This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

  “I play the odds. Every once in a while, I get an answer.”

  I thought he almost smiled. Instead he said, “Old and just fell apart.”

  Like hell. Somebody had taken a sledgehammer to that press, or my name wasn’t Odie O’Banion. Revenuers did that sometimes. But maybe sometimes men who went crazy with rage did, too.

  By evening, the little still was completed and the mash was fermenting. Though it would take several days before we would be ready to do the first run, the pig scarer seemed pleased. That night when he unlocked the tack room door, Emmy brought us a good meal of baked chicken and roasted carrots. After we ate, the pig scarer sat on the hay bale outside the tack room, with Emmy at his side, and said, “Can you play ‘Goodbye Old Paint’ on that mouth organ of yours?”

  “ ‘Leaving Cheyenne,’ you mean? Sure.”

  I pulled out my harmonica, but before I put it to my mouth, the pig scarer surprised me. He lifted a fiddle from behind the hay bale and settled it beneath his chin.

  “Go on,” he said.

  So I launched into that old cowboy tune, and the pig scarer began to bow that fiddle along with me. He was pretty good, and we sounded not half bad together. The whole time I was aware of the fact that both his hands were occupied with the instrument and not his shotgun. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d positioned the hay bale far enough out that even Mose, who was the fastest of us all, probably couldn’t have reached him before the shotgun was in his hands. Still, it gave me hope.

  “You play a good fiddle,” I said.

  “Haven’t had occasion for a while.” He cradled the instrument gently in his hands and for a moment seemed somewhere else. “Sophie used to beg me to play at night when I put her to bed.” Saying that name woke him from whatever reverie he’d been in, and he set the fiddle down.

  The song had put me in mind of horses, so I asked, “What happened to the nags who used to wear these harnesses?”

  “Sold ’em,” he said. “Year ago. Was going to modernize, buy myself a tractor.”

  “Never did?”

  “You see one around here anywhere, boy?”

  “Nope. And I don’t see any animals either, except those chickens in that coop.”

  “Used to have some goats,” the pig scarer said. “Mostly pets for Sophie.”

  There was that name again, stumbling accidentally from his lips. As soon as it was out, it seemed to turn like a boomerang and hit his heart. He sat up straight, snatched the hooch bottle from his back pocket, and took a long pull.

  “What happened to the goats?” I asked.

  “Ate ’em,” he said.

  “You ate your daughter’s pets? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “How old are you, boy?”

  “Thirteen.” Which wasn’t true, strictly speaking. I still had a couple of months to go, but it sounded better. Older, wiser. Tougher.

  “When you got a couple more decades behind you,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “then you can talk to me about what’s right.” He stood up directly, grabbed his shotgun and fiddle, and said to Emmy, “Collect those chicken bones and them dishes. Night’s over.”

  “He didn’t mean anything by it,” Albert said.

  “Think I give a good goddamn about what that boy means or don’t mean, Norman? Come on, girl.” He hustled Emmy out and bolted the tack room door.

  I lay in the dark thinking about the bitterness inside the pig scarer and the sadness that was there, too, and I figured they were probably twins joined at the hip. I thought maybe it wasn’t love that consumed him but a terrible sense of loss, which was something all of us who’d taken to the Gilead knew about. I’d considered loss only from my own perspective and Albert’s and Mose’s and Emmy’s, because our parents had been taken from us. But it worked the other way, too. Losing a child, that had to be akin to losing a good part of your heart.

  Slowly, the pig scarer was becoming like Faria when I’d first met the little rat. The more I knew about him, the less frightful he was.

  In the moonlight that slipped between the wall slats, I saw Mose tap Albert on the arm and spell out in sign, Norman?

  “The old clerk at the hardware store was asking all kinds of questions,” Albert explained. “Said to Jack, ‘What’s the boy’s name?’ I told him I wasn’t a boy. Jack said I was no man neither. So I told the clerk my name was Norman. Neither boy nor man.”

