Michael Matheson
His heart hangs from the gallows where she left it. His skin and bones she took with her, and his name he traded away long ago. What’s left of him hangs from the noose, swaying in the hot, dry wind, while his heart burns black in the beating desert sun.
The chinooks have become siroccos. They set the whole of the scaffold to creaking and his disembodied heart, tied in an oubliette bow, swings with it – traces a pendulum arc as a murder of crows descends on it with a furious beat of wings. Digging, tearing, snapping, biting, the crows feast and rise in a flurry, winging away still fighting over the last remnants of gore.
Their caws linger in the air long after they’re gone, only gristle and half-cooked ropy trails hanging from the swinging gallows knot.
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His bones rattle in the lockbox hitched on the back of Jenny’s cart and the iron-shod hooves of her pitch team clop muted on the dusty road. She lashes the Clydes and they quicken to a trot, braying in protest as she hurries them west toward Spiritwood, making her seasonal round.
A flash of black on brilliant blue catches her eye and she turns skyward, shielding her eyes against the sweltering sun with one long hand. High overhead a murder of crows wings its way north. She frowns; tightens her grip on the reins and slows up her team. They whinny, anxious to be on, while Jenny watches the murder fly. It blots out the burnished sun as its patchwork shadow shifts and writhes along the ground, keeping pace with the welter above.
With sun-browned hands, slender, fine-boned, callusworn, she ties back wavy, black-bleached-nutmeg hair dark against the plains around her. Lets it waterfall over her shoulder as she turns in her seat to eye the lockbox on the wagon bed. “You got something to say?” The box shakes fiercely, though the wagon bed is still. “Didn’t think so.” She straightens, the box rattling on as Jenny lashes the reins. Her titan blacks neigh and pull forward past stunted trees and withering scrub.
The string of broken black bodies littering the path behind her goes unnoticed; glutted crows cawing weakly as they fade away in the choking dust.
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Jenny pulls hard on the reins as the wagon comes to a ford in the river. Her stallions snort and shake their heads, hooves splashing into the edge of the shallow, pebbled water. The liquid runs cool on the hot metal of their shoes as they slow up and stop. Across the burbling stream, no more than a score wide, sprawls a Lowlands camp, covered wagons sending up streamers of pale smoke.
She leans back in her seat, considering, shifting into the shadow of a tall, skeletal tree with gnarled and greedy roots dug deep into the riverbed.
Eyes trained on the Lowlands camp and one hand on the reins, she reaches back into the wagon bed with the other. Roots among tossed blankets and tanned hides. Ignores the rattling box. Her fingers find the 12-gauge buried beneath a sprawl of coarse-haired hides. The metal of the long shotgun is cool against her palm as she draws it free and lays it across her lap.
She flicks the reins and her Clydes drag the cart through the splashing water, clomping hooves sending up small sprays and wagon wheels sluicing long waves into the air. The cart dips and rises again as it comes up the other side of the shallow bank. But the shotgun, clutched in long, lean fingers, never wavers as Jenny makes her way into the camp to pick up more wares before she heads into town.
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The Lowlanders stare up at Jenny with blank, filmy eyes near blind from the driving dust. The sirocco whips at their tangled hair; picks at nests of nits and other, smaller things hiding in coarse tresses – only the elders of the tribe allowed hair shorn close to the skull. They follow her as the cart rattles through the waste of the camp. Wild dogs lie dying, poked by children with sharp sticks; the ones already dead split open to roast on cook fires. The smell of burning flesh fills the air.
Jenny slows her team to a halt, horses snapping sharply at children who come too close, made reckless by hunger. The women paw at her cart, stroking the grain of the wood. Listening to the creak of the wagon as the wind rocks it.
The flap of a covered wagon folds back, held open by a grimy hand corrupt with age spots and withered flesh. The chieftain’s face pokes out after it, eyes scrunched up against the sun, deep black irises swimming in a sea of off-colour white. He drops down from the wagon and rears up, a tall man over six feet, all gristle and burlap, wrapped in sagging flesh over strong, lank bones. “You got something to trade?” he rasps, voice ruined by too many years of drinking down the grit in the air; inclines one skeletal hand at the slow-cooking corpse of a wild dog. “We have meat.”
Jenny rises and comes to her full height, a fence post of a woman: rail thin and pole tall. Her hair streams in the hot wind and her long gauge rests in the crook of her arm, barrel aimed casually down at the face of the Lowlands chief. “I have hides,” she croaks through a parched throat and dry lips. Her eyes don’t leave his face. Around her the women paw at her boots; coo softly at the feel of the supple leather.
The chieftain caws like a brassy crow, shooing the women away. They scatter to the winds, dragging stupefied children after them. In their wake he turns again to Jenny. “Show me.”
