Blood Wedding

6

As soon as the Murray gang was out of sight, Fargo came out of the trees at a run. He went to the grave and began digging with his hands, throwing dirt and talking loud in the hope that Abby could somehow hear him.

He knew that Abby had landed underneath Jed’s body and that at least some air would have been trapped around her. The dirt was loose enough to trap a little more air, and the grave had not been dug deep the first time. Fargo was sure Murray’s men hadn’t deepened it, which meant that Abby was only a couple of feet under the soil. If Fargo was lucky—if Abby was lucky—he would reach her in time.

When he came to Jed, Fargo raked dirt aside even faster.

“Hang on a little longer, Abby,” he said. “I’m nearly there.”

He located Jed’s back. Abby, being much shorter, would be right there.

“Don’t talk,” Fargo said, though he’d heard nothing from Abby. “Save your breath.”

He cleared away more and more dirt, and soon he had Jed uncovered completely. Fargo straddled the grave, bent down, and grabbed Jed’s belt. He braced his legs and pulled.

Jed and Abby came up out of the ground slowly, sinking back a little bit every time they rose, like a bad tooth being pulled from a jaw. Fargo’s face reddened with strain, and his head began to throb steadily. After he had pulled them out a short distance, he could feel Abby helping him as she pushed with her legs.

“Glad to know you’re alive,” he said in response to her exertions. “I’ll have you out in a second now.”

He stumbled back, falling as they popped out of the earth. He heard Abby spluttering and spitting dirt. Reaching into his boot, he pulled out a bowie knife and cut the rope that bound her to Jed. Then he rolled Jed’s body to the side.

Abby sat up, shaking dirt from her hair, brushing away from her face, still spitting. When she was finally able to talk, she said, “I thought I was going to die there.”

“You didn’t, though,” Fargo said.

“How did you know where I was?”

“I saw them bury you.”

Abby looked at him. Her cotton gown was filthy, her face was smeared with dirt, and her hair was matted with it.

“You saw them?”

“Yes. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. There were too many of them.”

“You bastard!” she said, leaning toward him, beating him with her tiny fists. “You let them bury me, you bastard!”

Fargo let her pound him. She was too small to hurt him unless she hit his wound, and there wasn’t much chance of that.

After a while she was exhausted, and she collapsed against him.

“They told me you were dead,” she said. “Angel told me that she’d killed you. She said that no one would come for me, that no one would ever find me.”

“I found you,” Fargo said. “I figured they’d come here, so I got here as soon as I could. I just didn’t know what they’d do to you.”

“I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to lie there forever rotting away with Jed tied to me.

“It didn’t happen,” Fargo said.

She pulled away from him and looked at him more closely.

“What happened to your head?”

“That’s where Angel shot me. But she didn’t finish the job. She must have a soft heart.”

Abby almost managed a smile. She said, “She might have a soft spot or two, but her heart’s not one of them.”

Fargo thought about the way Angel’s breasts had felt when he’d encountered her in the barn earlier.

“I guess not,” he said. “I’d better take you home now.”

He stood up and helped her to her feet. “They’ll be back,” she said. “The Murrays, I mean. They won’t let it go at this, not when they find out that I’m still alive. You know that, don’t you?”

Fargo said he knew. He told her to wait there while he went for his horse.

When he got back, she was standing by Jed’s body.

“It wasn’t enough for them to kill Jed,” she said. “The way they talked when they brought me here, that didn’t count for a thing. The only thing they cared about was that Paul Murray was dead.”

Fargo bent down and took hold of Jed’s body, grabbing it under the armpits from behind and pulling upright.

“They didn’t care about Jed at all,” Abby said, not looking directly at either Fargo or the body. “They thought his death didn’t mean a thing.”

“Families are important,” Fargo said as he heaved Jed’s body across the broad rear of the Ovaro behind the saddle.

“What about me and Jed?” Abby said. “If you care about your own family, you should care about other people’s families.”

Fargo knew that revenge didn’t work that way, but he didn’t try to explain things to her.

“It’s a shame about the way they treated Jed,” Abby said. “And Paul Murray, too. You ought to be allowed a little dignity when you’re dead.”

Fargo looked at Jed’s body as it hung slack across the back of the horse. As far as Fargo had ever been able to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of dignity in death, and nothing Abby thought was going to change that. The way to look at it was that the things that had happened to Jed’s body didn’t matter to him in the least, any more than what had happened to Paul Murray’s body mattered to Paul. When you were dead, if you felt anything at all, which Fargo doubted, you sure as hell wouldn’t be worried about what was happening to a body you no longer had any use for. Or that was the way it had always seemed to Fargo.

But that wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about with anybody, not then, so he put his foot in the stirrup, grabbed the saddle horn, and pulled himself atop the Ovaro. He reached down and offered his hand to Abby. She took hold of it, and he pulled her up in front of him.

“Let’s get you back to the house,” he said.

“Angel was the worst,” Abby said as they rode through the ruined cornfield.

The green stalks were flattened and trampled in a broad path, though the damage wasn’t as bad as Fargo would have expected.

