by Gary D. Svee
“We worked pretty hard today.”
Standish nodded.
“Figured I’d like to take a little break.”
“You don’t want to work tomorrow?”
“I’ll work tomorrow, but I was kind hoping.…” Arch stared into Standish’s eyes. “I was kind of hoping that we could go fishing the next day.”
Arch’s eyes squinted almost shut. “Ain’t like I’m taking a day off or nothing. I’ll be doing what I can to feed Ma even if I go fishing.” He scowled, waiting to see if Standish disputed that. Standish’s silence eased the tension.
“I figure we could catch a mess—Ma calls ’em a mess—and we could fry ’em up over here. Ma took that one I caught and dipped it in flour and salt and pepper and fried it.” Arch swallowed. “You throw in the potatoes, and we could have a hesper of a dinner.”
“Not a bad day, either.”
A grin teased the edges of Arch’s mouth. “Not a bad day, either.”
“I guess I’d call it a hesper of a day.”
Arch grinned ear to ear.
Standish held his hand out to Arch, and Arch took it. The deal was made. He rose to leave. “Remember, don’t eat more than your share.”
“Just what you say.”
Arch nodded. That was the way it should be.
Standish scrubbed himself in the wash basin, emptying it three times before he felt clean enough to climb into bed. The sheets smelled fresh from their washing, and even now it seemed a luxury to have a bed beneath him and a roof overhead.
Kabanov’s words flitted through his mind, sifting into some of the gaps in his understanding of Arch and Iona. Standish knew he had only a piece of the story. He knew this tale didn’t end with Hedrick’s desperate horse ride to undue the evil he had done. Great holes remained in this mystery, and Standish didn’t like that. The mystery of a snapped twig could mean the end of man’s life. Arch and Iona could be that snapped twig. Standish squirmed, trying to find a comfortable position. The safest solution was to leave. Only a matter of time before Bodmer found him. He would be running then for his life. He couldn’t have this place and Arch and Iona holding him back. Standish sighed. He was already tied down. This meadow and the beaver ponds and cabin tugged at him. Iona and Arch tugged at him, too. They were kindred spirits, drawing pain from the same poisonous root.
Standish sighed and reached to his wooden-box nightstand. He thumbed through the book to the marked page. Bele had completed his cabin and invited Kabanov to a dinner of sausage and beer.
“I don’t know when I have ever been so happy or had so fine a friend as Ivan,” Bele had written. “In this land I have found such wonder that it seems that God has given us a second Eden. Ivan brought his accordion, and I listened to the music of my country with a glass of slivovitz, in my hand. I had brought this plum brandy from home, and Ivan and I drank all of it that night.
“About nine o’clock, there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and there stood a young boy of maybe six or seven with hair so red it seemed on fire. He didn’t say anything. He just walked to the table and took one slice of sausage and one of cheese. He put that between two thick slices of bread. How hungry that young man must be. He ate all of our food.
“Then he pulled a chair over to Ivan. He sat down as though he had spent his entire life in my cabin listening to songs. He tried to sing with us, but the words were foreign to him. He had been there for an hour when there was another knock at the door.
“A man was standing there. His face was dark from the sun, but there was a darkness to it that came from inside. He said nothing, walking to the chair where the boy was sitting. He grabbed the boy by the arm and dragged him toward the door. He stopped there to say, ‘If you want a boy get one of your own. Don’t try to take mine.’
“He beat the boy outside. We could hear the deep thumps of his fists against the boy’s ribs, and we ran to the door, but they were gone into the darkness.”
Standish laid the journal open across his chest. He rubbed his eyes, and then picked up the journal and read on. The beating didn’t stop Arch from returning to the cabin. Food seemed the root of Arch’s visits, but Bele sensed that the boy was seeking something more. The boy pulled Bele into the Belshaw’s lives. Hedrick Belshaw wasn’t much of a farmer or father or husband, and he lashed out at his own ineptitudes with his fists. He resented, feared, Bele, but Bele had fallen in love with Arch and Iona. So much did he love them that he showed no emotion. Any sign of suspected affection would show in bruises on Arch and Iona on the next visit.
