by Jon E. Lewis
Most of us were not looking at Jess Dutrow. We were looking at the father. He sat motionless for a few seconds after Judge Cutler finished speaking. Then he roused in the chair and rose to his feet and walked steadily to the doorway and out, his head still low with the beard fanwise on his chest and his eyes lost and unseeable in their deep shadow-holes. I passed near him on the way home about an hour later and he was the same, walking steadily along, not slow, not fast, just steady and stubborn in his face. I called to him and he did not answer, did not even raise or turn his head.
The next morning I woke early. I lay quiet a moment trying to focus on what had wakened me. Then I heard it plain, the creaking of wagon wheels. I went to the door and looked out. In the brightening pinkish light of dawn I saw him going by on the other side of the creek. He had yoked the oxen to the big wagon and was pushing steadily along, leading them with the leather thong. I watched him going into the distance until I shivered in the chill morning air and I went back into the house and closed the door.
It was the middle of the afternoon when he returned, leading the oxen, and behind them on the wagon was the long rectangular box. I did not watch him. I simply looked towards his place every now and then. I had things to do and I was glad I had things to do.
I saw him stop the oxen by the cabin and go inside. Later I saw him standing outside the door, both arms thrust upward. I could not be sure, but I thought his head was moving and he was shouting at the sky. And later I saw him back in the shadow of the rock ledge digging the grave. And still later I saw him there digging the second grave.
That brought me up short. I stared across the distance and there was no mistaking what he was doing. I set the pitchfork against the barn and went down to the creek and across on the stones and straight to him. I had to shout twice, close beside him, before he heard me.
He turned his head towards me and at last he saw me. His face above and beneath the beard was drawn, the flesh collapsed on the bones. He looked like a man riven by some terrible torment. But his voice was low. There was no roll in it. It was low and mild.
“Yes, neighbour?” he said.
“Damn it, man,” I said, “ what are you doing?”
“This is my wife,” he said. His voice did not change, mild and matter-of-fact. “ She killed herself.” He drew a long breath and added gently, very gently: “With my butchering knife.”
I stared at him and there was nothing I could say. At last: “I’ll do what I can. I’ll go into town and report it. You won’t have to bother with that.”
“If you wish,” he said. “But that is all a foolishness. Man’s justice is a mockery. But God’s will prevail. He will give me time to finish this work. Then He will deal with me in His might.”
He withdrew within himself and turned back to his digging. I tried to speak to him again and he did not hear me. I went to the cabin and looked through the doorway and went away quickly to my place and saddled the grey and rode towards town. When I returned, the last shadows were merging into the dusk and the two graves were filled with two small wooden crosses by them and I saw him there on the ledge.
Three days he was there. And late in the night of the third day the rain began and the lightning streaked and the thunder rolled through the valley, and in the last hour before dawn I heard the deeper rolling rumble I had heard once before on a hunting trip when the whole face of a mountain moved and crashed irresistibly into a canyon below.
Standing on the porch in the first light of dawn, I saw the new broken outline of the cliff up and across the valley and the great slant jagged pile of stone and rubble below where the rock ledge had been.
We found him under the stones, lying crumpled and twisted near the big squarish rock with the wooden cross cracked and smashed beside him. What I remember is his face. The deep-sunk, sightless eyes were open and they and the whole face were peaceful. His God had not failed him. Out of the high heaven arching above had come the blast that gave him his judgement and his release.
MARI SANDOZ
River Polak
MARI SANDOZ was the pen name of Mary Susette Sandoz (1896–1966), born in Sheridan County, Nebraska, to Swiss immigrant homesteaders. Leaving school at sixteen she helped support her family by teaching in local rural schools. After a brief, failed marriage to a local rancher she entered the University of Nebraska as a part-time adult student; the campus magazine Prairie Schooner was regularly the recipient of her literary efforts. Her short story “ The Vine”, penned under the name Marie Macumber, was the first piece in the first issue. It was not until the death of her father in 1928, who strongly opposed her writing career, that she began to publish under the name of Mari Sandoz. A biography of her father, Old Jules, went through many rejections and rewrites until it won the March 1935 Atlantic Monthly contest for non-fiction.
