E.L. Doctorow Read Online Free Page A

hard I was sure she was breathing.
    “She’s alive,” I said to Ezra.
    “Well what do you mean to do?”
    “We can’t leave her here this way.”
    I straightened up and saw John Bear pulling his travois back down the street toward his shack. I yelled at him but he didn’t turn around so I had to run and get him. The three of us picked Molly up by the hands and feet and carried her over to the Indian’s hut. The front of her dress hung down like a flag.
    “Wait a minute,” Ezra said, wanting to stop, “it’s not decent.”
    “You can’t cover her up,” I said, “her whole back is burned.” From her shoulder blades to her ankles, Molly was covered with blisters. We laid her down on the hard earth inside Bear’s place and then the Indian went out and drew some water from Hausenfield’s tank. When he came back he scraped a pile of earth from his floor and poured the water on it till it was a mush; then he took a tin from his pack and sprinkled whatever was in that tin—saleratus maybe—on the mud; then he spread the mixture along Molly’s back and haunches and legs and covered it up with some kind of flat weed he had. John Bear was a true doctor, there was no hesitation in his moves. By the time he was finished Molly wasmoaning, a good sound although I didn’t like to hear it. I stepped outside and a shadow passed over my eyes.
    I don’t know where the buzzards come from but they’re never late. Three or four were making slow circles above the town, another few over the flats. I had left the Major’s body out there, lodged against a back wheel so his pony couldn’t run. But one of the carrion birds glided down, spread his big wings and perched on the buckboard and I saw the pony shy. A second later I heard his whinny and then he was rearing; the wheel rolled over the Major, and the pony was trotting free toward the town, pulling the rig with him, leaving the old man’s body exposed to the birds.
    A few hundred yards to the east the little boy, Jimmy Fee, was running around his father’s grave, waving his arms as if the shadows of the buzzards were cobwebs in his hair.
    I ran to the end of the street and caught the horse, turned him around and rode him back out. The birds on Major Munn spraddled their wings and flapped into the air. They had already blooded his neck. I lifted the old man on the buckboard, sitting him down among his possessions. There was a blanket and I threw it over him. Then I rode the wagon to Jimmy Fee. A few more buzzards had come up over the flats and now they circled Fee’s grave in a procession. Hausenfield had not dug very deep. The boy was huddled on top of the mound with his hands over his head, he was crying and screaming although he had hardly whimpered when Fee died.
    “Come on up here, boy,” I said still holding the reins. “Come on up beside me.” But he only cried the more. Ihad to step down and carry him in my arms and hold him in my lap all the way back to town. He kept crying: “They’re gonna get my Pa, the birds are gonna get my Pa …” And I knew that before anything else we had better hurry up and bury the dead. Someone in the street was shooting and cursing and a coyote was running fast back to the rocks.
    Ezra found one shovel from his store that was only charred along the haft, and I found a rusty pick that was lying at the foot of Hausenfield’s windmill. To give Jimmy Fee something to do I sent him looking for his own digging tool and he came on the skillet lying in the dirt where the Bad Man had flung it. Even if we had ten new shovels it would have done no good, only two of the men besides Ezra and me were willing to help dig. The rest of those who had come back to the town were packing their saddles or loading their rigs with what was left to them and riding out in ones and twos.
    I chose to dig in the flats, making the holes in a line beginning with Fee’s. There is no work harder than cutting a grave. Though the rain had softened the ground,