Chapter 4: The Bride at Thirteen Mile

Harlan Deeds lasted about a year.

He had two hundred men on a payroll and a county that voted however he told them to, and that counted for nothing the day the man up the next valley came over the ridge with more men, better rifles, and nothing left to lose. It came down to a fight over ground — I have heard it called a range war, and I have heard it called a squabble over a railroad spur, and I don’t know which is the truth and it doesn’t touch this part of the story. Deeds went into it and was shot in it and died in the road.

That was the only man in that county who had ever handed Elias Hollis anything.

So he ran. Nobody chases a hired hand, but he ran anyway, thirty-odd miles of it, most of it at night, and when he got home the house had fallen in. It had been thinking about falling in for years — he had propped the corner by the stove with a wagon tongue the summer before — and then it did it, and he stood in his own yard looking at the roof lying down inside the walls like a lid on a pot.

He had the revolver he had carried for Deeds, the belt, and the coat on his back. He had no money. Money did not stay with him, and what did stay, the bottle took. By the second day his hands were shaking so bad he could not get a button through a buttonhole. On the third day he sold the revolver and the belt and the holster to a crew driving cattle over the line — men with no brand and no questions — and got four dollars, a sack of flour, a side of bacon and a bag of coffee for it, which was half what the gun was worth in town. He knew that. He was not going into town.

The four dollars lasted him nine days. Then he sat down in the yard with his back against the fallen corner of the house and did the arithmetic on what he had left, which was a cup of flour and a bottle with nothing in it, and while he was doing it he remembered what the thing had promised him.

Two years before, he had burned a woman’s shape in that yard — paper and wire and dress goods, and his mother’s good clothes on it for kindling — and before it went down it spoke to him in a woman’s voice and made him a promise. When you come to the end of everything, it said, go out to Thirteen Mile Flat and find the grave with no stone on it. I’m buried with my gold.

He had been a soldier since the night he burned that thing in the yard, and soldiering does something to a man’s nerve. It does not make it longer or shorter so much as different. And he had listened to an old hand in the outfit talk about grave work: how it pays, how the men who do it live, and how they hang you for it when they catch you at it. So he waited for dark, and he took a lantern and a shovel, and he went out to Thirteen Mile.

You may not have heard the term, so I’ll put it in, because my grandfather always stopped here. A woolly moon is a moon in a clear sky with a ring around it, and the light off it is not bright, exactly — it is the light of a lamp with a coat over it. You can look it up now: it is ice up high in the air and it means wind coming. He knew that, near the end of his life. He could read weather. He got more off the sky than most men get off a newspaper. But in that country they called it a moon with wool on it, and I have heard men say — old men, and not fools, and not drunk either — that a night lit like that one is when the restless dead do their walking. Both of those things are in my family’s mouth to this day.

He had a half-pint of busthead in his coat and he poured most of it down on the road out, and afterward he called it a waste of a half-pint, because that country took it out of him through his shirt before he ever got to the burying ground.

It was a big old burying ground. No fence around it and no church in sight of it. The graves in it were so old that nobody in the county could have told you what years they were, and there were lights moving over them, low to the ground, blue and green, the size of a man’s hand. Something in the trees off to the left made a sound like a hinge. The flame in his lantern sank and came up and sank again, as if it might go out any time it pleased.

He sang. A man alone in a place like that sings. He knew four lines of a waltz called “The Lights of Adobe Wells” and he knew every verse there was of a song called “The Twelve Touches of Liza Bly,” which he would not have sung in front of his mother and did sing out there, twice, at the top of his voice, because the second one worked better than the first. It wasn’t courage. It was noise.

He walked out into the middle of that field, and there it was. One grave with no stone on it, and the coffin standing on end, jammed down into the mound like a fence post, better than half of it out of the ground, catching the woolly light along its side and giving it back. It was new. He could not get past that, walking around it with the shovel. Somebody had put eighteen coats of red lacquer on that box, and a man could count them, and every one of the eighteen was fresh.

He walked around it twice. He was not a man who thought twice about anything, and he thought twice about this one. Then he reasoned with himself, and the reasoning he told me, more than once, was this: a man who stays in town and starves is dead for nothing, and a man who gets his throat opened out here by something that has been dead a hundred years is at least dead for something.