As a Western writer she evidenced an atypical sympathy for the sodbuster, once writing that “the most important themes of Nebraska will always be those of the farmer and his dispossession.” The world of hardscrabble farming was, of course, the world in which she grew up; her parents were some of the last settlers of “free land”.
Sandoz was also one of the first white writers to evidence interest in the Plains Indians: her biography of Crazy Horse was published in 1942 and her epic novel Cheyenne Autumn released in 1953.
Sandoz is buried on a hill overlooking the Sandoz family farm near Gordon, Nebraska.
I
FOR ONE WEEK in the spring the Niobrara River jammed its bed with broken ice. Its gray floodwaters rose over the bottom lands, piling trash at the feet of the ash and box elder along the bluffs, with here and there a bridge plank or a drowned hog in the willows. From then until fall the tepid little stream flowed tranquilly past the old cottonwood leaning from the cutbank of sandstone, making a soft, friendly little sound as it ran past the Polanders’.
On quiet June evenings a blue plume of corncob smoke rose over the Smolka house in the little ash grove and hung in thin threads along the shadowing bluffs. Now and then a bell tinkled somewhere, not loud or often, for the cows had learned not to disturb the clapper overmuch.
But this evening there was no hand cupped to the ear for cowbells. Instead, Yonak Smolka was squandering his time on Indian Bluff, at the feet of the bare-legged little American girl, Eckie Mason, making a wreath of wild flowers for her. And as he selected one sprig of bloom after another from the girl’s apron, he forgot that his tongue had a way of escaping his lips when he worked, that his shoes were manure-yellowed and too large to pass in a plow furrow.
At last the boy shook his hair that was bleached and unruly as weathered binder twine from his eyes. Then he arose, unbelievably long and awkward, holding the thick wreath of purple and yellow wild peas like a thing of fragile china on the palms of his broad hands before the waiting girl.
“I – c-crown you,” he stammered, breathing hard, “I c-c-crown—” But his voice broke and he jammed the wreath down hard on the girl’s dark hair, glad to be rid of it. There it hung, over one ear and the delicate nose as on a post.
Seeing that Eckie still waited, he fell awkwardly to one knee, touched his lips to her extended hand, and sat back on his haunches in relief.
“The glass,” Eckie prompted in a whisper.
Yonak wiped a bit of broken mirror on his overalls and held it up. The girl straightened the wreath, and, seeing only a blur of purple and gold and no sunburned face, she sighed. “I wish I could be like this all the time, with no sick baby to mind and no cows to get.”
At the mention of chores Yonak let the glass clink down his overalls to the gravel as he straightened up and peered under his palm toward the shadowed grove across the river. “Gee, I bet Pa be home and I have not the cows . . . Maybe he knock me down.”
But the sun stood large on the bluffs, powdering the quiet evening air and spreading a bright path over the moving water. And suddenly for him there was no angry Polish father with eyes red from the jug under the bed of Ignaz Kodis.
“Look it!” he cried, wanting Eckie to see that the water was like mice running under a golden sheet and that the purple stealing down the draws was the flying veil on his sister Olga’s new hat. But before his thick tongue could move to it a woman’s voice called up the bluff. “Eckie! – Eckie! – Come away from that dumb Polak and mind this baby!”
Holding the wreath to her head and without a look or a word for the boy, Eckie ran down the shadowing slope to throw clods at the two milk cows switching indolent tails in a patch of sand-burrs where she could not follow barefooted.
