Abandon

“But you seen it.”

“Awful to say, but I seen worse.” I done worse. “Now I’m madder’n hell you came up here when I said stay put, but I can probably let that slide if you listen to me.” He held her face in his hands. “Look here, Glori. Go on back down now. Go on.”

He watched her descend back through the trapdoor, then walked up to Stephen, said, “Man, where the f**k is your head? My wife almost saw this. Got half a mind to throw your ass off this roof.”

But the preacher stood stone-faced and glaze-eyed, staring at the stiffs and all of that red snow surrounding them. “Who do you reckon would do a thing like this?”

“Bad men,” Ezekiel said. “Looks to have been done with a couple a Arkansas toothpicks. Nasty work. They were probably worried about gunshots settin off a slide, blockin their way out a the basin.”

Stephen started toward the dead. Ezekiel grabbed him by the shoulders, drew him back. “Best to let ’em lie for now, Preach. What can you do?”

Stephen nodded. His hands shook. He tried to steady them.

“Is it any wonder, Zeke, that He hates us?”

“Who?”

“God.”

“Wait. You sayin God hates His own creations?”

The preacher gestured at the carnage. “Wouldn’t you?”

TWENTY

When she opened her only Christmas present of 1893, Harriet McCabe ran shrieking in circles around the ten-by-ten cabin where she lived with her parents. It was by leaps and bounds the most extravagant gift she’d ever received, her mother having skimped on their family’s last three food orders so she could purchase the doll from the general store’s window. Samantha was sixteen inches tall, came with two dresses and a little comb to brush her luxurious red hair.

“Now I understand why we been eatin pooch and splatter dabs for supper, ‘stead a meat,” Billy grumbled, still stretched out and hungover on the lumpy straw-filled mattress.

Bessie said, “I’s fine to make the sacrifice. Look at your daughter, Billy. You ever seen her so happy? Don’t it warm your heart even a little?”

Harriet sat on the dirt floor by the sink—just a washbasin on an upended packing crate—whispering secrets to Samantha.

“Fire’s gettin low,” Billy said. “Go on, bring in some wood from the porch. This shithole’s drafty as hell.”

“Billy! That mouth! It’s Christmas mornin, and your daughter—”

“Get goin, I said!” So Bessie wrapped every available blanket around her underpinnings and stepped into Billy’s arctics. When she’d gone outside, Billy sat up in bed and raised his arms over his head. At twenty years, he was small and looked young for his age, with jittery eyes that caused most men to treat him like a boy. He was handsome until he opened his mouth. His front teeth had resembled jagged canines ever since his father had broken them when Billy was nine. He got up, the dirt floor freezing, his head pounding. He could feel the morning cold slipping through his stained and threadbare long drawers.

He staggered to the table, covered in oilcloth and a few airtights of rarities they’d saved for Christmas. Billy pried open a tin of mustard sardines, crammed a handful into his mouth. He went over to the cabin’s only window and swept back the curtains Bessie had sewn out of an old lace-edged petticoat—nothing to see of the outside world, condensation having frosted the inside of the glass.

A whiskey bottle filled with tiny seashells sat in the windowsill. He ran a finger across the glass and thought of his big brother, Arnold, missed him so much in that moment, he felt his throat close up, went short of breath, like someone had punched him in the gut.

Billy turned around, looked at his daughter.

“Merry Christmas, girl,” he said.

The six-year-old glanced up at her father, and he saw the wariness in her eyes, and it shot him full of sadness and vexation.

“Got a present for your mama,” he said, and he reached under the bed and lifted something the size of a small loaf of bread, packaged in newspaper. He walked over to the spruce sapling they’d uprooted from the hillside above their cabin. Bessie had potted it in a lard bucket, kept it watered, but the needles had begun to brown at the tips. Billy placed the package on the flour sack wrapped around the base of the Christmas tree.

“Y-y-y-you like that doll?” Billy asked, blushing as he always did when he stuttered, no matter that he was conversing with his six-year-old. He’d never had a speech problem before coming to Abandon.

“Yessir.”

“That’s good. It cost a damn sight more than we can afford.”

He lifted the lid and peered into the graniteware pot on top of the stove. The snow had finally melted, tiny bubbles rushing up from the bottom. He took his tin cup down from one of the newspaper-lined shelves above the washbasin and poured the hot water over the old Arbuckle’s grounds. “Christmas mornin, ain’t even got a decent cup a coffee to sip. This is belly wash.” The front door swung open and Bessie stumbled in with two armloads of firewood and a draft of bitter cold. She dropped them on the floor, opened the iron stove, shoved in three logs. “Guess it’s still snowin,” Billy said, noticing the streaks of white in Bessie’s yellow hair.

“Comin down like it got no mind to stop. Dust me off, will ye?”

Billy walked over, brushed the snow off her blankets.

“W-w-w-well, looky what’s under the tree,” he said.

Bessie saw the small package on the flour sack and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d got me nothin.” Bessie draped the blankets over the rocking chair beside the stove and approached the dying spruce.

She lifted the present. “Heavy.”

“C-c-c-c-come over to the bed.” Bessie sat down on the mattress. Harriet crawled over, crouched at her parents’ feet.

Bessie ripped off the old newspaper.

“Holy God, Billy.” What lay in Bessie’s lap amid the torn newspaper was inconceivable, a dream.

“I weighed it,” Billy said. “Twenty-two pounds.”

“Mama, let me see.”

Bessie hoisted the bar of solid gold, the metal freezing cold to the touch, marred with scrapes and tiny chinks, a dully gleaming bronze.

“How much?” she asked.

“Gold’s at twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents a ounce, so you’re holdin more’n seven thousand dollars right there.”

It was more money than Bessie had ever heard of. She began to cry. Billy put his arm around her.