“I don’t use names.”
“Oh. What d’you call your horse?”
“ ‘Horse.’ ”
“ ‘Horse,’ ” she said.
“ ‘Horse,’ ” he repeated.
“That’s all,” she said.
“That’s all,” he repeated. “I don’t care to get too choice of anyone or anything.”
“I see.” She considered that. “Well, my mare’s name is ‘Dorothy,’ after my sister.”
She waited. That gave him a lead, and if he had a smithereen of social instinct he’d take it, he’d inquire politely about her sister, or her family, or her origins. She waited in vain. He was an utter dolt. And so, eventually, she took her own lead, plodding through her past as though she were following a plow up and down a field while his eyelids drooped and his head sank. Dorothy was her older sister, two years older. They had no brothers. Dorothy was happily married to a doctor, had a little boy, six, and was expecting another child, she’d just written as much. She lived in Bath, on Lake Keuka, in upper York State, where both girls had been born and raised. Their father was a tanner, and she could still remember the smell of the acid when he came home evenings from the tannery. Her mother died when she, Mary Bee, was twelve. She attended the Troy Female Seminary, taught primary school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for eight years, and then applied to Catharine Beecher’s National Popular Education Board in Boston to be tested and inspired and transported out west, her way paid. To serve God and her church, to light a candle of learning in the darkness of the far frontier—these were her intentions. That she hoped also to have some adventures and to catch a strong, handsome, educated, industrious, virile paragon of a husband went without saying to anyone, certainly to Briggs. She was accepted and soon, with her friend Miss Clara Marsh, transported to the Territory by rail, steamer, and stage. In the winter of that dreadful year at the school south of Wamego, word came that her father had passed away, and in the spring came her inheritance. Within weeks she had bought a claim from a new widow and started putting in a crop. The driver’s chin reached his chest.
“Am I keeping you awake, Mr. Briggs?” she asked.
His head jerked erect.
“Why, no, Cuddy,” said he, touching the brim of his hat. “You are putting me to sleep.”
One day he turned the wagon down into a stand of timber to water the animals and fill the keg. As soon as they stopped by the considerable stream, Mary Bee jumped down, walked stiff-legged to the nearest tree, a black walnut, and flung her arms around it, holding it in her embrace for several minutes. Perhaps what she missed most, she told Briggs defiantly, cheek to trunk, was trees, the trees she had known and loved in York State—maple and beech, poplar and birch, spruce and cedar, in all their multitudes. She let the women out and put them back. Then, as they moved away through the timber, Briggs held up the mules. Ahead of them, atop four poles cut from young trees, was a scaffold of saplings lashed together and to the poles by rawhide thongs. There were three such platforms. On each lay a shape the size of a human wrapped in a buffalo hide. Corpses, said Briggs. Winnebago. This was how they did it. They sat for a moment in stillness. A crow cawed, distantly. Briggs eased the wagon alongside the nearest scaffold and climbed back on top, over the gear on hands and knees. He leaned, got a grip on the buffalo hide encasing the corpse, and yanked on it until it pulled free and dumped the body off the scaffold. Before it thudded on the ground Mary Bee had exclaimed in horror and averted her eyes. Briggs shook the hide, whacked it on the platform to get the dust out of it, spread it on the wagon top to air, and resumed his seat and driving. That day, whenever Mary Bee chanced to see the hide, she felt sick at her stomach. That night, at bedtime, Briggs laid his two blankets over the hide and rolled up in all three. In the morning he announced he had slept warm for the first time.
She had all her valuables in the velvet sewing bag now: a sheet with the name and address of Theoline Belknap’s sister in Kentucky; the packet of letters and the name and address of Karl Koenig, Hedda Petzke’s brother near Springfield, Illinois; the paper with the names of Arabella Sours’s numerous family in Ohio, and her pink cameo pinned to a piece of cardboard; the envelope with the names and addresses of Gro Svendsen’s two cousins in Minnesota; the cloth melodeon keyboard; the last letter from Dorothy; and the envelope the banker had given her containing six fifty-dollar notes on the Bank of Loup and addressed to Mr. George Briggs, c/o Mrs. Altha Carter, Ladies Aid Society, Methodist Church, Hebron, Iowa; plus her own ten dollars in greenbacks. By day the bag was rolled up in her blankets. By night she slept with it. In her bones she knew she had been right to bring the three hundred dollars rather than mailing it, but the same bones told her indubitably that if Briggs laid hands on it, he would abandon them forthwith. If he was the other things she believed him to be, he could certainly be a thief. A man of low character. An ignoramus. A stick-in-the-mud. A dolt. A brute—only a brute could have split Vester Belknap’s scalp. She had ransacked her vocabulary for the one noun that would perfectly peg him. Most of the men who came to the plains were good men, hardy and brave, God-fearing and ambitious, family men. Oh, there were exceptions, lowest on the scale, the outlaws and ne’er-do-wells. The in-between batch consisted of culls, inferior in every aspect, taking what they could, contributing nil. Eureka. She had her noun. The claim-jumper was a cull.
