Prairie Widow

by Harold Bakst

  “You like bullying ladies and children, don’t you,” growled Aaron, his eyes on Wilkes.

  The other customers began to crowd around the two. Jennifer tried stoutly to hold her position. But she was being nudged by the people behind her, all of them edging forward and scolding Bill Wilkes over and around her shoulders.

  “Look, Aaron, I’m going to let you walk way,” said Wilkes, “and I’ll forget all this.”

  “You will, will you?” asked Aaron Whittaker. “And what if I don’t forget?”

  “So don’t forget!” erupted Wilkes, his voice cracking, his face reddening. “What are you going to do? Lynch me?”

  “If there was a tree in this town…”

  “Well, there ain’t!”

  “So instead you’re going to make good on the property you destroyed.”

  “Oh no, I won’t pay for something I didn’t do!”

  “If I have to take it out of your hide,” said Aaron, stepping closer, his fists clenched.

  “To hell with you!” shouted Wilkes, pushing past Aaron. But the older man spun him about. Wilkes struck out, his fist grazing Aaron’s jaw. Aaron, eyes flashing, charged Wilkes, slamming him back against the wall and pinning him. Wilkes drew his gun.

  “No!” shrieked Jennifer.

  But even as the gun cleared the holster, the other farmers jumped its owner, several grabbing his arm and wrist. The gun was forced up as it roared, discharging into the ceiling, causing Jennifer to nearly jump out of her skin.

  “Let go…” shouted Wilkes, his gun barrel waving over everyone’s head. But the farmers dared not let go of his gun arm. Instead, they dragged Wilkes down. “Get… off!” he groaned. One man stepped on his wrist with a heavy workboot, and Wilkes finally released the gun, which thudded onto the floor.

  Aaron snatched it away. He stood up and back, breathing heavily. “Wilkes, you just outstayed your welcome in this town,” he croaked. “Someone go get his horse.”

  “You can’t do this!” yelled Wilkes from the floor, struggling to break free of the many strong, gnarly hands pinning him. “I’m a government agent! Let…me…up!”

  The farmers obliged. They lifted Wilkes up and hauled him, kicking and screaming, outside. One of the farmers returned with Wilkes’s bay in tow. Following just behind the horse was Frank Turner, who stopped to watch at a distance.

  “Now, don’t you show your face around here again,” growled Aaron as the rest of the farmers pushed Wilkes up atop his horse.

  Wilkes, his hair mussed, his shirttail out, kicked back at them with his pointy boots. “Get away! You’ve no right! I own property!”

  The lanky farmer slapped the horse on his rump, and off the animal trotted, nearly throwing the agent off. But Wilkes grabbed the reins and kept his seat. He stopped his horse at the north edge of town. “You’ll pay for this!” he shouted. “All of you!”

  Aaron Whittaker pointed the gun at Wilkes, and the land agent spun his horse around and galloped out, the report of the gun spurring him on, though Aaron had aimed it in the air.

  Letting the gun rest at his side, Aaron now stepped up to Jennifer, who had taken her place by her frightened children on the buggy seat. With beads of sweat on his broad forehead, Aaron rested a thick hand on the front wheel. “Don’t you fret, Jenny,” he said. “We’ll fix up your dugout.” Then he turned to the others. “Someone get a crowbar and pick! Wilkes is about to make good!”

  Two farmers ran back past Frank Turner. “Mind if we borrow some tools?” one of them called. Frank shrugged his permission. The two went into his shop and returned with the tools. Then, as Jennifer watched, her mouth agape, the farmers set to gouging out the sod walls of Wilkes’s storefront—that is, removing from it his door and two windows.

  “Someone give a hand here.”

  “Careful with the panes.”

  “Get the wagon.”

  Jennifer glanced out of town and saw the now small, distant figure of Wilkes on the prairie trail. He had stopped to look back. Jennifer was certain he was glaring back at her. Then he turned his horse and continued riding off.

  “Sit down,” hissed Jennifer at her children, who were all agog. They sat. Jennifer flicked the reins. She left town, and fortunately in the opposite direction from Bill Wilkes.

