He said, ‘It’s like I haven’t arrived yet.’
He stomped the dust from his boots and joined the family in the living room where tallow candles were out on the tables and a glass bowl heaped with rust-colored leaves sat on the head of the coffin. Minnie was sitting with my sisters but looking out a window that had started to frost. Bob stood by the oil lamp where the wallpaper was peeling down, combing his hair flat, staring at his sweetheart, wiping the water trickle from his neck.
‘She’s lost heft too,’ he whispered.
I said, ‘Why don’t you be quiet about her.’
Some visitors arrived for viewing after their Thursday night chores and with my brothers Ben and Charles and Henry and their wives and children, plus my sisters who were still at home, we had to take turns at the dining-room table, eating bowls of pork-belly stew and corn biscuits. Bob was still observing things about his loved one, and Minnie’s eyes were avoiding. When she spoke at all it was about cooking. She thought pound cake was too heavy with four eggs.
Vespers were at seven. Julia bowed her head next to me and we clenched hands as a Methodist minister with a marled eye read from the Good Book and Grat slunk in from the kitchen and dug at his teeth with a thumbnail. After prayers were finished, everyone just sat around and looked uneasy and drank coffee. The cups clacked loudly in the saucers. The women comforted my mother until she began to cry, and then they took her to a back bedroom. ‘Lean on the Lord, honey,’ they said. Mom sat on a spring bed and wiped her eyes while a woman professed that Simon had been taken unto his heavenly Father’s bosom and to that special place where the righteous know not fear.
I left Julia cutting chocolate-frosted cake and discovered Bob in the master bedroom with my father, who sucked at his pipe and spit into an empty peach can by his chair. ‘Your mother wants to divorce me, did you know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Bob.
‘The doctor says I should drink castor oil for my liver.’ He tapped his pipe into the peach can. ‘Minnie’s been seeing a boy with a criminal record. That’s news, I’ll wager.’
Bob leaned forward from his seat on the bed. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Charles Montgomery. Good manners, about thirty years old. Has a prominent nose that carries a wart. Served time for burglary, introducing.’ Dad blinked in my direction. ‘Which one are you?’
‘Emmett.’
‘And you’re Bob?’
My brother said, ‘This is the hired hand, right? Sleeps in the loft of Ted Seymour’s barn?’
My father tossed his pipe onto the bed quilt. ‘I’m seventy-four years old and I don’t care if I’m married or not. When I was a boy we used to poke heifers. You know what Simon loved most in the whole world? Licorice. I remember him better than I do either of you two fellas.’
I think Bob closed Minnie’s bedroom door behind him and had violent words with her while the assembled drank milk that my twelve-year-old sister Leona poured straight from the pail. Along about nine o’clock those people not family left and Ben took a kerosene lamp to the outhouse with him and I took Julia to a widow’s house where she was being put up until the funeral. I played three games of pinochle there and returned to see that drapes were blowing out through Minnie’s shuttered bedroom window.
I hung my coat on the hall tree and heard Bob and Grat whispering in the front room so quietly all I could make out were the consonants, the k’s and p’s and t’s. It was like hearing a fire snap and hiss and fall apart in a far-off kitchen stove. I walked into the front room. Grat said, ‘I believe that’s what I’d do,’ and Bob shoved past me into the kitchen and let slide out of its brown suede case a Winchester 1866 carbine that was then called The Yellow Boy for its brass. He slammed the back door behind him.
Apparently Minnie had crawled out through her window and plunged through cornfields to Seymour’s in her Sunday dress in order to deliver a warning to her lover.
I asked, ‘What’s Bob going to do?’
‘I make it a point not to meddle,’ said Grat. And I sat in a stuffed chair ruminating, staring at the coffin, while my brother snapped cards over into an upended hat.
I fell asleep shortly thereafter and woke to see Bob in the kitchen, opening pantry doors and closing them. He got a handful of oatmeal cookies and piled them on the kitchen table where he was cleaning his unused rifle. I straddled a chair and ate one.
‘The lovers flee,’ he said.
I brushed cookie crumbs off my shirtfront. ‘How does that make you feel?’
He oiled the trigger mechanism and ignored me until I left.
Simon’s funeral service the next day was fairly well attended. Children scrunched at the house windows, staring in, and farmers stood reverently in the yard while the minister read from the Psalms in the front room. Then participants and grievers alike mounted buggies and buckboards and clucked their teams in a slow walk to the Elmwood Cemetery and a plot next to Frank’s where Grat had dug the grave himself, swinging a pick so hard the ground chipped up like arrow-heads.
There was a lunch at a neighbor’s farm and then Bob rode with Grat into the Coffeyville business district to help him lay in winter supplies. They bought deviled ham and raisins and boxes of dried figs to stuff in their saddlebags, and flour and lard and beef jerky to store in the Tahlequah office. Then Grat threw up his arm in a wave good-bye and Bob crossed Union Street to have his boot heel restitched by Mr. Brown.
Bob put a penny down for a paper and saw Charles Montgomery walk into Rammel’s drugstore and walk out again with a paper bag. He was riding a horse with the Ted Seymour brand. Bob read the newspaper through with coffee in a cafe. The Kansas State Grange and Patrons of Husbandry were meeting in Olathe, it said. Ted Seymour had taken his wife with him to the Armour stockyards in Omaha.
I guess Bob then went to the city marshal’s office where he reviewed the conviction record of Charles Montgomery, and instead of riding
on to the Indian Territory, as he’d planned, he returned to the Dalton farm where he harnessed a dark brown team to a gray board-wagon and drove them to a ditch of sunflowers beside the Santa Fe Railroad tracks.
Bob loaded his rifle and crept across the Seymour backyard to squat in the empty chicken coop and stare at the barn and empty house. Sparrows had their nests in the coop and they chased and screeched a while. Snow began to fall and the temperature dropped to ten degrees, but Bob just huddled down in his mackinaw with the rifle cradled warm inside his coat and the barrel against his cheek. It was eleven o’clock at night and the ground was thick with snow when Montgomery pounded out of the Seymour house with dresses draped over his shoulder and two pair of ladies’ shoes in his hand. When he was inside the barn he shouted to someone, ‘Look what I got for you.’