its eyes on the distant fire, its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth.
The smoke filled almost a third of the sky now and continued to spread like a black veil being slowly drawn across the day. Vehicles and people were starting to congregate by the billboard at the edge of town, black dots against the orange roadside dust. A few weeks ago Jim would have been right at the centre of it, organizing the effort, leading the charge to save the town, risking his life, if that’s what it took. And in the end, that’s exactly what it had taken.
Holly heard boots hurry up the hill then stop a few feet short of where she was standing. ‘I could drop you back home,’ he said, talking to his feet rather than to her. ‘I’ll come back before sundown to finish up here, I promise.’
‘Give me the shovel, Billy.’
He held the shovel up and examined the blade. It looked new, the polished-steel surface catching the sun as he turned it.
‘If you don’t give me the damn thing, I’ll bury my husband with my bare hands.’
He shook his head like he was disappointed or maybe just defeated. ‘Don’t feel right,’ he said. Then he flipped the shovel over and jabbed it into the dirt like a spear. ‘Just leave it round here someplace,’ he said, turning away and hurrying down the hill. ‘I’ll fetch it later.’
Holly waited until the noise of his engine faded, allowing the softer sounds of nature and the empty cemetery to creep back in. She stood for a long while, listening to the cord slapping against the flagpole by the entrance, the Arizona state flag fluttering at half-mast, the wind humming in the power lines that looped away down the hill. She wondered how many widows had stood here like her and listened to these same lonely sounds.
‘Well, here we are, Jimbo,’ she whispered to the wind. ‘Alone at last.’
The last time they’d been up here together was for a campaign photo-op about two or three months previously. They had not been alone back then; there had been a handful of other people – press, photographers. She had stood here by his side, framed by the grave markers with the town spread out below them while he outlined his plans for its future, not realizing he wouldn’t be around to see it.
She walked over to a mound of dirt set to one side of the grave. She grabbed the edge of the stone-coloured sheet of canvas covering it and started dragging it off, stumbling as her heels sank into the ground and her tailored dress restricted the movement of her legs. She had bought it for his investiture, a little black number designed to be classy but not too showy to draw attention away from her handsome husband, the real star of the show. It was the only black dress she owned.
She stumbled again and nearly fell, the tight dress making it hard to keep balance.
‘SHIT!’ she shouted into the silence. ‘SHIT FUCKING SHIT.’
She kicked her shoes off, sending her heels sailing away through the air. One skittered to rest against the sword cluster of an agave plant, the other bounced off a painted board that marked the final resting place of one J.J. James, died of sweats, 1882.
She grabbed the hem of her dress either side of the seam and wrenched it apart with a loud rip. She was never going to wear it again; no amount of dressing it up with a new scarf or belt was ever going to accessorize away this memory. She gave it another yank and it tore all the way up to her thigh. She planted her bare feet wide apart and felt the heat of the earth beneath them. It felt good to be free of the constricting dress and the heels. She felt more like herself. She grabbed the shovel and stabbed the blade into the pile of dirt, the muscles in her arms and shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.
Dry earth whumped down on the wooden lid of her husband’s coffin.
Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood. Jim had told her that.
They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, taken her riding in the desert, where they’d made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of the souvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff’s badge until he got a real one.
First anniversary is paper – he had told her with a smile – tin is what you give on the tenth.
She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy’s guy like he was – like he had been.
He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was a pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.
Goddammit. She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She didn’t want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.
She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.
I need to fix this – was all he would tell her. The town needs fixing.
Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.
Tragic accident … So sorry for your loss … Anything the town can do … Anything at all …
She hauled another shovel-load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead love. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted up from the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.
Anything the town can do – Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down. Anything at all.
They could all die and burn in hell.
That was what they could do for her.
‘How did he die?’ Solomon kept his voice calm but he felt like howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn’t helping.
‘Car wreck,’ Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window towards the slopes of the mountains. ‘He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.’
Dead by the time I found him too …
Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. ‘Where are all the people?’
‘Oh, those are the old miners’ houses,’ Morgan said. ‘They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people live around the centre nowadays.’
A large sign whipped past – old-style lettering telling travellers they were now entering ‘The Historic Old Town of Redemption’ – and the place came suddenly to life. Pastel houses were lined up in neat rows behind white-painted picket fences