He had a wonderful freedom from false nicety. “Tell me about the deaths of your two brothers. We hear a lot about them back east. I never dreamed they were my uncles!”
She laughed bitterly, then told how one had been hanged, how the other had been shot in the back by Frank Skimmerhorn, and how Levi, defying local hatreds, had buried them both. They talked a good deal about tribal law, and Levi was astounded at how much his wife knew. Her knowledge was not codified—that would be the task of trained men like Christian—but it hung together, and for the first time Levi understood that Indians were governed by customs as rigid as those which bound the Mennonites of Lancaster County.
One night Lucinda told Levi, “It’s not proper, a young man like this talking with us all night. He ought to be meeting some of the girls.” When Levi saw how easily this youngster of twenty-three handled the young ladies and with what grace he bandied their flirtations, he recalled his own barbarity at that age.
When the time came for Christian to return to Dickinson, four Centennial families with daughters sought to give him farewell parties, and he accepted, kissing the girls and their mothers goodbye. At the station he told Levi, “You should visit the family. I’m sure they’d welcome you.”
“I’m not so sure. I’m still the outcast.” He was standing with his arm about Lucinda as he added, “Don’t tell them I married an Indian. They wouldn’t understand.”
“I never see them.”
“You don’t?”
“No, when I wanted to go to college they raised Cain, Mahlon worst of all. Even my father ridiculed me. To hell with them all.”
When the train chugged in from Denver, Lucinda kissed her nephew goodbye and said, “Come back. Come often. Lots of people in this town would be pleased to see you, Levi and me most of all.”
He swung onto the train, blew kisses at the girls—and returned to his studies. Three times that winter Lucinda brought up the question of Levi’s going back home for a short visit. Each time he said, “Not unless you come too,” and she replied, “Lancaster’s not ready for an Arapaho Indian.”
So he dropped the matter, but she raised it a fourth time: “A man ought to see his kin. Levi, you can’t imagine how you perked up when Christian was here. You have a right to know how the trees are doing.”
Often through the years he had wondered how those stately trees had grown, and whether the barn still sat with its hex signs among the meadows, but before he could respond, she made another comment even more compelling: “I cannot forget that when they left Jake Pasquinel’s body on the gallows, you stepped forward to claim it, because he was my brother. From that day I would have walked through hell for you, Levi. A man ought to stick with his kin.”
She bought him a large suitcase and some new clothes. She purchased the ticket, Centennial to Omaha to Chicago on the Union Pacific. Change stations at Chicago for Lancaster on the Pennsylvania. She took him down to the station an hour early and introduced him to others who were going as far as Chicago. But she would not accompany him.
The trip was so uneventful. He could not believe that he had once struggled for a half year to cover the same distance, and on Wednesday morning when the train pulled into the cavernous station at Lancaster, he was awed by the change, but then he saw his three bearded brothers waiting for him, and time seemed not to have touched them. Mahlon, still tall and dark, had acquired neither weight nor congeniality. He looked as if he were there to collect the remaining eighty-eight dollars Levi owed him for the stolen horses. Jacob looked pretty much the same, and Caspar, who did the butchering, was the powerful man he had been forty years ago. To the farmers of Lancaster the passage of years meant little; they tended their business and allowed others to worry over intrusions like the Civil War and financial panics.
The brothers remarked on Levi’s lack of beard and congratulated him on having been able to manage a train trip all the way from Colorado. They piled him into a wagon pulled by two handsome bays and off they went to Lampeter, where Levi discovered that Hell Street was quieter now, but as they approached the ancient lane and the tall trees, he saw that the farm was unchanged. There stood the towering barn with its colorful hex signs and the reassuring pronouncement:
JACOB ZENDT
1713
BUTCHER
The lovely trees were more stately and the little buildings were just as he had left them. He wondered how many miles of sausage and acres of scrapple had come from that red shack since he left.
“We have a stall in Philadelphia now,” Caspar explained. “We take the train to Reading Terminal. Very large business.” Levi was pleased to hear the Pennsylvania German accent again: werry larch busy-niss.
At the house, so small when compared to the barn, Levi met the Zendt wives, and there was Rebecca Stoltzfus, totally changed. She was plump and white-haired and very stolid. Only the cupid’s-bow mouth was the same, and in her expanded face it looked rather ridiculous. He held out his hand and she shook it formally.
“Things are good at the market,” she said.
“Who’s runnin’ the bakery?” he asked.
“My brother,” she said.
The Zendt women had a traditional family dinner waiting, a display of food that staggered Levi, who recalled the many years he had lived on pemmican and beans. The table and the groaning sideboards contained a full seven sweets and seven sours, eight kinds of meat, three kinds of fowl, and six kinds of cookies, including the ones whose memory had tormented him when he was starving: crunchy black-walnut made with black molasses.
He wondered if any people were entitled to so much food, so much of the world’s goodness. And as he surveyed the farm and saw the ample supply of water and the infinity of trees and the lush grass where one acre would support a cow, he was struck with how easy life was in Pennsylvania and how brutally difficult in Colorado, where you had to dig a ditch twenty miles before you could tease a little water onto your land.
