Rose came to my grave every Friday except the thirteenth. She came before it was light so she could pretend nobody knew, and she never brought flowers or tended the ones that grew wild and tangled over my grave. She never talked to the cross, even though that was all she had of me, but I could understand her silences well enough. She always stayed until sunrise and I always stayed with her.
She was older than me after a few years, but she never remarried. The other men in town probably thought I’d come back from the dead for her and they were probably right. They probably thought I’d kill them like I did her husband, and they were probably right. I never was a good man.
I always wanted to die standing up, and I did. But I wanted to die with my hat on, too, and the noose knocked it off. Rose, a baby in her arms with my eyes and another man’s name, picked it up and watched stonily as I dropped.
Jace grew into the hat but my eyes always looked funny on him.
I’m no more than earth now. I’ve got worms whispering in my ear all day and night. Lightning strikes a hundred miles away, I feel it. A foot falls in the desert, I hear it. A tree can’t fall in the forest with nobody around anymore. I’m around. It makes a noise.
My body stays moldering but I drift. I watched a band of soldiers trudging home, young men no more, faces ashen as their uniforms, a kid younger than Jace beating senselessly on a bullet-riddled drum. I watched them lay railroad tracks from here to the end of the world. I watched endless fights over land, watched endless blood spilled. I saw the land soaked in blood and hung out to dry and soaked again.
And then, for a long time, there was no rain.
Rose didn’t tell Jace much about me. Just that I was dead. But she didn’t have to. He learned the story from the way women looked at her like she was trash. He learned it from the things men said about her when they knew he could hear. He learned it from the way the other kids avoided him when they weren’t tormenting him.
Mostly, he learned it from the way the sheriff smirked at him whenever they passed each other on the street.
He didn’t tell Rose. He figured she had enough troubles.
Time slipped out of our hands and suddenly Jace was nearly a man.
He got a job at the bar, the only real money in town. Everyone was thirsty all the time because by then it hadn’t rained in over a year. The dirt around me got powdery and the dirt above me cracked. The tree roots went for me but I had run dry a long time ago.
Late in the summer, late at night, all the good people in bed. Jace was behind the bar, Rose sitting there visiting him, proud as ever. The sheriff was the only customer left, slumped lumpishly in the corner. And me, of course, in the air.
“You can go on home,” Jace said. “Get some rest. Might be a while.”
Rose touched his hand and I knew she wasn’t going anywhere. “How did I get such a nice boy?” she said, teasing, and he grinned in a way he hadn’t gotten from either of us and looked away.
“That’s a damn good question,” the sheriff slurred. They turned to look and he got up and staggered towards them. “Looks like blood doesn’t make the man, huh?”
He punched Jace on the shoulder, harder than friendly.
“That’s enough,” Rose said.
“Everybody knew she was gonna be trouble the minute she rode in,” he told Jace, holding out his glass. Jace refilled it, spilling a little. “Pretty as she was. Isn’t she pretty, still?”
He reached out and brushed a thick finger along her cheek. She slapped his hand away and took a long sip of her drink. I’d already be going for the rifle under the bar. Jace didn’t but he shifted his weight uneasily, looking between them, and his hands closed into fists on the bar. The sheriff noticed.
“I keep this town safe,” he said. “I’ve been keeping this town safe since before you were born.”
I remembered that last night, her husband in the ground and her in my arms, the first good sleep I’d had in years. I woke up to find the sheriff and half the men in town standing over me, guns drawn, and all I could say was “Don’t shoot her.” I heard Jace wailing as they dragged me out and I killed two of them trying to get to him.
We’re all trying to keep something safe. Most of us don’t get paid for it.
“Stay away from pretty women,” he went on, still talking to Jace like Rose had left the room. “They’ll screw around on you and get you killed.”
“That’s enough!” she said. “Go home.” And then, pointedly: “Your wife’ll be worried.”
“He’s got a right to know.”
Jace knew already and he didn’t like what he knew, and you could tell it by the look on his face.