She keeps her gun trained on the Lowlander as she dismounts and circuits to the back of the wagon bed. He shadows her, feet kicking up a sea of dust, as Jenny leans in and pulls out several coarse-haired blankets.
He grumbles in disinterest. “What else?” Jenny tosses the blankets aside. Uncovers a hoary, suntanned hide. He glances at her out the corner of one eye. “How long dead?”
Jenny shrugs, pulls a contemplative face. “Couple weeks? Crows didn’t get him.”
He nods. Looks over the rest of her wares. “I’ll take the hide. What else you got?” He leans forward to snatch up the skin and paw at the jumbled contents of her wagon.
She gives him a sly grin. “Got his bones.”
He looks up at her with newfound respect. “Fresh?”
“Same as the hide.” She smiles, yellowing teeth looking a little whiter than true in the harsh light.
“Mmm,” he grumbles. Juts his chin at the cart. Impatient.
Jenny grins wider. Grunts as she pulls the concealed lockbox from under the coarse blankets and throws back the simple catch. The box opens with a creak and the bones within rattle feverishly, straining to be heard as the lid cracks wide.
He shakes his head. Glares down at the jumble of bleached bits bathed in their own light. “Won’t take the bones. Still got life in them.”
“They’re dead,” she says, as the dry bones rattle.
“Gallows stink is still on them.”
“You don’t want them? Fine.” She slams the lid of the lockbox down. Heads back to the seat of her wagon, calling back over her shoulder, “Plenty of medicine men who’ll take them in Spiritwood.”
“I’ll still take the skin,” the Lowlander calls after her as she settles in. “You want dog for it?”
“Gold.”
“Gold.” He spits in disgust. Looks away. “Always trinkets with you people.”
Jenny stares down at him from her perch, shotgun resting on her arm. Her horses knead the ground, restless.
The Lowlander chieftain looks up into Jenny’s eyes, appraising her. After a time he lowers his head. “Gold.”
“Good,” grins Jenny. Catches up the reins and whips her team on. “I’ll be at the other end of the wheat fields. Bring it by tomorrow.” Her twin blacks canter off, raising a man-high trail of dust in their wake.
The chieftain stares after her, squinting against the chalky silt. An old woman comes to stand beside him. Paws at the skin. He hands it to her without taking his eyes off Jenny. The Lowlander woman coughs as she wraps the skin around her shoulders and rubs it to her skin.
Grumbling, the chieftain stalks off to his covered wagon. Doesn’t look back as the woman wearing the bought skin breaks out in a slow sweat. She hacks up something fierce and slumps to the ground, dry heaving, teeth rattling loose in her skull.
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The wagon cuts through a high swath of blackened wheat, the stunted crop long ago gone wild, carefully trained borders overrun generations back: now a small lake of stalk and chaff. Jenny uncocks her shotgun and slides it into the wagon bed without looking back. Around her the stalks bend as the wagon tramples them, springing back in the cart’s wake.
On the other side of the wheat field she pulls up the reins, her team snuffling loudly and shaking their manes. She leaps down from the cart and pats the side of the older stallion’s head. The Clydesdale nuzzles up to her, rearing his head several times against her chest, and snorts. The other Clyde brays and lowers his head to bite at scrub grass growing beyond the ragged borders of the wheat.
Jenny runs her palm down the panting stallion’s sharp-boned cheek as she rounds the wagon to fetch the feedbags. She watches the encampment, a haze of slow smoke and huddled wagons far in the distance and down a stretch of hill, as she pulls out the heavy leather sacks and secures them over her team’s muzzles. They chew noisily, tearing at what passes for feed – hard maize and scrub root. Jenny pats the flank of the younger stallion out of long habit as she clambers back into the wagon seat to wait.
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They come in the night, the rustling of the wheat giving them away. Jenny has been waiting for them since the sun went down. She lies in the back of the wagon, the long gauge in her hands, one eye closed, the other looking down the cylindrical length of the barrel balanced flat atop the lockbox.
Her finger rests lightly on the trigger, hammer already down. Beneath her the lockbox shudders as the bones rattle. “Shut up,” she rasps, and takes aim. Squeezes her trigger finger back and the explosion of the 12-gauge rips open the night, the thick slug slamming out of the hot barrel in a burst of light and powdery fire. A Lowlander falls apart wetly as the slug rips through his chest and knocks him back through the air. The others come at her fast and she drops them one by one, one eye shut tight as she fires, reloading cartridges two at a time and firing off shots in pairs. The muzzle of the gauge is red-hot and smoking when she finally stops shooting. Steam hisses off the slowly cooling metal.