It was the trees that moved him most deeply. He loved to walk in the woods or sit at the picnic area in the grove: Yes, that’s a hickory. How many of them I chopped down to fuel the smokehouse. And the oaks, they haven’t grown an inch in forty years. And the good maples and the ash and the elm. We had a treasure here and never knew it.
On Friday evening the children found him sitting beneath the trees, tears in his eyes. “You feeling tired, Uncle Levi?”
“I was thinkin’ of the time I needed a tree to save my wagon,” he told them. “And I had to walk many miles to find one.” They knew he had to be lying.
At family prayers Levi was astonished, there could be no other word for it, by the minute detail with which Mahlon told God what to do. At each grace the tall, acidulous man would direct God’s attention to evildoers, to men who had stolen money from the bank, to girls who were misbehaving, and Levi began to understand why so much violence had been permitted in Colorado. With God kept so busy in Lancaster prying into petty problems, how could He find time to watch over real crimes like those of the Pasquinel brothers and Colonel Skimmerhorn?
From time to time the family dropped discreet questions about his experiences in the west. They knew that the girl he had abducted from the orphanage at gunpoint had died.
“Killed by a rattlesnake,” Levi said without inflection.
“Any children?”
“She was about to have one when she died.”
“Did you remarry?”
“Yep.” He let it go at that.
By Saturday it was obvious that Levi Zendt was not happy at the family farm and that his brothers were ill-at-ease with him. He did not belong to the family, and no one was grieved when he announced that on Monday he would head back for Colorado. “Chicago, then St. Joseph, Missouri. There’s a stage that runs out of there along the old road that Elly and I took in the Conestoga ...”
“That would be interesting,” Casper said frigidly.
At Sunday dinner the Zendt women put on a lavish display, not only to send Levi west on a f
ull stomach but also to welcome Reverend Fenstermacher—son of the older preacher—on his regular eating visit. Levi dreaded the prospect, but the minister proved much different from his self-righteous father.
“Forty years ago, when I bought my rifle from Melchior Fordney, he boasted that you could fire one of his percussion guns three times in two minutes,” Levi said.
“That was my brother. He died at Antietam.”
“Was the war hard on Lancaster?”
“On boys like my brother ... very hard.”
Fenstermacher offered a grace marked by a deep sense of God’s benign presence and the fellowship that sprang from it. At the end he pointed to the table and said to Levi, “Your family intends that you shall not forget the bounty of Lancaster.”
Levi put his fork down and said, “It’s strange, but when we were starving on the plains I never once thought of a dinner like this. I thought only of special things. The bite of sour souse, the rich stink of cup cheese, and black-walnut cookies. Does the souse still sell well?”
“Better than ever,” Mahlon said, “especially in Philadelphia. Caspar’s wife makes it now, same way you did.”
Then, for some perverse reason, Levi decided to show his family their sister-in-law. Coughing, he produced a photograph of Lucinda, one in which she looked very dark. He said, “You haven’t seen my wife,” and passed it to his left. He could tell who was holding the picture by the look of shock that came over each face. Finally the Stoltzfus girl said, hesitantly, “She’s very ... western.”
“She’s an Arapaho.”
“What’s that?” Casper asked. “Indian. She’s half-Indian.”
This was greeted with gasps, which Levi ignored, directing his attention to the meats. From somewhere came the question, “What’s her name?”
“Lucinda McKeag.”
“Doesn’t sound Indian. Sounds Scotch.”
“That wasn’t her real name. McKeag picked up her mother when her father died, and she went along.”
There was enough in that sentence to preoccupy the Zendts for some moments, after which Levi volunteered, “Her real name was Pasquinel.”
This information was greeted by silence, during which Reverend Fenstermacher knitted his brow. At last he asked quietly, “Was she related to ... Wasn’t there a Pasquinel family we read about?”
“There was. The old fellow was a mountain man. His sons were known as the Pasquinel brothers.”
“Those?” several voices asked almost tremulously.
“Yep. Lucinda’s brothers were a mean pair. They hanged one. Shot the other in the back.”
“The half-breed murderers?”
“The Indians suffered more murders than they committed, but the Pasquinels were killers.” Levi helped himself to apple butter and preserved cherries. “I had the unpleasant job of cutting the older boy down from the gallows. At the time I thought it was merciful he was dead, but reflectin’ on what we did to his tribe, I’m not so sure we hung the right people.”
Reverend Fenstermacher coughed, but Levi was started and nothing, not even food, could stop him. He told of the Indian fights, of the years of drought, of locust swarms, of the gold-mining camps. Every incident he referred to was alien to the Zendts, and in a way ugly, but as he unfolded the epic of life in the west it began to acquire a certain grandeur, and the very magnitude of it made them at least listen with respect.
One comment on the sun dance reminded him of young Christian Zendt, and prompted him to say, “You ought to get that boy back here. He may prove to be the best Zendt of all.”
