On firm ground, both men turned and stood there, gazes fixed on the dead bodies they must approach, and unable to take the few more steps it would take to cover the space dividing them. Ben's eyes filled with tears and he wiped his sleeve across his face, trying not to choke on those tears he held back, tears that caught in his throat like swallowed fish bones.
He took John's arm and together they walked over to the still smoldering fire that stood at the center of the abattoir. John looked down at his little sister and doubled up with grief, his sobs ripping from his throat in a terrible scream of mourning. And then he saw his mother, her sightless eyes frosted over, glinting with sunlight, vacant, dead, as fixed as dried resin set in polished glass.
“Mother,” John breathed, and fell upon her lifeless body, clasping her shoulders, pulling her to him as if he could give his life for hers, as if he could make her whole again.
As he lay there, John could not stop crying.
And that was the only sound in the awful stillness of the waning morning.
5
BEN KNELT DOWN NEXT TO THE BODY OF HIS BROTHER, LELAND. He lifted his brother's limp hand, saw the dirt embedded under the fingernails, felt the knobs of his calloused knuckles, the cords threading his palm.
“Oh, Lee,” Ben said. “Oh, dear, sweet Lee, I'm sorry.”
He could barely look at the others, but he forced himself to scan their bodies in the distant hope that one might still be alive. The bodies lay still, flies buzzing at their nostrils and eyes, penetrating their ears, crawling over their mouths and faces. A jay landed on an overturned skillet, its eyes shining like polished beads, its head twisting around in jerky movements. Another jay flew down, landed a few feet away, and strutted across the gravel, its head tilted as it eyed the ground for crumbs.
Ben stood up and shaded his eyes as he peered upward at the sun. Its rays felt warm on his skin and there was something beneficent about its golden glow on his face, as if life could be renewed in some magical way just by letting the sunshine seep over his skin and penetrate the flesh, restoring vitality to flaccid muscles and limp tendons. He was alive. His brother Leland, and all of his other friends, Sam and Clare and little Alice, all were dead and no elixir, no potion, no radiance of sun, could bring any of them back to life. They were dead and gone, when a few moments before they had all been smiling and talking, breathing the crisp mountain air.
Ben swore under his breath and watched as John arose from his mother's breast and stumbled over to Alice. John stooped down and picked up the blood-spattered body of Alice, held her in his arms as he would hold a broken doll. Alice's golden blond ringlets hung from her head like ribbon remnants from a long-ago birthday party, and they held their sheen in the sun. Blessedly, her eyes were closed and she looked at peace, as if she was merely asleep and John was carrying her to her bed.
“I'm real sorry, Johnny,” Ben said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his hands dangling helplessly at his side.
“Poor little Alice,” John said. “She was so pretty, had so much to live for. She loved life so much.” He choked on the last few words and could speak no more as fresh tears flooded his eyes and coursed down his face, twisting and overrunning the tracks that were already there.
“We could get the wagon and take everybody to Colorado Springs, Johnny. They got an undertaker there. Or, if you like, we can haul 'em to Pueblo. A lot farther. Maybe easier. I don't know.”
John lay Alice's body out on the white tent canvas he had just smoothed out with his boots. He picked up a blanket and covered her with it. Jays marched around like little blue martinets just on the edge of where the camp had been.
“No, we'll bury everyone up in that meadow, beyond where we built the barn and keep the wagons. You know the one I mean?”
“Well, yeah, that's a mite purty place, Johnny. Ground might be soft there. It's got a spring.”
“It's got a spring, a little creek, some columbines growing. Pa always talked about building a house up yonder. He and Ma both. He took a claim on it in my name. It's got a good view of the mountain ranges on both sides, lots of green grass and flowers. Alice would love to be buried there.”
“Your ma, too, Johnny. You're right. That'd make a nice, fine place.”
“And, someday, maybe I'll build a big old house there and we'll already have a little cemetery. There's some junipers and some spruce down on the lower far corner that would make a fine little cemetery.”