The echoes of the shots fade into the darkness as she rises and gently hoists herself over the lip of the wagon, shotgun still in hand. She lands in a crouch by the side of the wagon. Waits for the telltale rustle of more Lowland men moving through the stunted wheat.
When Jenny deems it’s been silent long enough she straightens, and without taking her eyes off the wheat field reaches into the back of the wagon to retrieve her flensing knife. Rail-thin legs covering long strides, she moves into the field.
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Her cart loaded down with new hides still curing in the burning sun, Jenny pulls into the outskirts of Spiritwood: the town still rebuilding after the Big Dry in what had once been the heart of lake country. Shanties at its edges give way to larger establishments in the city proper. Cattlemen drive their slave stock through unpaved streets – harrying filthy, heat-sick stragglers on with a crack of the lash – past whorehouses and saloons fighting for space with gambling dens and dingy hotels: all the elements of a booming frontier town – except there’s nothing left beyond Spiritwood’s westward edge but the dust bowls of the Barrens.
Jenny cranes her neck to admire new-cut boardwalks. The planking is sound wood – a rarity in the scorched expanse of the desert burn, the forests of the North denuded centuries back.
A lawman tips his hat to her. Jenny notes the polished, virgin shine of his sidearm. Notes, too, the blight lesions sluicing along his forearms in clear runnels, poking out from under rolled-up sleeves. The sores haven’t begun to weep yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Jenny makes a mental note to move on quickly. The marshal watches her, not sure what to make of her; shudders as he sees the contents of her wagon.
Her Clydes halt on their own in front of a saloon and Jenny vaults down from the wagon before it settles, eager to be out of Spiritwood’s board-stiff closeness. Eager to be out on the plains again. She leads her team to the trough, the wagon dragging behind. The water is caked with silt, but clean beneath the scum, and her stallions drink greedily, heads bent low. She strokes their sweat-flecked hides as she moves past them to the wagon bed, pulls the collapsible metal cover over the split wood and peeling paint, and digs deep in the pocket of her pants for the key. Retrieves the flensing knife from the wagon bed with her other hand and tucks it away in her hide jacket before locking up.
Jenny pulls a pair of leather gloves from the back pocket of her pants as she heads up the stairs. Slips them on and pulls them tight; not wanting to touch anything in a town where the blight has made itself at home. Takes a deep breath before she opens the swing doors and heads into the noisy, grimy saloon.
The first thing that catches her eye isn’t the bar itself, or the patrons, mostly grizzled veterans and whores; it’s the impressionist mural adorning one full wall of the interior: an iceberg floating in choppy seas. The rendering an imagined one with no subject available for reference since the polar melt. The painted blue is as cooling as the ice itself would be and Jenny leans her face toward a phantom arctic wind, drinking in the genetic memory of the cold.
“Something, ain’t it?” The bartender flashes a broken smile at her, hands working the counter with a dirty rag.
Jenny startles at a white face behind the bar. Then comes up to lean on the wood with her elbows. There’s plenty of room, though the tables are occupied well enough. “How long you had it?”
“Since my grandfather opened the doors, back when Spiritwood was just starting over: all of two streets and a railyard.”
Jenny frowns at the boldfaced lie: the mural’s new, and the saloon’s belonged to the Chamakese family since George came down from Pelican Lake Reserve with his sons a couple of decades back and built it. She looks around pointedly. “I don’t see many medicine men ’round.”
The bartender rubbernecks awkwardly as his patrons raise their heads at Jenny’s words; leans in to whisper, “They ain’t welcome round here no more. Local marshal and his boys run what few of ’em were left out on a rail few months back.” He answers Jenny’s confused stare with: “New law passed in the territories. We don’t have to treat ’em like people no more.”
Jenny spits on the floor, thinking about George. About his sons. About herself. “Well how in the hell am I supposed to make a living now?” She slams one hand down on the counter, startling the bartender; shoves a finger in his face. “I ain’t gonna end up like one of them doxies down by the depot.”
He opens his mouth to answer but looks up past Jenny, eyes widening, and slips off down the bar to “attend” to other patrons.
Jenny glances over her shoulder as a tall shadow falls across her; turns to stare up at the men caging her in a semicircle. “I think you’d make a right good doxy,” leers the head man, big grey cow’s eyes sizing her up. Both he and the two men who flank him are ham-fisted bruisers, built like trees and just as broad. Jenny knows their kind, the remnants of their eugenically bred lines still working the mines back East; she’s put down more than a few of them in her time. She’s not sure what men like this are doing so far west but there’s always work on the frontier for big men who don’t think too much. “What’s the matter, whore, you didn’t hear me?” the ringleader barks, shoving her back.
