And the Hills Opened Up (17 page)

The day had warmed.  Hayes’ ugly cut stopped bleeding long
enough for Father Lynch to apply more salve and slap on a fresh bandage, a swatch of towel that stuck to the greased wound on its own.  Hayes claimed nothing broken but said his entire backside ached like one fearsome bruise.  When he’d felt ready, Lynch helped Hayes to his feet, digging in with his heels as he pulled the younger man upward.  Hayes cursed loudly and winced as he tottered about like a newborn deer.  The priest couldn’t help smiling and looked away.

“You find my suffering amusing, Father?”

“No, my son.  Just your reaction to it.”

Hayes laughed at that, but the laugh turned into a hacking cough as he spat out more soot.

“Goddamn.  I must have swallowed half that fire myself.”

They circled around the saloon.  Lynch scanned the cabins toward the north end of town, deciding they’d need to head there next to check for more survivors. 

“Jesus,” Hayes whispered, stopping as they came to the street.  A huge vulture had set upon Ingrid Blomvik’s shoulders and was tugging at strands of her blond hair.  Her face was turned toward them and her eyes had rolled back open.

“I’m sorry, Elwood—”

A gunshot rang out and the vulture dropped, shot through the breast.  The priest looked to his side and saw Hayes with his gun fixed on the bird, as if he expected the vulture to rise again and attack.  The young man’s body, bruised as it was, had gone as straight and rigid as a flagpole. 

Lynch held back as Hayes approached the girl.

“Damn buzzards,” Hayes said, tucking his pistol away.  He had some kind of hidden back rig for his gun.

“You got that one, for certain.”

Hayes knelt in front of the girl.  “Sorry we never got you out of town, Mrs. Blomvik.  Looks like we should have forgotten about that fussy accountant and rode on.”

Father Lynch looked down the street at the Cooke House.  The front door was missing.

“I think Mr. Cooke was also called upon last night.”

“Shit,” Hayes spat.  “Serves him right.”

The other vultures, which had risen briefly after the gunshot, fluttered down from the sky and resettled on whatever fallen body looked juiciest.  Lynch scratched his head, wincing at the sun overhead. 

“You going to shoot some more?”

Hayes turned away from the hotel and started up the street.  Lynch fell in beside him, matching his pace.

“No, Father.  I’m going to need the bullets for later.”

“Suicide is a sin—”

“I ain’t talking about suicide, Father.”

The priest closed his mouth, his brow furrowing as he considered what the other man was getting at.  Hayes cupped his hands around his mouth and started shouting hello as they approached the miner shacks, a roughhewn assemblage of cabins and lean-tos that appeared to have about a year left between them.  As they walked, they came across six additional dead bodies: three women, two men, and a little girl with pretty browns curls and a throat purpled from strangulation, her eyes nearly pried from their sockets.

Father Lynch joined in, shouting hello at the top of his lungs.  Nobody answered or came running out of the shacks.  They reached the end of town, where the road trailed to nothing and the hills sloped steeply upward.  Lynch made out a shaggy mountain goat about halfway up the hillside.  He was chewing on a clump of wildflowers that had sprouted from beneath a boulder like the tail of a cat.

“Quiet on this end,” Hayes said, setting his hands upon his hips.  “Everybody must have gone to the meeting.”

“That’s the sheriff’s,” Lynch said, pointing to a cabin.  “Milo liked to live as far from the action as he could.  He thought it got him hassled less.”

“He have any family?”

“A wife and boy.”

They headed to the cabin and found the door open.  They found Milo Atkins inside, sitting at his kitchen table with an empty porcelain cup clasped between his hands.  His eyes were fixed straight ahead, as if he could see through the cabin’s walls.  They thought he was dead, like the others, but then the sheriff turned and looked their way, causing them both to jump.

“Goddamn, Sheriff,” Hayes blurted, looking from the priest to the lawman and back again.  “You’re alive.”

Atkins blinked while the rest of his face remained set.  Father Lynch placed his hand on the lawman’s shoulder.

“Milo?  You with us, son?”

Hayes whooped and slapped at his thigh, gawking at the sheriff.

“I can’t believe it.  Three of us.  At least three of us slipped past.”

Atkins turned in Hayes’ direction. 

“You know what this means, fellas?  It means that son-of-a-bitch makes mistakes.  He makes mistakes, like a regular man does, and something that makes mistakes can be killed.  I’ll be damned if it can’t.”

