Blood Wedding

Fargo looked at Jed’s body as it hung slack across the back of the horse. As far as Fargo had ever been able to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of dignity in death, and nothing Abby thought was going to change that. The way to look at it was that the things that had happened to Jed’s body didn’t matter to him in the least, any more than what had happened to Paul Murray’s body mattered to Paul. When you were dead, if you felt anything at all, which Fargo doubted, you sure as hell wouldn’t be worried about what was happening to a body you no longer had any use for. Or that was the way it had always seemed to Fargo.

But that wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about with anybody, not then, so he put his foot in the stirrup, grabbed the saddle horn, and pulled himself atop the Ovaro. He reached down and offered his hand to Abby. She took hold of it, and he pulled her up in front of him.

“Let’s get you back to the house,” he said.

“Angel was the worst,” Abby said as they rode through the ruined cornfield.

The green stalks were flattened and trampled in a broad path, though the damage wasn’t as bad as Fargo would have expected.

“She was enjoying the whole thing,” Abby went on. “She laughed the whole way to the graves, thinking about what they were going to do to me. She said that I took Jed away from her, and that he deserved what he got and that if she couldn’t have him, nobody would. She said he and I were going to be together for a long time, but that it wouldn’t be like I’d thought it would. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”

“Did she tell you?”

“No. She said the men were all going to rape me, and she was going to watch. I think she would have liked that. It would have been another way to get back at me for marrying Jed. Thank God it was a lie, or maybe they just didn’t have time for it. What they did was almost as bad. It would have been worse if you hadn’t been there. I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You didn’t hurt me. Anyway, I don’t much blame you. If somebody left me to be buried alive, I might get a little upset, myself.”

Dawn was beginning to show in the eastern sky as a thin line of lighter gray. Somewhere off in the distance a dog was barking, faint and far away. Fargo knew there were other farms near the Watkins place, but he didn’t know where they were.

“The Murrays aren’t through with us, you know,” Abby said. “They’ll find out that they didn’t kill you. They’ll find out I’m alive. And when they do, they won’t be happy about it. They might stew about it for a while, but then they’ll come back.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fargo said.

The funeral service was late that afternoon. It was a short one. Jed hadn’t been much of a churchgoing man, so the preacher didn’t have much to say.

They buried Jed in the churchyard in the stout wooden casket that Cass Ellis had built that morning. Fargo could smell the newly sawed wood and the newly turned earth.

There were several markers in the cemetery, but Fargo didn’t bother to count them or to read any of the inscriptions. They wouldn’t have meant anything to him.

The little church was whitewash and clean, and the lowering sun pushed the building’s shadow across the grass. People stood around the grave as the preacher read the Bible verse about the valley of the shadow of death. Fargo had heard it before.

He looked around at the men with their hats in their hands, the women crying under their bonnets. He recognized Alf Wesley, Rip Johnson, Frank Conner, and Tom Talley. Cass Ellis and Bob Tabor stood a bit farther off. They appeared to have recovered from their little drinking bout of the night before. Ellis had a couple of small cuts on his hands from having built the casket. He’d probably had a little case of the shakes.

Molly Doyle was there, too, dressed in clean men’s clothing that did nothing to hide her abundant womanliness. She was crying quietly and trying to hide the fact by putting a hand to her face.

Abby and Lem were standing beside the preacher. There were tears on Abby’s cheeks, but she wasn’t weeping. She had cleaned herself up and washed her hair. There were no physical signs remaining of what had happened to her earlier, but Fargo wondered what might lie beneath the nearly placid surface of her face. A woman doesn’t lose her prospective husband and then get thrown in a shallow grave tied to his body without it having some kind of effect.

The preacher finished reading the psalm, closed his Bible, and said a prayer. When he finished, several amens echoed his own. Some of the men who had dug the grave that morning got shovels from beside the church and began filling the grave.

Abby and Lem watched for a while and then turned away. The other mourners offered their condolences, while Fargo went over and sat on the church steps. After a few minutes, he was joined by Molly Doyle. She sat beside him without waiting for an invitation, the way another man might.

“What do you think will happen now?” she said.