E.L. Doctorow Read Online Free Page B

it was a few hot hours of taking turns at the pick and shovel before we had the five holes dug. The bodies we had gathered were lying under blankets. When it came time to put them down and to rebury Fee I didn’t want the boy there, I shooed him away. We stood waiting while he walked back, turning every few yards to look at us. He finally squatted down at the edge of the flats, not going as far as the town, I suppose, because the buzzards were all down in the street now eating from that dead roan.
    We did what we had to and the two men besidesEzra and me got on one horse and rode off south. Everyone else had already left. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the sun was low in the west but I was warm. My foot ached and flies were buzzing around my head.
    “Shall we say a word, Ezra?”
    “Expect so.”
    “Well what should it be?”
    He took his hat off and I took off mine and we stood looking down at the fresh earth: There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I thought of Fee putting his trust in wood, and fat Avery worrying for his establishment, and crippled Jack with a one-armed interest in things; I thought of the old Major who always wore his dress blues on Sunday; and I thought of the way redheaded Flo, who had plump knees, could sometimes get interested. I had been in the town a year and I knew them all. Behind me the town was now a ruin, and who would remember in another year that it was ever there or that they had ever lived?
    The Bad Man’s grinning face came back to me and I felt my shy hand choosing the glass he offered. Twenty years before I had put my young wife into the ground after the cholera took her and the same rage rose in my throat for something that was too strong for me, something I could not cope with.
    Kicking a clod with his toe Ezra said: “Well the Lord says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”
    We rode back in to Hausenfield’s well to wash the grave dirt off. Jimmy Fee followed us and squatted withhis back against the bottom of the windmill, but he wouldn’t wash and he wouldn’t look at us.
    I saw from where I stood that it would not do to leave that dead roan lying in the middle of the street. He was covered with the birds and I knew if the birds flew off he would be covered with bluebottle flies. When I finished washing I said to Ezra: “Between your mule and the Major’s pony I think they could just about pull that carcass out of here.”
    “Where to?”
    “Down along the rocks about a mile.”
    “No sense to that,” Ezra said, “unless you’re fixin’ to stay.”
    “I am.” I had hoped he was too.
    He looked at me: “Town’s gone, Blue.”
    “Now I don’t know,” I said. “We got a cemetery. That’s the beginnings of a town anyway.”
    Ezra poured half a bucket of water over his head. Then he wiped his face and neck with a rag, and then his arms and hands.
    “Blue, I came West from Vermont. They have trees in that country.”
    “Is that right?”
    “Water flows from the rocks, game will nibble at your back door, and if you’re half a man you can make your life without too much trouble.”
    “That’s what I once heard about this country.”
    “That’s what I heard too. Back in Vermont.”
    Ezra was a long-faced man, taller than I was, with a stoop in his shoulders and eyes like a beagle hound. He put on a coat and turned to look at the black smoking street and the scrubby stretches beyond:
    “Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”
    He walked over to his mule, fixed his saddle and climbed on. With his hunched shoulders and his long coat and sad eyes Ezra was not much of a sight on muleback.
    “There are other towns westerly,” he said. “A man’s a fool if he don’t know when to move on.”
    And I said: “Ezra, all