So he dug. He dug the mound out from under the lower half of the coffin, and by the time the box stood free he was sitting on the ground with his lungs going like a dog in the sun, because his wind was gone, and had been gone since about the second month on the bottle. He did not open it right away. He got the bottle out of his coat and the spoon out of his other pocket — he carried both, always, the way another man carries a pipe and a knife — and he took his medicine, and after a while the ground came up level with him again, and he stood up and put the shovel to the lid.

He put the shovel under the lid and the lid came off. Inside was a woman.

She was dressed for a wedding. White dress, veil, a wreath of wax flowers gone the color of tea, and the paint on her face laid on thicker than any living woman would wear in daylight: white, laid on thick as whitewash, and two patches of rouge on the cheeks standing out of the white like a pair of red court plasters. That’s his phrase, not mine. And under the paint, the face was whole.

He knew right off she was not the one from two years before. He had seen that face, and it was wide and flat with a mouth like a cut in a melon. This one had a face a man could stand to look at, which was worse and not better, and while he was standing there working out what it meant that she had not rotted in two years, his eye went past her face, and after that he did not think at all.

There were silver dollars in there, rolled up tight in paper, roll after roll of them, and gold coin lying loose in the folds of the dress, and pins, and a string of something green. And on her hand there was a ring with an emerald in it the size of his thumbnail, and his hand went into that coffin the way a hand goes into a pocket.

Her arm came over and took his wrist.

There was strength in it that no woman ever had. The nails on that hand were long and hard as steel hooks, and an inch of them went into the cords of his wrist and stayed in there, and he pulled and got exactly nothing for it. Then she opened her eyes.

He has said the cold of it went through him like falling into a cistern, and that he watched his own breath come out white in front of his face, which he could see perfectly well by the light of a lantern he was no longer holding.

“You’re one of the money ones,” she said. “If it can be bought with gold, you’ll do it; if it can’t be bought with gold, you’re no good to anybody at all.” She looked at him until she was done deciding about him. “And I don’t believe that heart of yours is doing you any good the way you run it. I’ll keep it for you.”

She had his shirt open with the other hand. One nail came down his chest, one stroke, and his heart came out of him whole and lay in the open shirt for as long as it takes to see a thing, and then she had it in her mouth and swallowed it without chewing. Like a cat with a chick.

He remembers nothing after that. The next thing he had was dirt under his forehead and the coffin in front of him and his hands flat on the ground, and he was crying so hard he could not get a breath between it, and he was bowing to her, over and over, and he could not have told you why. There was no pain anywhere. There was a scar over his heart the length of a fingernail, like an old wound he’d had for years. There was nothing in the middle of him where something had been, and he could not have said what.

She was sitting up on the top end of the coffin, the end standing out of the ground, like a woman sitting on a porch rail, and her white dress hung a foot clear of the dirt.

“You’re mine now,” she said. “I’m not hard on what’s mine. You’ll be warm and you’ll be fed and you’ll have money in your pocket the rest of your life. You’ll bring me women. Eight times eight. Sixty-four of them, out here on this flat, and I’ll eat their hearts and their livers. When the sixty-fourth goes down me there is not a power in heaven or under it that can lay a hand on me.” She said it without any heat at all, the way you’d read out a bill of lading. “Miss one. Hold one back. Make one mistake anywhere in it, and I’ll take your life, and I won’t be in any hurry about it.”

And here is what she was, or what he understood her to be, which is the same thing he went on telling for the next fifty years. She was a hundred years dead and she owed something on that ground, a debt of some kind, and until that debt was paid off she could not walk out of that flat on her own two feet. So she worked through men like him, men whose hands go out on their own the minute they see gold, and she paid them well, and kept them, and left them breathing as long as they were useful.

He went out of that burying ground at a dead run with his shirt hanging open and his pants fouled. He stopped twice behind rocks on the way and was sick. Behind the first house he came to there was washing out on a line, and he took it down and got out of his own clothes and put those on, and he was half a mile down the road before it came over him that he had lost something and could not remember what it was, and that it was the most important thing he owned.

Then, walking, he put his hand into the pocket of the filthy pants he was carrying under his arm, looking for a match, and found two twenty-dollar gold pieces.

