“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why in the dickens can’t he dig back down again?”
“Cause as fast as he can dig, the sand’ll fall back in. He can’t get nowhere. I come along and I open the top and there he is. I got me a prairie dog.”
“And then what you got? Somethin’ that ain’t worth the sand you wasted.”
Jonah thinks this over.
Outside the train station, sundown. Jonah sleeps in a chair leaning on the wall as the train pulls in. He looks at Nelly’s sketch as he paces the platform, waiting for her to get off, which she does, the last of ten or fifteen passengers.
“Hello, Nelly.”
“Hello, Jonah.”
They stare into one another’s anxious eyes and kiss awkwardly.
One wall of Dewey’s cell is completely filled with lampblack smudges. With long hair and a full beard now, Dewey reads from the Bible by lamplight as it rains and thunders outside. “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” He muses a moment. “Now what in the hell is Isaiah goin’ on about here? Whose cheeks are we talkin’ about? And who’s this that’s fixin’ to pluck the hair out of ‘em? And what’s all this shame and spittin’ about? Heck, I’m beginnin’ to think this book’s just a pile o’ snakeshit.”
The office of the Justice of the Peace in Dodge City. Jonah and Nelly exit, smiling, elbows locked, Jonah waving the marriage certificate. Behind them the door closes and the OPEN sign is turned to CLOSED.
“I guess we’re hitched, Sweetheart.”
“Forever?”
“Of course, Darlin’. Forever.”
They leave town on Jonah’s wagon.
Dewey sits crosslegged on the floor of his cell, carving nuggets out of soap with a long thumbnail that he’s let grow for this very purpose. A drawstring pouch made from a bandana and a bootstring sits in front of him on the floor. When he’s finished carving the pretend gold nugget, he drops it into the pouch and smiles with childish glee.
A small area of Jonah’s homestead has been plowed, enough to support a modest garden, though its furrows are littered with prairie dog burrows. Stove wood is stacked neatly near the front door of the house. The windmill is dead-still as Jonah and Nelly arrive. The terrier runs from the barn and barks at Nelly, then bites her ankle. Jonah kicks the dog into the air. “You nasty little viper! Get on outta here…. He ain’t mine, Darlin’. He came with the place.”
“Look, I’m bleeding,” Nelly says.
“Let’s go on in and put some linney-mint on it.”
Jonah carries Nelly over the threshold and sets her down. The place is Spartan in its furnishings — little more than a stove, a bed with a straw mattress, a table and a chair. Worry and disappointment cloud Nelly’s face as Jonah applies lineament to her bite, spilling some on the bed. The dog continues to growl at her.
Jonah confesses he isn’t much of a housekeeper. “Nell, that’ll be your concern from now on. Warshin’, cookin’, cleanin’ and such.”
“It’s awful small, Jonah. It won’t be too long before we need a room for my baby.” She rubs her stomach. “I mean our baby, when we have one…which will be really, really soon…I hope and pray.” She raises her skirts and pulls Jonah down on top of her.
Dewey’s beard and hair are long and tangled. The strain of imprisonment shows in his weary eyes. Through his cell door he sees a condemned man being marched along in shackles by two guards. A preacher follows. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”
Dewey shouts, “Preach! I beg your pardon. Can you spare a minute?”
“What is it son? This is a solemn time.”
“Here’s my question to you. If the Lord is my shepherd, and he makes me lie down in green pastures, that’s good. I’ll eat some grass. But what’s all that about leadin’ me beside still waters. What’s wrong with a nice, cool, fast movin’ crick?”
The preacher shrugs. The guards shrug. The prisoner says, “A sheep won’t drink from movin’ water.”
“Well, now, that makes a lotta sense. Thank you, Mister, and goodbye.”
Thirty minutes later, Dewey lies in his cot twirling his thumbs and staring into space as he listens first to the snap of the trap door, then the snap of the man’s neck, then a wet, gurgling death rattle.
Nelly lies abed, in labor. Jonah sits beside her, rubbing her stomach.
Rags boil on the stove. While stirring them, Jonah looks at a calendar on the wall. The month is March. Curious, he stops stirring and goes back through the pages of the calendar, stopping at October. He returns to the bed.
“You know what, Honey Flower. This little’un’s commin’ perty early. It ain’t gonna be very big. Hell’s bells, Darlin’. You only been here a day or two more than five months.” Nelly is not paying attention. She’s very focused on giving birth. “I reckon I had it wrong. I thought it took longer.” He thinks for a moment. “We could have two babies a year now. They could help out with the chores.”
“I’m gonna bust, Jonah! I’m gonna bust wide open!”
“Don’t go to frettin’, Darlin’.”
“It ain’t right! The baby ain’t right! I’m gonna die. It’s gonna kill me! Help me, Jonah!” Jonah is frozen with fear. Nelly gives one big push and screams as the baby squirts out, fat, full-term, bloody, with the umbilical coiled around his neck. The baby has a purple birthmark in the center of its forehead that looks like a vestigial third eye. Nelly faints. Jonah recoils in horror. The dog jumps on the bed and eats the placenta.
The homestead, four years later. Jonah pushes a wheelbarrow-load of sand to his prairie dog trapping grounds. On top of the sand is a cage. Tied to Jonah’s belt is an empty feed sack; in his back pocket a pair of heavy-duty leather gloves. He opens the hinged, latched top of an overturned barrel, reaches in and comes out with a fussing prairie dog, which he dumps into the feed sack. He repeats the process with the other kegs, finding at least one, sometimes two or three, each time. Soon the sack is full of chittering, barking, scrabbling prairie dogs.
Dewey looks over his cigar-boxed pill bug collection, about twenty or so. They feed on a piece of moldy bread. He uses his long thumbnail to separate two pill bugs from the rest. When he touches them they curl into pea-sized balls. He picks one up and pushes it into his right ear, then the other one into his left. He covers both ears with his hands and lies on the cot, giggling and squirming as the bugs open up inside his ears and try to dig their way out.
As Nelly washes dishes, James, her four-year-old birth-marked boy, frolics with the terrier and in the process knocks a jar of honey from the table. It breaks. Honey oozes out. The dog licks it. Nelly pulls the boy over her knee, pulls down his trousers and swats his bare bottom with a switch. “Bad little devil child! Bad little demon boy!”
The terrified boy screams in pain as Jonah enters with a skinned, dressed and bleeding prairie dog carcass. “Try fryin’ it this time. Soak it in some vinegar first. What’s that boy done now?”
“Broke the honey jar. He’s cursed. Can’t do anything right.”
“Go get on your pallet, son, and shut that mouth o’ yourn.”
Nelly sets the boy on his feet. His crying subsides and finally stops when he settles onto the pallet. “One more sound,” Nelly says, “and I’ll cut your tongue out with my scissors.”