The sight of Billy’s hand and, above all, the lingering smell of his putrid expulsions haunted Randall through the afternoon. He found nothing to distract him from their memory and could not force his eyes to remain too long fixed on anything but that they would wander back to the shack and the awful drama unfolding silently within.

  Occasionally, he thought as though he could hear feeble whimperings emanating from the shack, or imagined that a puff of breeze carried to his nostrils a trace of that nauseating smell, and each of these imaginings birthed a wave of new sorrow and fresh revulsion.

  True, he mourned poor, young Billy who, it seemed certain, would soon die in considerable agony, so much of what may have been his life before him, unlived and uncherished, to evaporate into nothingness like so much smoke in a gale, but his thoughts soon turned to other young lives cut tragically short, other folk of his old and intimate acquaintance with hearts as big and virtues as true as any who ever lived and yet, like Billy, faced the slow septic rot of a foul death.

  In the throes of these hard memoires, Randall turned to hard drinks to dull his mind. He retrieved half a bottle of rotgut whiskey from his saddlebags and set to gulping it down with uninhibited enthusiasm. By evening, he had become quite shamelessly drunk only to discover, as his throat burned and his head swam in circles, that it did little to dull the pain of remembering.

  Contrary, even, in the fading of his senses the visions of his mind seemed to grow only more acute. When he closed his eyes, he found himself assailed by blurry images of the tear-streaked faces of the beloved dead.

  He searched through the images, trying so hard to find a picture in his mind’s eye of his sister as she appeared in their youth, smiling as the sun glittered off her hair. Before the rot, the terrible creeping rot, had eaten half that pretty face away and she could never smile again. Look as he might, he couldn’t find it.

  He searched again the smile of his beloved mother, only to watch it fade to anguish at the creeping death of her daughter, only for the anguish to give way into hopeless pallor as the rot also took hold of her. He watched his father, once a strong man, with a chest like rain barrel and arms like carved oak, wither and diminish, devoured from the inside out until he lay in his sickbed little more than a patchwork scarecrow, too weak even to stand on his own. The pox took them all, then the village, then even the town.

  By the time the survivors rallied to burn the town, there was no one left who dared protest. Not even Randall. That ravaged town, hell in all but name, wanted only for the flames to complete the unholy vision of damnation.

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  Randall had been young then, a boy of about ten, the only one spared of his whole family. All the rest the pox had claimed. Their bodies still lay where they had expired, tucked into their filthy beds, still too contagious for any man to dare retrieval much less burial. They lay there still when he had watched the men set fire to the little farm that had been his home, where he had spent so many happy days in pleasant pursuits, fighting and failing to hold back stinging tears that wet his cheeks, helpless and understanding with a child’s intuition that all the happy days were gone then, never to return.

  He watched, helpless, as Poll, and his whole life with her, burned.

  Later, on reflecting on that day, it seemed to Randall that as the flames licked at the wooden supports and the flames raged hot and red in the little farmhouse, he had seen a shadow moving through the open window in the sitting room of the little farm house. He remembered straining to see it against the smoke and stinging tears clouding his eyes. And, although he could never be sure if the sight was genuine or an invention born of trauma that took vivid detail only past remembrances, there he saw the skeleton of his sister walking through the inferno, on its own accord, wreathed in flickering flames. True or imagined, that image remained branded on Randall’s brain; the bits of bubbling charred flesh clinging in sticky strips to exposed bone and that horrid skull, strands of golden hair twisting and curling in the fire’s heat, mouth dropped open as though screaming as smoke smoldered from vacant eye sockets.

  The thing peered at him from the farmhouse window, beckoning to him with the stubs of roasted fingers on boney hands. In his dreams, he heard it call his name.

  He had told doctors of his vision. They always said the same thing:

  “You’ve suffered a severe stress, my boy. The mind is capable of many queer things is such circumstances. The mind, like the body, must heal. In time these things will fade from your memory and haunt you no more.”

  The doctors were right about one thing. The mind did heal.

  Eventually, Randall adjusted to his tragedy and learned to carry it. He went to work, got jobs, got drunk on occasion, like most men his age. Life, in short, went on and went on quite normally for Randall.

  But he never forgot.

  On that account, the doctors had been entirely wrong. No matter how much time passed, the image of the burning skeleton haunted his memories, never far from the surface. He learned to live with it, alright, and learned, as he aged, that no man had a monopoly on tragedy, but he never forgot.

  No matter how drunk he got or how far he traveled, from the bunkhouses at the Empire Ranch to the saloons of Fort Drudge, even to the prairies west of Lincolntown by a little shack where a friend laying coughing out his last, there was no distance great enough to separate him for long from that night, from the gaze fixed on him out of vacant sockets.

  Even in sleep, some nights, he could not escape that mournful, beckoning wail:

  “Randall… Randall… Randall…”