“She was enjoying the whole thing,” Abby went on. “She laughed the whole way to the graves, thinking about what they were going to do to me. She said that I took Jed away from her, and that he deserved what he got and that if she couldn’t have him, nobody would. She said he and I were going to be together for a long time, but that it wouldn’t be like I’d thought it would. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”

“Did she tell you?”

“No. She said the men were all going to rape me, and she was going to watch. I think she would have liked that. It would have been another way to get back at me for marrying Jed. Thank God it was a lie, or maybe they just didn’t have time for it. What they did was almost as bad. It would have been worse if you hadn’t been there. I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You didn’t hurt me. Anyway, I don’t much blame you. If somebody left me to be buried alive, I might get a little upset, myself.”

Dawn was beginning to show in the eastern sky as a thin line of lighter gray. Somewhere off in the distance a dog was barking, faint and far away. Fargo knew there were other farms near the Watkins place, but he didn’t know where they were.

“The Murrays aren’t through with us, you know,” Abby said. “They’ll find out that they didn’t kill you. They’ll find out I’m alive. And when they do, they won’t be happy about it. They might stew about it for a while, but then they’ll come back.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fargo said.

The funeral service was late that afternoon. It was a short one. Jed hadn’t been much of a churchgoing man, so the preacher didn’t have much to say.

They buried Jed in the churchyard in the stout wooden casket that Cass Ellis had built that morning. Fargo could smell the newly sawed wood and the newly turned earth.

There were several markers in the cemetery, but Fargo didn’t bother to count them or to read any of the inscriptions. They wouldn’t have meant anything to him.

The little church was whitewash and clean, and the lowering sun pushed the building’s shadow across the grass. People stood around the grave as the preacher read the Bible verse about the valley of the shadow of death. Fargo had heard it before.

He looked around at the men with their hats in their hands, the women crying under their bonnets. He recognized Alf Wesley, Rip Johnson, Frank Conner, and Tom Talley. Cass Ellis and Bob Tabor stood a bit farther off. They appeared to have recovered from their little drinking bout of the night before. Ellis had a couple of small cuts on his hands from having built the casket. He’d probably had a little case of the shakes.

Molly Doyle was there, too, dressed in clean men’s clothing that did nothing to hide her abundant womanliness. She was crying quietly and trying to hide the fact by putting a hand to her face.

Abby and Lem were standing beside the preacher. There were tears on Abby’s cheeks, but she wasn’t weeping. She had cleaned herself up and washed her hair. There were no physical signs remaining of what had happened to her earlier, but Fargo wondered what might lie beneath the nearly placid surface of her face. A woman doesn’t lose her prospective husband and then get thrown in a shallow grave tied to his body without it having some kind of effect.

The preacher finished reading the psalm, closed his Bible, and said a prayer. When he finished, several amens echoed his own. Some of the men who had dug the grave that morning got shovels from beside the church and began filling the grave.

Abby and Lem watched for a while and then turned away. The other mourners offered their condolences, while Fargo went over and sat on the church steps. After a few minutes, he was joined by Molly Doyle. She sat beside him without waiting for an invitation, the way another man might.

“What do you think will happen now?” she said.

“Why does everyone seem to think I know what’s going to happen or how to deal with it?” Fargo asked.

Molly laughed. “I think you know the answer to that. You look like the kind of man who’s been in a fracas or two before. The rest of these fellas around here, well, they look like farmers. Which is what they are. You give ’em a plow or some chicken feed, and they know exactly what to do with it. But you hand ’em a gun, and they’re as likely to shoot themselves in the toe as to hit somebody who’s shooting at them. I get the idea that wouldn’t happen to you.”

“I didn’t sign on to be the sheriff. You have one of those?”

“We have us one, but you won’t be seeing him. He’d never go up against the Murrays. You know about what’s going on around here?

Fargo said he had a pretty good idea.

“Well, then you know what it’s like. We have the army fighting the militia half the time and the militia fighting the army the other half. Most of the folks here don’t want any part of that slavery argument, but that doesn’t stop the fighting among the rest of them. The Murray gang just takes advantage of the situation to pretty much have a free hand. The army’s too busy to mess with them, and the sheriff’s too worried about his own skin.”

“Sounds like you need a better sheriff.”

“Nobody wants the job. The one we have’s fine for rounding up drunks in town on Saturday night or tracking down somebody who’s stolen a cow or some chickens. But that’s all he’s good for. Maybe you’d be interested.”

Fargo said he didn’t think so. He looked over at a spot near the church where Wesley, Conner, Talley, and Johnson were talking and smoking. Johnson smoked a pipe. The others had cigarettes.

“What can you tell me about those four?” Fargo asked.

Molly gave them a disdainful glance. It was plain that she didn’t think much of them.

“What do you want to know about them? They’re farmers, and that’s about all you can say for them. Not very good farmers, either, but they get by.”

The last was said with a bit of pride, but then Fargo already knew that Molly was proud of her own capabilities when it came to farming.

