Ralph Compton Blood on the Prairie

Chapter One

On his last visit to Broken Bow, Sherman's brother, Jed, had been in full health. Tall, broad shouldered and lean from years of working the land, Jed possessed the kind of wiry strength only a man who worked with his hands possessed.

In his travels, Sherman had encountered all kinds. Men who looked dumber than an ox but were gifted with a genius intellect; women whose features were hardened by tough lives and tough conditions but could sing with such sweetness as to make even the most hard-hearted son of a gun weep with sorrow.

His brother, Jed, was just so deceptive. The man possessed not an ounce of fat on his entire body; he was all bone, muscle and sinew. The last time Sherman had seen him, Jed's hair had been beginning to thin at the crown, but that was the only thing that aged him. He looked far younger than his years.

That was not the case now.

The sickness had drained him. It had aged him, hollowing out his cheeks, darkening his once bright eyes. His hair had turned gray and all but fallen out. His once strong and sturdy frame had become little more than a withered husk. Jed was all paper-thin, dry skin stretched tight over bone. His hands, which had once been big and viselike, were elongated claws that could barely grip a spoon with which to eat-and Jed had stopped doing that three days ago. Sherman looked at his own hand, and his prosthetic appendage. The hook where his right hand had once been. Our hands tell our story, he thought.

Sherman peeked in at Jed through the open doorway. His brother lay on a cot, sleeping soundly, hands clasped on the chasm of his stomach. He'd grown so thin that his top row of teeth jutted out, pronounced in a way that Sherman had never seen before.

Hattie took his hat and jacket from him. "He's been that way a few days now. Just sleeping."

"Will he know I'm here?" Sherman asked.

"Oh, sure. He'll wake up and talk to you," Hattie assured him. "Just don't expect too much. As you can imagine . . . he tires ever so easily now."

Sherman watched her busy herself. "I want to say something-"

"No need to say it, Sherman. I know, and I appreciate it."

But he felt the need to explain himself. To let her know, whether she wished to hear it or not, that he appreciated her caring for Jed. He appreciated the dignity she'd afforded him as the sickness took hold and reduced him to his present state. "Hattie . . ."

"Please, don't."

Sherman pressed on, undeterred. The whole ride from Elam Hollow, he'd been thinking about what he'd say to his sister-in-law. How to express his gratitude to her. "Hattie, I just want to say, what you've done for Jed these past couple of months, you've gone above and beyond, you really have-"

Hattie shook her head. "No, no, no. Not here, not now. There will be a time, but that time is not now. I can't do this now."

"Okay," Sherman said softly.

Hattie looked through the open doorway to the angular shape of her husband flat out on the cot, breathing shallowly as he slept. "Whatever I did, it wasn't enough to stop him dying, was it? So I'm not sure I can stand any gratitude or platitudes just yet. Because we all failed him, even God. Ain't nobody was able to stop it happening, just as there isn't anything in heaven or earth gonna stop what's coming, either."

"I know." Sherman bowed his head. He glanced back at his brother. Sherman hadn't yet crossed the threshold of the door and stepped foot in the room. A part of him didn't want to, either. "It almost seems cruel to wake him."

"It does. But you will not get another chance. The doctor told me as much this morning."

"Really?"

Hattie folded her arms and sighed. "Really."

"Did he say how long?"

Jed's wife sighed. "Maybe by the morning."

The prediction made Sherman's blood run cold. How many people had Jed's doctor seen die before he had been able to make such a prediction? Before he had gotten a feel for how long patients had left before they met their Maker?

Sherman changed tack. "How is Annie getting on?"

"Like a young woman who is watching her father die," Hattie told him.

The brutality of her words, the sharpness of her tongue, made Sherman flinch. He had always admired and respected Hattie. And he'd always feared her, too. But she had done everything she possibly could for Jed. His brother couldn't have asked for a better wife. And for all her hard edges, Hattie was a warm, loving woman. When Jed finally passed, Hattie would be inconsolable, Sherman knew.