As the meal ended, Mahlon said unctuously, “Reverend Fenstermacher, since it may be a long time before we see our brother again, would you please give our family a special blessing!” The reverend, having anticipated such an invitation, had certain things he wanted to say.
“Dear God, Who watches over us, You have heard me say a hundred times in church, ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.’ Nothing in my experience has been more mysterious than the manner in which You took Brother Levi west and placed him among the Indians and gave him an Indian wife and Indian brothers. You chose him from among the five Zendt brothers to do your work on the frontier, and he has done it well. He has been our emissary, and we have all been remiss in not sending him money to aid him when he needed it. We have kept our love from him. We have not even bothered to acquaint ourselves with what he was doing. God, forgive us for our indifference.
“But Levi was in error, too. He did not share with us his adventure in settling the wilderness. He did not report to us either his struggles or his victories. Especially was he afraid to bring his wife Lucinda here to visit with his family, afraid lest we embarrass her because she was Indian. Does he think we are so poor in spirit? When he returns home let him tell his wife that we send her our love, that we know her as our sister and that our home is her home, now and forever. Does he think that we do not know tragedy also? The Civil War that struck so many families here was just as deep a sorrow to us as the Indian wars were to him. We are all Your children, God. Truly, we are brothers in Your family and as we share our tragedies so we share our triumphs, and it is love that binds us together. Amen.”
There wasn’t much the Zendts could say after that. It was obvious that any preacher who would insult the richest Mennonite family in Lampeter, and at their own table, had no bright future in the Lancaster area, and the goodbyes after dinner were restrained. Levi went down to the grove, to sit among the trees, and it occurred to him that just as the Arapaho had dragged buffalo skulls through the dust, punishing themselves, so white men dragged behind them enormous skulls of another kind. The Indians were smart enough to allow their burdens to rip free; the white man seldom did.
The return to Lancaster had been unbearably painful. He had not said a dozen words to Rebecca Stoltzfus, the girl who had changed the direction of his life; he knew no more about her now than when he stepped off the train. He had discussed nothing of gravity with Mahlon, who seemed as distasteful now as he had forty years ago. He had not even been gracious enough to ride in to Philadelphia to see the family stall in Reading Station, because he had been so wrapped up in his own memories that he didn’t really care what was happening to the family.
It had been a terrible mistake to come here, and he left without being able to improve relations with his family in the way Reverend Fenstermacher had hoped. He was not sorry to go, and the Zendts were even less sorry to see him board the train.
At St. Joseph, Levi changed to the stagecoach, which would take him slowly west; and as the ferry carried them across the Missouri, he relived the journey of forty years ago. He felt he had been correct in leaving Lancaster, for now he knew that nothing had changed in the intervening years: he had found no significance other than tables piled ridiculously high with food. And as they chugged along, everything he saw added to his excitement—the muddy river, the black boys along the waterfront, the creaking ferry, the brooding threat of Kansas, the highway west. How he wished that Elly and proper Captain Mercy and bright Oliver Seccombe were with him now, just starting out with their teams. Even crafty Sam Purchase—he would want Sam too.
But after the coach was well into Kansas and had climbed past the Presbyterian mission, it came to the Big Blue, and Levi called to the driver to stop, and he climbed down to inspect this puny creek, this mere trickle of water in August, and he was aghast to think that this miserable pencil line across the landscape had once been a forbidding torrent where he had nearly lost his wagon and his wife.
It was incredible. Memory was playing him false. Then the image of the buffalo skulls returned, and he visualized himself dragging across the prairies his painful burdens of remembrance. But his robust sense of reality reasserted itself, and he began to laugh at himself. “I missed the whole point!” he cried. “My brothers were uneasy because they feared I was comin’ back to claim my share of the farm. It’s part mine, but let ’em keep it.” He continued laughing. “Never once did
they ask about the dinosaur. Biggest thing ever discovered in the west. Must have been in the Lancaster papers.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They’d have asked about the dinosaur if it was something good to eat.”
When he climbed back into the coach a man from Nebraska, staring at the river, said, “Hell, you could spit across that,” and Levi laughed and told him, “Not in the spring of ’44, my friend.” And heavy skulls tore from the sinews of his mind, and he told the man, “Right now, though, you’re right. A good man could spit across it.”
When Levi reached Centennial, neighbors persisted in questioning him about the east, and at first he rebuffed them, but finally he spoke for all westerners when he said, “Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can’t tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything ... not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important ... not a lot of trees and buildings.”
Other people were also returning from their travels. When Oliver Seccombe came home with his wife after their six months in England, he found Venneford Ranch in trouble. On the extreme outer edges, over toward Nebraska, squatters were building sod huts on the open range which had long been preempted by Crown Vee cattle. Along the Platte, immigrants from states like Ohio and Tennessee were taking out formal homesteads, as if by doing so they could gain access to the range. Committees were actually visiting the ranch headquarters to see about buying ranch land for the building of small towns.
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