  By day’s end, Jennifer had a new door and two new, if slightly cracked, glass-paned windows. After also rebuilding the stall, the farmers readied to leave, loading up their tools into their wagons. Jennifer stood back from her dugout and marveled at her reclaimed home. What a big difference glass windows made!

  But it didn’t stop there. All that afternoon and the next day, she received a steady stream of visitors, led off by Lucy Baker, all bearing gifts for their school teacher: blankets, tableware, all-purpose packing crates…

  Naturally, Joseph Caulder came, too. He gave Jennifer an old, wooden chair for her dugout and seeds for a vegetable garden. The seeds Jennifer readily accepted, but, fearing Isaac’s reaction to losing a chair to her, she said, “No, I couldn’t take it…” Joseph left the chair outside her dugout and started hoeing the garden.

  Several days later, Karl Pfeffer found outwhat had happened. Not to be outdone by his rival, he brought Jennifer two chickens and a cushioned parlor chair. The chickens Jennifer also readily accepted, but the parlor chair was much too nice to accept as a gift. “Really, Karl, I couldn’t…”

  But Karl dropped the chickens outside her doorstep and pressed his way inside with the chair, which he placed near the cookstove, shunting Joseph’s gift aside. “Goot!” he declared, stepping back and admiring his own addition to the room.

  Jennifer sighed but was grateful for all these gifts. And she was flattered that her neighbors should rally around so. Only she was beginning to have second thoughts about having accused Bill Wilkes so quickly and in front of everybody. Perhaps he was telling the truth, after all. Perhaps it had been the Indians.

  But, really, she was most concerned that Wilkes might return with an eye towards revenge—and here she was, living in the middle of nowhere. The idea unnerved her, and she prayed that the blessed train would arrive in Four Comers to take her and her children away before anything happened.

  So she settled into her newly done home, resumed her routine, even beginning to teach again, but what she did mostly was wait.

  And wait.

  Days turned into weeks. Outside her dugout door, she witnessed a prairie transformed continually. Those first flowers of the season were eventually joined, and replaced, by others that her children could identify, having learned the names from their school friends—flowers with such descriptive names as bird’s-foot violets and Indian paintbrush. But then these flowers, in turn, were soon overwhelmed by the grasses, which all the while were growing taller and darker, so that the flowers were necessarily replaced by longer-stemmed ones, among which were those Peter and Emma called prairie violets and false indigo.

  But in all that time, there came no railroad, not even word of one.

  And no letter.

  Jennifer had hoped she might at least receive a response from her father. Surely he had gotten her letter. Surely he meant to write back. Maybe, thought Jennifer with some amusement, his letter is on the train.

  And so the weeks continued to slip by. The days grew still warmer, the grasses ever higher, and still longer-stemmed flowers blossomed, splotching the green sea with rippling rafts of crimsons, yellows, purples, and golds, until they, too, began to drown in the ever-rising tide of grasses.

  And it wasn’t only the grasses and flowers that were growing. The hems of Emma’s dresses had risen to just below the little girl’s knees. Peter’s pants were above his ankles. And neither child could fit comfortably into his or her shoes. They went barefoot. More and more, it seemed to Jennifer, Peter and Emma were looking like all the other children in the class. Peter, in fact, began to call her “Maw,” what the Baker children called Lucy—a change Jennifer didn’t welcome.

  And still she waited. Befo
re she knew it, spring had peaked and was already fading. The tallest flowers yet were now appearing in the swelling grasses: the daisies, larkspur, and wild roses. Then, one hot day in early July, while washing clothes in a tub before her dugout, sleeves rolled up, dark hair drawn tightly back in a bun, Jennifer noticed familiar pink flowers, mostly because of all the hoardes of monarch butterflies fluttering about them. Emma, who was helping with the wash, told her mother what they were: milkweed.

  Jennifer remembered now. These were the flowers that had greeted her when she first arrived in Four Comers. But could it be? Had she really been there a year? And yet not even for such an occasion as that did the weeks pause, for it didn’t seem so long before a different, and still sadder, anniversary arrived.