Hattie looked at him. "Are you going to go in there and talk to your brother or not?"

"Yes."

"What're you waiting for, then? Time is wasting away."

Sherman considered this. He didn't seem able to step over the threshold. Perhaps because once he did, there was no going back. He could smell the unmistakable stink of death coming from within the room and the reality of what was about to happen to his brother sank in with awful finality. It took every ounce of strength and determination he possessed to enter the room and stand at his brother's bedside.

"Jed?"

His brother barely stirred. Sherman leaned in, placed his hand over Jed's.

"Brother, I'm here."

Jed stirred, cleared his throat. His eyes opened lazily and it took him several seconds to recognize Sherman. Then he attempted to sit up, but Sherman insisted he stay as he was.

"Don't get up."

"Brother?" Jed croaked, eyes widening, the whites turned nicotine yellow. He lay back against the pillow, visibly exhausted. "What're you doing here?"

"Came to see you, Jed."

Jedediah Knowles looked up at the ceiling. "Because I'm dying."

Sherman thought how to soften the impact of what he had to say, how to make it easier on Jed. But there was no way of breaking it to him that would have been any less cruel than the harsh reality of his diagnosis. The ticking clock that now existed between both men. Counting down every second of time that was already spent.

"Jed, I don't think there's long."

His brother swallowed. "I know."

"When I heard you were sick, I got to thinking of the old times," Sherman said. "You know, when we were young. How we grew up. How we went our separate ways."

"I seem to recall one of us choosing a direction and the other deciding to fly wherever the wind took him."

Sherman said, "Sure sounds familiar. But we always got on, didn't we?"

Jed smiled weakly. "Have you come to clear your conscience, Sherman?"

"Not at all."

"All right, yes, we got on. We had our ups and downs, like everyone. But I am mighty proud of the way you turned things around in the end. The way you saw sense. It just took you a while, is all."

"Sure did," Sherman said.

Jed continued. "Nobody knows how to live, Sherman. You just have to pick a road. I picked mine and was lucky to have what I have. Others weren't so lucky, which I guess is just a case of the odds stacked against them. Like whatever this is that's killing me. Ain't nobody or nothing to blame, it was just my time, brother. It was just my time."

Silence fell between them, both men reflecting on their words, on their own paths and how they had converged. One about to carry on, the other about to pass.

Sherman had to ask the inevitable question, and he had to look away from Jed in order to do so. "You scared?"

His big brother thought on that question for a long moment. Finally he said, "I don't know if I'm scared of dying. I guess I'm scared of not knowing what'll happen to Hattie and Annie."

Sherman took his brother's hand. "I'll be there for them, as you were there for me. When I needed direction, you and Hattie were there to show me the way. You were my compass."

"You'll do that for me?"

"No harm will come to either of them while there is breath in my lungs. I swear it."

Jed squeezed Sherman's hand tight. Sherman realized, much later, when Jed had already passed, that it must have taken all his strength to do so. Almost as if Jed wanted Sherman to know he still had some fight in him.

The sun broke through the clouds outside, the thin, watery light filling the room.

"I don't want you to go," Sherman admitted, his voice cracking.

Jed smiled. "And I regret having to leave, brother."

That night, Jedediah fell asleep with Sherman, Hattie and Annie sitting around him. They were there as his eyes closed and his breathing slowed to an irregular rhythm. Just before midnight, he stopped breathing altogether and lay perfectly still, his passing gentle as rain on a spring night. Sherman watched as Annie rose from her chair and pulled the sheet up over her father's face. "Good night, Pa," she said in her soft voice, and not for the first time in his life, Sherman felt something inside of him break in a way it never had before.

