Blood Wedding

“Hell,” Wesley said. “Can’t you see it for yourself?”

“If I could, I wouldn’t have asked you.”

“Well, take a better look. Who do you think that is lying there.”

Conner looked down at the body. The dead face stared back at him with wide-open eyes. It was a young face, with hardly a trace of a beard, but the eyes were hard, as if even in life they had been cold as the moon on a winter night.

“Don’t know him,” Conner said, looking back at Wesley.

“Well, I sure as hell do, and so does everybody else standing here.” He looked at Fargo. “Except maybe you, stranger. What did you say your name was?”

Fargo hadn’t mentioned his name, and he didn’t remember having met Wesley when he’d been introduced around by Jed earlier in the evening. He didn’t go into that, however. He just said, “My name’s Fargo.”

“You know who this is, Fargo?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. Like you said, I’m a stranger around here. Who is it?”

“It’s Paul Murray, that’s who it is. Peter Murray’s son.”

“Shit,” Conner said.

“Right,” Wesley. “That’s what I said. ‘Shit.’ Which is just exactly what’s going to come down on us from now on. Pete Murray will never let this go by. He won’t know who did it, so he won’t know who to kill. It could have been anybody in here that had a gun. Not that it’ll make any difference to Pete. He’ll just take it out on everybody who was here tonight. We might all be better off if we just packed our duds and cleared off our land right now.”

“We’ve all got too much time and money and sweat invested to do that,” Conner said.

“Won’t any of that matter if we’re dead,” Wesley told him.

“Anyhow, I didn’t shoot him,” Conner said. “I don’t even have a pistol.”

“You see that pile of weapons over on that table?” Molly asked, pointing toward them.

“Sure, I see ’em. I’m not blind.” Conner shrugged. “But they don’t have anything to do with me. Those all belonged to the Murray gang.”

“And we picked ’em up and put ’em on the table,” Johnson said. “So what?”

“You might have picked them up and put them there,” Molly said, “but that doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t pick one up first, use it, and throw it back down. So you can’t weasel out of it by saying you didn’t have a pistol.”

“Dammit, I wasn’t trying to weasel out of anything.”

“It’s not doing us any good to argue about things like that,” Talley said. “Wesley’s right. It doesn’t matter who killed Murray’s son. We’re all going to pay for it.”

“Maybe we could do something about it,” Molly said.

“What would that be?” Talley asked.

“We could go get Murray before he gets us.”

“You’re sounding just like Jed now,” Conner said. “It won’t do you any good. You can’t impress a dead man.”

Molly’s face reddened. “I’m not trying to impress anybody. I’m just making sense.”

“Right,” Wesley said. “The same way Jed made sense, and you see where it got him. Laid out dead as a hammer.”

There was still something bothering Fargo about Jed’s death, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He said, “Where does the Murray gang hide out?”

“They don’t have to hide,” Molly said, giving Wesley a scornful look. “Everybody’s afraid of ’em, so they can walk right down the streets of town without worrying about a thing. Makes it right handy when they want to rob a bank.”

“Nothing wrong with wanting to stay alive,” Wesley said. “I don’t think I’d like being dead one bit.”

“You’re probably right, considering where you’d be,” Molly said. “Might hot there, so I’ve heard.”

Wesley drew himself up to his full height, which put his head on about the level of Molly’s shoulders.

“If you weren’t a woman, I’d have to bust you for having such a smart mouth.”

“You could go ahead and give it a try,” Molly said. “And we could see what would happen.”

Fargo grinned. “This isn’t getting those bodies buried. Let’s get them out of here and down to the river bottom.”

Wesley grumbled a little, but they loaded the other bodies into the wagon. They found some shovels and put them into the wagon as well, and Conner drove out of the barn while the others sat in the rear with the bodies, except for Molly, who was riding beside him.

The night had gotten a bit cooler, but the air had become still, and Fargo heard the chickens clucking in their sleep. The wagon bounced along a little rutted track through the cornfield and down toward the creek. There were some scraggly trees growing in the marshy ground, a few box elders and cottonwoods. A hoot owl called out from one of the higher branches.

The digging was as easy as Fargo had figured, and they were able to dig deep without too much trouble. Between the moon and a lantern that hung from a limb, they had enough light to work by. When the bodies were covered over, Conner suggested that they should mark the graves some way.

“It seems like the respectful thing to do,” he said.

“I don’t have any respect for these varmints,” Molly said.

“I’ll tell you what worries me,” Wesley said, “and it’s not grave markers. It’s whether Pete Murray’s gonna let his boy lie in an unmarked grave on some sodbuster’s farm.”