“You told me at the dance that Conner wasn’t much and that he wanted to marry Abby to get Lem’s place. What about the others?”

“Rip Johnson’s married, got a place that could be right nice if he’d work it right. But he’s as lazy as Conner. I feel sorry for his wife. She’s just a little bit of a thing, but she does more of the work around there than he does.”

“He has a hardworking wife, but you say he likes Abby.”

“Everybody likes her. She’s sweet and pretty and friendly. Why wouldn’t they like her?”

“I didn’t mean he liked her that way,” Fargo said.

Molly frowned. “I know what you meant. Johnson’s a sorry excuse for a husband. He thinks his wife doesn’t know about him, but I’m sure she does. He’ll make a grab for anything in skirts.” She smiled and ran a hand over her well-filled shirt. “Or even some people who aren’t in skirts.”

Fargo grinned. “I take it he’s made a grab or two for you, then.”

“For all the good it did him. I told him if he tried anything like that again, I’d break both his arms, and I could do it, too.”

Molly flexed her hands, and Fargo thought they were big enough to do just about anything she wanted to do with them. They weren’t soft, womanly hands. They were roughened and callused from hard work.

“I know I’m not pretty,” Molly said. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll let any man who comes along jump me. Rip found that out right quick. ’Course, I’m sure there’s more than one who hasn’t turned him down, married or not.”

Molly didn’t have a high enough opinion of herself, Fargo thought. She might not be small, like Abby, or have Abby’s delicate features, but she was pretty enough in her own way. If she wouldn’t hide her figure inside men’s clothes, she’d most likely knock any man’s eye out.

“And how about Wesley?” Fargo said.

“Alf? Well, he’s not really so bad. He liked Abby, too, like the rest of them, but he was never a pest about it like Rip and Frank.”

“What about Tom Talley?”

“He’s a funny-looking fella, don’t you think? Looks like somebody mashed his head in on the sides and crowded everything together.”

“I don’t much care how he looks. I’d like to know about him and Abby.”

“What do you think?”

“If he’s like everybody else, he must have liked her.”

“Yes, but he knew he didn’t have a chance with her. He tried to court her once, and she just laughed at him. Because of the way he looked, I guess. He pouted around for a couple of weeks after that, but he got over it.”

Fargo wondered if that was true. Men didn’t always get over things like that as easily as women seemed to think. Having a woman laugh at your looks was enough to set some men off, maybe even enough for them to start thinking about a way to strike back. It was possible that Talley had found a way, by killing Jed.

Women didn’t get over things so easily, either. Fargo wondered if Molly had gotten over Jed, but he didn’t ask. He said, “How did Jed take it that all these men were interested in his sweetheart?”

“He didn’t like it one little bit, but there wasn’t much he could say about it. After all, he was sweet on Angel Murray for a while there himself, at least until he found out what her family was involved in. So he couldn’t really blame anybody for being interested in Abby. They knew her before he did, and I think they were all put out that she picked him over one of them. Made them all pretty mad when it happened. But they forgot about it after a while.

Again, Fargo wasn’t so sure it was as easy as all that. But again he didn’t press the point. He said, “Angel Murray didn’t get over losing Jed quite so easy, by all accounts.”

“Angel’s no farmer, though. She’s different. She’s a killer. She’s as bloodthirsty as her father. Maybe even worse than he is. And you know what they say about a woman scorned. In Angel’s case, that’s the literal truth. Compared to what she’d do to you, the devil in hell would probably seem like a nice Methodist preacher.

If that was true of Angel Murray, and Fargo didn’t doubt it, it was true in plenty of other cases, too. Fargo had known more than one woman who’d killed for a lesser offense than being scorned. He still wasn’t convinced that any of the Murray gang had killed Jed, but if one of them had, it was probably Angel.

“Have you talked to Abby today?” he asked.

“You mean do I know about what happened to her last night? Yes, she told me. That’s what I mean about Angel being bloodthirsty.”

“And those farmers aren’t bloodthirsty.”

“Nope. Not a one of them. They just don’t have it in them to be like that. You can call them a lot of things. Mean, some of them. Lazy, too, some of them. But not bloodthirsty.”

“None of them ever got into an argument or a fight with Jed about Abby or about anything else?”

“Not that I know of. Like I say, they’re not the fighting kind. You should ask Abby about it, though. She could tell you if there was ever any trouble.”

“I’ll do that,” Fargo said.

He stared out over the cemetery. The grave had been filled, and the grave diggers were putting their shovels away in the undertaker’s wagon. All that was left to remind anyone of Jed was a mound of fresh earth that would eventually sink back level with the rest of the ground and maybe a little below that. Grass would grow over it, and there would be another white marker to remind people that someone who’d once had a name was buried there.

The sun was going down behind a slate-gray cloud just above the horizon. The sky above the cloud was red and pink and yellow.

And on the horizon just off to the right, a thick column of dark smoke rose lazily upward.

Fargo pointed it out to Molly, who jumped to her feet.

“Son of a bitch!” she said. “That’s my farm!”