“Jace, he’s drunk, don’t listen–”
The sheriff looked at her blearily. “Truth doesn’t change just because you’re drunk.”
Rose pressed her lips together tight and went very still. I watched her breath in, breath out, waiting for this to be over.
“But then was then and now is now,” the sheriff said.
It was quiet for a while after he said that. He was looking at Rose and Jace was watching him and Rose was wishing she was somewhere else. It was the darkest part of night and there was still time to go home and pretend this never happened.
And then Rose looked back at the sheriff, knowing in the way she had what was going to happen just before it did happen. He grabbed her and kissed her hard and that did it.
Jace jumped across the counter and yanked him off her. He got the sheriff around the throat and the man’s eyes bulged out of his already-red face, looked ready to pop.
That was the only time my eyes looked right on Jace.
The sheriff was drunk but he was bigger and meaner. He knocked Jace to the ground and got on top of him and started hitting him.
Rose screamed “Stop it!” and tried to pull him off. But he kept hitting Jace, again and again, until blood stained the dusty floorboards and he still didn’t stop. And a gunshot rang out. And the sheriff fell over dead. And Rose stood there holding the smoking rifle in steady hands.
A bastard makes a better killer than a whore, so daylight found Jace in the jailhouse.
He stood in the patch of light in the middle of the cell. He stood still, eyes closed, face
raised to the light like a man praying. His body stiff and bruised. Dust clung to the sweat and blood on his face, dulling the shine of the sun, and he was holding my old hat at his thighs with both hands.
He was seventeen years old then. He still looked like the child in Rose’s arms to me.
The cell was a gray room, river-rock walls around a patch of gray dirt. The worms writhe out on rainy days but in years like this the dust comes up and covers the prisoner like he’s already in the grave. It was a cramped little cell with a cramped little window. It was the condemned cell. I remember it more than anything.
In years past some people had snuck knives in and then, losing their nerve, carved things into the walls for future inhabitants. See you in hell brother. That was mine. Other people’d done scripture or dirty pictures or their sweethearts’ names. I didn’t care what they’d written the first time I was there, but I spent a long time looking over them that long day and night I spent with Jace.
Clara and Polly and Grace. Willa and Ruth and Mary. Did any of them watch the hangings? Visit the graves? Most of them were dead, I’d bet.
and I looked and beheld a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and hell followed with him. there is no peace saith the lord unto the wicked. and they shall wander from sea to sea and from the north even to the east they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the lord and shall not find it. how shall we sing the lords song in a strange land?
The sunlight hour ended and Jace slumped over, slid down the wall, sat there huddled up,
scratching something of his own on the wall with a piece of rock. His eyes looked like his again,
which is to say out of place. He twisted the hat in his hands until the brim snapped and then he threw it away.
I looked at what he had written, which no one else would ever read. I didnt do it in childish scrawl.
Rose came that night. Sometimes I think that woman spends her life visiting graves. The window was high but she brought a tin bucket and flipped it upside down and stood on it.
“Jace,” she said, quiet but sharp.
He got up. He could see through the window if he strained.
“Mama,” he said. I was surprised to hear his voice steady.
“You been praying?”
“Yeah, Mama, all the time I’ve been in here.”
A coyote wailed in the distance, then another, then the pack. Rose turned to look but they didn’t come close and their cries faded after a while.
“Don’t do it,” Jace said abruptly.
“What?”
“I did it. That’s the story I told and that’s the story I’m sticking to. Your word against mine.”
I drew closer and laid a weightless hand on his shoulder.
“In the morning I’ll go to the reverend and explain it properly,” she said. She wasn’t crying–I’d never seen her cry, not while I was alive and not in all the years since. She just didn’t have any tears in her. “I was defending you. It would have been wrong to do anything but what I did.”
He fell back from the window for a minute. Turned a slow circle looking around the cell. Rose stood there, waiting, perched on the bucket, thick moonlight casting her shadow long. A breeze came and lifted her hair, sweaty clumps clinging to her neck.
“Don’t treat me like a kid,” he said. “Nobody’s going to believe you–Mama, don’t you know I know what they think of you?”