The right corner of Atkins’ mouth twitched.  Father Lynch felt the sheriff’s forehead with the back of his hand—it was warm, but so was the cabin.

“You feeling peculiar, Milo?”

The sheriff’s eyes flickered to something over Lynch’s shoulder.  Following the man’s gaze, the priest felt an additional wariness settle upon his shoulders. 

“Would you please look into the other room, Mr. Hayes?”

Hayes’ grin faded as he turned around and sized up the cabin’s bedroom door.  “Sure,” he said, lowering his voice.  “I can do that.”

The priest stayed beside Sheriff Atkins while Hayes went into the other room.  He searched his mind for something comforting to say but found nothing that approached the situation.  The sheriff’s hands began to tremble around his cup.

Hayes returned to the cabin’s main room, his face solemn and pale.  “Throats cut,” he said, swallowing.  “Both of them.”

The sheriff removed his hands from around the cup, clasped them together, and set them in his lap.

“I’m sorry, Milo,” Father Lynch said, bending down so they faced each other.  “I’m sorry about your wife and boy.”

The sheriff closed his eyes and inhaled. 

“They’re with the Lord now, son, but the living still need your help.  We need to find out if there’s more survivors.  We need to see to the dead.”

Hayes crouched beside Lynch and set his hand on Atkins’ shoulder.

“And when we’re done with that, Sheriff, we’re going to hunt him down.  Hunt him till he’s dead.”

The crease in Milo Atkins’ forehead smoothed. 

He opened his eyes, returned to them.

The sheriff wouldn’t answer their questions, or talk much at all, but he did rise from his chair and help them search the rest of town.  Hayes took the shacks on the west side of Main Street while Lynch and Atkins took the shacks on the east.  They found a total of twenty-two dead, nearly all of them women and children, with a few prospectors sprinkled in like rock salt.  They swaddled each body in a blanket and dragged it out to the sunny street.  Most had their throats torn or crushed. 

Elwood Hayes checked the livery stables and came back scratching his head. 

“Didn’t touch the horses.  They looked spooked, but when I poured ’em their oats they fed well enough.”

Father Lynch gazed across the valley south of town. 

“He spared the animals?”

“That’s right.”

“And nobody found teeth marks on the dead?”

“He doesn’t feed like that,” Atkins said, speaking for the first time since they’d found him.  “It’s souls that fed him.  He liked the pained ones best.”

Father Lynch stepped toward Atkins.  “You think he’s the Devil, Milo?  Is that what you’re saying?”

Atkins wiped his hands down the sides of his pants.  “I don’t know about that, Father.  He’s a devil, anyhow, and should have been left buried in those hills.  I reckon he’s headed for Rawlins now, where he can get at more folks.” 

Lynch imagined the Charred Man in a city that size, appearing regular to anybody who saw him.  Rawlins, a town on the Union Pacific rail line.  Hayes scratched under his hat and glanced at Lynch. 

“He jawed with you, Sheriff?”

Atkins nodded.

“He said he wanted a witness to all this killing and figured folks would believe a lawman easiest.  Some Indians put him to fire a while back.  He’s looking for revenge anywhere he can find it.”

Hayes laughed and shook his head.

“Goddamn.  If that don’t beat all.  Indians started all this?” 

“No, I figure they tried to stop all this,” Father Lynch said, glancing across the valley.  “Was the Dennison Mining Company that got it started again.”

Nobody said anything to that.  The three men stood in the street while the crickets sang in the grass and the sun glared down.  Lynch checked his pocket watch and saw it was already past noon.  “Guess we should see to the dead,” Hayes said, looking up at the sun.  “I figure it’d be easiest to drag those in the street over to the Copper Hotel and let ’em go up together.  We can’t dig sixty graves.”

“I am going to dig two,” Atkins said, walking off and leaving them staring after.  Hayes looped his thumbs in his belt.

“You think he’ll be all right, Father?”

“No,” the priest said, rubbing the sweaty back of his neck.  “But as long as there’s work ahead, he’ll keep pulling that plow.”

Lynch and Hayes started lugging bodies to the Copper Hotel.  They ignored the vultures and hefted the dead into the hotel’s front room, laying them side to side.  The men were heavy, the women lighter, and the smaller children they could carry one apiece.  What limbs had been removed from their original source were collected, matched, and reunited with their owners.  They found Revis Cooke hacked into ribbons with one of the National men lying beside him, his own face and body thoroughly crushed.