Jedediah had left home and pursued a life working the land. First, he was the hired help, and then, when heÕd squirreled away enough money, he had the means by which to purchase his own farm in Broken Bow. Every year he invested in buying more land and expanding his property. Jed made a deal with free grazers, giving them permission to drive their cattle through his property in exchange for a modest fee. This combined with what he made from the crops kept him above water. He was earning enough to build a house, and a barn, and a cattle shed. He hired people, all year-round, to keep up with the workload. There were bad years. There were bad crops. But he pushed through, and he made a living, and he provided. TheyÕd wanted more children, and they tried for them, but they never came.

Hattie had had Annie and never fallen pregnant again. That was how it was sometimes, Jed guessed. The Knowles of Broken Bow were happy with their lot, regardless. They had a life, a home, a family. They had security and were principled, respected members of their community.

The trouble was Sherman. The trouble had always been Sherman.

When Jed had left home to go learn his trade and apply himself, Sherman chose another path. He rode with the wrong crowd. He discovered he was a natural with a pistol-even better with two. He could shoot a glass bottle off a fence post at an impossible distance and do so in a manner that made it look easy. While Jed was up to his knees in mud, plowing a field for little pay, Sherman was a great distance away, running a man down in the town of Godwinson. He shot that man and stood over him as he drew his last breath. And what Sherman came to realize was that he had no issue with taking a life. He could render himself judge, jury and executioner with the pull of a trigger. One shot and a life was extinguished at his whim. It filled him with terror and awe to be so powerful.

When Jed was purchasing his first stretch of land, Sherman was working bounties. He took a second horse with him at all times. Either for the living, breathing bounty to sit upon-or to carry their cadaver. The outcomes were generally determined by how the bounties conducted themselves, and when all was said and done, it mattered little. Whether they died at his hand, or by a noose around the neck, every man with a price on his head knew the eventual outcome as surely as Sherman did. The reaper took them all in the end.

Jed had never understood Sherman's reasons for shrugging off the trappings of a settled existence. Because to Jed, they were not trappings at all. They were the bounty of life. A roof over his head; the warmth of the fire after a day's work in the cold; Hattie's body lying next to his after they'd made love; Annie growing up, more beautiful with each passing year-they were truly life's treasures.

For his part, Sherman could not fathom why Jed would have chosen such a rooted, stagnant existence. Hunting people down and collecting on their bounties had afforded Sherman the opportunity to see every corner of the country. From sea to sea he had ridden, from north to south and back again. He'd interacted with all walks of life and felt all the more enlightened for it. His brother was happy farming the ground and digging in roots ever farther with each passing year. Sherman found the idea smothering. Who would have preferred that to riding with the wind into the sunset?

After he lost his hand, and things changed for good, Sherman dropped by frequently. Despite his previous misgivings about Jed's lack of worldliness, he found the Knowles farm a safe haven. A place to return to where he could be nurtured and cared for. Where he could feel the warmth of his brother's love, and what became a genuine friendship between the two men. For all the time they'd been so different, so distant, in time maturity had brought them back together.

Sherman and Jedediah found they had more in common than what divided them.

They held a quiet service in Broken Bow Cemetery, and when the priest had finished his oratory, Sherman was invited to stand over the chasm into which his brotherÕs coffin had been lowered and say a few words. He had nothing prepared, so he fumbled for a moment for something to say something about Jedediah that would bring solace to his widow and child. Sherman looked down at JedÕs casket, and to his surprise, the words found him. They rose from the grave, as it were. He thought on a day theyÕd spent fishing the Mountain Fork, talking for hours. How Jed had described seeing Hattie and loving her the moment their eyes met. Sherman had never felt that feeling and doubted he ever would. He envied Jed for experiencing something so pure in such a harsh, volatile world as theirs. Tell the truth, he envied him still.

"Jedediah was one helluva brother," Sherman said. "If anyone deserved to reach a ripe old age, it was Jed. He was a patient and thoughtful man. We never had cross words, but he never shied away from tellin' me where my faults lie. Not that he was perfect. Difference between Jed and most other fellas is he took everything on the chin. He accepted his faults, and that made him a better man. If I'm being honest, he was the kind of man most aspire to be."