A man named Alfred Kime who never did anything in his life worth retelling, is here remembered by me for digging a common grave in the potter’s field of the Elmwood Cemetery. The stiff bodies of Broadwell and Powers and my two brothers were dragged like heavy mahogany doors from the jail to a dining room table in the parlor of Lang and Lape’s furniture store where Bob and I carried the corpse of Charley Montgomery that December night in 1888. Little boys would rush up and slap Bob on the sleeve and a crowd followed with handkerchiefs cupped to their noses. There was a toe hole in Bob’s left wool sock and his mouth was open so that his teeth looked bucked and he was no longer the blue-eyed boy. The dead were white except where the blood had sunk green on them and they were frozen with rigor mortis exactly as they had been when Tackett propped their heads up against a board front for photographs, so that they seemed to be raising up in their sleep; and they smelled worse than you’d think it possible, like the blast of bad air you’d get if you opened a junkyard icebox that was rank with spoiled chicken wings and vegetables and a rotting cat near the milk.

Undertaker W. H. Lape did some simple embalming and stole my binoculars off Bob. And some fortune hunter snuck in at noon and stripped every stitch of clothing off my brother. Then two clopping draft horses with mud-clumped hair at their fetlocks pulled a box wagon to the graveyard on Thursday afternoon. Orange kernels of corn jittered on the box planks and the spoke wheels crunched over gravel and the Dalton gang jostled with each bump—four dead men in buttoned shirt collars and blood-caked coats squeezed into four pinewood coffins.

A dozen men, including Chris Madsen, Henry Isham, and Colonel Elliott, stood with hats in their hands at the burial while scoops of shoveled earth flopped black as Bibles on top of the coffins. The bent pipe we’d hitched our horses to was what they had instead of headstones until I purchased a simple granite slab with some of the income from my first movie.

I don’t recall anything of October 7th and only snatches of the 8th when my family arrived by train from Kingfisher. Mom could only pat the bed covers near my sore leg and my brothers all were red-eyed but for Bill. Bill was hospital good cheer. He asked, “Where does it hurt the worst, Emmett?”

“It’s miserable pain almost everywheres,” I said. “I really can’t separate it. The ache in my crotch, I guess.”

He winked toward my brothers and laughed, saying, “Hell, that’s just normal biology, Emmett. That’s gonna bother you till you die.”