How Klaus loved Iona.
Silent smile speaking spring promises
Voice whisp’ring ages to aching ear
A single touch would launch me rising
Golden phoenix from the ashes of my life
Standish marked his place in the journal and laid it on the nightstand. He picked up his watch. Half an hour after midnight. He should go to sleep. Tomorrow would be a long day and building a rock wall around a root cellar was hard work. He sighed. No sense pretending; he couldn’t sleep until he knew what happened that night.
Standish threw off the covers, shivering a little in the cold. He walked barefoot to the stove, mincing at the slivers in the rough-cut floor, wondering if he would live in the cabin long enough to wear the floor smooth.
Embers still. That was good. He picked small kindling from a bucket and laid the sticks across the glowing coals just so, blowing gently until the wood burst into flame. He added other sticks, nursing the fire, and when it was blazing, he set the coffee pot on the stove. He carried the lantern and the journal to the table and sat down to read. When the coffee was ready, he would drink a cup and then two and three. He needed to stay awake.
Bele’s love for Iona was as deep in his bones as his tuberculosis. The disease raged through him leaving ashes of blood on his handkerchiefs. He tried to hide his affliction in the walls of the cabin. Still Arch came to see him, to eat sausage and cheese and to wonder at an adult lying slugabed through the morning hours. And late one afternoon, Arch came and found a terrible fever shaking the life from Bele. Arch ran home to get his mother.
Iona ran to the cabin. She made a tea of yarrow leaves, and while it was boiling on the stove, she ran a wet towel over Bele’s body, willing it to cool. It was then that Hedrick Belshaw stepped through the door. Bele’s fever was a soft spring day compared to Belshaw’s rage.
“‘Whore! Harlot! Jezebel!’”
Standish winced at the words, but he read on. Hedrick had beaten Iona then, her cheek spouting blood from one of his blows. Arch attacked his father, and Belshaw struck him again and again. When his wife and child lay bleeding on the floor, Belshaw turned to Bele, his fists tearing at the skin stretched tight across Bele’s face. Bele was unconscious when Hedrick stalked from the cabin. He didn’t hear Arch and Iona leave, but deep in his subconscious he thought he heard the sound of a woman weeping.
Standish remembered the scar on Iona’s face that blushed red when she was nervous. Hedrick had left his mark. Standish poured himself another cup of coffee, wishing as he hadn’t wished in a long time that he had tobacco and cigarette paper.
Bele rose from his bed later that night confused, the bruises on his body acting in concert with his fever. He was confused but he knew core deep beneath the pain and the fever that he must reach the Belshaw cabin.
I stepped outside wearing nothing more than my nightshirt, thinking nothing of it until the terrible cold of the night raged at my body. I must have seemed a specter as I walked toward the Belshaws; my feet finding every sharp rock and branch on the way, my body shaking until I thought the Earth had stumbled. I lost my way in the trees, and I wouldn’t have found the farm if I hadn’t heard the sound of drunken men. I hurried as best I could, not noticing the pain.
I came to the farm yard. They had Iona, passing her from one to the other, each groping her body, each slapping her. The words came. I don’t know why I heard them in the midst of the babble. Perhaps t
hey were so terrible, I could hear nothing else.
‘We paid the price, whore. One dollar for the bunch of us, and we ain’t going to be cheated.’ One of the men had stepped on the porch, but just as he neared the door, Arch stepped out. He was carrying a double-barrel shotgun, and he was trying to pull the hammers back. One man, if he may be called a man, grabbed the shotgun.
Standish stood. He paced across the floor, focused on the words on the journal’s pages, and the unwritten message, too. Bele’s tears had wrinkled the page, distorted the words, and now Standish’s tears were wrinkling and distorting objects in the weak, yellow light of the kerosene lantern. He stared out the window, wondering if he’d rather see the blackness there or on the journal pages. He sighed, returned to the stove and poured himself another cup of coffee. He settled to read more of that terrible night.
