The Homesman

by Glendon Swarthout

  She must have help.

  Andy Giffen would have gone with her, gladly, but Andy Giffen was back east after a wife.

  What was she to do? Choke on her pride and ask Alfred to draw again? Beg the others, even young Sours? Get down on her knees and shed tears before Vester? Let poor Alfred attempt it and fail? Pretend to take sick and be unable?

  No, she must have help.

  In the name of God, who?

  She had routed herself across the snow to tell Vester what had been decided, and get it over with, but now, after a mile, she reined Dorothy north and east, toward home, and eased her back to a trot. It was night now, and she shuddered with cold and unhooked the flaps of her rabbit hat and rode on, full of fear.

  By the time she reached home, three miles later, she was in panic, short of breath, gulping cold air. As fast as she could she watered her mare, stabled and unsaddled her and forked her rack high with hay, then rushed into the house. She lit two candles and set them on opposite sides of the table. She threw off her hat and coat, restarted a fire in the stove, took off boots and shirt and trousers. From the chest of drawers she took out the very best dress Theoline had made for her, one of lustrous maroon taffeta that complemented perfectly, she thought, her dark hair. This she kept up with combs most of the time, but at a party she let it down for this dress and tied it with a maroon ribbon. The dress was floor-length, there were ruffles of maroon lace at the sleeves and around the high neckline, and it buttoned at the bodice. She pulled it on over her head now without buttoning, and seated herself at the table, unrolling and spreading out a five-octave melodeon keyboard she had made from a length of muslin. It was an excellent replica, actual size. The white keys were outlined with, the dark keys stained with, a dye derived from walnut shells crushed and boiled. She smoothed the cloth keyboard, placed her hands, and began to play and sing, when her breath returned, in a deep, contralto voice. She loved music. As she played and sang she felt the ice melt in her, the fear recede, and the void fill slowly with her own warm, strong, real self. She had come to do this often in the endless evenings of this winter. Mary Bee Cuddy believed sometimes that it had preserved her sanity. She sang hymns and ballads, sad songs and sacred, and finished the recital with her favorite ballad, “Take Thee This Token.”

  • • •

  There were five of them this night: Charley Linens, John Cox, Martin Polhemus, who brought rope, Henry Caudill, and the new man, Thor Svendsen, whose wife was in a bad way and who did have a pound of gunpowder.

  They had clouds overhead, but scudding clouds, and in the separations they had moonlight. They talked little. Charley Linens set a steady pace. Each one had a sense of finality. They had plenty of light and gunpowder and men enough to be rid, once for all, of the jumper. Martin Polhemus put it well: “Boys, we’re a-going to blow his ass to Kingdom Come.”

  They located Andy Giffen’s stovepipe up on the flat, and Caudill dismounted with the paper sack of explosive. He would be the exploder. He said he’d give them ten minutes, give or take a minute, then drop the charge down the pipe and hurry on down to see the fun.

  They left him and rode down into the ravine and tied horses to the runt tree, slipped rifles, and sneaked along like Indians past the stable. But they couldn’t fool the jumper’s hard-mouth horse. When they went by he let out some mean snorts. Once into the cover of the gooseberry bushes across from the dugout they laid down flat, side by side in the snow, and fixed on the wink of light at one edge of the window. They were counting along with Henry Caudill.

  That gunpowder, when it hit the fire in the stove, made about the most splendiferous boom they had heard in their born days. Clods of sod catapulted across the whole ravine into the bushes and chunked down around them. After that was over they hoisted themselves to their feet and honed their eyes to see what had happened.

  The job was done all right. Half the front wall of the dugout was blown away. There was no door anymore, no window. There was no trace of stove or stovepipe. They figured the iron of the stove, blown to bits, must have cut the man to pieces. They had saved Andy Giffen his claim, but he would have, on return, a sight of work to do on his house.

  Henry Caudill joined them puffing and said well, let’s get up close, make sure he’s dead. So rifles at the ready they started in a bunch toward the half-hole that had been the front of the dugout. They got within a few rods and stopped in their tracks as though they had been hit over the head.