  Damn, that was smart, I thought. Me, when I was pressed, all I could come up with was some stupid movie cowboy’s name. Albert, he’d come up with a corker. I decided next time somebody asked me, I was going to give them a name just as slick as Norman.

  * * *

  BY OUR FOURTH morning with the pig scarer, we’d finished the work in the orchard, and he set us to painting the barn and tending the big garden. Except for the fact that we’d been locked in the tack room every night and fed only once a day, it hadn’t been that different from the work we’d done on the Frosts’ farm. We saw Emmy every evening at supper, and she seemed to be doing okay. After we ate, the pig scarer would bring out his fiddle and I would put my harmonica to my lips and we’d play tunes together. He didn’t seem to me to be a bad sort. It was just that life had been pretty cruel to him. He’d been visited by his own Tornado God.

  I asked him one night about that eye patch he wore.

  “Lost it fighting the Kaiser,” he said. “The war to end all wars. Ha!”

  “You don’t believe it did any good?” Albert asked.

  “There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don’t go by that there’s not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That’s like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that’ll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.”

  Mose signed, Not everybody’s greedy.

  Emmy translated for the pig scarer.

  “Boy, I never knew anybody didn’t have their own best interests at heart, and the hell with everyone else.” He scrutinized each one of us with his good eye. “Be honest. Given the chance to get yourselves free of me, you’d slit my throat, wouldn’t you?”

  Although I’d killed a man already in order to be free, slitting the pig scarer’s throat was a sickening thought. “Not me,” I said.

  The pig scarer drank the last of the alcohol he’d brought with him, eyed the clear, empty glass bottle, and flung it against the barn wall, where it shattered with an explosion that destroyed the fragile camaraderie the evening’s music had created.

  “Let me tell you something, boy. Whatever you think you’re not capable of doing, the minute you think it, the moment it enters your mind, just in the imagining, it’s already been done. Only a matter of time before your hands follow through.”

  He grabbed Emmy, yanked her to her feet, bolted the tack room door, and shut us up in the dark.

  It rained all the next day, a steady drizzle, and the pig scarer had us working inside the barn, sharpening and oiling his tools, seeing to the fermenting whiskey mash, while he stayed in the house with Emmy. I took a good look at the broken-up cider press against the barn’s back wall. That cider press had been the object of some great rage. I’d been thinking about what the pig scarer said the night before, about the moment when something terrible comes into your head, that it’s only a matter of time before you do it. I couldn’t see into his head or his heart, but whatever was there, no matter how terrible, I figured the pig scarer was capable of it. I kept thinking about Aggie and Sophie and Rudy, and wondering more and more what had really happened to them. And all along I’d been trying to figure a way to escape.

  That day, while eyeing everything in the barn, I finally had a decent idea. There was a roll of stiff, heavy wire hanging on the wall among the hand tools. I used a pair of cutters, clipped off a two-foot length, and made a hook at one end.

  Mose signed, What doing?

  “You’ll see. Albert, lock me in the tack room.”

  When
I was inside and he’d set the bolt in place, I slipped the wire through a knothole in one of the warped door boards and worked it until the hook snagged the knob at the end of the bolt. I carefully drew the wire back and the bolt with it, and in less than a minute, I’d freed myself.

  Albert and Mose both gave me a look of admiration.

  When escape? Mose signed.

  Albert said, “Not until we can free Emmy, too. Hide that wire under the hay in the tack room, Odie. And good work.”

  The rain seemed to have put the pig scarer in a foul mood. Or maybe it was the discussion from the night before. Whatever, he wasn’t talkative when Emmy brought us our supper, and he didn’t have his fiddle with him. As soon as we’d finished eating, he ordered Emmy to gather up everything and locked us in for the night.

