“But he’s my brother!”
Images swam through his memory. Billy as an infant, cradled in Maw’s arms. The two-footed bundle of trouble he’d been when he was two. The time he’d stolen Butler’s jackknife and laid his hand open “knife fighting” with imaginary raiding Choctaws. He’d been what? Eight? As Billy had grown older, he’d pitched in with the farmwork, taken on his share of the chores. When he worked, he worked hard. By the time he’d been ten, he could best Butler when it came to putting up tobacco or corn. And John Gritts had been taking him out hunting since he was little. No one could track, stalk, or fill a larder with game the way Billy could.
“That child!” Maw’s voice came unbidden from the past. “I swear, he’ll put me in my grave! If he ain’t the spittin’ image of his paw, I don’t know doodle when I see it.”
And strangers took him, and hung him.
“My fault,” Butler whispered, stepping around a family that had stopped to stare into a store window. “Mine and Tom Hindman’s. We made Arkansas into the kind of battleground it was. We were the ones who unleashed the whirlwind. Once Maw was dead and Sarah raped, what did Billy have left but raiding and ambushing?”
“Don’t you go puttin’ all de blame on yorseff, Cap’n.” Kershaw’s deep voice rumbled. “Avec certitude, yor brother make his own decisions.”
“Can’t live no other man’s life for ’im,” Corporal Pettigrew agreed from behind. “Ain’t yer fault, Cap’n.”
“What would have been different if I’d been there?”
“Reckon nothin’,” Vail called from the side. “Somebody would’a conscripted your sorry hide, Cap’n. They’d’a made you fight, one way or t’other.”
He turned onto Larimer Street and made his way to 1412 where Walley did his undertaking business. He hammered on the door. Then hammered again.
“Coming!” The cry was barely audible over the noise in the crowded street. Two open-air bands were playing. One down by Cherry Creek, the other up on Sixteenth. Nor was Larimer Street short on saloons, each with its door open to allow piano and horn music to spill out in hopes of luring additional patrons.
John J. Walley unlocked his door, staring out at Butler. “Yes?”
“I’m Butler Hancock. Come to see about Billy. Dave Cook’s deputies brought his body in this morning.” He took a breath, trying to still his grief. “I’m one of his brothers.”
“Ah yes, come in.” Walley closed the door behind him. “I haven’t prepared the body yet. What did the family have in mind?”
“Just a quiet burial tomorrow morning.” Butler tried to keep his hands from twitching like butterflies. “I hear that Doc buried his wife out at the boneyard. Maybe next to her?”
Walley lifted an eyebrow. “You familiar with the hill out there? It’s three hundred and twenty acres. The top of the hill is … well, for our better citizenry. One section is Jewish, another Catholic. Dr. Hancock’s wife, given his reputation in the community, is on the edge of that higher ground. It’s rather more expensive than the area off to the southeast.” He shrugged slightly. “Your brother Billy, having been involved in a shooting, claiming to be this Meadowlark—”
“How much for him to lie next to Mrs. Hancock?”
“Fifty dollars for the plot, a fir coffin, the excavation, and refilling the grave. Another twenty for embalming if you want it. Ten more if you want me to make the deceased presentable for a viewing.”
“Can I see him?”
“Mr. Hancock, I haven’t had time to—”
“Would I be seeing anything I haven’t seen on the battlefield? No? Then let me see my brother, please.”
Walley led the way through the front office and into the back. Butler felt his skin crawl at the sight of a woman laid out on her back, a series of tubes actually inserted into her veins and attached to a hand pump atop a brass tank.
He’d never seen embalming before. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about it.
Billy lay on a stained pine table just inside the big sliding rear door. At the sight, Butler stopped short. His brother’s eyes were open and bulged, his tongue jammed out, the jaw dislocated, broken, and lopsided. Billy’s neck—oddly elongated, the skin chafed—looked unnatural, and for reasons Butler couldn’t quite understand, reminded him of a plucked turkey neck.
“I can make him look like he’s just asleep,” Walley said softly.
Butler drew a short breath. “No need, sir. Closed coffin. No embalming.” Butler reached in his pocket, pulling out coins. In the dim light he sorted through them, finding two twenty-dollar gold pieces and a ten. “There’s fifty for the lot and the rest.”
He dropped what remained in his pocket—all except the piece of hard candy he’d found in Doc’s cash box. That he cradled in his hand, thinking it inappropriate to pop it into his mouth when his brother lay there, cold, covered with a sheet, after having been viciously executed by hooded and masked stranglers.
“I’ll leave you alone, sir.” Walley retreated on silent feet.
“Well, Billy,” Butler said softly, “they sure played hell this time, didn’t they?” He reached out, pulled the sheet back so he could hold Billy’s cold hand. “It’s too late to ask now, but I hope you’ll forgive me for my part in all this.”
He sniffed, feeling an unfamiliar hole emptying in his heart. So this was what it was like to grieve?
“I’m going to tell Doc and Sarah not to come. I don’t think it would do any good for them to see you like this. Instead, I’ll say good-bye for all of us.”
He sniffed. “I wish … I wish we would have had the chance to talk. Like in the old days. Remember all those insane and impossible stories you told? How they made me laugh? I just wish we’d had
