Unbury Carol(92)

“We did it, Moxie!” Rinaldo called, rushing to Moxie’s side. “It was…it was…magic! I fooled him twice! I fooled him twice!”

Moxie watched the blood pour from the triggerman’s heart, crimson oil, down his shirt, to his pants, and to the boots and grass at his feet.

The Cripple looked like a man who had fallen asleep standing up, his hands at his pockets, as though trying to

Draw.

When Moxie turned to face Rinaldo, he looked nothing like the man Rinaldo had caught up to only an hour ago.

“How’d you get out of the outhouse?” Moxie asked him, his voice crackling flames.

Rinaldo opened his mouth to tell him, then stopped himself.

“Same way you did the Trick. Magic.”

Rinaldo smiled, but Moxie did not.

“The worst trick I ever performed,” Moxie said, the flames rising in his animal eyes, “was breaking a good woman’s heart.” He looked at Rinaldo and Rinaldo could see that the outlaw, his hero, was somewhere far from the graveyard in Harrows. “Thank you, Rinaldo.”

Then Moxie went to Old Girl and mounted.

“Do you need me, Moxie? Do you need me to follow? Do you need me to act as your double again?”

“Stay here,” Moxie said.

From town, as if crawling between the trees that bordered the graveyard, in the first scant trace of daylight, Moxie saw the morning of Carol’s burial approaching.

He rode toward it.





Carol started doing the thing she’d heard other people had done when faced with the end. She started listing off the things she was grateful for, the things she had loved, the things that meant something good to her during her time living. For that life, she believed now, was as close to its end as it was going to be and she didn’t think she’d find the strength to say thanks once she was buried alive.

It had taken a lot out of her to sit up in the coach. From Howltown, Dwight looked something like a corpse himself. The veil between the coma and the real world had lessened even more: Rot’s plan for her to experience her death in full. She screamed, silently, inside the coma, when Dwight opened the door. And she cried out when he pushed her so easily back to the coach floor.

Whatever Dwight had added to her dress made it impossible to sit up again. The weight, the pressure…too much.

Rot had been in and out to see her. To hold her hand. To whisper sickening phrases into her all-hearing ears. Rot was the one thing Carol had ever encountered in the coma that was not distorted by it. Rot came as he was. Carol had no doubt that the monster belonged there.

No sheriff in Howltown, no. But perhaps Rot was the closest thing to it.

Dwight had fallen asleep in the drive outside the coach. Carol could hear him breathing. And try as she might to sit up again, the added weight was too much.

But she found enough of it to give thanks.

To Hattie.

To Farrah Darrow.

To John Bowie.

To James Moxie, too.

This last one was hard for her to reconcile. She’d spent so many years angry at him; to think of him now in any other way was foreign to her. Almost. He’d certainly done enough to frighten Dwight. Perhaps that was enough to say I forgive you.

It was earliest of morning. She could tell by the songs of the insects and frogs. The wind in the trees that never came with quite as much bravado during the day. She’d been listening to the swaying of the trees for so long that she lost track of the unseen winds of Howltown. The ceiling of the coach rippled, but she hadn’t been looking at it. Her mind’s eye, it seemed, had finally transcended the coma. Carol was doing something now, at the end, that both Hattie and John had wanted so badly for her to do.

She was finding peace.

Don’t give up yet. John Bowie’s voice. So clear that Carol half expected him to be standing outside the coach, his bare feet in the gravel drive. You aren’t buried yet.

But no word from Hattie. No right words that Carol could come up with that might be something Hattie would say at a moment like this.

That’s because Hattie was practical, Carol thought. And the meaning of this statement seemed to be the lock that clicked shut on Carol’s casket.

She gave thanks to the same people she’d already given them to, pausing again on James Moxie, wondering what might have been had he not run off to the Trail. Had she not foolishly trusted the monster that was Dwight. Had she—

No more of that.

Her own voice. Stronger somehow.

She heard movement from up on the bench and knew Rot had returned from whatever errand he’d been on. The fiend was in the coach with her again. She didn’t wonder what he would say, didn’t wonder what he would do. Instead, she lived her final moments to the beat of a memory of Hattie constructing a box, the sawing and the hammering, the polishing and paint.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Rot. Slumped in the corner of the coach bench. As he actually was. His wide-open, unfocused eyes revealed a depression, a sadness Carol was grateful to have never known.

The monster, Carol thought, looks different when nobody’s watching.

The memory of Hattie at work continued. The vision of James Moxie helping her faded. And the lack of Hattie’s words only meant that Mom was still working, of course, in her own Howltown, perhaps, unable to bring herself to say don’t worry when those words did not apply.