“Still,” Shelby said, “I guess it’s best we steer clear.”
* * *
We rode past the Papago Indian Reservation and into the Coronado Forest. We wound our way through Santa Cruz, watering the horses at stock tanks and creek beds. We passed only game hunters and tree dwellers, gruff folks who eyed us with suspicion and madness.
There was no rain. The days fell hard upon my skin, which burned and peeled and burned again. I imagined it a precursor to Hell, and during the long rides with little water I became convinced whatever god controlled the sky was surely showing me my future eternal.
Whether Shelby felt remorse, I could not say, but in the end it was not him who’d murdered the child. And so it was my soul, beyond saving, that was bound to navigate the everlasting flames of the underworld. Never seeing my mother again.
We made no fires at night, and the heat from the day was chased away by an urgent cold that sank into my bones, and I shivered in and out of dreams. I saw her face and the face of my father and the face of the boy. They were each one set against dark clouds and a rolling thunder. When lightning struck, the faces were illuminated and I could see they weren’t all the way human. They were ever-changing, like portraits with dripping paint, and their mouths were open wide like they were screaming, but I heard only the storm.
2
The sky darkened and there were naught but bones and Randall felt them and saw them—his own bones aching and Harry’s resting in the box—and the rain was like a crawling shadow on the mountains beyond. The site was slanted and covered in desert spoons, which were Harry’s favorite, likely because of their name, and the gathering storm sent ahead its wind so that the tall plants might bow before it. Randall’s body mimicked their contortions. With the shovel he lurched toward the dirt, the blade piercing the earth again and again, and the wind carrying the sounds of his mother’s whimpers. He swore he heard the pounding of hooves, but when he looked up all was still and bracing. His mother’s head was lowered in grief and tears, but his wife stared straight ahead with no emotion to be discerned. Randall watched her until her eyes found his, and he saw there a hollowness to rival any canyon, and she turned away as the first drops of rain turned dark brown on the dust before him.
Some of the ranchmen had come, and others had stayed behind at the barracks. Randall had not required attendance, though he doubted the difference that would have made. As the rain began to fall in earnest, the men replaced their hats and started a staggered and premature dispersion. None offered their help, and Randall hated them all and drove the shovel down with a violence he was not accustomed to. His hands bled against the wooden end and his back and shoulders were afire. He saw in the distance several head of cattle making for a mesquite grove to wait out the storm. Above them the sky fractured and cracked and the herd called out to him or to one another or to God as the dirt went to mud, slick and unbalanced.
Among those gathered stood a boy Randall recognized. A boy, inexplicably called Tadpole, who had been a friend to Harry during the lonesome days on the ranch. He still held his hat across his chest and was the only one to do so, and his lips trembled so that he might not cry and show weakness to the older men around him.
The preacher had been delayed on account of the weather and so it was Randall, covered in mud and rain, who spoke the words of the Lord to the few souls who yet remained.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Amen.”
“Amen,” whispered a few.
“Harry was a good boy,” Randall said, then paused. “A good boy who loved horses—” His voice cracked and so too did the thunder. “. . . horses and his family and . . . he was only trying to do what was right. Trying to protect us.”
Randall began to sob. “I should have protected him,” he cried, and with a muted lurching the coffin came unsettled from the stunted hill.
It slid into the hole and Randall, falling backward, narrowly avoided its path. The wood crashed below and Randall’s mother screamed and the lid splintered and snapped, and Harry’s body spilled out into the mud and pooling water. Randall dove, splashing into the grave, and picked up his son and held him close and rocked and cried. His wife stood straight and stern and unchanged.
* * *
The storm since passed, Randall was on the great porch and looking out at the land, his land, where always his father claimed the future of their family lay. And how right he had been, Randall thought, and a rainbow came and the cattle returned across the mesa and he felt his wife by his side.
Joanna was the daughter of a highly regarded doctor in the bustling metropolis of Philadelphia, and he a budding poet—so said those who cared of such things. He used the words of his father and his grandfather before him to speak of a West he could barely remember. As a boy he’d ridden a horse, he knew, and once stalked a great elk with his grandfather, but he’d grown up in academies along the East Coast and had learned table manners instead of survival skills. Still, his inexperience did not dilute his romanticism of the wild spaces that lay beyond the setting sun and with his words he entertained and entranced the young girl. He promised a life of adventurous splendor and did so with all the confidence and naivety of the soldier yet to see battle, and in the end his tenderfoot notions had betrayed them both.
His grandfather, the esteemed commander Lieutenant Travis Dawson, hero of the Mexican War, had been given land in the new territories of the Southwest as a grant from the United States. His grandfather would often say the government hoped the Apaches would kill him off, so as it could take back the lands once they proved fertile for cattle. Instead of only his own fresh scalp, the lieutenant brought to the Southwest a group of renegade soldiers who wanted no part in the coming conflict between the states. In exchange for parcels of his land, they helped Dawson drive back the Apaches and established several ranches in parts of the Arizona and New Mexico Territories—the greatest being Longpine, which soon became a boomtown of sorts.
When the Civil War did come, covering the country in a dark ritual of familial bloodletting, Dawson and his comrades had no qualms enriching themselves through cattle trade to both the Union and Confederate armies. The territories followed the violent example of their creator and divided themselves during the war. Dawson, being perhaps the most well known of the pioneers at the time, was asked by a newspaperman from Taos which side he supported.
“I will take no side save that which furthers my fortune,” his quote read. “And should there be a man obliged to point out my sin and greed, I would say to him: I have served the United States in its wars, now I will let its wars serve me.”
The lieutenant’s son, Randall’s father, had been raised in a boys’ school in Baltimore but was summoned West before the war in an attempt to keep him away from the fighting. During his first five years in the territory Edmund Dawson had taken a wife, lost an arm to a poisoned Apache arrow, and been appointed as a delegate to the newly reunited states. Despite having a wife who had fallen into depression after losing two children before birth, Edmund was a successful statesman and made the harrowing trip to and from Washington, DC, with growing regularity. Randall was born while his father was away in the spring of 1878 and by the time he was of schooling age the two switched places, Randall taking up residence at Mormont Boys Academy in Philadelphia and his father returning to the territory with a dream of statehood.