Arch’s father had left the boy’s face bruised and bloody. Still, he attacked the man on the porch, hitting and kicking him. The man raised the shotgun above his head as though to bring the butt down on Arch’s head and said, ‘I’ll kill this little son of a whore.’
Iona screamed then. So terrible was her scream that it pierced even the black hearts of these men. Everything stopped. The yard seemed a picture painted by a man with no soul. Iona stood, her clothing in shreds, blood streaming down her face. ‘Leave Arch alone, and you can have me.’
The man on the porch slapped Arch so hard he went spinning off the porch into a little heap by the step. And there in the midst of this terror, I found my voice. I staggered into the light, and said, ‘You cannot do this. Do you not understand? You cannot do this. She is a good woman.’ Iona burst again into tears, and I realized there was nothing I could do, but humiliate her even more with my presence. I found strength I didn’t imagine that I had. I picked up a heavy stick. I hit one man in the face. His nose spewed blood. I swung again, but the man grabbed the stick and hit me. I didn’t awaken until the next morning. I was lying on the ground, quite sure I would die. Arch was sitting on the porch with a cocked shotgun across his knees. His head was bobbing. He had stayed awake all night. There was no sign of Iona. I didn’t even know if she survived. I tried to go into the house, but Arch stopped me. He had cocked the hammers of the shotgun over the night, and he pointed it at me. ‘Go home,’ he said. “Arch would have shot me that morning. I know he would have. I think he had to do something, anything, to change what had happened the night before, so I went home.”
The journal grew sketchy then, as Bele lost his strength. Some specks of blood showed amidst the ink, and then some ink showed amidst the blood. Bele’s lucidity drifted in and out, but Standish wondered if that was the result of his sickness or of what was happening at the Belshaw house.
Hedrick’s funeral was a farce. Bele rode with Iona to the Holy Church of the Sanctified. T.C. Baunder, the minister, refused to do services for Hedrick. He also refused to allow Hedrick to be buried in the cemetery. Baunder told Iona that it was quite obvious that Hedrick, a good man, had committed suicide after discovering that his wife was a whore. She was responsible for his death and only the gallows could answer for her sins. Certainly, she would suffer the flames of eternal damnation for her wicked ways.
Bele wrote:
Iona sagged as though she were once again suffering a beating by her husband, but she left this ‘church’ with no tears. I suspect that she has no tears remaining. She and Arch have taken to hiding nights, sometimes at my house, sometimes in the woods away from her home. Having heard the stories, they come, willing to trade a cheap bottle of whiskey for Iona’s body.
I have never been a violent man, but I am taken with the thought that these creatures are less than human and should be expunged lest their progeny spew filth on future generations. In the end, I have neither the strength nor the will to accomplish that, so I hide, too.
Standish turned the page. A question wrinkled his face, and he turned back to the last. October 22 to November 5, a two-week lapse. What was it that the clerk had told him? Yes, Klaus died in November. He hadn’t long to live when he wrote this, his weakness showing in his handwriting.
“Two weeks, I have been sick, very sick. Iona and Arch they have cared for me, even though I should be caring for them. I feel so weak. Some words are running through my mind.”
The next day, Bele wrote:
Comes now a shadow stalking my home
Swiftly it chills me deep to the bone
Nearing me as I lie on this cot
Please leave, I plead, but it listens not
Where will you take me, I ask of this shade?
Faraway, says he from this green glade
A place without cares or blood-spraying coughs
A place to lift your spirit aloft
How far must we travel to reach this place?
Don’t worry, says he, for we’ll travel apace
Well past the moon and the stars we will soar
We’ll go on ’til there’s simply no more
The shade steps closer and offers his hand
I reach t’ward him, this journey so grand
Then day soft as down comes from the east
And a fit of coughing steals my reach
I’ll be back coos he, another day
I’ll be waiting say I, coughing away
The remaining pages were brief comments, sometimes too tangled to understand, and then a long line as the weight of his dead arm drew a line across the page.
