The sheriff turned to Deputy Wootan, who was involved in some whispered conversation with Tom Power that neither seemed to favor. He turned back to Jeff. “I really hate to do this, to bring this up. But your boys have to register for the draft. That's federal law. I have no say.”

Jeff, his jaw still set, continued to stare straight ahead. He turned slowly to face McBride. “You take your law and get the hell out of my life. I don't give a damn about federal or state or local. I care about Rattlesnake Canyon, and I care about my boys. All the rest of you can just go to hell. Soon.”

McBride stared back, then nodded. “Deputy, let's ride and leave these people to their grief.”

A week later an inquest was held in Safford. The jury heard the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Bosco and Dr. Platt. A grim-faced Jeff Power stood at the back of the courtroom, but he was not called, and he did not speak. The jury ruled that an autopsy was not necessary and returned a verdict of “death by unknown causes.” On hearing the phrase, Jeff Power turned and left the courtroom.

He tried to think of the losses of Granny Jane and Ola May as inconveniences, their chores now his. It was a way to avoid thinking of those losses as the deep and dear ones they were. He had thought that the day the roof fell in on Mattie was the worst day of his life, and in terms of pure pain, it was so. But it was also the first day of a lifetime of pain and loss. It was an announcement that the hardest times were to come, but he had been deaf to that.

Whether by the hand of God, or fate, or plain old happenstance, or just by the nature of the world, his life had turned that day. He had had a good run of getting—finding Mattie and marrying her, building up herds of cattle, the birth of three sons, and then, finally, the birth of his daughter. But then it turned to a progression of loss—Mattie, the ranch, then Charlie off to New Mexico without a damned look back, Granny Jane and Ola May within two months of each other. The getting had been slow and graceful, the giving up had been hard, swift, and unrelenting. How people could keep kneeling and praying to a God they thought loved them, and protected them, and occasionally tested them he could not understand. The God he conceived was a mean, vicious old man who cared for nothing beyond His own damned amusement. He wished that God would come to him as He was supposed to have come to others. He would love to give that son of a bitch both barrels of a 10 gauge and then piss on the corpse.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1918