Ben could see that John was holding it all in, talking faster than a Cherry Creek magpie just so he wouldn't have to think about what he had seen with his own eyes, what he was never going to forget for as long as he lived.
“Why, I think that's a right nice place, Johnny. I know my brother, Lee, would be proud to buried there alongside your kin and all his friends. I'll walk up to the barn and hitch a couple of mules to the wagon and come on down here. We can get them all in maybe two loads. I think we can shorten the digging time a heap, too, if you agree to my idea.”
“What's that, Ben?”
“We'll get us a few sticks of Dupont sixty/forty, cut 'em in half, cap 'em, lay 'em out the way we want the graves to be, set 'em all off. The nitro will blast each plot and we can dig out what needs be dug out.”
“Good idea,” John said. “Bring the wagon down. I'll lay everybody out and cover them decent.”
“You be all right, John?”
“Yeah. Go on. You know, Ben, those bastards didn't get all the gold we had. And they didn't get something else, something just about as precious to me.”
“What's that?” Ben stopped on his walk up to the path that would take him to the meadow through a fringe of trees along a ridge.
“My daddy's gun.”
“You mean that fancy Colt of his? I thought he kept that in a lockbox at the bank in Pueblo.”
“Nope. He gave it to me, and I buried it in a little strongbox, along with my poke.”
“You got a poke?”
“I been keepin' that, too. For a long time. Remember that muley I killed last year up at timberline?”
“Yeah. I remember you skinnin' it and tannin' it out. Liked to drove your mama plumb crazy, all that lye, that burnt wood soaking, the smell of the hide when you boiled it.”
“I made leather pouches out of that hide and I've been filling them with dust and nuggets Alice and I panned from the creek when the rest of you was drinking peach brandy and hollering while you danced on the wagon sheets after sundown.”
“Well, that's right smart of you, Johnny. I got a poke, too, smarty-pants. Been keepin' it in a box I buried up by my mine. Looks like you and I aren't paupers, exactly, are we?”
John grinned.
Ben tossed John a wave and started hiking up the wagon-rutted road. John turned to the task at hand, going to his mother next, picking her up and carrying her over to the flattened tent, laying her beside Alice, covering her up with the same wide blanket.
He looked at his father and winced when he saw the wounds. He fought back the tears, but his ducts filled up anyway. Some fell on his father's face as he lifted his lifeless body from the ground and carried him over to the canvas. He laid him out next to his mother and retrieved another blanket from the detritus and covered his face and body, leaving only the boots sticking out.
While he was attending to his grisly task, John kept seeing the faces of killers. He put names to their faces, ran names and faces through his mind over and over until they were indelible. He looked down into the creek when he crossed the bridge, looked into its swirling amber-green water flecked with gold and silver from the sun and he listened to its soothing babble as if it were some kind of cryptic symphony that filled the empty spaces in his heart. The screeching of the jays, too, seemed to be speaking to him in strange, mournful tongues, and even the solemn trees rising to the sky seemed fraught with hidden messages of life and death, of ordinary matters and of those things arcane and indecipherable in the course of human history. He felt strangely light-headed and heartsore, as if all of his vital organs had been cut out of him and lay strewn along the creek bank with all of the other things pertaining to mundane, everyday life, a diurnal account seemingly suspended in time, outside of his mind's grasp, elusive, like the tiny rainbows that danced in the stream as it bounded over smooth and shiny rocks, shooting spray into the air that quickly vanished in the small corner of the universe that lay scattered around him like remnants of some somber dream.
By the time John heard the wagon top the ridge and start down the road, its wheels rattling, its wood groaning, he had laid out all of the bodies and covered them. He'd had to cross the bridge to gather up more blankets from the other side of the creek, but all of the corpses were covered, and John felt enervated from the effort and the mental strain. He had never seen a dead person before, and to have seen so many, all at once, was very nearly overwhelming.
Ben pulled up in the wagon, turning it around so that it faced back toward the ridge. He set the brake and climbed down. He looked at all the blankets, so still, so final. A light breeze lifted the corner of one blanket and it flapped like a loose shutter. Jays quarreled with shrill screeches over by the campfire that John and Ben put out by pouring water and sand over it. Chunks of kindling and cut logs lay scattered nearby as if some great beast had run through the camp and knocked them askew.