His hand flies into the air before any of them realize she’s drawn the knife. His eyes widen as she cuts open his throat, hot blood spraying where she was standing a moment ago. She’s already moving in among the other two bruisers, opening up bellies. They goggle stupidly at their own spilling intestines, trying to hold them in, before they topple, gurgling.
By the time the lawman makes his way in the bartender is crouched down behind the bar, whimpering, and the patrons are all carefully minding their own business. Jenny stands farther down the bar, finishing an abandoned drink. The lawman takes in the bodies on the floor, the crowd nursing their drinks in dead quiet, and lonely Jenny down the other end of the bar. She cradles the remnant of the alcohol in her glass like a dying lover. She can feel his frown from across the room as he steps over the dead men, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.
“You gonna run me out on a rail too?” she says as he sidles up next to her. She downs the alcohol in her glass in a single slug.
The marshal settles in beside her. Leans on the polished wood and folds his hands together on the bar. “Could hold you till a judge comes through.” Jenny snorts, unimpressed. “But I get the feeling you don’t like being tied down to one place too long. And, truth be told, I’d rather have you gone. So I tell you what: you leave town before the sun goes down—” he pauses, Jenny casting a sidelong eye in his direction, “and we’ll say you were never here.”
“What about them?” asks Jenny, nodding at the bodies.
“Ma’am,” he smiles, “world’s dying by slow inches, I got a town full of people holding tooth and nail to what they got while the blight cuts ’em down, and a territory full of men waiting on Spiritwood to fail so they can wipe it off the map and start over. Three dead men from out East don’t make a world of difference to me. One lone medicine woman, neither.” He straightens, waiting for Jenny to leave.
She slams her glass down and slides it back toward the bar rail. “Ain’t got no reason to stick around this shithole anyway.” She stretches out the kinks in her shoulders, pushes off the bar, and shoulders past the sheriff. Knocks him a step back to make a point. He makes no move to stop her. Just settles back against the bar and reaches for a half-full bottle as the saloon doors swing uneven in Jenny’s wake.
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Twenty kilometres north of Spiritwood, Jenny stands knee-deep in dirt and mud, digging a hole. The spade, acquired on her way out of the city limits, is a parting gift from an unsuspecting prospector. She wipes the back of one gloved hand across her sweating brow – even in the dead of night the heat oppressive – and shifts another load of dirt. The moon hangs low and silvered in the sky and somewhere off in the distance a coyote howls as she bends down to dig one final furrow out of the cracked earth.
Panting, she tosses the spade to the ground and clambers out of the hole to grab the lockbox from the back of her wagon. Carries the lead-lined crate over to the hole, balances it on one knee so she can unlatch it, and upends it. The skeleton of the hanged man dumps out into the hole, and Jenny spreads the mess around with one foot while the bones rattle – still caught in the grip of the radioactive blight that was killing him long before he was hanged.
Then Jenny goes back for the rest of her wares. Dumps hard-won skins into the hole by the armload. And when the cart is empty and she’s finished covering over the hole she pats the earth down and jams the shovel in at the head of the impromptu grave as a marker. Lays one arm atop the other over the rough wood and rests her weary chin on the back of her hands, breathing slow.
She glances north to the lands of her own people, the Nakota. Considering. But there’s no life to be had there, not anymore. That land is being winnowed; history repeating itself in cruel turn as treaties are revoked – those that still stand – and her people are driven farther and farther north; a new Trail of Tears already begun. With each territory law there’s less land for any of the First Nations; day by day the men of the East hem in the West. And Jenny will not be caged.
She turns tired eyes, dirt-rimmed, closer north to the cattle yards and mills of Leoville, next stop on her seasonal round, some dozen kilometres distant. No point heading that way now. She glances back east. Dismisses the idea quick as it comes. Rubs at her sore neck before looking west, to the Barrens: a desert of salted, broken earth stretching out beyond the matchstick-dry grass of the plains, far as the eye can see. There’s open territory out West; out past the Barrens; over the mountains; bordering the risen sea. Or so they say. No one’s ever come back to tell the truth of it. ’Course, that don’t prove a thing: even if there is something past the Barrens – some fabled strip of land that ain’t swimming in sand and choking dust – who’d want to come back from that to this?
Bones aching, long arms swinging at her sides, Jenny clambers up into her wagon, takes the reins and snaps them down with a lash that echoes against the baked scrubland beneath her stallions’ hooves. And heads West.
At her back the sirocco stirs, drives her on and washes over Jenny’s dust-caked skin to scour the ruined earth. High above, a murder follows; black wings beating against a black sky. And in her wake, nameless bones rattle beneath the earth, dry as the land in which they rest.
The wind sweeps away all trace she was ever there.