The next morning the mules, harnessed and hitched, would not go. Mary Bee had the reins. She clucked till her tongue tired. Briggs sat impassive beside her. She stood up, grasped the reins, and gave each beast a smart switch on the croup. Neither budged. The Thinker twitched his ears. The Worker was adamant. She gave them a second switch. They would not go. She consigned them to Perdition. She switched again. They stood stubborn as—as mules.
“Damn!” she cried, and sat down.
Briggs got down and unhitched them, and taking the span by both bridles, trailing the reins, led them out of the shafts and around the wagon in a wide circle, backed them into the shafts, hitched them up again as though for the first time that morning, handed Mary Bee the reins, and took his seat.
She clucked.
Away they went.
She looked at Briggs, who was looking at her, and he did something so startling she could have fallen from the seat.
He gave her a wink.
• • •
As the long miles hissed and grumbled under the wheels of the frame wagon, she studied her four charges with great interest, making daily entries in a kind of mental notebook.
There was no change in the condition of Mrs. Petzke, who had been terrorized into insanity. Her paralysis persisted. She could walk only with an arm about her waist, moving and supporting her, and could take nourishment only if fed by hand. She seemed never to sleep. Mary Bee would peer in at her as she lay under the wagon at night, tethered by a wrist to a wheel spoke, and her eyes were always open, the pupils always dilated. Sometimes she whimpered. It was as though the poor woman was still besieged by wolves, and would be as long as she lived.
Mrs. Sours seemed to have lost permanently the use of her legs. Briggs carried her to meals and to relieve herself. Awake or asleep, she clutched the rag doll. She was scrawny, her cheeks pale, her flaxen hair had no luster, and incredibly, for a girl of nineteen, she showed no animation. Mary Bee fed her, too, by morsel, with her fingers. She opened her mouth for food like an infant, but ate without appetite. Her paralysis seemed to be as much of the will as of the body, and to Mary Bee she was the most pitiful of the four.
The dangerous one, Mrs. Svendsen, turned out to be anything but homicidal. Now that she had been removed from the presence of her husband, the hate that had glittered in her eyes was gone and she seemed entirely harmless. When spoken to, as Mary Bee did, she made no response except to say, from time to time, and in a placid manner, “God will strike you down.” She was frequently sleepless at night, turning and tossing under the wagon with sig
hs and groans, due perhaps to an inner agitation which did not manifest itself by day.
Among the women Mrs. Belknap, dear Theoline, was the most obviously demented. Her rest at night was fitful, and while awake she often babbled softly in a language intelligible only to herself. She threw her eyes about at random. She ate like a bird. She understood nothing said to her, and Mary Bee gradually developed a theory: Theoline must remain demented, because if her mind cleared, and guilt entered, she would kill herself. There must have been at least one rational moment, then, a moment when her murder of her baby had been revealed to her in all its horror, or she would not have bitten through the radial artery in her forearm. Mary Bee took care to change the bandaging on that wrist every several days, and to keep the other bound in case Theoline’s mind cleared again.
These were observations she could make when they were out of the wagon. When they were inside, after she had closed and bolted the rear doors, they were hidden to her, and she had no idea how they reacted to the confinement and to each other. There was one curious thing: when she opened the doors at each stop, none of the women had moved en route. Each sat in exactly the same place on the bench and on the same side that she had taken all along. And each was separated from the woman beside her and across from her by several inches, so that there would be no physical contact no matter how rough the ride. It was as though each of the four was determined to stake out her own space, her own inches, to isolate herself in her own individual Hell.
It was late March, but there had been no shift of season. Winter would not go. Spring would not come. Instead, ten like days shuffled from one end of the plains to the other. They were divided only by darkness. Every day of the ten the sky was gray, the air still and swollen. Every day a gray wagon crawled under a gray sky from one part of the plains to another. Every day the land lengthened before it.
Then late one afternoon there was a breeze, from the north, and welcome to it. But soon it became a wind, and Briggs sniffed it. They were going to have a blow, he said, he didn’t know what kind, but a hell of a big blow. He stopped and stood on the seat but could find no river bottom or sheltering timber or even a deep draw. He continued until he could drive the wagon down into a buffalo wallow, which would give them close to three feet of advantage. He ordered Mary Bee to hurry, to get the women out of the wagon and under it, together with their bedrolls and his and hers. While she hurried, he unlashed the tarpaulin and cleared the top of the wagon, and when the women were out, he hauled out the grub box, shoved it under the wagon, and loaded the interior with everything from the top, blocking one north window with a sack of cornmeal stood on a saddle, the other with a sack of beans. By now the day was blackening to night, suddenly, and the wind was growing to a gale. He got hammer and nails and, with Mary Bee holding it, nailed the tarp to the north side of the wagon to cut off whatever was coming, rain or hail. Finally, he unhitched and unharnessed the span and the roan and mare, and rather than picketing them, tied the four animals to wheel spokes on the south side of the wagon. Here they’d be close, and in the lee, and though they might suffer they wouldn’t scare off and go gallivanting. He and Mary Bee went under the box then, and got themselves and the women into blankets just as the storm smote the wagon with a blast that hoisted both north wheels entirely off the ground.