  Jennifer and her children hadn’t been to the cemetery since Walter was buried. It looked very different. The grasses had infiltrated the tombstones, except for where there were some freshly dug sites, mostly on the perimeter. Jennifer and her children waded their way from one marker to the other, brushing back the tawny-green grass. When they found Walter’s grave, they bent those tough grasses back and tugged at them until they could read the stone’s inscription. Then they stood silently before the marker, Jennifer embracing her children by their shoulders. She and Emma cried softly while Peter clenched his jaw and wiped away the occasional stray tear from his reddened cheek.

  Still, the weeks passed. And while during that time there came no railroad—and Jennifer was beginning to think there never would be—there did arrive a letter. It was dropped off at Pearson’s Inn with other mail from the east by westward-bound homesteaders. The letter, however, was not the one Jennifer expected.

  Dear Jenny,

  Can anyone be as unfortunate as I? What news I have to tell you! Your letter, meant for your father’s eyes, has instead reached mine. And now I sit before my desk, wondering how to tell you what I must. If only you hadn’t lost Walter! My dear, poor thing, just when you need solace the most, I must compound your woes, for your father, too, has passed away…

  Jennifer, standing on the loose planking before the inn, stared glassy-eyed at those scribbled words of Dorothy Owens, her neigbhor back in Ohio. “Poppa? Gone?”

  … Your very house has been sold to pay for his debts. What unfriendly people live there now! Oh, if only there had been someone else to tell you this …

  Jennifer closed her eyes tightly. A tear dribbled down her cheek. So all this time her Poppa had not been sitting before the hearth, awaiting her return. He had been in the cold ground! Like Walter! Oh, it smacked of a conspiracy! If she didn’t know better, Jennifer would have sworn the two had actually arranged it that way, to sneak off together, leaving her with her earthly burdens so they could pal around in Eternity!

  “Is the letter from Grandpoppa?” came Peter’s voice as the boy stepped up, holding his sister’s hand. Both had green-striped candy sticks from Franz’s store.

  Jennifer gazed at her children. “Get in the buggy,” she said stiffly. “I have something to tell you.”

  That night, the dugout was silent. Peter kept trying not to cry, but sometimes he broke down. At one point, Emma, teary-eyed, went up to her mother rocking in her chair before the cookstove. “Is Grandpoppa keeping Poppa company?” she asked, her eyes red.

  The very notion angered Jennifer. Her own eyes watery, she began rocking harder. “I imagine so,” she said curtly.

  Then later, with her children sleeping in their comer, Jennifer calmed down enough to come to a sobering realization—there was no longer anyone waiting for her back home. There wasn’t even a house there. No Poppa. No hearth. Suddenly, she felt her feet take root in the dirt floor— as if, with no connection back home, and after now having lived in that hillside for so long, she had just at that moment become—like all the animals, grasses, and flowers around her—part of the prairie’s sod.

  This she could not let happen. “No, I am not a prairie plant,” she murmured. “I can return east. And I will.”

  Autumn arrived. It was Jennifer’s second autumn in Kansas, and this time around she recognized, from lands that had been spared the fire the previous year, the prairie’s apparent cycle of the seasons. This was the time of the year when the grasses, having reached their greatest height, were now tawny and ready to wither, when those tallest flowers of all—the yellow goldenrod and sunflowers—were blooming, and when her students, all a year older, again departed to help their families with the harvesting.

  But, this time around, there was something she hadn’t before seen—at least not in such great numbers…

  Chapter Twelve

  The Prairie Widow

  The ground was littered with grasshoppers. When she went to the well, Jennifer would knock one or two off the bucket. When she went to the stall, she’d find several clinging to the sod walls. And when she went to the garden, she found the most, all eating away at the leaves of her lettuce, potatoes, and watermelons. Karl Pfeffer’s chickens chased them around with outstretched necks, trying to gobble them up, but without much success.

  “Where did they all come from?” wondered Jennifer out loud as she and her children walked through the vegetables to knock away and squash the big, jointy-legged insects with the children’s old shoes.

  Then, while her children worked, Jennifer noticed off to the northwest a strange cloud. It was massive and stretched clear along the length of the horizon. Jennifer at first thought it was an approaching storm and worried about her dugout flooding. But it didn’t really look like a storm cloud.