Standish wondered what he would write when he was dying, what he would say that would capture his being, his observations of life on this green Earth. He was thinking that when Arch burst through the door.
“Well, at least you ain’t still in bed, but you’d best get dressed if we’re going to get that root cellar done.”
CHAPTER 10
The root cellar went up in stages. Boards and tarpaper were nailed to the frame and flat rock stacked outside the wall. Each time Standish finished one layer, Arch had another pile of rocks ready for placement. The work was going well.
Standish stepped back and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “What do you say we take a break and get something to eat?” The question was rhetorical. Arch would never turn down food.
Arch flopped over on his back, shutting his eyes. “I die, you tell Ma I was working hard.”
“Guess I could do that.”
“Don’t seem like much to do for someone who kills himself working for you.”
Standish nodded, “Guess I could get somebody to play taps while I extol your working virtues.”
Arch rolled over on one elbow to look at Standish. “You’d do that for me?”
“What else could I do for such a hesper of a worker?”
Arch nodded. “You figure I’m worth a last request.”
“Depends.”
“What say you bring me a ham sandwich?” Arch’s lips wrinkled. “No, better make that two ham sandwiches and a jar of water.”
Arch rolled into a hunkering position. “You got any more of that licorice?”
“Nope, traded that for the potatoes I’m going to get tonight.”
“For a share of potatoes,” Arch said, eyes squinting.
Standish nodded.
“Guess a couple of sandwiches and a jar of water would do.”
“No pickles?”
“You got pickles?”
“Yeah.”
“Dill or sweet?”
“Dill.”
“Those big pickles?”
Standish nodded.
“Better bring me three or four of those.” Arch cocked his head. “No, I figure five would be about right.”
“You’re asking me to carry a lot.”
Arch’s voice took on an edge. “I been carrying rocks for you all morning.”
“Guess so.” Standish looked up and rubbed his chin. “Course if you want another sandwich or another pickle, no way I’d know that what with me sitting at the table and you sitting out here.”
&
nbsp; Arch cocked his head. “Maybe it’d be better if we both ate in the house.”
Standish cocked his head. “I think you’re on to something, Arch.”
Arch nodded.
Standish was sitting at the table, watching Arch stab at the last pickle with his fork.
“Doesn’t seem to want to come out.”
“Probably terrified.”
Arch looked up.
Standish continued. “Way you eat pickles; I suspect you have terrified the world’s supply of dills.”
“Ain’t had any for a long time.”
“What’s your Ma doing today?”
Arch bristled. “Ain’t none of your business.”
“Guess not.”
Arch exhaled a long breath. “She’s got a surprise for dinner tonight.”
“What’s that?”
Arch shook his head. “Well, it would be a hesper of a surprise if I told you what it was, wouldn’t it.”
“Guess so.”
“Well you guess right.”
Arch scooted back in his chair. “S’pose those fish’ll be bitin’ tomorrow?”
“Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.”
“I figure I’ll catch a fish as big as the last one, maybe bigger.”
“Don’t know. That was a really big fish.”
Arch grinned. “He sure was, wasn’t he?”
“Biggest cutthroat I ever saw.”
“Me, too,” Arch said.
Arch leaned back in his chair and stared at Standish. “You sick?”
One of Standish’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “Do I look sick?”
“Nope, but you don’t have to look sick to be sick. Klaus didn’t look sick but he was. He was real sick.”
“Klaus, the man who owned this cabin?”
Arch’s eyes squinted nearly shut. “How’d you know that?”
“Arch, I’m buying this cabin. I had to know who owned it.”
Arch tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “You know anything else?”
“About what?”
“About anything?”
Standish scratched his eyebrow. “I know I don’t know what the hesper you’re talking about.”