Blood Wedding

21

It was a little after first daylight when Lem, Abby, and Molly came riding up. There was nothing left of Lem’s barn but a pile of ashes and blackened timbers. A smaller pile of charred debris remained not far away, but nobody noticed it.

“Good God a’mighty, Fargo,” Lem said, wrinkling his nose at the smell of the burned barn and of something else that was harder to identify. “What happened here?”

Fargo gave them a short account of the fight with Murray.

“That’s him over there,” Fargo said, pointing to the burned carcass.

“I thought I smelled something funny,” Lem said.

“Doesn’t look like much now, does he?” Molly said. “Hard to believe he had us all running scared for so long. Well, we won’t be running now.”

“He still managed to cause a hell of a mess of trouble,” Lem said. “No matter how he looks and smells now. And he finally got to my place, too.”

“He got your barn,” Fargo said, “but he didn’t get your house. And he didn’t get anybody else’s house. Not today.”

“We can build a new barn,” Abby said. “It’s just a building. Where’s Angel?”

Fargo told them about that, too.

“She’s inside,” he added. “I laid her on the table.”

“I’d be proud to sit up with her,” Lem said.

“So would I, I think,” Abby said. “Even if she did try to bury me alive, she wasn’t all bad.”

“She wasn’t all good, either,” Molly said, “but even at that she didn’t deserve the kind of family she had.”

“What about you?” Fargo asked them. “How did things turn out at the Bigelow House?”

“We got all the bastards,” Lem said. “Some of them are just wounded, but we left them to take care of each other. If they do, that’s fine. They won’t be bothering anybody for a while. And if they don’t, well, to hell with them. We gave them every chance.”

“Jed would be glad to know you settled everything for him,” Abby told Fargo. “I knew you could do it.”

There’d been times when Fargo hadn’t shared her confidence, but he figured he’d done what Jed would have wanted. And he’d done what he wanted. He couldn’t let his friend be murdered and just walk away.

“I guess you’ll be leaving now,” Molly said.

She was right. Fargo didn’t have anything to tie him to the farmers now.

“I’ll head out tomorrow,” he said. “After Angel’s funeral.”

“And you’re sure there’s no way we could make a farmer of you?” Molly asked.

Abby looked at her suspiciously and asked, “Have you been thinking about farming, Fargo?”

“Not a whole lot,” Fargo said. “I’ve been thinking more about mountains with snow on the tops, and some country where there aren’t a lot of farms all jammed up together.”

Lem laughed. “I wouldn’t say we’re all jammed together here, Fargo. Plenty of room for another farm. Lots more of them, to tell the truth.”

“It may look that way to you. Not to me, though.”

“Well,” Molly said, getting another suspicious look from Abby, “if you’re ever back this way, Fargo, stop in and visit for a while.”

Fargo never knew where he might be the next week or the next month, but he knew how way led on to way, and he didn’t think he’d ever find himself in this part of the country again, at least not for a long time.

“I’ll be sure and do that,” he said.