Innocent Foxes: A Novel. Torey Hayden

So?’

      ‘So that’s cool. Cowboys are cool. He can teach you how to be a man.’

      The look of contemptuous ennui on the boy’s face did away with any need for an answer.

      ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Spencer said. ‘Normal kids would be grateful for all this.’

      ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ the boy replied. Then he turned and went back into the house.

      Chapter Four

      They buried Jamie Lee on Wednesday morning. It was a bright day, cooler than the previous ones, but very still. The sky was completely cloudless and the air so clear that it magnified the mountains, pulling them right up close to the small party at the graveside, as if they were family mourners.

      Abundance had two cemeteries. The new one out on the edge of town looked like a park. In fact, it was a lot prettier than the real park. An irrigation system pumped water up from the river so that its grass stayed green even in the hottest part of the summer and there were ornamental cherries planted all around the perimeter. Because of the rule about only having flat headstones, you would have never known it was a cemetery if you were just driving past it, except for all the vases of plastic flowers.

      The old cemetery, in contrast, sprawled over a dusty, treeless hillside east of town. It was seldom used any more because the county stopped maintaining it once the new one was built. A rusty wrought-iron fence was all that separated it from the vast, wild hillside beyond.

      There had never been any question in Dixie’s mind about where to bury Jamie Lee. She had loved the old cemetery all her life, if ‘love’ was the kind of word you could use about such a place. Its location high up behind the town gave the most panoramic view you could find that included both the river basin that cupped Abundance and the enormous mountain range beyond. Throughout her growing-up years, Dixie had regularly made the three-mile uphill trek from home to the cemetery. She’d spent many hours wandering in the crowded solitude, reading the tombstones and speculating on the lives of the people beneath them. In one place six young children from a single family had died of diphtheria in the spring of 1901. The six slabs of stone marking their graves were amateurishly hewn, the names etched crudely on the stone by hand. Dixie visualized a heart-broken father struggling with chisel and hammer himself because he was unable to afford so many tombstones made by a stonemason. In a different part of the cemetery, a child of four named Laura Mae lay beneath a most exquisite white marble lamb. When Dixie was young, she would stroke its nose, cool even on the hottest day, and make chains of clover to hang around its neck. At the far back of the cemetery where the earliest residents of Abundance had been laid to rest, there used to be an old wooden tombstone inscribed ‘Charles Turner, aged 23. Hanged Nov. 1889’ and nothing more.

      Daddy had asked her once why she spent so much time in a place full of dead people she’d never known, only Daddy being Daddy he’d said ‘worm-eaten corpses’ instead of the word ‘people’. She hadn’t replied. It was impossible to explain the sense of peace she felt there with the mountains gathered in close, cradling the open hillside, and the locusts and meadowlarks embroidering the stillness. And there was something deeper yet about the place that Dixie never could find words for, something about those worms and bugs and seeking roots of grass being the real gods of resurrection, turning death back into life. She found a sense of rightness in the cemetery, a feeling that maybe there wasn’t really anything wrong with death and dying, that it was just another part of living, not so very different. Even on this sad, sad day now, with Jamie Lee, the place brought comfort to her. If she had to leave him anywhere, Dixie was glad it would be here.

      Only the immediate family came to the funeral. And Billy, of course, who was wearing that awful black polyester suit with the decorative red stitching that Dixie abhorred. He looked like a cheap Elvis Presley impersonator in it, but it was his only black suit – his only suit, period, if truth be known – and, as he was always pointing out, it still had a lot of wear left in it.

      Dixie’s sister Leola came, but Earl Ray didn’t, so Dixie knew what Mama had been saying about Leola’s marriage was probably true. And Daddy came, Mama doggedly pushing his wheelchair up the grassy slope to the graveside. Dixie was surprised to see him. What with the way things were between them, she wouldn’t have thought much about it if he’d decided to stay home. Most likely Mama made him come. That was the big problem with being in a wheelchair. You were at the mercy of other folk. Even Daddy was.

      The graveside service was very short. The small fibreglass coffin was lowered into the ground and the preacher bent to pick up a handful of soil. As he cast it into the open grave, an unexpected breeze played across the hillside, dispersing most of the dirt over the yellow prairie grass. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Dixie watched the blowing soil as it drifted away. A locust buzzed by and landed with an audible thunk on the lid of the coffin. The air was heavy with the scent of sagebrush. The mountains shimmered in the heat.

      Since it was just family at the funeral, Mama made the meal for afterwards so that there wouldn’t be the expense of taking folks to the diner. There was cold fried chicken and potato salad, a relish tray with green onions, carrots, celery and some of those little sweet pickles Dixie liked so well. Even though she hadn’t been able to come, Aunt Ethel sent over a big batch of her special home-made rolls.

      They ate outside in the shade of the house because the August heat had really set in by the time everyone got back from the cemetery. Dixie enjoyed meal. She’d expected to feel too sad, but it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone ended up relaxed and laughing. Even Daddy smiled, so that it felt almost like their family picnics in the old days, back before he’d had his accident.

      Billy stepped back into his jeans, fastened them and did up his belt, clamping shut the big silver and copper buckle he’d won at the Abundance rodeo for staying on ‘the red-eyed roan’ till the buzzer sounded. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots.

      ‘The funeral was good,’ Dixie said. ‘I think it went well.’

      Billy nodded.

      The heat in the small upstairs bedroom was absolutely suffocating, even with both gable-end windows pushed wide open to catch the slightest whiff of a late-afternoon breeze. Taking one of Billy’s folded handkerchiefs from the top of the dresser, Dixie wiped the sweat from her face. ‘I thought the service was nice, didn’t you?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘I liked the bit where the preacher was saying how Jamie Lee was perfect in Jesus’ eyes, and all innocent, you know, and Jesus was going to welcome him with open arms.’

      Billy was still sitting on his side of the bed. The suit was lying rumpled on the floor and he just stared at it, not making any move to put it away.

      ‘I reckon that’s true, don’t you?’ Dixie said. ‘I reckon Jesus don’t care one whit that Jamie Lee had Down’s. He just sees how perfect Jamie Lee really was.’

      Billy didn’t answer.

      ‘Anyway, I liked for the preacher to say that.’

      ‘It cost almost a thousand dollars for him to say that,’ Billy replied morosely.

      Dixie looked over. Billy had his forearms on his knees and his head hanging down so that all she could see was his rumpled hair. ‘You worrying about the money?’ she asked.

      Billy didn’t answer.

      This wasn’t the right time to be pointing out how much better it would have been if he’d taken the railroad job. Work at the sawmill would only last through August, and even if he saved every single penny he earned from it, Billy still wasn’t going to have enough money for more than a couple of horses by the end of it, even without Jamie Lee’s funeral to pay for. But at least it was a proper job and he wasn’t off cowboying.

      Dixie reached a hand over to comfort him. ‘I already paid two hundred dollars towards it. And that man from the funeral home, he’s real nice. I told him you got steady work now, so he said we could give him the rest of the money in payments as long as we got it all paid off by the end