Encountering Old Bones: 2.

Encountering Old Bones: 2

(For episode 1, go back here.)

‘Human bone?’ I said, ‘How can you tell?’ Sure, the man was a doctor, but he was talking about bone that had been shaped and carved.

‘I’m not that smart,’ he said. ‘We found a note in his vest pocket. If anything happened to him, he wanted the rosary returned to the family of the woman the bone came from: the family of Lily Vallee. He was looking for them, apparently. But it’s no name from round here.’

‘That sounds like a made-up name,’ said Ben, the newspaper man. ‘A stage name, maybe?’

‘GRUESOME FIND ON DEAD MAN’ read the headline. As sheriff, I made some posters with the details. Our little local paper wouldn’t reach very far. We used an artist’s drawing of the dead man’s face; he never told his own name, but maybe someone would recognise him.

I locked the rosary away but I used to look at it sometimes, and even handle it, wondering about the woman whose body was pilfered for such a ghoulish souvenir, and the man who carried it. Was it love or revenge that motivated him? Guilt or duty spurring his quest for her relatives? Was he even the one who stole the bone?

What if it wasn’t stolen? Maybe it was her dying wish, a charge she laid upon him. Then why would he take it on – unless they were close? Lovers, I thought of course. Or … mother and son? Father and …? Brother …? 

Years later a new teacher arrived. She read the old poster still hopefully decorating the notice-board.

‘Did someone take it that seriously?’ she said, aghast.

A well-known trick, she told us, out where she came from. Skin someone of his money by whispering a ‘secret’ history about a rosary in the pawnshop and a family who’d pay a fortune for the last relic of a child abducted by Indians years before. Not a word of truth in it of course. Every so often some fool who thought he was clever would pay much too much for the rosary, in hope of a great reward. After he’d properly left town, a replacement would go on display. They were carved from the bones of dead cattle.

369 words, shared in Writers' Pantry #43 at Poets and Storytellers United. Many thanks to Magaly Guerrero, and to she whom we know as Magical Mystical Teacher, for the inspiration which proved to me I can write fiction after all! (It's a bit of a cop-out ending, sorry – but taking it anywhere else would have meant at least one more episode and I don't know that I have the perseverance for that.)

Encountering Old Bones

 Encountering Old Bones

At first I thought he was dead, lying there in the desert, his legs and extended arms protruding from behind one of the sparse cactus plants. Then I realised he was consciously holding up his rosary. 

‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘looks like I’m the answer to a freaking prayer! How about that?’

I got one of the team to give him some water, slowly at first, then lay him across the saddle of the pack-horse and make him secure (moving some of the baggage to our mounts). He was damn near collapsing, and couldn’t seem to talk but only gasp and grunt, yet he still clutched that rosary with fierce persistence.

We couldn’t tell what he was doing out there, apparently travelling on foot. Sure he needed help pronto, but did he also need jail when we got back to town? Was he running from the law, or escaping some desperado? He’d have to have a guard on him, either way.

We knew the way to the springs, which our guest obviously didn’t. We camped there overnight. We did our best to make him comfortable, but when we tried to get food into him, it dribbled back out of his mouth. He was barely conscious. Tom tried to gently take the rosary out of his hand to settle him on the blanket, but he half-roused then, muttered something that sounded angry or desperate or both, and clutched it tighter. We figured he was delirious, but not much we could do apart from give him another drink before we bedded down, and more when we woke.

We got under way again early. We shielded him from the sun as best we could and stopped now and then to give him a drink, which he could only just manage to gulp. We took him straight to the doc in the little hospital when we arrived. He was unconscious by then, but even in that state his fingers seemed glued around his rosary.

The doc found us in the saloon later, to tell us the poor man was so far gone he couldn’t save him. Then he told us a curious thing: the rosary was carved from human bone.

To be continued.

369 words written in response to Weekly Scribblings #42: About Those Bones at Poets and Storytellers United.

(Episode 2 is here.)