  The rain finally let up, and the cloud cover broke. The moon was up and slid its bright yellow fingers through the cracks in the barn wall and across the tack room floor. I could hear Mose and Albert sawing z’s, but my own eyes wouldn’t close. I lay there thinking about the pig scarer, about the foul mood he seemed to be in, and I worried about Emmy. Finally, I slipped the wire from its hiding place under our mat of hay and crept to the door. I threaded the wire through the knothole, hooked the bolt knob, and drew it back slowly. When the bolt was clear, I edged the door open.

  The hand on my shoulder made me jump. I spun and Mose stood there in moonlit stripes.

  Where going?

  Emmy, I signed. Worried.

  Me, too. Coming with you.

  Most farmhouses I’d visited had a dog, but not the pig scarer’s place. More and more, I thought of him as a man so deep in his misery that it had become what he breathed and ate and clothed himself in. I figured he wanted nothing, not even the companionship of a dog, to lessen that misery. I didn’t know the why of it but expected that it had something to do with losing his wife and daughter. Or maybe just Sophie, because I hadn’t heard him mention his wife’s name at all. Mose and Albert and me, we were just free labor to him. But Emmy, she might mean something else, or the promise of something else, and if she didn’t fulfill that promise, who knew what the pig scarer in his misery might do?

  We crept to the farmhouse, our shadows tagging along behind. Through an open window I could hear the sound of music from the radio inside. I eased myself against the wall and slowly peeked over the sill. The room was lit by an oil lamp. The pig scarer sat in one of the upholstered wing chairs, drinking moonshine from a pint bottle. When we had the still up and running, we’d probably save him a fortune. He laid his head back and closed his good eye. I signaled to Mose, and we headed around to the back of the house.

  The window of Emmy’s room was still nailed shut, but a river of moonlight flowed through the clear pane and fell across Emmy, who was asleep in her bed.

  Mose smiled and signed, Angel. Then he signed, Devil, and nodded toward the front room.

  Not the Devil, I thought. But maybe a man capable of doing the Devil’s work.

  The door to Emmy’s room opened suddenly. Silhouetted against the lamplight stood the pig scarer. I dropped to the ground and Mose did, too, and I held my breath hoping we hadn’t been spotted. A few moments later, the window above us rattled. Everything in me screamed Run! Mose must have sensed my panic and put his hand over mine on the ground and gave his head a faint shake. We stayed that way for five minutes, frozen against the back side of the house, but nothing more happened. The window didn’t shatter and the pig scarer didn’t shoot us. We finally eased ourselves up and risked another peek through Emmy’s window. She was still asleep in bed and was alone once again.

  Back now, Mose signed, and I started to follow him to the barn.

  Before we could cross the farmyard, the front door of the house opened, and the pig scarer stepped out with a lantern in his hand. He closed the door behind him and began walking, a little unsteadily, until he’d entered the orchard.

  Free Emmy? Mose signed. Get away from here?

  I shook my head and signed, He might come back quick. We’d be in big trouble. I glanced where the pig scarer had gone. Follow, I signed.

  Mose shook his head and signed, You crazy?

  The pig scarer was far enough away that I could whisper. “Where does a man go in the middle of the night, Mose?”

  Pee, Mose signed.

  “He could pee in the yard. Come on, before it’s too late.” And I took off.

  The moon lit the scythed grass between the rows of trees with a silver luminescence. Mose and I kept to the black shadows of the apple trees. The pig scarer’s lamp was easy to follow. He headed west to the end of his orchard. When Mose and I arrived at the last of the trees, we saw him fifty yards out, kneeling beneath a lone oak in a fallow area, bent so far over that his forehead touched the ground. The sound of his deep sobs was enough to make a stone weep. It’s impossible to witness such open grief and not feel pity wrung from your heart. I’d heard little kids at Lincoln School cry all night long, and I’d heard Mose, too, but I couldn’t recall ever hearing a man cry this way. It made me think that no matter how big we grew or how old, there was always a child in us somewhere.

  Mose touched my arm and signed, Go now.