With the bright sun still upon him, Yonak watched the girl vanish along the path through the brush. Then he kicked a pebble bounding after her and plodded down the slope toward the river. Dumb Polak – dumb, left-alone Polak. Sometimes even Olga wanted to be American, with an American name, Ollie Smith, not a greenhorn Smolka. But only when she was angry with her father. Other times she laughed and strutted a little, like her black Leghorn rooster, saying, “Pretty good for dumb Polander, no?”
II
From the time Yonak’s thick baby legs could keep his sister in sight they had played together. Often it was games like going to the market in the Old Country, under the cottonwood leaning over the Niobrara River. They played selling syrup buckets full of wild flowers, the cat and her kittens, their pet rooster, or the runty pig that wouldn’t stand still and so fell off into the water and had to be dragged out. And once, when the house was dark and empty, they sneaked out their mother’s black Sunday shawl. And then Olga was the queen of the market and made music with the accordion like a fine big dance with many rich city people.
When she was fifteen the father heard that his countrymen down the river took in much money from their sons and daughters who worked for the Americans. He got Olga a job at Union, waiting tables, and once a week he stopped at the back door for her pay.
It was during his first summer alone that Yonak found the American girl across the river. She was watching a bull snake try to get the bulge in his middle that had been a gopher into a mouse hole. It was very funny and they laughed together. After that they were what the Americans called friends, and so she took the Polish boy up to her house and showed him how to make good races with the Leghorn roosters. Her mother said it was bad, but she didn’t think so. The roosters liked it. Yonak found it truly so.
After that he often hit the wire fence between the two places with a stick and made it sing to let Eckie know he was going down by the river. Sometimes she could get away and came running, dodging barefooted through sandburrs and rosebushes. Then Yonak cut whistles if the willows were sapping, made bows and arrows for them both, or scalded crawdads to a blood red in an old tomato can to eat with salt.
And now, today, he had made the wreath.
When the house was filled with warm, dark silence, Yonak lay in the little half-dugout bedroom under the picture of the thorn-crowned Christ, and thought about it. Gradually he forgot the throb of his head from Big Steve Smolka’s willow whipstock and the hurt of the American woman’s words, calling him a dumb Polak. The memory of the girl’s hand against his lips was like sweet, gritty bumblebee honey from the nest in the meadow. And below the grove the river made its soft, busy little sound as it ran past the Polanders’.
The next day Olga came home for her birthday. She was seventeen now, dark hair short, eyes swift and blue as the kingfisher’s, and with only red-lipped contempt for the old bachelor Ignaz Kodis who hoped to trade a daily drink from the jug under the bed for the high-headed Smolka girl. She would give Ignaz a bellyful of fight, Big Steve promised loudly after the third tipping of the jug. She was a bad one, that Olga, standing up to her father like the August thunderhead, making the ground to shake with a great wind and fire and noise, until the little mother hid her face in the headcloth.
And Ignaz licked his brown lips and passed the jug once more.
A week later Steve Smolka brought home a full bottle of whisky and walked so straight that there must surely have been more. He filled a cup half full of cold coffee and brimmed it over with the paler liquid.
“Tomorrow I get Olga from the town and the next day it will be a wedding,” he said through his floating moustache.
With shaking hands the mother wiped up the ham fat she spilled on the hot lids and moved quickly to put the supper on the table. Once or twice she coughed into a white rag that she hid in her slit pocket. Steven talked big. No more cutting corn by hand, Yonak! From now on it would be the binder of Ignaz Kodis, and perhaps a ride to the town in his car on Saturdays.
After supper Yonak slipped through the dark trees to the soft-looking gray clumps of buffalo-berry brush. They were really not soft at all, but stood thick and thorny about him, shutting out everything except the fragile lace of the fireflies and the square of yellow that was the window of the Americans across the river.
