Chapter 2 – Orbiting the Dead...
“Poor Samuel.”
Thaddeus Turner's voice cracked as it seeped into his home's great chamber through the thick, wooden door of his inner sanctum.
“They took innocent Samuel, our kindest heart, our most dutiful son.”
Maggie sat at the base of her father's closed door and wept. She could cry in her home. In her home, Maggie could shake both in anger and in fear.
“It was Harlington's hired man who shot him,” Maggie sobbed.
A great sigh drifted through the wooden door.
The last of the Turner brothers – Robert, Grant and Glen – circled in the darkness behind Maggie, moving counterclockwise around the great room's center in a ritual their father prescribed upon accepting the dead into the home, a ritual they followed without question though none of them understand the purpose. Seven living Turner brothers had constructed the great room around which were built the chambers composing the Turner homestead. With simple minds and simple tools, the Turner brothers built the lofty chamber, crafted the thick wooden beams and foundation stones to stand against storm and wind, to hold the hearth's heat in winter, to supply cool shade in summer. With hard hands and sharp chisels they carved the wooden reliefs of wane, upside-down faces that lined the walls. Maggie knew more about her father's craft than any of her brothers, and she recognized the power each relief, death masks of great bone-shakers, held in their silent, moaning expressions. Tragedy visited the Turners more often than guests, and it was within the great room where the Turners shared whatever fate knocked upon their door.
After brother Samuel dragged the two rusting barrels of father's shotgun to town, the great room again served as funeral parlor.
The upside-down, moaning and silent faces stared upon Samuel's body, placed atop a wooden table stretched through the great room's center. The Turner brothers had possessed only one suit befitting for such a solemn occasion as death, and that suit had been interred with brother Harry's corpse. Better fortune with which to purchase new suits had not come to the Turners by the time three more brothers died, and so Samuel's hands rested across the same soiled and torn clothes he had worn while he walked the many miles to town while dragging the shotgun behind him in the dust. Samuel's eyes remained open and stared back at the wooden reliefs regarding him. Father Thaddeus always demanded that each fallen brother's eyes remain open for the grave. Maggie understood only a little of her father's dealings with the dead. Her brothers understood even less. Yet none of Thaddeus Turner's children would dare challenge any custom father instructed them to follow.
Robert, Grant and Glen continued to circle counterclockwise around brother Samuel's corpse while Maggie wept at the base of her father's door. The brothers occasionally reached out to poke at Samuel's body, as if unbelieving that the bullet that tore open their sibling's forehead could have been enough to rip their brother away from the living. Often, they paused their orbit when they neared Maggie. They would pause to consider how to reach out and offer solace to their ugly, albino sister. Yet they pulled their hand back before touching her shoulder, as if something unnatural hovered about Maggie that even her brothers feared to feel.
“How many more brothers do they have to kill?” Maggie sobbed against her father's door.
“What would you ask me to do, child?” rasped her father's voice through the wood.
“Leave,” Maggie sobbed. “Just leave. We still have three brothers. We'll find home elsewhere. We could build another great room on some other acre.”
For a long time, silence answered Maggie while her brothers orbited Samuel's body.
“Where would we go, Maggie?” Father Thaddeus finally answered from his chamber.
“Anywhere. So long as we do not stay,” Maggie cried. “San Francisco. Portland. Perhaps we could go to a city and become lost in the numbers of so many people.”
Another heavy sigh drifted through Thaddeus's door. “You don't believe that. You know well enough to realize our kind does not go unnoticed in the world.”
“Then somewhere more isolated,” Maggie pleaded.
“More isolated than Dry Acre?” Father Thaddeus choked a frustrated chuckle.
“Anywhere but here!”
Maggie pounded at the closed door to her father's inner sanctum. How many more brothers would she lose so that Randolph Harlington might drive his heifers and bulls across their land? How many more Turners would be planted in the ground for the sake of that man's cattle?
“They kill us here! We still have brothers left! We can build another great room!”
“It is not so easy to build a great room the likes of which we have erected here, Maggie,” Thaddeus spoke. “I have invested too much in this room to move now, when I'm so close. Another glyph is nearby, Maggie. My bones feel the presence of another rune. I hear whispers on the wind. I suspect the Lakota language hides a piece of the dead's alphabet. I need time to gain their trust. I need time to find a translator and guide. But another rune is close Maggie, and none of those brothers will be lost once I find the missing symbols.”
Maggie pounded weakly on her father's door and slumped onto the floor. She did not believe her brothers shared their father's fascination for symbols of a lost language of the dead, no matter that they paid for their father's obsession with their lives. Her brothers could not even read. How could they understand their father's zeal for a lost language rumored to be spoken between the dead? How could father expect such brothers to find meaning in strange symbols burned into skin or carved into bone?
“You understand, Maggie.” Father spoke through his thick, wooden door. “You understand even if your brothers cannot. You understand the power that will come by reconstructing the dead's alphabet.”
Maggie still did not know if she found more comfort or dread in her father's habit of anticipating her thoughts. But he was right. Maggie understood her father's obsession with a lost cipher composed of glyphs scattered in the wind. Maggie could indeed imagine what it might mean to reconstruct that alphabet from which those symbols had scattered.
Maggie could imagine, and so she shared and suffered in her father's fascination of a language spoken between the dead that already cost them four brothers.
She hated herself for it, but Maggie understood why they would stay though those in Dry Acre wished to see them all planted beneath the dust.
“Tell your brothers not to wander off the ranch, Maggie.” Father Thaddeus's voice seeped through his inner sanctum's wooden door. “Tell them to stay close to the great room. Remind them what befell brother Samuel. Now is not the time for revenge.”
“I'll tell them,” Maggie leaned against the door and closed her eyes. “I'll tell them so they understand.”
“Good girl,” the father sighed. “We are so close. The symbols call to me.”
Maggie slept at the base of her father's door while her surviving three brothers continued their counterclockwise orbit around Samuel's body in the great room's center. Throughout the night, and throughout the next morning, when his brothers dug the hole in which to place his body, Samuel Turner's eyes remained open.
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