One Came Home

So it comes to this
, I remember thinking on Wednesday, June 7, 1871. The date sticks in my mind because it was the day of my sister’s first funeral and I knew it wasn’t her last—which is why I left. That’s the long and short of it.

But surely, you’d rather hear the long than the short.

At the moment of the above thought, I stood wedged between Ma and Grandfather Bolte. Ma seemed a statue in black except for the movement of her thumb and forefinger over a scrap of blue-green fabric. Grandfather Bolte sighed, adjusting his hands on the hat he held in front of his belly. Seeing the reverend on the other side of that six-foot hole reminded me that I was “sister of the deceased”—a fancy title for someone who stands quietly, holds her tongue, and
maintains a mournful attitude. But I could barely stay still. I was not in this situation by choice, and wore a borrowed black dress to boot. The collar clamped to my neck and the tension of the muslin between my shoulder blades suggested that if I let my arms fall to my sides, the dress would rip somewhere in the proximity of my armpits. So there I was, sticking a finger down my collar, holding my arms out from my sides, and the meaner part of me thinking about walking out—surely, enough is enough. But Grandfather Bolte saved me from strangulation. He unbuttoned the top two buttons on that collar, and from somewhere deep in my depths came a patience I didn’t know I possessed. I stayed.

Don’t misunderstand me—a funeral is a funeral. Though my sister wasn’t in that pine box, a body lay in it sure enough.
Remember
, I told myself many times during the reverend’s eulogy, and then as people started shoveling dirt into the hole,
that coffined body down there is dead
. That’s a
d
at the beginning and a
d
at the end. There’s no forward or backward from “dead,” and no breath either—“dead” stops a person cold. It does not make that body your sister, but it is sad, sad news.

The way I figured it, I’d survive this funeral, and then I was free to go.

My sister, Agatha Burkhardt, had run off with pigeoners—two men and one woman in a forlorn-looking buckboard. Sheriff McCabe went after those pigeon hunters, following them all the way to Dog Hollow. One week later he came back with a body.

Ma said I was old enough to face facts. So I went with Ma and Grandfather Bolte out to the McCabe stables to “identify.”

You could smell the body from outside the building.

Inside, dust hung in a twist of sunlight, an old mare stamped in a far stall, and a pine box lay on a roughly hewn table. Grandfather Bolte walked straight up to that box and slid the lid off.

I do not want to talk about what I saw. But if you’re to understand the rest, here’s what you need to know: There wasn’t a lot of body left (the sheriff said that it’d been exposed to animals). There wasn’t a face. There wasn’t a left or right hand. The body was wrapped in fabric from Agatha’s blue-green ball gown. There was a clump of auburn hair. I started to shake. I still have nightmares (that body was in an advanced state of decomposition). But I am glad I looked. I know what I saw. I also know what I
didn’t
see.

Grandfather Bolte put his hand to his mouth and turned away. Ma stood there, taking it all in, pausing for what seemed like months. Then she asked Sheriff McCabe for his knife. When he didn’t give it to her, she laid her eyes on him. They stared at each other for a long while, and then he pulled it from its sheath.

It was a big knife—the kind of knife with a sharp, upturned point. Ma took it, reached into that pine box, and sawed a hunk of something off.

I inhaled sharply, not knowing what she was doing.

Then her hands reappeared: the right held the knife, and
the left, a fistful of blue-green cloth. I saw pleats. Ma stepped back.

“You were tracking the pigeoners when you found this?” Ma jabbed the air with the knife.

We knew he was, so the jerk of the knife panicked me a little. Grandfather Bolte tried to reach for the knife, but Sheriff McCabe held him back.

“I was on their trail,” the sheriff said.

“She still traveling with them?”

“Pretty sure she was.”

“She was shot? In the
face
?” The blade jerked upward.

The sheriff nodded ever so slightly. “I am so sorry, Dora.” He laid out the syllables of her name with the most tender care.

Sometimes I forget how long they’ve known each other.

Ma’s chest rose in a long breath. Then she opened up her left hand and nodded at the fabric as it unrolled. “These are my stitches,” she said. The knife dropped from her hand, planting itself in the earthen floor. “It’s Agatha. We’ll bury her tomorrow.”

The first minutes of the ride home I kept silent, but the words “bury her” compelled me to speak. I leaned over Ma, who sat in the middle of the buckboard, to speak directly to Grandfather Bolte. “There wasn’t enough of the body to be sure—altogether that body couldn’t have weighed more than two cats. You’ve got to go. You’ll find her. You should have gone in the first place.”

It was bold of me to speak so, but it was commonly known that no one tracked better than my grandfather. (Sheriff McCabe would tell you straight out that he was better at keeping the peace than tracking.) Grandfather Bolte hadn’t gone because with the pigeoners in town, our general store had been chaotic and we had been hard-pressed for help. At that point in time, Grandfather Bolte had already spent a couple of days away from the store, and if truth be told, he never thought Agatha’s
life
was at risk. Therefore, when the sheriff offered to chase her, Grandfather Bolte took him up on it.

That was a mistake in need of rectification.

I reached over Ma, who’d visibly stiffened, to grab hold of Grandfather Bolte’s forearm. “You have to go find her. Please, Grandfather,
please
.”

When I didn’t release his forearm, Grandfather Bolte put his hand on top of mine and squeezed.

“You are thirteen years. You’ll hold your tongue.”

He pointed at me. “We are
blessed
to have a body at all. Now, we are done talking about this. You shut your mouth or you walk home.”

Then he looked forward and flicked the reins.

I sat back in a state of shock. How could Grandfather Bolte be satisfied with what we’d seen in that pine box? I understood about Ma. When Pa left in search of Colorado gold, he wrote two letters. These came in the first six months. After that? No word at all. That was ten years ago. Pa had to be dead, but were we certain? No. Ma never did put on
mourning black. It was only in the last year that Ma had removed her wedding band. So for Ma to have parts of a body wrapped in a blue-green cloth containing her stitches? Well, Ma would think Agatha was dead.

But Grandfather Bolte knew better. Had he forgotten how he taught Agatha to walk silently through a forest carpeted with leaves? Had he lost all recollection of how Agatha could read a hillside for the caves it contained? My sister climbed trees as easily as a raccoon. And there was no one better at sneaking off. I thought of all those nights Agatha slipped out of our bedroom. One morning I awoke beside Agatha and saw a fragment of dried leaf in her hair, and that was how I found out she’d been gone.

My sister would never
die
and then
lie
there. It made no sense.

I jumped off the wagon. Going that fast, I tumbled.

“Georgie!” Ma said.

But Grandfather Bolte didn’t halt the horses, and Ma didn’t tell him to stop.

When I got home, the planning for my sister’s funeral was well under way.

It doesn’t take long to bury a body when there’s need. At ten o’clock the next day, the body was in the hole, and Grandfather Bolte, Ma, and I stood listening to a eulogy by Reverend Leland. No headstone—that’d come later. And despite the short notice, there was no lack of mourners—over fifty,
I’d guess. But then again, there’s nothing like a sheriff returning to town with a body to spread news of a coming funeral.

Graveside, I noted that Sheriff McCabe came early and stood next to Ma. The other sight worth seeing was Billy McCabe and Mr. Benjamin Olmstead—the two rivals for Agatha’s affection—standing so near to one another. Only the four younger McCabe boys separated them. How could they be so civil after all that had happened? Mr. Olmstead was my sister’s most recent attachment. Billy McCabe was Agatha’s intended: the one everyone thought Agatha would marry.