"I hope you're carpenter enough to build an honest coffin," I told Jackson, my younger brother. About an hour ago, I would guess, our father, Perceval Staunton Courtright, had foolishly hung himself from a rafter in the barn. From the rope burns on his hands, it seemed likely that Father changed his mind at the last minute and tried to claw his way back up to the rafter, where he might have rid himself of the inconvenient noose—last-minute mind changes were a lifelong practice of Father's. In this case, though, the mind change had come too late, meaning that Jackson and I were faced with the necessity of burying Father in windy No Man's Land, a grassy part of the American West that, for the moment, no state claimed.
My younger brother, Jackson, was just seventeen. Here we were, the two surviving Courtrights, having already, in the course of our westering progress, buried two little brothers, three little sisters, an older sister, three darkies, our mother, and now look! Father’s tongue was black as a boot.
“I’m a fair carpenter, but where will I get the lumber?” Jackson asked, surveying the vast grassy prairie. We were just south of the Cimarron River, in a part of the plains populated by no one, other than Jackson and myself—and I, for one, didn’t plan to stay:
“Use some of this worthless barn,” I told my brother. “It’s only half a barn anyway, and we won’t be needing it now.” Father had first supposed that the prairies beside the Cimarron might be a good place to start a Virginia-style plantation, but he wisely discarded that notion while the barn was just half built. Now, with Father dead, we were down to Percy, our strong-minded mule, and a flea-filled cabin with glass windows. Ma had insisted on the glass windows—it was her last request. But she was dead and so was our gentle, feckless father. We had no reason to linger on the Black Mesa Ranch—the name Father had rather grandly bestowed on our empty acres.
I was twenty-two, kissable, and of an independent disposition. My full name was Marie Antoinette Courtright, but everyone called me Nellie. Mother told me I got named after Marie Antoinette because Father happened to be reading about the French Revolution the night I was born—my own view is that he anticipated my yappiness and was secretly hoping the people would rise up and cut off my head.
Jackson began to rip boards off the barn. He handed me a pick and a spade, implements I accepted reluctantly.
“Being a lady: I try to avoid picks and spades,” I mentioned.
“I guess you’ve kissed too many fellows to be calling yourself a lady,” Jackson remarked, picking up a crowbar—or half a crowbar. At some point, mysteriously, our family crowbar got broken in two; this setback annoyed Father so much that he threw the other half in the Missouri River.
“It’s not my fault you’re off to a slow start in the kissing derby,” I told him.
“Where would I get a girl to try and kiss, living way out here?” he asked.
For once Jackson had a point. My various cowboys could always slip away from their herds long enough to provide me with a spot of romance, but very few young ladies showed up on the Cimarron’s shores.
“I expect you’ll get your chance once we get settled in Rita Blanca,” I assured him.
Jackson looked a little droopy as he laid out Father’s coffin. We Courtrights are, in the main, not a very sentimental lot. But burying brother after brother, sister after sister, and now parent after parent, as Jackson had been required to do, was the kind of work that didn’t put one in the whistling mood. I marched over and gave my brother a big hug—he didn’t sob aloud but he did tear up.
“I expect I’ll miss Pa more than you will,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “Pa, he always had a story.”
“It’s just as well he didn’t hear you call him Pa,” I reminded Jackson.