1862, Chapter 10
Mr. Waggoner has met his untimely death making love with Johanna in Room 5 up in the town’s hotel. August has crept through the window to confront Johanna about Wagoner. We pick them up there.
August, given all that he seen as he stood looking in through the hotel window, was drawn to Johanna. He always had been, he now knew.
He’d never admitted it. First, his face moved toward her lips—but at the last possible moment he turned away and said, “I can’t.”
Johanna looked at him, ready to pity him for his innocence. She was only four years older than him, but she’d lived decades, it seemed, getting along as a single woman in this town’s flat, dusty hell.
She touched his cheek, and he flinched.
“Don’t do that.”
She pulled her hand back. “I won’t. I will respect your wishes.” And she said, “From now on, you’re going to respect mine.”
She stepped back and looked at him.
He stood nearly six-foot, dressed in moleskin pants cinched tight with a crude length of leather, a denim shirt tight across his broad chest.
His black hair was pasted against his forehead, his eyes were blue.
She liked what she saw.
She thought that it was a matter of time before he understood he was in love with her.
As for her?
She thought maybe she could love him.
She wanted companionship, someone to talk about the ideas in the newspaper that arrived by wagon from St. Paul each week. Someone who could play a musical instrument. That would be love, wouldn’t it? That’s all she wanted.
A life of the mind.
As for the other, her life of the body, she figured she enjoyed sex as much as any woman could, though it was often fast, brusque, furtive, all about the man’s needs.
The slim saving grace concerning Mr. Carlton Waggoner is that occasionally he was a careful lover.
However, when he was not trembling at the sight of her body, he was too excitable and rushed, speaking gibberish as he reached his conclusion.
Just once she wanted to cry out in pleasure and abandon in the arms of a man, or a woman.
August interrupted her thoughts, saying “Now you’re going to do exactly as I say.”
“Am I?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
He nudged Waggoner’s pale, chicken-skinny leg with his dusty boot.
“We’re going to get him outta here, there’s no way my brother’s going to know what you’ve been up to.”
“You’d do all this for me?” she said. She even batted her eyes at him.
She realized sarcasm suited her. She had employed it far too little in her dealings with people.
Johanna, The Agreeable-- that was her secret nickname for herself.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m doing this for William.”
“Sure you are.”
“My brother is the only person I got left in the world. I’d just as soon feed you to the hogs too.”
She gasped. “What?”
“It ain’t market day. I’m going to feed old Waggoner to the pigs, nuts and all. He ain’t never going to have existed. At least in these parts.”
She looked at him and swallowed.
“Are you going to feed me…?”
“What?” August was confused. “Hell no. Pigs don’t like spice. And you’re spicy.”
“I could be a woman of means if I had a chance—”
“Enough. Now pick him up.”
August grabbed Waggoner by the shoulders and Johanna tried lifting the long legs but couldn’t.
“That’s okay, we’ll get him through the window piece by piece.”
August laid Waggoner’s shoulders on the sill and moved around and got next to Johanna and pushed, and Waggoner flopped though the window and they heard him hit the roof with thud.
“Christ, I hope he don’t roll into the street.”
August stuck his head out.
“Yep, that’s what he did. Shit.”
He jumped through the window, turning to say to her, “Get dressed and meet me downstairs, out back.”
And then he was scampering across the roof and jumped down to the street.
Waggoner lay in the mud, his old ball sack covered with grey hair like a dandelion gone to seed.
His eyes were closed, probably snapped shut by the shock of falling off the roof.
“You don’t look so happy now, old partner.”
Johanna came around the corner, took one look, and felt she would faint. Waggoner looked so pitiful.
“Oh god,” she said. “What have we done?”
“Too late for that.”
The main street was filling with people out for lunchtime walk, such as it was in Winchester.
On any walk, in any direction, there was nothing to see but prairie.
People reached the town’s edge and turned back as if they’d approached a boundary not to be crossed.
Johanna longed to blow the hell out of that boundary and head out, somewhere. For anywhere
“Help me before somebody comes by!” said August.
They struggled as they lifted Waggoner to the wagon’s edge and pushed him in and over.
The pigs startled and squealed.
They trotted to a corner in the wagon, where they grunted as they regarded the lanky body of Carlton Waggoner whose green silk dressing robe had fallen open to the noon sun.
Johanna began to cry.
August reached out and gently touched her cheek. He left a little mark of mud there.
“Shush now. You created this problem.”
“What do you intend to do?”
August threw a tarp over the body.
“Get in.”
August snapped on the reins and Jim the horse pulled ahead.
They rode through town, took the granary road north, and drove for an hour and finally turned off the road, rolling along a dirt lane lined with walnut trees...
Wow! Another great installment and with enough "visuals" to keep my mind going to places I'd rather it didn't (right before dinner . . .) Thanks, Doug!!
Isn’t this an interesting turn in the story! Now I am anxiously awaiting the next installment.