  Because just then the moon came out and so did Briggs. He sort of staggered out of the hole and staggered around in a circle like a man blind, deaf, and dumb. He didn’t know where he was or the day of the week. And he was a spectacle. His face was smoke black. His hair was concussed every which way. All he had on above was longjohn, and it was black, too, and below were his pants, which were black in the first place, and even his two bare feet were smoky. Suddenly he lurched toward Henry Caudill, arms out as though to get hold of something and hang on, whereupon Henry jammed him hard in the ribs with the business end of his rifle.

  “Hold on there, Mister,” said Henry. “I would take pleasure shooting you.”

  Briggs backed off and Charley Linens said, sharply, “Everybody get around him. Pen him up!”

  This they did, and every time he lunged again he ran into a rifle. And there they stood, five God-fearing farmers, surrounding him, breathing hard. They were edgy. The fact was, they were afraid of him, and had been since that first afternoon when he snaked his gun. And even though they had him helpless now, dead to rights, they had no particular notion what to do with him. One did, though.

  “Oh, I am glad of this,” said Martin Polhemus. “I am glad the sonvabitch ain’t dead. I told you fellers before, I aim to see him dance. That’s why I brung rope. Let’s get him mounted up and down to the river under one of them big trees. Then let’s see him swing and get on home.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Charley Linens.

  “I do,” said John Cox, normally a peaceable man. “I vote with Martin. I got a warm bed waiting.”

  “Count me in,” said Henry Caudill. “How d’you stand, Thor?”

  Svendsen, the tall, spare Norskie who had provided the gunpowder, was decisive. “Hang him. If we let him go, he will jump more claims. If we hang him, he is over.”

  That was logical. “All right,” said Charley Linens. “I’m not easy with it, but I’ll go along.”

  Agreement set them stirring. John Cox kept the prisoner covered. Henry Caudill struck up the ravine to bring the horses. Linens and Polhemus and Svendsen went to the stable to bring out the jumper’s horse and for the life of them couldn’t. He was wild as a catamount cornered. He ripped and reared and kicked and tried to bite and made a terrible racket. What they had to do, finally, was go get Briggs and nudge him into the stable and alongside, and that quieted the bastard beast down. They haltered him and led him out and helped Briggs up on him and tied his hands behind his back and his ankles under the horse. Caudill brought their mounts. They climbed on and, leading the roan, rode on down the ravine a quarter-mile to where it opened out into the north bottom of the Kettle River, which was frozen over. Here was a fine stand of trees, cottonwood and sycamore mostly. Here was where they’d cut the timber for the church-school. And here they selected a big sycamore with a long limb that suited their purpose to a T. They dismounted and moved horse and rider under it. If the rider knew where he was or what was going on he gave no indication. Being handy with rope, Henry Caudill looped and knotted the noose. He slipped it over Briggs’s head and way up under his jaw and slung the coil up over the limb, then yanked it into a fork, then looped the free end around the tree trunk and began to take up slack ever so carefully until he had the line not too taut to choke but taut enough to raise Briggs’s head so he was sitting up straight and staring straight ahead like a soldier at attention. Then he wound the line around the trunk thrice and secured it with a slipknot and cin
ched it up just so. Then they all stood back to take their satisfaction.

  “I’m the one hits that horse out from under him,” announced Martin Polhemus.

  “How’ll it work?” asked John Cox.

  “He won’t have much of a drop,” explained Henry Caudill, the man from Missouri. “It won’t break his neck. It’ll just shet off his wind. I reckon he won’t die for two, three minutes. Not entirely.”

  “So long, you sonvabitch,” said Martin Polhemus to Briggs, moving up close. “I’ll hit this goddam horse so hard he’ll run from here to Ioway.”

  “Hold on.” This was Charley Linens. He walked over to the trunk of the sycamore and laid his forehead up against it a spell, then turned and walked back to the others. “Boys, listen to me,” he said. “This here’s lynching, plain and simple. I never killed a man before, and I don’t care to now. I was praying the Lord, and what I got was, don’t do it. Don’t lynch him. Let him hang himself.”

  “How is that?” asked Thor Svendsen.