“That National man’s the first beaten on like that,” Hayes said, stuffing a pile of dollar certificates piled on Cooke’s desk into a leather satchel.  “Why do you think the Charred Man dwelt on him?”

“Don’t know,” Lynch said.  “Maybe he fought back the hardest.”

“Yeah.  Shotguns are always ornery old coots.”

Hayes finished stuffing the bills and moved on to the silver coins. 

“What are you going to do with that payroll, Mr. Hayes?”

“Exactly what it looks like, Father.  I’m taking this as payment for services rendered, the death of my brother, and the death of my men.  If Mr. Dennison don’t like it, he’s welcome to come find me.”

“You’re just inviting more trouble, Mr. Hayes.”

“Yes, but I am reconciled with that.”

Flies harried the two men as they continued hauling bodies.  Father Lynch, who’d worked in his share of pestilence tents, fell into a familiar, mind-numbing reverie.  The work needed doing, so he would do it.  He was a servant of the Lord and did not shirk work merely because it was unpleasant.  Better for it to be unpleasant, for it brought him closer to the purity of the spirit of Christ, who had not heeded the sores of lepers, who’d touched the untouchable.  Better these biting black flies than the crack of the Devil’s whip, snapping through the air as it lashed his hide for all eternity, the wicked and the damned lamenting their fate in one awful, united wail. 

After they finished the south end of camp, they scared off the vultures and dragged the dead surrounding the hotel back inside it.  When they’d finished with that, they started on the north end of camp, glad they’d already dragged the fallen into the street and could work outside where the smell was not as fierce.  Atkins joined them a few bodies in, himself covered in dirt and sweat, and the three of them were able to work more quickly after that. 

The priest’s watch read four-thirty when they set the last body inside the hotel and splashed a whole bucket of kerosene over it.  Hayes fashioned a torch and Lynch brought out his Bible.  “Dear Lord,” the priest called out, “please bless these souls, who died in such agony, and see to it they are rewarded in Heaven for their pain here on Earth.  Many of them were women, and many of them were children.  None, I am certain, deserved to die in such great terror.”

Father Lynch pointed to the hotel and Elwood Hayes obliged, throwing the torch through the shattered front window.  The fire caught immediately, with a loud thump, and rose so quickly the three men were forced to stand back to avoid the worst of the heat. 

“Amen,” Hayes shouted, his voice carrying above the fire and into the hills.  “Amen, amen, amen.”

The fire crackled and climbed higher as a dark, foul-smelling smoke rose above the hotel.  “I will not sleep in this place tonight,” Atkins said, his voice low and so soft Father Lynch turned away from the burning hotel to make certain he’d spoken.

“You think we should leave for Rawlins straight off?”

“Yes, sir,” Hayes said, answering for the sheriff.  “He’s already got near a day on us.  No sense in dawdling here.”

Lynch lowered the layers of handkerchief from his mouth.

“No.  I suppose not.”

Hayes grinned and slapped Atkins on the arm.  “We’ve gone through the mill, boys.  Now it’s our turn to hunt.”

They saddled up four good horses and turned the rest loose from the livery.  The fourth horse was piled with supplies from the general store and led on a string by Elwood Hayes, who guided two horses more gracefully than Father Lynch did one.  The priest hadn’t ridden a horse in years—his joints ached by the time they’d crossed the valley and started up the steep mountain path. 

Hayes noticed him lagging and announced they only had an hour of good light remaining.   “I’m riding my best, Mr. Hayes,” Lynch replied.  “The way you’re leading that horse, I’m wondering if you’ve had some experience thieving.”

“Some,” Hayes called back, picking up the pace. 

As they climbed the hillside, Red Earth grew smaller and the Copper Hotel continued to burn, giving off an ugly, rising smoke the color of tar.  Father Lynch felt as if the fire were watching them depart, both enraged by their abandonment and consumed by the dirty work it had upon its hands.  The Church would not be happy with such a mass burial—they’d not only find it a pagan blasphemy, they’d argue that destroying the human body in such a way denied the resurrection, that as an instrument of the Lord receiving sacrament, the human body itself was a sacred, sacramental object, and that to put it to flame was an insult.