  Then she thought it might be smoke. Another prairie fire? “Wilkes!” she gasped. But, no, it didn’t look like smoke either.

  This cloud scintillated, almost as if, brushing through the atmosphere, it were crackling with static electricity. Also, it seemed to move fester than the wind was blowing, as if it had a life of its own.

  Below the cloud Jennifer now noticed a distant, solitary horseman, or rather muleman, riding on the trail in her direction. Jennifer hoped it was Joseph. He would know what the cloud was. But when, finally, the man had gotten close enough, Jennifer saw that it was Isaac.

  “Why, Mr. Caulder!” called Jennifer from her door when Issac had at last reached earshot. “I never expect a visit from you!” She waited till he was close enough so that she could lower her voice. “I’m delighted.”

  Isaac Caulder didn’t answer. He just kept up a steady walk on his mule until he came right up to Jennifer.

  “Morning, Mr. Caulder!” called Emma, standing up a moment from her work in the garden. “Did you ever see so many grasshoppers?”

  Isaac Caulder ignored the child. “

  They do seem to be all over,” said Jennifer, looking about her. “But come in. I can spare a moment and make us some tea.”

  Isaac Caulder looked grimmer than usual. His jaw was unshaven. His tired eyes were sunken, his hat slouched low. His whole body hunched over the saddle pommel as if he might soon topple. He seemed so loath to move that he hadn’t even bothered to knock away a grasshopper that clung to his beaten coat and another that stubbornly clung to a long, flicking ear of his mule. “I didn’t come for tea,” muttered Isaac.

  Jennifer lifted her chin, preparing to defend herself once more. “You seem upset over something. I do hope it doesn’t involve that chair Joseph gave me. I told him…”

  “I didn’t come for the chair.” Isaac ground his jaw muscles. “I’ve come to set something right.” The grim man swallowed hard. His eyes focused on the grasshopper-spangled ground. “I come to give you and Joe my blessing.”

  Jennifer pressed back and placed an open hand on her chest. “Your blessing!”

  “And I hope to get your forgiveness.”

  Jennifer softened. She shook her head sympathetically. “You needn’t apologize for anything. I know I must have seemed an intruder. But why don’t you come in so we can talk?”

  “Ain’t possible. I’d only bring more ruin on your home.”

  “Heavens, Mr. Caul
der, you are being more puzzling today than usual.”

  “In the Bible it tells of a ship that nearly sunk ’cause it had a sinner aboard. God wasn’t appeased until that sinner was thrown over.”

  “That was Jonah!” came in Emma, proudly displaying her knowledge. “He was swallowed by the whale!”

  “I’m a sinner,” said Isaac. “And I’m leaving before God scourges this land.”

  “Mr. Caulder,” said Jennifer slowly, “I’m still not sure I’m following you.”

  But even as she spoke, Jennifer found herself distracted by that cloud, which, so much closer now, was filling the sky behind the slumped man on his mule.

  “I sinned twice against you,” continued Isaac, his mule pawing the ground nervously and grunting, as was the mule in the stall. “And then I sinned against Bill by letting him take the blame.”

  Jennifer, still distracted by the cloud, only barely heard her mumbling neighbor. “Take the blame? For what? What are you saying?” Then Jennifer fell silent. She stared up at the bedraggled man. “My God, Mr. Caulder, you don’t mean it was you…”

  “But I’m setting it straight,” said Isaac. “Like I said, you and Joe got my blessing.”

  The cloud behind Isaac Caulder was closer. It moved in great undulating layers, like huge waves of an ethereal sea, its front portions breaking now and then upon the prairie below.

  “And you don’t fret about this scourge,” said Isaac. “It’ll follow me out.”

  “Mr. Caulder,” said Jennifer, not sure where to direct her attention anymore, “if I understand you correctly, then we’ve done a great injustice to Mr. Wilkes.”

  “Justice will be done,” assured Isaac, tugging at his reins and turning his restless mount away. “God has rooted out his sinner.” He started off slowly toward the tall grass.

  Jennifer wished to call out to him, but she could no longer ignore the cloud, which loomed shimmering ever nearer. It engulfed so much of the sky by now that it threatened to swallow the noon sun. And from it could be heard a low hum.