  “Why, leave him be,” Charley responded. “Let him set just as he is. That rope’s tighter’n a bowstring. Sooner or later that horse’ll walk out from under him and he’ll hang himself and we won’t have blood on our hands.”

  “Shit,” said Martin Polhemus.

  “Martin, you mind what I say.” Charley Linens rubbed his hands together. “Do we want something we have to be forgiven for later on? What if we’re not? Forgiven, I mean.” He appealed to the rest. “Think about it, boys. We’re all believers. He’s a goner anyhow. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ the Lord said. Well, let’s go on home and let the Lord have it.”

  No one said a word after that. They kicked at the snow or stared out at the ice on the river. Martin Polhemus was the first, unexpectedly, to throw in his hand. He plodded to his horse and grabbed the reins and hauled himself disgustedly into the saddle.

  “Shit,” he said.

  The others went slowly to their animals and mounted. But instead of leaving, they sat for a time in the dark under the tree and had a last, interested look at their handiwork. There he sat, bareback, bound and silent, upright and stiff as a poker, a rider going nowhere to see nobody about nothing. If he so much as looked down or sideways the rope, which had no give to it, would eat into his throat. Charley Linens was right. In an hour, or two, or three, that infernal, four-legged thing he was up on would spook or go off to graze and the confounded claim-jumper would do what the law of gravity decreed. He would damn well drop.

  Martin Polhemus shook a fist at him. “So long, you thieving sonvabitch. All I wish is we’d hung you up by the nuts.”

  “Hey, Jumper,” said Henry Caudill. “Sorry, but there won’t be no claims you can steal in Hell. That country’s all settled.”

  John Cox piped up. “Might as well tell us now, Mister. What in Jehu’s your name?”

  Of course he had no answer. They wheeled out from under the sycamore and away up the ravine through intermittent moonlight. Each man probably asked himself whether they had made a mistake or not, whether they should have hung him and cut him down and buried him then and there or whether they had done the right thing after all, leaving him be, and just as probably had no answer to that either.

  • • •

  She set out for Loup early in the morning. A man named Hessler had stopped by her place the preceding afternoon with a message from Alfred Dowd: the wagon and team and supplies were ready and waiting at the blacksmith’s.

  Morning of the day before she had gone over to tell Vester Belknap even though she dreaded to. She did not go in the house to see Theoline or the girls. She told him about the drawing, that Petzke and Sours and Svendsen were there and she had drawn the black for him and since he had declared he wouldn’t, she had volunteered to go east in his place. It was well she had not expected gratitude from the Kentuckian. To cover his conscience, he covered her with scorn. She was as crazy as the wives. She’d never get there. She’d bog down in the middle of nowhere and they’d all starve to death or be taken captive by goddam murdering Indians. No, he loved his wife too much to trust her to any damn female in the Territory. She heard him out, then said that was the situation, she was going, take it or leave it. Her rig would be ready any day now, and she’d start gathering the women immediately. She would stop at his place last of the four, to see if he had changed his mind. That would be his last chance. If he did change it, he should have a paper for Theoline with the name and address of her kin back home, and blankets, brush, comb, soap, handtowels, and clean underclothing. If he didn’t, if he held her, so be it, her care and keep were his. Vester sent her on her way with a string of language too lewd to ignore. She turned in the saddle and thumbed her nose at him.

  Mary Bee Cuddy had not made a trip into town since November. She had a long list of needs and treats compiled through the winter, but that buying could wait until her return from Iowa. She had a sunny day for the ten miles. Snowdrifts were caving in like cakes. Running water gurgled in the gullies. She lost count of skinny rabbits. Her mare Dorothy knew spring when she saw it. She pranced.

  Seen by a bird, Loup would have resembled buffalo droppings. Seen from terra firma, it was a scatter of shacks and small buildings, some of sod, some of logs, some of both, dropped here and there about a hollow, and through it twisted a main trail of mud and manure. It had a general store and dry goods in which the mail, when it came, was distributed; a bank, with a counter, a desk, and a safe; a saloon with a whiskey barrel and a bar made of planks over sawhorses; a feed yard in which horses and mules were bought and sold and cattle and hogs were slaughtered on local demand; and Buster Shaver’s establishment, consisting of a log smithy, a plank shed, and a stable roofed with brush. In good weather there might have been a hundred people and dogs in Loup any day but Sunday; in bad half that number, counting dogs.

