Bone Corner

Bone Corner

     Suicide Sickness hit the high-country hard as an ice storm and silent as a blight. Too frequently my rides into town were blocked by processions of mourners. The burials had turned to bonfires. The survivors circled the departed, howling around the flames. The ash only made it about a mile from the ceremonies before settling on stilled vehicles and once white windowsills. The snows didn’t wash it away, it clumped, and it dripped, and it stained everything gray. Burn-burials, as they called them, happened after the ground froze, and people kept on needing to be laid to rest. Folks considered several bodies sharing a grave to be morbidly unacceptable—but bodies sharing the flames, that was alright. At first it smelled like people were grilling chicken and burning hair at some disgraceful cook out. It’s confounding how much human flesh smells like barbecue and then how much burning the rotten clothes triggered that gag reflex deep within. 

At least it was just the older folks back then.

     Documentation of the goings on around Bone Corner are understandably lacking. Even the thinkers weren’t safe—and most of the journalists succumbed to the very thing they set out to journal on. For many, you could say, their manner of demise was reflective of their labors. Writers set their offices afire, all their daily efforts fueled the flames that did them in. Farmers fell on their pitchforks or hung from their hay lofts. Andy, the butcher was a ghoulish scene. Nobody quite knew how he brought the knocking hammer down on himself. The coroner said, “The man landed three blows before substantially damaging his brain.” Lawmen pressed their revolvers to their temples. Pharmacists swallowed up their supplies. Even Dean, the fella who ran the soda fountain since the days when I scrounged for coins to buy penny candy, was found frozen solid in his cooler—they chose to leave him right there until the spring.

     The immune among us were said to be worse off than the afflicted. That’s what they said when the younger, healthier town folk succumbed to Sickness. I don’t know about that. I think my people were just lucky to live so remotely, far from the funeral fires, and with no children among us. Our cabins were twenty-seven miles far off along a road dusted with dismissed things. When compelled, I rode into town in the evenings, after my work was done. Our weekly supplies were neatly bundled out back behind the General Store. Simpson left the sack; I replaced it with the next week’s list and the appropriate coin. Beyond the dried goods and the occasional purchase of a fresh shirt or maybe a tablecloth for momma, we made do with the minimum of things. It’s thanks to our spread’s remove that we were spared the affliction that renamed Bonner City to how it’s known today.

Bone Corner.

     You asked, so I’m telling. The worst days were toward the end. That’s when the disease changed somehow. Doc Bonner called it an evolution or a variant or the like. The old folks who ended themselves hard in the beginning were but an introduction to the shameful sadness of our tragedy. “Death was bound for them anyway,” we reminded each other. Better to go peaceful. Don’t raise a fuss about it.

“The end ends all for everyone,” went momma’s prayer.

Back when we lost Abattoir Andy and Sheriff Steve in the same day, some among us, Momma included, got to thinking that foul play was at hand. “Perhaps some of the local exploitative types were seeking to cover up malicious intent with cases of the sickness,” was momma’s suggestion. I couldn’t see it that way. Few could lift Andy’s hammer but Andy. And Sheriff Steve, folks used to say, slept with his nickel-plated revolver beside him on the end table since coming home from the wars. He slept with his black automatic held to his heart too, practically sitting straight up on all them pillows. Momma said the man’s eyes closed occasionally like all men under god, but that Sheriff Steve could see in other ways. That’s why he spent hard nights screaming and talked softly in the day, and no more than he had to.

     Toward the end there, when few of us were left living to realize our touch and breath carried Suicide Sickness. It’s when the gloom hastened the final quitting for so many more in Bone Corner. Those who’d avoided the germs at first, murdered themselves anyway. That’s when they came to know Doc Bonner’s variant meant the sickness had finally come for the children. 

Doc was found cut like he was bleeding his self. He had that knowledge and may have been working for a more ancient treatment for Suicide Sickness. -just cut too deep. Anyway, that’s what town folks said around quiet meals behind closed doors. I think it was his daughter going the way she did that turned Doc’s heart toward its dark corner.

She was a Bonner. She was beautiful. And she had the world before her in a town of her great-grand-daddy’s founding. When she walked Main Street, folks stopping just to see her pass, they couldn’t help but look, barely fifteen but beautiful beyond.

—that day they thought she was holding a sparkler. 

It looked like a sparkler and the Bonners were always a people eager to celebrate. She carried that stick of dynamite in two hands up to the café porch like it was Sunday mass. She smiled through the glass panes in the door, according to Mr. Townsend, who ran the place. Then she was gone. She misted the walls pink, blew in all the glass, and left behind a scorched circle, a burnt-halo some called it, that you can see on Main Street right now.

     Children hanging by their necks from white fences, their bottoms three inches off the dirt, their legs stretched out before them so we knew they could have stood up if only they were so inclined… If Bonner City were founded near a dark lake or a deep canyon, maybe the immune among us would have been spared the unspeakable sight of them who pursued self-demise and found it every time. We wouldn’t have turned from every fence row between the school and the church if all those little bodies lay quiet in a canyon or covered over by dark water.

But I suspect it’s over now. 

Mother went in her sleep. She endured no harm but that caused by time. 

I still buried her extra deep and burned the bedsheets to be sure. 

Now it’s down to me. I don’t venture to the store, nor to what was the café, not anymore. I do ride up some nights. Ride up to the stony hills above town. I see lights on sometimes. Lonely lights, second floor kind of lights. Always behind shadowy curtains. But then the wind shifts, and the smell comes. Sweet smelling, people don’t mention that. After a great dying off, when some are left unburned and above ground to putrefy—

it’s nauseating, sure—but it’s sweet too. When it hits me and I’m gagging all alone, that’s when I turn around and head for home. I’ll go down there eventually—but not until the smell dries up and those last few upstairs lights go out for good.