  I’d seen what I came for, though I still didn’t understand it exactly, and I nodded and we slipped back toward the barn.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE PIG SCARER was in a surprisingly good mood the next morning. I wondered if the tears, like rain, had washed him clean of his misery, at least for a while. Or maybe it was because of the news Albert gave him, that the mash was ready for its first run in the still. Or it could have been something else entirely.

  The stack in the woodshed was pitifully low, and Albert told the pig scarer that we would need that and more for both the firing of the still and any cooking that he hoped to do on the stove in the farmhouse. When Emmy had finished gathering eggs from the chicken house, which was one of her daily chores, he put her to work helping Albert get things ready for the first run of the still. He took a two-man saw from where it hung on the barn wall and handed it to Mose, then he pulled down an ax for himself. He pointed toward a wood cart in the corner and said to me, “Bring that, and you and the mute come with me.”

  He led the way, carrying his ever-present shotgun, and we walked through the orchard to the edge of the Gilead River. The whole distance the pig scarer merrily whistled “Wabash Cannonball,” as if whatever labor awaited us was something to look forward to. He stopped where a great cottonwood stood, long dead but still upright, its branches dry and brittle, its trunk riddled with holes where squirrels or maybe woodpeckers nested. The tree was only a stone’s throw from the brush on the riverbank in which we’d hidden the canoe, and I caught Mose’s eye, and we exchanged a look of concern.

  “There she is, boys. Been meaning to take her down for a while. Looks like today’s the day.”

  The morning air was fresh and smelled of blooming wood lily and wild rose and prairie smoke, which had all taken root in the fallow between the orchard and the river. It was going to be a hot day, I could tell, and the idea of spending hours cutting down a tree and splitting it into pieces small enough to feed a stove or a still fire wasn’t particularly enticing. But the beauty of the day itself and the mood of the pig scarer helped. Sweating in Hector Bledsoe’s hayfields wouldn’t have been half the hell it was if the man himself had been anything but a bastard. The pig scarer was downright jovial that day, and it made a difference.

  Before he and Mose set to work cutting down the cottonwood, he walked around the base of the trunk, as if taking its measure. On the side that faced the river, he knelt and said, “Son of a gun.” He reached down and pulled something from the ground, then held it out in his hand so that we could see.

  “A toadstool?” I said.

  He shook his head. “A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here,” he said to me. “Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.” />
  It was brown, four inches long, and looked like the ratty cap some gnome might wear in a Grimms’ fairy tale. It didn’t look appetizing in the least, but I was a whole lot more interested in locating mushrooms than in working up a sweat on that old cottonwood.

  “You find ’em,” the pig scarer said, “you bring ’em back here directly.” He winked at me with his one good eye. “I know what you’re thinking, that you’re getting out of the hard work. There’ll be plenty waiting for you when you get back, I guarantee it.”

  I walked away. At my back I heard the saw teeth begin to bite into the cottonwood.

  I went slowly among the trees on the riverbank, looking closely at the ground and all the wild things that grew there. I found several more of the odd-looking mushrooms. The river curved around the edge of the orchard, and very soon I was completely out of sight of the pig scarer and Mose. I was intent on my mission, eyes to the earth, when I looked up and realized I wasn’t far from the lone oak tree where the pig scarer had knelt the night before and had wept his heart out. I glanced back to be sure I couldn’t be seen and ran to the oak.

  What I found was a little graveyard, a family burial plot. I’d seen them before in rural areas, where the laws that governed interment didn’t reach or were ignored. Some that I’d seen had fences around them, but not this one. There were a number of wooden grave makers, upright plaques so bleached by the sun and weathered that whatever had once been written on them was now obliterated. There were also three graves with no markers whatsoever, but they were clearly outlined by wild clover. I stood there thinking that probably I was looking at the pig scarer’s family, those who’d come before him and had maybe first tilled the soil. Because he was the only one at the farm, I wondered if he might be the last of them, the end of the line. I considered our one-eyed Jack, and how lonely it must feel believing that you’re all alone, with no one to remember or grieve for you when you’re gone. I had Albert and Mose, and now Emmy. The pig scarer seemed to have no one.