  Mary Bee’s mail disappointed. She had but one letter from Dorothy, her married sister in Geneva, New York, who wrote every month without fail, and a flyer from a nursery in Fort Wayne, Indiana, urging her to put in an orchard of apples, plums, cherries, etc. The gall of them. She’d ordered several of each tree from the very same flyer from the very same nursery last year, and the saplings, when shipped, were in such poor condition she couldn’t persuade them to grow. Writing for her money back had been like writing to a stone wall. The gall of them. The clerk in the general store told her he’d heard there was a ton of mail backed up in Wamego, but the big back up was in St. Joe. Apt to be another month, he said, before the pipe opened. She bought a dime’s worth of cheese and crackers for her lunch.

  Buster Shaver set up shop in Loup before there was a Loup. The town attached itself to him the way a litter attaches itself to a sow. He had two trades, transportation and information, and both were basic, transportation to the economy and information to the curiosity. He could shoe a horse and inform you who was ill and reinforce an axle and inform you who was close to foreclosure and make a singletree and inform you who was pregnant and hub a wheel and inform you who was to blame.

  “Hullo, Mar’ Bee. Hey, you heard about the jumper?” He had the hind leg of a spavined old sorrel tucked up and was trimming a hoof.

  “Hello, Buster. Which one?”

  They might not have seen each other since November, but there was no need to get gushy. Mary Bee and Buster were members of their own mutual-admiration society.

  “One over to Andy’s. Name of Briggs.”

  “Oh. No, I haven’t.”

  “They lynched ’im last night.”

  “They what!”

  “Blew ’im outa the dugout with gunpowder, hung ’im, buried ’im. That’s all she wrote.”

  “Mercy! Who?”

  Buster grinned. “They didn’t leave no callin’ card.” He let down the hind leg. “Say, wanta see yer mules?”

  “Mules!”

  “That’s right.”

  If there’d been someth
ing to sit down on, she would have. “Damn them! Mules? Oh, no. I asked for a good team. They promised—”

  “Petzke and Svendsen.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they got you a span of mules—bought ’em cheap, I hear. Well, c’mon, time the three of you got acquainted.”

  Buster walked her out of the smithy. A man in his fifties, he was short in the legs and long in the arms and thick in the shoulders, causing some to liken his appearance to that of an ape, though never in his presence. He walked her into his stable and there were the mules. Mary Bee looked at them hopelessly. “I don’t know a thing about mules!”

  “Who does?”

  “Are they sound?”

  “Sound enough.”

  “Are they kickers?”

  A straight face. “I asked ’em. They said no.”

  “Why does that one twitch his ears?”

  Buster was up a tree. To gain time, he reached down and flicked dried mud from his leather apron. “I expect,” he theorized, “because he’s thinking. It must hurt a mule to think, and as his mind is between his ears, he twitches ’em to relieve the hurt.” He sighed. “Anything else?”

  “Damn them.”

  “The mules?”

  “Otto Petzke and Thor Svendsen. How do you harness mules?”

  “Same as horses. How else?”

  “Show me.”

  Buster started, she helping him with bridles and collars until she said, “Wait a minute. This is shaft harness, not tongue. I asked them for a good strong wagon, not a buckboard. What have they—”

  “Hold on. Let’s finish up and hitch ’em up, then you can have a fit.”

  They finished, Buster backed the span out of the stable, and using the traces as reins walked them around behind the plank shed, Mary Bee following.

  “My Lord, what’s that!”

  She was as bowled over as she had been by the mules. The vehicle resembled a big box on wheels. Away from everything, on flat land, it would stick out like a sore thumb. From a distance, it might have been a hearse. Closer up, there was something ominous about it, even fateful. It was the kind of rig in which criminals would be carried, or soldiers being slow-marched and drum-rolled to a firing squad. Just to look at it lowered your spirits.