“Glad to know you’re alive,” he said in response to her exertions. “I’ll have you out in a second now.”
He stumbled back, falling as they popped out of the earth. He heard Abby spluttering and spitting dirt. Reaching into his boot, he pulled out a bowie knife and cut the rope that bound her to Jed. Then he rolled Jed’s body to the side.
Abby sat up, shaking dirt from her hair, brushing away from her face, still spitting. When she was finally able to talk, she said, “I thought I was going to die there.”
“You didn’t, though,” Fargo said.
“How did you know where I was?”
“I saw them bury you.”
Abby looked at him. Her cotton gown was filthy, her face was smeared with dirt, and her hair was matted with it.
“You saw them?”
“Yes. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. There were too many of them.”
“You bastard!” she said, leaning toward him, beating him with her tiny fists. “You let them bury me, you bastard!”
Fargo let her pound him. She was too small to hurt him unless she hit his wound, and there wasn’t much chance of that.
After a while she was exhausted, and she collapsed against him.
“They told me you were dead,” she said. “Angel told me that she’d killed you. She said that no one would come for me, that no one would ever find me.”
“I found you,” Fargo said. “I figured they’d come here, so I got here as soon as I could. I just didn’t know what they’d do to you.”
“I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to lie there forever rotting away with Jed tied to me.
“It didn’t happen,” Fargo said.
She pulled away from him and looked at him more closely.
“What happened to your head?”
“That’s where Angel shot me. But she didn’t finish the job. She must have a soft heart.”
Abby almost managed a smile. She said, “She might have a soft spot or two, but her heart’s not one of them.”
Fargo thought about the way Angel’s breasts had felt when he’d encountered her in the barn earlier.
“I guess not,” he said. “I’d better take you home now.”
He stood up and helped her to her feet. “They’ll be back,” she said. “The Murrays, I mean. They won’t let it go at this, not when they find out that I’m still alive. You know that, don’t you?”
Fargo said he knew. He told her to wait there while he went for his horse.
When he got back, she was standing by Jed’s body.
“It wasn’t enough for them to kill Jed,” she said. “The way they talked when they brought me here, that didn’t count for a thing. The only thing they cared about was that Paul Murray was dead.”
Fargo bent down and took hold of Jed’s body, grabbing it under the armpits from behind and pulling upright.
“They didn’t care about Jed at all,” Abby said, not looking directly at either Fargo or the body. “They thought his death didn’t mean a thing.”
“Families are important,” Fargo said as he heaved Jed’s body across the broad rear of the Ovaro behind the saddle.
“What about me and Jed?” Abby said. “If you care about your own family, you should care about other people’s families.”
Fargo knew that revenge didn’t work that way, but he didn’t try to explain things to her.
“It’s a shame about the way they treated Jed,” Abby said. “And Paul Murray, too. You ought to be allowed a little dignity when you’re dead.”
Fargo looked at Jed’s body as it hung slack across the back of the horse. As far as Fargo had ever been able to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of dignity in death, and nothing Abby thought was going to change that. The way to look at it was that the things that had happened to Jed’s body didn’t matter to him in the least, any more than what had happened to Paul Murray’s body mattered to Paul. When you were dead, if you felt anything at all, which Fargo doubted, you sure as hell wouldn’t be worried about what was happening to a body you no longer had any use for. Or that was the way it had always seemed to Fargo.
But that wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about with anybody, not then, so he put his foot in the stirrup, grabbed the saddle horn, and pulled himself atop the Ovaro. He reached down and offered his hand to Abby. She took hold of it, and he pulled her up in front of him.
“Let’s get you back to the house,” he said.
“Angel was the worst,” Abby said as they rode through the ruined cornfield.
The green stalks were flattened and trampled in a broad path, though the damage wasn’t as bad as Fargo would have expected.
“She was enjoying the whole thing,” Abby went on. “She laughed the whole way to the graves, thinking about what they were going to do to me. She said that I took Jed away from her, and that he deserved what he got and that if she couldn’t have him, nobody would. She said he and I were going to be together for a long time, but that it wouldn’t be like I’d thought it would. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”
“Did she tell you?”
“No. She said the men were all going to rape me, and she was going to watch. I think she would have liked that. It would have been another way to get back at me for marrying Jed. Thank God it was a lie, or maybe they just didn’t have time for it. What they did was almost as bad. It would have been worse if you hadn’t been there. I’m sorry I hit you.”
“You didn’t hurt me. Anyway, I don’t much blame you. If somebody left me to be buried alive, I might get a little upset, myself.”
Dawn was beginning to show in the eastern sky as a thin line of lighter gray. Somewhere off in the distance a dog was barking, faint and far away. Fargo knew there were other farms near the Watkins place, but he didn’t know where they were.
“The Murrays aren’t through with us, you know,” Abby said. “They’ll find out that they didn’t kill you. They’ll find out I’m alive. And when they do, they won’t be happy about it. They might stew about it for a while, but then they’ll come back.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fargo said.
The funeral service was late that afternoon. It was a short one. Jed hadn’t been much of a churchgoing man, so the preacher didn’t have much to say.
They buried Jed in the churchyard in the stout wooden casket that Cass Ellis had built that morning. Fargo could smell the newly sawed wood and the newly turned earth.
There were several markers in the cemetery, but Fargo didn’t bother to count them or to read any of the inscriptions. They wouldn’t have meant anything to him.
The little church was whitewash and clean, and the lowering sun pushed the building’s shadow across the grass. People stood around the grave as the preacher read the Bible verse about the valley of the shadow of death. Fargo had heard it before.
He looked around at the men with their hats in their hands, the women crying under their bonnets. He recognized Alf Wesley, Rip Johnson, Frank Conner, and Tom Talley. Cass Ellis and Bob Tabor stood a bit farther off. They appeared to have recovered from their little drinking bout of the night before. Ellis had a couple of small cuts on his hands from having built the casket. He’d probably had a little case of the shakes.
Molly Doyle was there, too, dressed in clean men’s clothing that did nothing to hide her abundant womanliness. She was crying quietly and trying to hide the fact by putting a hand to her face.
Abby and Lem were standing beside the preacher. There were tears on Abby’s cheeks, but she wasn’t weeping. She had cleaned herself up and washed her hair. There were no physical signs remaining of what had happened to her earlier, but Fargo wondered what might lie beneath the nearly placid surface of her face. A woman doesn’t lose her prospective husband and then get thrown in a shallow grave tied to his body without it having some kind of effect.