Before the sun stood man-high the next morning Big Steve was gone. A sad murmur as of fall insects rose gradually from the darkened bedroom where the mother knelt before a dim candle. Yonak put the milk away quickly and went into the yard where he need not hear. His pet rooster gave a high cackle and fled. When there was no pursuit, he came back curiously, looking sidewise at the boy, scolding. Slowly Yonak roused himself and the rooster was gone again, under thistles, over fences, dodging, scolding, squawking. At last the boy caught him, stroked his gleaming black neck, and watched the American girl, the baby across her hip, come to the bridge to fish in the deep hole at the pilings. He threw the rooster a handful of wheat and made business at the sweet-corn patch across the river. With the doubletrees balancing across his shoulders he stopped on the bridge.
“What you using?” he asked casually.
“Grubworms.”
“Grasshoppers is better.”
“Maybe,” the American girl admitted, flipping a silvery chub from the water, “but I bet you couldn’t catch many grasshoppers neither with a sick kid like Dickie hanging onto you.”
“Oh, I dunno.” Yonak spit into the water and went on, his big feet clap-clapping on the planks like a horse, pretending he never made a wreath for an American girl, never a purple and gold wreath, and that there was no soft, sad noise in his mother’s bedroom.
That night there were violent words over the oilcloth-covered table in the Smolka kitchen. Once the mother dared remonstrate, but Steve sent her back into the shadows with the flat of his hand and Yonak had to lead her away to cry in the outside darkness. Olga better give up; only get a smashed mouth for her wedding.
And at last she tossed her short black hair out of her eyes and, grabbing her red accordion, played like drunk or crazy. Her teeth, white as corn in milk, flashed; sweat beaded her forehead. Finally she went to bed. Yonak lay tense and still as she crept into the cot across the dugout from him. Until the rooster crowed she cried softly.
In the morning she was gone. It was Yonak who found her, hanging from the cottonwood over the river. When Ignaz came in his old car to the wedding, Yonak had to tell him. Red moustache bristling, the man swore that Big Steve had cheated him. Without going in to look at the girl laid out in her new white dress, he went home to his corn. A dead woman is no good to a man and the sunflowers do not wait.
All the June day Steve Smolka sat with his fingers over his face while his Polish neighbors hammered together a long box and covered it with black cloth. That evening they buried Olga near the little white church on the Flats, where the roads going in and out cross, as was fitting.
Yonak stayed behind in the dusk at the leveled grave. Suddenly the American girl was there with him. Softly she laid a wreath of bluebells on the new earth and ran away. Yonak put his hand out to the flowers. They were cool as the waters of the Niobrara.
After Olga was gone the mother leaned lower under the sacks of weeds she carried home for the pigs; she huddled closer into her dark headcloth. Big Steve drank less and went to church, but the river Polanders avoided him. It was not right, this that Steve Smolka had done. Olga was sweet a
s the chokecherry blooms in the spring. Here it was not like the Old Country. One must use less of the club and more of the sugar on the colts.
The mother coughed steadily from the days of the black frost to the white. By spring she lay still in her dark bedroom. Because she would not have a doctor, Yonak steeped camomile and brewed wild sage tea in an iron pot, but it was as nothing. Na, what must be must be, she tried to tell this boy with the man bones pushing through his round cheeks. Only fifteen and already high as Big Steve, and no catalogue shoes big enough.
Then one night when Steve was in town with the fat pigs she called the boy to her. He cleared away the blood-soaked pillow and washed her white face. She smiled up to him, like a tired little child. He must not be afraid.
When the father came Yonak left him alone with the still, white woman on the bed. He walked fast to the old cottonwood. The tree still leaned a long arm over the river. Somewhere far in the high blue of the sky a bobolink sloped and sang. Only to him and to his father was everything different.
A sound of running feet came up the cowpath and Eckie stood before the Polish boy. He turned his light eyes upon her. “Why you come to bother me?” he cried, and could have bitten his tongue out.
Mutely the girl pushed something hard into Yonak’s hand and ran, her faded blue dress flying across the bridge and into her own yard, and on the boy’s calloused palm lay a round, shiny disk – a pyrite, a sheepherder had said – Eckie’s lovely gold dollar.