Rose inhaled sharply like it was her neck in the noose. She reached for him through the bars but couldn’t touch him.
“Was he in here?” Jace said after a silence.
“Yes,” she said. “He was.”
“Did you visit him too?”
“He wouldn’t have wanted to see me.”
I would have. I did. It wasn’t until morning came and she hadn’t come that I realized
what she’d done. I killed for her and she killed me. How else did they know where I was that night?
“But you…”
“I told the sheriff where he would be. I told him to come that night. I…I kept him there until they came.”
She had betrayed me for Jace and she would betray herself for him, too and Jace couldn’t
yet understand or bear either of those.
“He was my father,” he said. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“You weren’t going to grow up in his world.” She leaned forward and the bucket tilted with her and came crashing down, clattering against the jailhouse wall. They both froze, waiting for a shot that never came.
“Jace, listen,” she said intently, getting back up. “After…when it’s all over, get out of here. Go anywhere so long as it’s far away. Forget me, him, all of them, just–”
“Mama, stop!”
He scrubbed a hand across his face. He wanted to be tough like her but he wasn’t old enough yet and a couple of tears came.
“I can’t see you hang,” he said.
“Somebody’s going to die for this,” Rose said softly. “Somebody always has to die.”
And finally his voice cracked.
“But I still need you.”
He wrapped his hands around the bars and she kissed his knuckles. I always thought I was hanging around the land of the living. But seeing and not being seen, feeling and not ever touching–it was some kind of hell.
I wanted to claw my way out of the earth. I always did but it never compared to that night. My bones didn’t move but the room got a little clearer, the wind a little stronger across my face.
Rose stiffened. Said my name. Said, “Goddammit, leave us alone!”
So I did. So I didn’t hear what else was said that night.
But I was there when they hanged him.
The reverend was nowhere to be found in the morning. His house was shut up and dark and only an old woman who didn’t know who she was talking to would talk to Rose. It seemed he’d left town when the drought started after years of his best work. Even God wasn’t enough in the end. Nothing could stand up to that white-hot sky forever.
The height of the day and not an inch of shade to stand in, not even under the gallows. They shuffled around, sweating, irritable, wishing for it to be done quick so they could go home. Rose stood still, damp with sweat, a ghost among the barely living.
Nobody was close enough to see his eyes but me. And they were scared. They were. But he climbed those stairs with his head high and his back as straight as he could manage, and when they asked if he had any last words, he stepped forward and looked up at the sun like he was still in the cell. He took a slow breath, his last. When he spoke his voice was steady as a mountain and clear as the stream that runs off it.
“God saw,” Jace said. “He knows–”
But it was too hot to wait any longer. They tossed the rope around his neck and did it.
Rose asked them to lay him next to me in her own private cemetery. If he’s lingering, he’s keeping his distance.
She came one last Friday. Stood above us in a dress the color of the landscape, and
finally, a tear fell. Another. One for each of us but likely both for Jace. She laid a dusty white lily, already wilting, on each of our graves.
She had brought a starving, colorless horse with her and it stamped impatiently. The grass was sickly yellow-brown, not worth eating, and it crunched under the mare’s hooves. Wildfires were starting on the horizon. I could feel the heat snaking through the ground, bothering the worms.
Rose touched Jace’s cross and whispered something I didn’t listen in on. She swung herself onto the horse and dug her heels in and didn’t look back, not even when she crested the hill.
I watched her for a while. One more day, after all the years. She rode through the night and had found no towns by morning and the last I saw of her, the horse had died and she was walking through grass up to her hips. Her eyes looked more like mine than Jace’s ever had. Nothing on earth could touch her now.
And then I let her go, and then we were both alone.
Years ago, flowers grew over my grave without anyone tending to them, butterfly weed and marigolds and poppies, orange and yellow and red, bright against the sky. But the rains still haven’t come, and so nothing grows over Jace. There is only dust, pale brown and blowing away in the wind.
Madeline DeCoste is a Midwestern writer who loves a good story more than almost anything.