Come tomorrow morning when the rest of them were gone over the horizon and nothing was left of the train but a dusty smudge in the sky, he would remain here on the back trail and hide the grave. Build a big damn fire to kill the scent. Turn a few inches of topsoil after the limbs had gone to embers. And no wolf, no coyote, no poor Digger son of a bitch would ever know his grandson was buried there. Blood of his blood, bone of his bone, left there to rest in peace in this nameless, unmarked corner of the wilderness between what had been and what was to be.
“What’s that?” Roman asked the moment he dropped into the hole and the racket of hammers arose out of the silence of that chill, desert night like a disembodied poltergeist. Rhythmic, hauntingly rhythmic.
“I give Rankin and Winston two of those wood boxes my ship’s biscuits come in,” Bingham explained to his friend, who stared up at the eerie lamplight on their faces from the bottom of the hole. “Goodell had him two more.”
“Ship’s biscuits?” Burwell repeated, not understanding.
Bingham bit his lower lip a minute, then continued. “We figured it was the best thing we could come up with for a box, Row.”
“A box for my … my … for him?”
“Yes, we’re makin’ him a coffin,” Iverson said. “Winston took one side outta each box and they was laying ’em together, nailing ’em into a real nice coffin, Row.”
Ammons nodded his head, “It’s gonna work out real nice, Row—ain’t nothing gonna get in to your boy.”
Then they all saw how that image slapped Roman across the jaw as hard as a hickory-boned fist. His eyes scrunched up and his chin started to quake. Then it wasn’t but a heartbeat before that tremble started to work its way down through the rest of him until he was shaking as he stood in that dark hole. Slowly he sank down the long handle of that farmer’s shovel, gripping it for support until he landed at the bottom of the small hole with a grunt … and began to moan once more.
“Row,” Bingham pleaded as he leaned over the edge of the grave.
But Titus pulled the man back and knelt so he could look down on the grieving father. “Son, whyn’t you come on out now an’ lemme finish this up for the boy,” he said quietly, his voice having a hint of an echo as the words fell into the hollow grave.
“That you, Titus?”
“It’s me.”
Roman’s words drifted up from the dark, weak and plaintive, “How’s a man, a man ever s’posed to bear up under this?”
At first he swallowed, then said, “I ain’t for sure, Roman. Can’t claim to ever goin’ through what’s eatin’ a hole away at your heart right now. Fierce as my own heart screams in pain right now, I don’t have no idee how yours must be.”
“It’s like my legs won’t stand when I think of … of him.”
“But, you’re gonna have to stand, Roman,” Titus explained. “Amanda gonna be countin’ on you for that. Hold her up when it comes time we gotta put that li’l body down in this hole.”
“I-I don’t—”
“What about them other’ns? Three of the most likely young’uns a pa would ever want to light up his life. What about them three, Roman?”
“I didn’t figure on—”
“You tell me, son—would your boy, Lucas, want you an’ his mama to give up an’ die right here when you’re so close to where you was takin’ him?”
“Don’t have no way of knowing—”
“Lucas wants his folks to carry on,” Titus advised. “Lucas wants you both to be strong for each other. Say your words over his buryin’ spot. Then wipe your tears an’ get on down the trail another day.”
“L-leave him here?”
“Yes,” he whispered it. “You gonna leave the boy’s body behind, right here. Just like he left his body behind his own self a li’l while ago.”
“Then what, Titus?”
“You go on to get up next mornin’, an’ the mornin’ after that, and you take your family on to Oregon—”
“W-without him?” he shrieked in misery.
Scratch shuffled at the edge of the pit, stretching out on his belly so he could reach down with one hand, lay it on Roman’s trembling shoulder. “No, you an’ Amanda won’t never be ’thout young Lucas again. He’ll allays be with you, ever’ mile of the way to that new land in Oregon. Lucas allays be young, just like you ’member him.”
“It’s gonna hurt like the devil to remember him.”
“But you will … ’cause Lucas wants you to,” Titus said softly. “You go carry Lucas’s memory with you day by day now. ’Cause he’ll be right there with you on ever’ mile you put behin’t you from sunup to sundown. Lucas goin’ to finish this journey to Oregon with you an’ Amanda.”
It took a moment, but they heard the muted shuffling of the big farmer’s boots on the flaky soil at the bottom of the hole. Then his head came into the light as he stood, his face upturned, long muddy streaks coursing down each of his cheeks. Red eyes he turned up now to Titus.
“You don’t mind me doing the rest by myself, friends,” he told all of them quietly as his eyes touched their lamplit faces. “I got a grave to finish for my son.”
EIGHTEEN
He had helped Roman lay that little body in its coffin cobbled together from those wooden crates, just wide enough for the lad’s narrow shoulders. Long enough for those two legs: one thin and gangly, the other black and bloated with a serpent’s poison. A spare and bony body that so reminded Titus of the skinny tyke he himself had been at that age.
At the moment Lucas had breathed his last, Titus pulled a large flap of that old quilt over the boy’s disfigured leg. No one would ever have to look at the awful wounds again. Amanda made sure of that. She kept the boy wrapped from his chin on down, holding him in her lap there beneath the awning as the thin sliver of new moon rose, rocked across the horizon, then set in preparation for the coming of a gray dawn. Not until then did she wash his face, and only his face, with a scrap of burlap, then held Lucas against her breast so steadfastly Titus doubted they would be able to pry the body loose from her arms when it came time to consign the boy to the ground.
But she had given him up to Roman. With her face screwed up into an ugly picture of pure agony, she had bottled up the wail behind clenched teeth and allowed Roman to take the quilt-wrapped bundle from her … only that deathly pale face poking from one end of the blanket a mother-to-be had stitched for her youngest. On the far side of the wagon the friends had laid the box, its cover propped against a wagon wheel in the charcoal-hued light of that cold morning before the summer sun came to rewarm this high desert. Once her arms were empty, that’s when the women moved in—white women from the train, all of whom had stayed up through that long and sleepless night with Amanda—for this manner of grieving was something new to Waits and Toote. They stood back as the others swooped in to lay their hands on her, murmuring their prayers and wishes and condolences, brushing the matted hair back out of her face, bringing warm water in a china bowl to wash away the dust from her cheeks and the blood smeared on her hands, clean off that arm where her boy had spewed anything put into his belly.
From the bottom of a humpbacked sea chest, one of them brought out a black dress she had, not a formal mourning gown, but something that spoke a much simpler grief. It would do, most all of them assured her as they gathered round the grieving mother for cover and two of their number loosened every last tiny button from her bloodstained dress, slowly pulled it from her, then draped the black dress around her. They brushed and fixed her hair as they all listened to the dull, unanswered thud of that hammer driving one nail after another into the lid of that long, thin box they had cobbled together from the hard-biscuit crates.
Scratch looked around at the others, then handed the hammer to the one called Ryder with a nod of thanks. He found Roman still staring down at the box in that way of disbelief.
“You made him real comfortable, son,” Titus reassured. He swallowed hard and fought the quiver of his chin.