“Tough job, Johnny,” Ben said. “But you done it. You ready to go up? I'll throw in some shovels and we can start loading.”
“Yeah, I guess. I think we ought to get our guns first. Just in case. Don't you?”
“I reckon they didn't take anything with 'em but the gold. Seen my rifle anywhere?”
John shook his head.
“I didn't look,” he said and now started scanning the barren ground where their tents had once stood. There was so much debris, no single item stood out. There were kegs and wooden canteens, lanterns, hatchets, various other tools, tins and airtights, clothing, utensils, pots, pans, a torn flour sack, another of beans, an open coffee tin, nails, hammers.
Together, Ben and John poked through the scattered goods, finding scissors, needles and threads, yarn, bolts of cloth, odd pieces of leather, an awl, Alice's wooden toys, a couple of small dolls she liked, all kinds of things that tore at John's heartstrings and made him sick to his stomach.
Wrapped in an old army blanket that was moth-eaten and faded to a whitish gray, John found his father's Winchester '73, a .30-caliber lever action that shone like a crow's wing in the yellow sunlight. There were two boxes of cartridges inside, as well. The blanket had been beneath an overturned cot. The scabbard, John knew, was up at the log barn they had built the summer before, locked up in the tack room with the saddles, bridles, hackamores, and halters they had carried all the way from Arkansas so long ago.
“I found my rifle, Johnny,” Ben said, holding up his heavy Henry Yellow Boy, its bluing all mottled and the brass shining like pure gold. “They didn't see it, likely, under a pile of empty flour sacks I been meaning to make me some shirts from bye and bye.”
“We can gather all the guns later,” John said. “I'm sure they're all here under all this stuff.”
“You get your pistol? Your poke?”
“No, not yet.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I don't have a holster for it yet.”
“Lee had him a holster. Made it hisself over the winter. He was going to buy him a Colt the next trip down the mountain over to Pueblo.”
“I wouldn't know where it is,” John said, his voice sounding dull and faraway to himself.
“Get the pistol and we can look for the holster later.”
John drew in a deep breath, held it for a long moment. There was no need for secrecy anymore. He would not have to hide his poke nor his pistol from anyone. There wasn't anyone to hide these things from. It was still hard to imagine they were all gone. But they were. He looked over at the blankets and his eyes fisted shut as the tears started to well up again. Would he ever stop crying? Not this day. There was still the burying to do. And that would be hard. Hard as anything he'd ever had to do. Little Alice. His ma. His pa. All of his friends, and Ben's brother, his mother's brother.
“I got the rifle,” John said, opening his eyes. “I'll get the pistol later. Ain't nobody goin' to find it.” He said the last sentence almost belligerently, as if challenging Ben. But Ben had no interest in his poke or his pistol. He knew that. It was just that he had to give up the only secret he had and he wasn't quite ready to do that yet. He would dig up the box later. He knew right where it was.
He heard the clank of shovels striking the bed of the wagon. He saw Ben put his Yellow Boy under the seat, heard the swish of the mules' tails as they swatted flies, saw their ears twitch, heard one paw the ground with its hoof. The creek swished against its banks in a whispery undertone and he heard the flap of a jay's wings as it braked for a landing nearby.
“We got eleven to carry, Johnny. Want to take your folks, my brother, and your uncle with the first load, then come back for the others?”
In a fog of unbearable grief, John answered.
“Yeah, Ben, that would be fine. Let's just do it.”
Ben's eyes squinted at John's unnatural tone of voice. He looked at John, his eyes hard as agates, an unspoken question flitting in their depths.
John felt something hardening in him, something that had not been there before. He didn't know what it was, but he had an indication when he began to see the faces of the outlaws again when he looked up at the green trees and the blue sky and the white puffs of clouds floating in a serene sea high above the earth. He saw their faces and felt that same something tighten in him. It wasn't hatred, exactly, it was something beyond that simple explosive emotion.