it Bennett and his wife went off for a month, then came home, a load of furniture and junk in a wagon behind theirs. Within a couple of months they were buying stock to replace what they'd lost and eating store-bought food when the garden died. The younger son was born six months later.

As other spreads went under, Bennett's thrived, with enough money to buy surrounding land at rock-bottom prices. It didn't take a schoolteacher to figure out the arithmetic. Even after the past years of drought proved almost fatal for the ranch, these days any number of men nursed a healthy dose of envy and dislike for Bennett. What would happen to Hayward now? At fifteen he still acted the boy, no hand at all with the stock and a joke to the men. Damn Bennett for getting himself kilt. Higgs sought the end of his mustache and brought it to the corner of his mouth to chew, a habit he'd developed of late since he gave up whiskey and tobacco for his wife.

He thought again of the boy asleep upstairs. He sighed and rose, straightened stiffly and held the small of his back until the grabbing
pain reluctantly released. Best get this done before the men came up for breakfast.

Opening the bedroom door slowly didn't stop the hinges from squealing. Higgs froze in the hallway, waited to see if the boy would say something. Surely he was awake now, but when he pushed the door open the rest of the way and looked inside, the room and bed were empty in the dusty light. The lace window curtains were flung up over the rod, and the window gaped. A brown moth, stranded in the rising sun, fluttered weakly and tried to climb the inch from the frame to the sill. Upon closer inspection, Higgs realized the bed hadn't been slept in, although a body had at some recent time dented the blankets and pillow. The thought wormed into him that maybe he should be worried.

It was a boy's room to the extent that it contained the dusty trophies of hunting trips—antlers, brushes of rabbit, squirrel, fox, and deer, tail feathers of pheasant and turkey, and the two-foot span of an eagle's wing nailed to the wall. Higgs remembered that one—the boy shot the huge bird accidentally, he said. Bennett made him nail the wing to the wall over his bed so he had to endure the sweet rot as it slowly decayed to teach him a lesson, and Hayward never said a word. He kept the window open for the next year, even when it was thirty below zero last winter, so cold your snot froze your nose shut and stung your eyes, then froze the tears to your lashes. Maybe the boy was more like his father than either imagined.