He stood in that road turning them over. He had not put them there. He had not been given them by any living soul. He never did work out where they came from, or he worked it out and never said it, and I am not going to say it for him.

Next morning he washed in a ditch, walked into the crossing, and put the two gold pieces on the counter of the store there, and walked out with silver dollars in his coat and no questions asked, because questions cost money in a store like that. Then he took a room over the saloon, and a barber shaved him, and he ate a steak with onions and half a can of peaches, and then he went after his medicine and stayed after it, and the floor of that room came up and met the ceiling and stayed level with it for a day and a half.

When he came down out of it he went and bought Cora.

There was a family up a dry fork off the county road with eight children and nothing to eat, and he told them he was in a position to marry and take one of the girls off their hands, and he put ten silver dollars on the table. They took it. The law had a word for what he did. He knew the word, and the family knew the word, and nobody in that room used it. They used the other word, and the other word was marrying, and the girl was Cora, and she was eighteen.

He sat with her on the step and told her she was coming home with him to keep house as his wife, and that she would not go hungry again and she would not go barefoot again. She was a country girl and she could not lift her eyes to him, and she said nothing for the first mile of the road and then asked whether there was a church where they were going. He said there was one somewhere. She said that was good.

Then he bought a mule and put her up on it and waited for dark, and they went out toward Thirteen Mile.

That is where he met Silas Rand, on the county road at eleven at night, walking with a forked stick in one hand and a canvas bag in the other and a mule of his own tied off in the trees. Silas Rand was known in four counties as a man who could find water under rock, and it was true, and it was not the whole of what he could do. He could look at a face and read it the way another man reads a brand. He did both for money, and the men who hired him were not fools, and neither was he.

Rand turned and stood in the road and let Elias come up to him. Then he looked at him for a while, close, in the dark, without a light, and what he said was: “There’s a blackness laid over your face like smoke laid over a window. I’ll ask you one thing, and when I’ve asked it you can do whatever you like.”

Then he said: “Where is your heart?”

It hit him like a bar of iron across the back. He went down in the road on his knees with the mule’s lead rope still in his fist and asked the old man to save him. He did not ask what was meant. He knew what was meant. He had been carrying it around since the coffin on that flat and he had no name for it until the old man said it out loud in the road.

Rand put a hand under him and brought him up off his knees.

“You’ve been a low-living man,” he said, “and you haven’t been a killer yet. That girl you have on the mule is still breathing. That is the difference between you and what is out there on that flat. I can get you loose of it.” He picked the bag up off the ground. “Two things first. You take me for your teacher. And you put the bottle down.”

Elias stood in that road and worked it out in his head, and what he worked out was this: his life was worth more to him than his medicine, that night and probably the next; and once this was done with, the old man was not going to be in the same room with him every day of his life. He said yes to both. He meant yes to the second one for about as long as it took him to stand up.

Then he knelt down again, in the road, and took off the mule’s lead rope, and Rand laid the forked stick on the ground and stood over him with his hand on his head and said something short that Elias never repeated to anybody and was not supposed to, and that I am not going to guess at.

Then Rand took charge of it. He took Cora over the next ridge to a woman he knew, and told Cora he would come back for her, and Cora believed him, because she was eighteen and he was an old man with a stick.

Then he and Elias sat down together in the dark and built a girl.

She was wire and sacking and she came up to the right height, and they got dress goods on her and a shawl on her, and inside of her, where a heart would be, Rand put a sack of salt bound up with red cedar shavings, and over that he bound more cedar, and he smoked the whole business over the fire until it smelled like a cedar chest in a church. Elias carried it up the road in front of him on the mule and talked to it, out loud, in a married voice.

She was on that coffin waiting for him when he came into the flat, and she called him late and called him some other things, and then she had the girl off the mule and one hand into her chest before Elias had taken three steps backward, and she put the heart in her mouth and swallowed it without chewing.

Then she stopped.

She stood on the end of that coffin with her hand still up at her mouth and her head down, and the white paint on her face went gray from the inside out, and she did not move for as long as it takes to draw a breath. Then her other hand came up and went into her own chest, under the dress and under the bone, and she took hold of what was in there and pulled it out and stood looking at it in her hand: a sack of salt with red cedar shavings stuck to it.

