“I do not think that,” said Bird. He plunged the shovel and leveraged it against his leg again. His strength was not fully in the gesture though, and the dirt rose up but fell back into the hole, rather than to its side. “You could help. You could add depth to the hole as I draw out its side.”
“It is important to break and restore your strength. You are going at this like a mad man with only a day to get it done.”
“I’d like to get it done.”
“We have time.”
“You’d like to sleep with those people in the street like that?”
“It’s snowing,” she said.
“Only slightly,” he said.
“Still, they will be covered.”
“But what about the ghosts,” he said.
“There is no such thing,” she said.
Bird removed a knife from his belt and considered it.
“Do you have a knife?” he said.
She did not.
“But you can get one?”
She could.
“We’ll take their teeth,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We’ll bury their teeth. Bury their ghosts.”
“That is horrid and I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Will you help or not?”
“I will not,” she said.
As the sun began to set and the evening grew cool, they retreated to their building with the kitchen. The bodies lined up in the street were nothing more than row after row of raised snow, like a plowed field in winter. The blood was only faintly visible beneath the thinner layers, and it was vanishing with each passing moment.
Neither of them was in any condition to cook a meal, so they ate what was left of the bread with salt and stoked the fire and huddled together. Bird’s hand was well-worn and bloody. Mary’s hands were blistered and ready to pop. She rinsed the wounds with cool water, and bandaged each. It snowed steadily on outside. For the first time since they’d left home, they slept soundly through the night.
They woke to find the village covered in several feet of snow, with more of it still in the air. The rows Bird had set out were unidentifiable. The hole, on which they had worked so tirelessly, was filled now with snow and marked only by the snow-capped mound of dirt at its side.
The snow stayed with them for days. They dug out the store of logs lining the back of the building with the kitchen, and stacked them inside to thaw and dry. Most would not burn at first, but those that did warmed and worked to dry the others. They made more bread. Bird practiced with the pistol, although Mary insisted he do so upstairs. The sound of it startled her, but no matter of fussing or demanding would stop him.
He was closing off to her. He seemed distracted and uncomfortable. He would end what might have become a perfectly good conversation by refusing to answer with more than a single word.
“Do you think we might develop some land, when the snow stops?”
“No.”
“Would you like a family some day? Do you believe this town could restore itself? If we help, maybe? Do you think we could keep this town in some kind of decent shape, for when more people come? When the town grows again?”
To this, he said nothing. He was watching out the window. The snow was burying them. It wouldn’t stay forever. They could dig themselves out and get back to work. They had only a few more days of this. A week at most. They were not trapped. They were not in danger. They had only to wait.
~ ~ ~
The infant would not stop screaming. She had no milk for it, no liquid with which to feed it. Only a few scraps of food and the snow she could melt in her hands for drinking. She chewed a bit of dried beef and tried to spit it into the baby’s mouth, but it would not accept it. She rode on through the night and put the sun at her back as it began to rise. The horse was flagging. She was flagging. The baby was screaming and screaming and screaming. She did not know this baby. She did not have the body warmth to keep it alive. She did not know the man she had killed. From what she could tell, everyone from the town was dead. Everyone except for Mary and Bird. And they needed her. She had to survive for them and find her way back. She rode until the horse began to falter. She pushed it a bit farther and it finally bent its front knees and brought her down into the snow. The baby fell from her. It disappeared into several feet of snow without a sound, like a twig into a canyon. But then it began to scream again. The horse’s hocks gave then and she was suddenly in the snow and thanking the heavens that the horse had not crushed her. The child would not stop screaming. She had made a poor decision, coming out here. She had put herself at risk and the child was no better off. She had pursued the man unthinkingly and brought herself to this low point. There was no way of anticipating the snowfall. Now the snow would fall and it would keep falling and falling, as the baby kept screaming and screaming.
It was difficult to move. She wasn’t pinned, but was bound up by her clothing and finding it hard to lift or turn. She dropped to her side, into the snow and shook her sleeves back from her wrists, opening up the space around her elbows. Snow poured in, wedged itself between her coat and dress, and began to melt. She lifted herself onto an elbow and rose. She separated herself from the horse. It turned onto its side, obviously disliking the snow but without the strength to rise and shake it from its hair. She shook what she could from her arms and torso and lifted the baby from its pocket of snow. She removed a crude knife from the few belongings she’d taken from the man she’d killed. She plunged the knife into the belly of the horse and brought it down. The horse screamed and thrashed and landed a blow to her side, likely cracking a rib. She rose and opened the animal, releasing a pocket of steam. Blood and slick innards she could not identify spilled onto the snow for a moment but then seemed to reach an equilibrium and come to rest. The horse protested then, but only for a moment before going still. She wrapped herself around the infant and squeezed whatever parts of herself she could into the horse’s husk. Everything from her waist up was still exposed. Her legs were slick and sliding out. Nothing would stay put. She warmed slightly, but not for long. Her pants were wet now. There was nothing to set her heels upon. Nothing that would hold her. Only the snow and the meat and the hard bits she slid from. The baby was still screaming. She couldn’t think, so she didn’t try to.
Brooke started thinking about love once the snow began to fall. He’d met his wife during a brutal snowstorm, many years ago. The circumstances weren’t far from those of his current situation. He’d left the riders he was with. He’d struck out on his own. They were getting a reputation, and with that came a sense of obligation to this or that, and they started spending more time deciding who they were going to hunt down and how than actually getting after it. It wasn’t a bitter parting, but a necessary one. Hunting or no, they took the desert paths when they could. Slept in caves or alongside springs. It was by riding with these men that he had learned how to best survive the situation in which he’d currently found himself. He knew it well. Even if life did not repeat itself, there were certainly echoes that rang out forever. He had no doubt that he could survive out here for as long as it would take him to find the next place to be. There was water. Some plants. He didn’t need much. It wasn’t fun, and he was losing weight like a broken bucket drains water, but he could keep it all going if he had to.
It was clean. Or clean enough, their parting. They’d stopped for water and Brooke told one of the men he was thinking of riding off and trying to see if the rumors were true about making money digging in the earth. There were stories all the time about men finding a life’s fortune in rocks or oil, just under the sand, or in their own backyards. He figured he would take a stab at it. Ride out a bit and see what he could find.