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where the weight made it hard to catch his breath.
    â€œWhere is he—where’s my pa, Higgs, where is he?” The boy’s voice rose into an anguished cry as he turned and rushed downstairs, stumbled, almost fell in the middle, caught himself with the railing he rode in a kind of free fall until the bottom, where he regainedhis feet, then bent in the middle, heaving bile and snot and tears while Higgs watched from the last step.
    â€œHe’s on the sofa there.” The man tried to steady his voice, and Vera charged in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was.
    â€œOh my Lord,” Vera moaned. “Oh my sweet Jesus.” She reached for the boy, forced his head into the soft padding of her shoulder and bosom. Together they sank to the floor, Vera’s one arm cradling the boy, the other clasping J.B.’s jacket sleeve, stiff with the shawl of dried blood.
    There was a knock on the door, the handle rattled, and Larabee poked his head inside. “Boss?”
    Higgs glanced at his wife’s stricken face and went to the door, opened it enough to slide outside and shut it. The men gathered on the porch and brick walk, hats in hands, faces somber.

CHAPTER FOUR
    F ollowing a dreary breakfast no one could stomach, Vera cleared the long table in the kitchen, and Willie, Larabee, Jim, and Higgs deposited Bennett’s body on the bare boards. The three hands took one last look at their boss, bowed their heads, and left. Before Vera could do more than sniff away the tears and fill the dishpan with soapy water to bathe the naked body, Higgs took the washrag from her hand and sent her to find proper clothing to dress him for the burial. As he worked his way from the feet up the legs, Higgs imagined he was washing down a newborn calf or colt, rather than this other thing, but when he reached the genitals, shrunken, negligible, he paused, questioning the whole purpose. No wonder women did this job—what man could stand to see his kind so utterly useless, destroyed, and not despair?
    â€œJesus, J.B.,” he murmured, “I mean, what the hell happened to you?” The body Higgs had always known as powerful, as heavily muscled as that big red horse he rode, looked almost frail without clothing, drained, without purpose. It didn’t look capable of any of the feats of strength and will for which J.B. was known. Was it will, then, that first fled for the dead? Then purpose and desire. The body was remarkably without yearning now.
    Higgs scrubbed the dried flakes of blood from the torso of the man he had loved, then mopped at the pink water on the table, and watched as it ran over the edge. It puddled on the pine plank floor Vera kept so clean the wood was bleached light gray and so porous the blood-tinged water quickly soaked in a stain that would never disappear, although he would not know that.
    While he scrubbed the left hand, separated the fingers, worked the dirt and blood out from under the nails, he wondered if he should try to find J.B.’s wife. He wiped the empty ring finger clean. She’d never make it back in time, he thought, even if he knew where she was. Last he’d heard, she was teaching Indian school up on Rosebud Reservation. Before that, she moved from town to town in the Sand Hills, circling Bennett land but never stepping foot on it. The body wouldn’t hold for her to be found. The rigidity was starting to leave the limbs and there was a distinct spicy, sickening sweet smell.
    Maybe she’d finally gone home to her people out East. He remembered she was the daughter of a patent medicine manufacturer from Chicago, that was the place, with enough new money to have been wooed and won by a western rancher. He had to hand it to her, though, she stuck. No matter how the town women treated her because she was a Bennett and after her own father-in-law pronounced her too weak to be a good broodmare, she stuck. Made a good marriage and built the kind of family