The Station at Bitter Hollow

The water near the vile hole was thick and stale, with sulfurous salts. You didn’t drink it so much as you endured it, and if it touched raw skin too long, you’d find yourself blistered and burning by evening.

A man could die slower from that water than from a bullet, but just as sure. You learned not to wash in it, not to clean your gear, and Lord help the fool who tried to bathe.

They called it Bitter Hollow, though the name was kinder than the place deserved. The old station house squatted low and crooked against the edge of a wind-cut bluff, black with soot and sagging in on itself.

It had no roof worth mentioning, only beams charred by some half-hearted fire long forgotten. There were no chairs inside, and no one took notice. The floor was dust layered upon filth, and the smell clung to your boots long after you’d ridden a mile out.

Still, the Overland Trail passed through, and mail had to move, so the place remained, half-dead but stubborn as a mule with a broken leg.
Inside, smoke curled from a pit dug into the corner, the fire doing more to sting the eyes than warm the bones.

The walls, such as they were, stood open to the wind. A fella might think he’d find some relief in a breeze out here, but not these. These winds came daggered and wild, whistling down from the north like they were mad at the ground and determined to peel it clean.

The men stationed there were a sorry lot, God help ’em.

Most of them lounged like cattle in the shade, chewing nothing and staring nowhere. They weren’t drunk, but they looked it—slack-eyed, vacant, as if the land had burned out every thought they ever had.

In all my wandering, I’d seen miners ruined by quicksilver, mountain men lost in reverie from too long alone, but these boys were just blank. The desert had eaten ’em from the inside out.

All but one.

He lay near the broken door, stretched out on a bedroll that had gone too long without a shake. He was younger than the others, his face drawn tight with pain.

A horse had fallen on him weeks before, caved in his chest with the force of a rolling boulder. I could tell by the way he breathed—shallow, wheezing, like each pull of air was a debt he didn’t think he could repay.

The others ignored him. Not out of cruelty, I think, but because they’d already buried him in their minds.

When a man’s marked by death out here, folks quit looking at him. It’s easier that way.

I stepped in, said my how-do’s, but no one answered, but the wind and the wheeze of that boy dying, slow on the ground.

Sometimes the frontier broke a man with a bullet. Sometimes it broke him with loneliness.

But here at Bitter Hollow, it didn’t have to break you at all—you just had to stay awhile. And that was enough.