EARLY ON SATURDAY EVENING MARY WELLS GOT HERSELF out of bed and she and the girls drove to the Highway 34 Grocery Store at the edge of town to do the shopping that had not been done in days. There was nothing to eat in the house and Mary Wells was indifferent whether she had food or not, but the girls were hungry.
On the highway east of Holt a man from St. Francis Kansas was pulling a gooseneck stock trailer behind his Ford pickup, hauling five purebred Simmental bulls. He’d meant to sell the bulls in the fall, but his wife had been so sick that he had never gotten around to it, because of the daily care and the hurried trips to the hospital and finally the wearying bitter arrangements for her funeral. Now he was hauling the bulls to the sale barn in Brush for the auction on Monday, planning to feed and rest the bulls on Sunday, and make sure they drank enough that their weight was up so he could get all he could for them though it was not an opportune time to sell bulls.
He was not driving fast. He never did drive fast when he was pulling a stock trailer, and he made a particular point of slowing down because of the increase in traffic at that hour and more especially because of the glare of the setting sun shining in the windshield. He entered Holt and then a car suddenly pulled out in front of him from the grocery store parking lot.
Mary Wells was driving the car. Ten minutes earlier she had seen Bob Jeter standing at the refrigerated meat case in the Highway 34 Grocery Store beside a blonde woman, and Bob Jeter had had his arm wrapped around the woman’s waist.
Her older daughter, sitting in the passenger seat beside her, saw the pickup coming toward them and shouted: Mama! Look out!
The man from St. Francis did what he could to stop, but he had all that weight behind him and the pickup crashed into the side of the car and drove it skidding across the highway into a light pole that broke in half and fell over, dragging the wires down.
The younger girl, Emma, sitting in the backseat behind her mother, was thrown against the back door and knocked unconscious. Mary Wells’s head was slammed against the driver’s-side window and when her head cleared she discovered she could not move her left arm. It had already begun to throb. Next to her, Dena had been hurled forward and sideways, and a piece of the windshield had made a long deep gash through her right eyebrow and cheek. When the car rocked to a stop she cupped at her face with her hands. And then her hands filled with blood and she began to scream.
Honey, Mary Wells cried. Oh my God. She brushed the girl’s hair away from her face. Look at me, she said. Let me see. Oh Jesus. Blood was streaming down her cheek onto her shirt, and her mother wiped at it, trying to stop it.
Across the street a man in the parking lot ran back into the grocery store and called for an ambulance, and it came roaring up within minutes and the attendants jumped out and pried open the doors on the one side of the car and lifted Mary Wells and the two girls into the ambulance and raced them to the emergency room at Holt County Memorial Hospital on Main Street, just a few blocks away.
THE PICKUP, THE STOCK TRAILER, AND THE CAR WERE still blocking traffic, and the five tan-and-white bulls had stumbled out of the trailer when the tailgate had crashed open. Men from other cars and pickups were trying to herd them into a makeshift pen of vehicles at the edge of the road, but one of the bulls was lurching about, slipping on the blacktop, bellowing, its left hind leg severed almost in two at the joint, with the lower half flopping and dragging behind. The bull kept stumbling, trying to put his back foot down, while the blood pumped steadily out onto the pavement. The man from St. Francis kept following the bull, shouting: Somebody shoot him. Goddamn it, somebody shoot him. But no one would. Finally a man produced a rifle from the rack in the cab of his pickup and handed the rifle to him. Here, he said. You better do it yourself.
A patrolman who was directing traffic saw the rifle and came running over. What do you think you’re doing? You can’t fire off a gun out here.
By God, I’m going to, the man from St. Francis said. You want to let him suffer like that? I’ve seen all the suffering I’m going to see for a while.