Read Online The Taylor County War by Ford Fargo - Free Book Online Page A

maximize the profit
he made from each dead client. To do that he had to supplement what
he considered to be the meager fees he charged either the family or
the town for the burial. Over the years he had found various ways
of doing so.
    First of all, he enjoyed an
informal partnership with Wil Marsh, the local photographer; a
kindred spirit who was also able to see death and the anguish it
caused to grieving relatives as a sure way to earn extra dollars.
Graveley would beautify up the corpses and Marsh would photograph
them in all their glory, as if they had just gone to sleep. Few
widows could resist the little works of art, and saw it as part of
the twosome’s compassionate natures.
    On the other hand, if the deceased
had died violently as a result of some disagreement about what side
of the law they were on - well, Graveley could set them out in what
he called their ‘finest gory’ by opening up a wound or two,
scorching the flesh around the wounds and fixing their eyeballs so
that they were turned upward to show only the whites, making them
look like boiled fish eyes. Then Wil Marsh would take the picture
to turn them into the very embodiment of evil; men who deserved to
be slain like the vermin they were. And it worked. The pair found
that many of the fancy magazines back East were willing to pay top
dollar for them.
    A second source of income was
derived from another, more clandestine partnership that Gravely had
with Dr. Jefferson Cantrell, the Wolf Creek dentist. Cantrell was a
man to avoid at certain times, especially if you developed
toothache any time after noon. That was about the time that the
effects of the strong liquor he started imbibing in from nine in
the morning would have begun to exert an effect. That was not to
say that his tooth-pulling skills were much affected, it was just
that he was not guaranteed to pull the right one.
    Despite all that, the dentist was
much sought after by the toothless hags, crones and the middle aged
and elderly men who wanted either to be able to chew a steak again
or maybe attract a partner. Either way, Cantrell could whip up a
set of false teeth in a few days, for a fairly substantial fee, of
course. It was a lucrative skill that he had developed during the
War when there were so many dead young men who had no need to be
buried with their teeth.
    Elijah Graveley had become skilled
at pulling the teeth out of the dead jaws and stuffing the mouth
with rags to make it seem that they still had a mouthful of their
very own ivory. A couple of hidden stitches through gums and lips
prevented any unwanted exposure of his handiwork.
    No questions were asked and no one
to that date had ever recognized any of the teeth in the new sets
of dentures that Dr. Jefferson Cantrell made.
    The third source of the
undertaker’s extra income he had only discovered by accident. It
was the fact that a few people used their rectums as a kind of
internal purse. In a few miners, outlaws, and a couple of cowboys
he had found little stashes of gold and silver. An old maid had
kept her jewelry there, and in the body of one old man he had even
found a wad of notes wrapped up tight in an oilskin. It was not a
regular occurrence, but he had found it a sufficiently profitable
discovery to make a search of every corpse’s inner regions a part
of his normal examination after death.
    “No sense in burying good fortune
in Boot Hill,” he would muse to himself whenever he removed teeth
or made such a find as he prepared the body in his locked embalming
room. It was only when he had finally completed his work and
dressed the deceased in their burial clothes or one of his shrouds
that he would summon his assistant and gravedigger, Caleb Brodie,
and together they would load the body into the coffin ready for the
funeral.
    Often, when standing at one or
other of the bars in Dogleg City, Caleb Brodie would complain about
how little Graveley paid. Yet what he never told anyone was the
fact that Elijah Graveley