Go and Bury Your Dead by Bill Brooks

Author:Bill Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2017-06-19T15:48:55+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

They sat with their backs against the wagon wheel while Rita May built a cigarette and smoked it and looked up at the star-salted sky.

“Do you think we’ve done the right thing, Rita May?” Kate asked.

“What … about him?” she said with a jerk of her head to the man inside.

“No, I mean about leaving our men?”

“Well, I sure as hell did, didn’t you?”

Kate shrugged. “I’m sort of getting lonesome for a man, if you know what I mean.”

“I thought I’d be enough for you, but I reckon not, is that it?”

“Oh, no, Rita May, I didn’t mean it that way. But no matter how we want to slice it, it’s not the same without a man.”

“I guess if you don’t mind being rooted around on like you were slops at a trough, it ain’t.” Rita May reached for a newly open bottle of the cure-all and tipped it to her mouth, then smacked her lips loudly and on purpose before handing it to Kate. “Time will come you’ll see that a man ain’t worth the trouble and that you’ll like a lot more being able to take care of yourself.”

“Still, what about him?”

“What in God’s name do you intend on doing with him, Kate? It ain’t like he’s some dog we found you can just up and keep.”

Kate felt somehow mournful, thinking that the man inside the wagon would soon enough depart their company.

Rita May noticing Kate’s mood, made a ribald joke that caused Kate to laugh.

John Henry Cole had woken and now listened to them talking, their laughter, and was comforted by the sound of friendly voices even though his head still throbbed with vicious intensity. An inch over, he thought, and I would have been dead. I wonder why I ain’t?

The two women sat until they’d emptied the contents of the bottle and Kate flung it off into the night where it hit with a hollow thud.

“Well, I’d say its time to turn in, Kate.”

“What about him, we can’t just leave him out here, to the wolves and such?”

Rita May glanced at Cole who lay on his side, a ratty blanket over him. “Wolves ain’t going to eat him, don’t be foolish.”

“They might, if they get hungry enough.”

“Oh, don’t be a twit.”

They’d heard howling off in the low hills earlier, a sound like ghosts walking around calling to one another, ghosts who were lost and looking for something, Kate had said at the time. A not unfriendly argument ensued between them about the possibility of being eaten by wolves until Rita May threw up her hands.

“OK, OK, we’ll take him inside the wagon with us if it’ll please you.

“It will.”

Together they helped him into the wagon.

“He’s as heavy as a damn’ steer,” Rita May complained as Cole’s world gave out on him and things went dark and silent.

Once they’d wrestled him in, they stretched him out on the pallet. Kate began tugging off his boots, wrinkled her nose as she did.

“He’s a bit ripe,” she said.

“You just now noticing?”

“We’ll need to strip him out of his duds, too, and wash them tomorrow.

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