Then she made the sound. I have heard my grandfather describe it four or five times and he never found the right word for it, and I have never read one. She tore the figure into pieces and threw the pieces off her, and she came off that coffin after Elias, and Elias was forty yards out into the dark by then and running harder than he ever ran again in his life.

She couldn’t come after him. She stood up on that flat and howled at the sky until the sound went off flat and wide in every direction and came back off the far hills, and while she was howling the wedding dress went off her in flakes like burned paper in a wind, and then she went down onto the ground in a puddle of blood and water, and the ground drank it, and when it was over there was a skeleton lying there with a hundred years of road dust in it and nothing on it at all.

Rand came out of the rocks and went down on his knees beside the bones and went through them with both hands, like a man going through a sack of seed, and came up with a thing the size of a hen’s egg, dark red, hard, like a pill for a draft horse.

“Swallow it,” he said.

Elias swallowed it. He has never had a way to describe the next part that I would repeat, and I have heard men say the same thing about drowning. He said it was the moment when you have been under so long your eyes have started going and then you have the air. He said something came back into the middle of him and sat down there and started working, slow and heavy, and that it hurt, and that nothing had hurt since the flat. That night he put his hand inside his shirt and the scar was still there, the length of a fingernail, and under the scar something was working, slow and heavy, and it had not been working since he stood in front of that coffin on the flat.

Then they laid the bones back down in the red lacquer box and Rand set the lid and drove the long nails, and then he took a chalk line off a reel and chalked it and snapped it, and chalked it and snapped it again, and worked around that coffin until it was under a grid of black lines like a window, and every time he snapped a line he said something short under his breath that Elias was not close enough to hear, which was on purpose.

And when he was doing the last of it the skull came up off the bones inside the box and stood up in there, and opened its mouth and blew a mouthful of black vapor into the old man’s face.

Rand was standing over it with his shoulder to the lid and no room to do anything about it but take it, and he took all of it. Then he put his back into the lid and dropped it, and drove three nails and set the last of the chalk, and then he sat down in the dirt and couldn’t get up again.

“Don’t stand there looking at me,” he said. “There’s dry wood up the draw. You get a fire going.”

Elias stacked dry brush and deadfall around that coffin and lit it, and the lid caught and then the whole box went, and the smoke came off it black and rolling and it stank like a burning mattress. They stood there and watched it burn down. And when it was half burned through, Elias remembered what was in there with the bones — the silver dollars in their paper rolls, the gold lying loose, the emerald, the whole of it — and he stamped his foot in the dirt and swore at the smoke, and he stood there and watched it go to ash, and there was nothing he could do about it and he knew it, and it went to ash anyway.

He got Rand up on the mule. It took the two of them the better part of an hour, and Rand swore the whole time in a flat voice with nothing left in it, and they went off that flat with the night still in it.

It is four miles from the middle of that burying ground out to the county road, and it took them what was left of the night, because Rand came off the mule twice and both times Elias had to get him up off the ground and back on.

The woman’s house was the first one over the ridge, past the road. Cora was asleep in a chair with her shoes on. They told her the old man had been taken sick in the night and was better, and she got up and folded the blanket and said she was glad of it.

They were on the county road again before the sun was well up — Rand on his own mule with both hands in the mane, because sitting up was the one thing he could still do, and Cora on theirs, and Elias walking and leading them both.

Cora never found out what she had been taken out there to be. Neither of them told her. He did not tell her on the road and he did not tell her in the years after, and I have gone at it from every side, and it happened before I was born, and as near as I have ever been able to establish, nobody told her at all.

Rand never explains himself in this stretch, and I like him more for it. He asks Elias one question on a dark road, then stands there while the man goes down on his knees — but what stays with me is what he does after: takes that mouthful of black vapor full in the face so Elias doesn’t have to, and says only, don’t stand there looking at me. I keep wanting the version where somebody thanks him. There isn’t one.

Elias says yes to both of Rand’s terms, and means one of them for about as long as it takes him to stand up. I’d like to hear how you read a man like that.

If you’d like to read ahead, early chapters are available on my Patreon: https://patreon.com/zuochuang