Nelly looks at Jonah, dumbfounded by his ignorance.
Back at the Binder Place: a CLOSED sign across the door. The windows are boarded up. The signs that once hung from the porch roof rafters now dangle on broken wires, the paint faded, unreadable. A couple of wagons and a few horses are tied up in front of the house, a black wreath is affixed to the door.
In the parlor, Mrs. Binder’s body, coffined in a poorly made wooden box, rests on the dining table. A few black-clad mourners in attendance lower their heads in silence. Katie, standing at the head of the coffin, kisses the corpse on the forehead. “If you see Papa, tell him I love him and miss him dearly. And if Jonah’s there, tell him to please send me a sign that he’s passed on, so I won’t always be wonderin’ if my brother’s ever comin’ home. Good night, Mamma. I love you.” Several men in attendance nail the lid home and carry the coffin outside.
In the orchard a headstone with grasshoppers crawling on it reads:
GUSTAV BINDER
Born Hamburg, Ger., 1814
Died U.S.A. Kan. 1875
Beside it are a blank stone and an open grave. Men with ropes lower Mrs. Binder’s coffin into the excavation without ceremony. Dirt is shoveled in on top.
Katie walks back to the house in tears, accompanied by several women in black. On the porch men dawdle, smoke pipes, chew tobacco, carve wood, and spit. The women say their final goodbyes to Katie and coax their men to the wagons. She waves at them until the wagons are too far and dark to see. Alone now, she has a dose of tincture of opium, flops down in a chair and closes her eyes.
Her dreams have scarcely gotten underway when an unfamiliar sound ends them. With the empty tincture vial in her lap, she awakens to the sound of strong wind and flapping sailcloth. She feels her body drifting to the door. She feels her eyes looking out. On the horizon she sees a set of two square sails full in the wind.
The wind wagon sails over the hard prairie sod, fast, out of control. Two men are on board: Sheriff Peppard, now retired and wearing eyeglasses with half-inch thick lenses, and his former deputy, Ratoncito, retired in a sense, but also working for Peppard in a sidekick capacity. Ratoncito speaks with gestures, never words. As Peppard strains at the helm, his eyeglasses fall off. Everything is a blur. In searching for his glasses, he loses his grip on the helm. The wagon rolls on, out of control.
“Ratoncito! Drop the sails and heave the anchor!” Ratoncito lowers the sails, then applies all his strength toward lifting the “anchor,” fabricated from several plow blades and a cannon ball. He manages to get it over the stern. It bites into the sod, turning up a furrow, and slows the big wagon. “Step on the brake!” Ratoncito rides the smoking wooden brake, slowing the wagon further.
Katie backpedals into the house and watches terrified from the doorway as the wind wagon comes to a halt a mere foot or two from disaster. Peppard and Ratoncito climb out, shake off the dust and the grasshoppers. Katie greets them at the door, speechless, confused. Peppard removes his hat. “Good mornin’ ma’am. Hope all the commotion didn’t give ye’ a fright. But my assistant here ain’t quite got the hang of it yet. Please allow me to introduce myself. The name is Peppard. P-e-p-p-a-r-d. Luther Peppard. And this here little feller goes by the name of Ratoncito, which means “little rat” in Meskin. He ain’t never told me his real name. He can hear fine, but his daddy cut out his tongue when he was a little ole pepperbelly no bigger than that. So he’s dumb as a well bucket.”
Ratoncito bows gallantly and uses gestures to indicate pulling his tongue out and slicing it off with a knife.
“I’m Katie Binder, so pleased to meet you.”
“I see a fresh grave yonder,” Peppard says.
“That’s Mamma. Papa’s dead ten years. Don’t know what became of Jonah, my brother.”
Ratoncito crosses himself. Peppard grasps Katie’s hand. “My deepest condolences go out to you, Miss Katie Binder. I’m afraid we done landed here at the wrong time.” He continues to hold her hand and rub the back of it with his thumb.
“No, no, Mister Peppard. Please come in and enjoy a refreshment. Grieving all alone don’t make no sense at all.”
“Well, now, that don’t sound like a half bad offer. I’m parched as a cornhusk.”
Peppard and Ratoncito enter.
In the parlor a few minutes later Katie pours whiskey for them. “What in all the universe is that contraption of yours out there?”
“Well now, that wind-powered wagon was made by a blacksmith in Hays City. He was murdered and I come into possession of it.”
“Will you take me for a ride?”
He slugs the whiskey. “I’d be honored to. I do have a fear, though. We’re gonna be plum outta wind here when the sun drops off. If we don’t get goin’ soon, we’ll be marooned for the night.”
Katie shrugs, moves her braid to the other shoulder. “We’ll go tomorrow then. You can bed down here. There’s Mama and Papa’s room upstairs, right next to mine.”
The sheriff’s eyes are as big as dollars behind the glasses. “Now, Ratoncito, I ask you, how many times have you met a handsome young woman like this who also had manners?” Ratoncito’s thumb and forefinger form a zero.
Peppard considers his options, chooses deceit. “My dear young lady, I think it would be most improper for the two of us to be sleepin’ in a bed that belonged to someone so recently departed. Me ‘n’ Ratoncito got our bedrolls in the wagon. We’ll just throw ‘em out on the floor and sleep right down here.”
“Suit yourself, Mr. Peppard. But if you need anything, I’ll be right upstairs, the first door you come to. Good night, now.”
Later, Ratoncito sleeps on the floor next to an empty bedroll. Awakened by noises from upstairs, he listens carefully to the squeak of bedsprings and grunts of pleasure tumbling down the stairway. He makes the sign of the cross and goes back to sleep.
After sex, Peppard and Katie lie in bed, a lamp lit nearby. She has a sip of opium tincture, passes the bottle to Peppard, who also indulges. She takes up the volume of Poe and reads. “It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, / In the misty mid region of Weir, / It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, / In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
“Yer givin’ me the black twirlies…‘In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.’ I got the chills.”
James plays with a prairie dog head. Nelly salts a pot of beans, often glancing over at Dewey, who now sits upright in a chair, clad in a diaper. His bad foot dangles, blank eyes stare straight ahead. He drools slightly, his hands folded in his lap. The dog sleeps in a chair next to him. Jonah enters, tired, brushes off grasshoppers.
Nelly is almost in tears. “He needs a doctor, Jonah.”
“You reckon the fever cooked his brain?” Jonah waves his hand in Dewey’s face.
“You better go on into Dodge and fetch the Doc. It might be the cholera.”
Jonah takes a long look at Dewey’s face. “Or somethin’ else. If’n it was me gettin’ all that tender love and care, why I’d be awful tempted to stay ailin’ long as I could.”
“Don’t be silly, Jonah.”
“There’s somethin’ awful odd about this feller. What if he’s puttin’ on an act.”
Out of Dewey’s sight, Jonah checks the Sharps to make sure there isn’t a shell in the breech. He holds the barrel at Dewey’s temple, pulls back the hammer and winks at Nelly. “All right there, mysterious stranger, tell me what your name is by the time I count to three or I’m gonna blow yer head off.” Dewey’s placid, mindless expression is unchanged. “One…two…three. All right, then. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warnin’.” Jonah squeezes the trigger, the hammer falls on the empty chamber with a loud click. Not the slightest flinch out of Dewey. “Reckon he is pretty sick.”