It was an ice storm, a phenomenon of the plains. Clouds of ice particles almost as fine as flour were hurled across the level land by a roaring gale. Neither man nor beast could confront them. In the open a person’s face was covered with ice instantly, his eyes frozen shut, his breath taken away, his clothing so penetrated by ice that his whole body was encased. Only the protection afforded by the wagon and the tarpaulin saved these travelers. As it was, the tarp began to flap and whipped them violently until they got hold of it and pulled it inward and weighted it with their bodies. Even with lee shelter the animals suffered terribly. In an hour their bodies were sheeted in ice; in two hours their heads were the size of bushel baskets, made into masses of ice by their congealed breathing. Soon after, neither mules nor horses could support the heavy cumbers and lowered their heads to the ground. For hours the storm assailed the wagon and those beneath it. The six humans clung together in a kind of clump, blankets and a buffalo hide around and over them. Mary Bee could have no knowledge of what went on in the women’s heads, whether or not they were frightened. She was. There were moments when it seemed the wind would muscle the entire wagon into the air, the animals tied to it, and hurl it Heaven knew where. She tried to imagine her fright away by imagining herself away, not under a wagon on the prairie with four madwomen and a cull of a man but with a trusty captain on a stout bark on some romantic sea, tempest-tossed. Only once did she ask herself what would have happened in this emergency had she started out alone with the women, had Briggs not been there—and dared not answer the question. Toward morning the wind ceased to blow as abruptly as it had begun, and the only sound on earth was the breathing of animals through holes at their noses. It was black night yet, but presently the black washed to gray and then a great golden sun was lifted over the horizon, the first sun they had seen in eleven days, and in minutes its rays turned the world of ice into one made of diamonds. It blazed with a brilliance almost divine. The ground, for instance, was three inches deep in white fire. The six squinted. A cranky Briggs was first out from under the wagon, and after a bout of catarrh, hawking and spitting and cursing, then turning his back and passing water in plain sight, he said he wanted them moving, no food, nothing, so get to it. Using the flat of the ax like a club, he knocked the ice off the mules and horses, off the harness and the tarp. Mary Bee unloaded the wagon and got the women into it. She climbed up on top, and he heaved saddles and supplies up to her. She lashed down the tarp while he tied the mare and roan and hitched the span, and in fairly short order they were out of the wallow and crunching east again through light so bright it hurt the eyes. But within three miles they were past the ice and the ground was its old patch snow and brown grass again, as though the storm had never been. The sky was blue, not gray. The air had a remembered warmth. Mary Bee thought she saw a robin and a mockingbird. It had been the deadliest winter the Territory had known, taking an awful toll of its people, as witness the women behind her; but this storm, His storm, though limited in area, had at last blown down winter’s walls and let spring in, real spring. She was grateful to her God.
Near noon she made Briggs stop, opened the grub box, and gave everyone a cold corn dodger. She had just regained her seat and bitten hungrily into hers when screaming inside the wagon brought her down again. She ran to the doors, unbolted, and flung them open.
At first she couldn’t see clearly. Mrs. Sours and Line Belknap, nearest the doors, were cowering in fear, heads covered by their arms. She pulled them outside, then realized that Mrs. Svendsen was attacking Mrs. Petzke, had thrown her down on the bench and was beating her with her fists.
“Help!” she cried to Briggs, and jumped inside to stop Gro Svendsen. She struggled with her, but Gro was a wild woman and strong, and before Briggs could reach them Mary Bee was shoved out of the wagon and borne to the ground and being beaten viciously.
Suddenly the woman was hauled upward. Gro Svendsen’s felt cap had fallen off, and Briggs had her by the hair of her head.
He swung her about and with his free hand gave her a sharp slap on the cheek.
The fight went out of her. The hatred in her blue eyes faded. She sagged.
Briggs bound her with his arms and lifted her over the step and into the wagon and dumped her on a bench like a sack of beans.
He went to the front of the wagon, under the seat, and brought back hammer, nails, and the four leather strips he had cut from harness traces at Mary Bee’s place just before leaving. In the box again, he hammered eight nails through the hardwood planking, four on each side, and fitting a strip across Mrs. Svendsen’s body and arms just above the elbows, pushed the hole in each end of the strip over a
nailhead. She was strapped to the wall tightly. She could move neither of her arms and had to sit upright.
“No, no,” choked Mary Bee. Tears rolled down her cheeks, which were bruised. Her ribs ached from blows.
Briggs stepped down and, taking Mrs. Sours inside, strapped her against the opposite wall.
“You will not!” sobbed Mary Bee.
He proceeded to do likewise with Mrs. Petzke and with Line Belknap, then exiting the wagon, hammer in one hand, an extra nail protruding from his mouth, closed and bolted the doors.
“I won’t have it!” cried Mary Bee. “They’re not prisoners, they’re precious human beings! The Lord’s creatures! Let them go!”
“They’re crazy as bedbugs,” said Briggs around the nail. “And I intend to get ’em to Ioway before they kill each other.”
“You must never touch them again!”
“I’ll do what needs doing,” he replied, and heading for the front end of the wagon, put away hammer and nail and took the seat and reins.
“You’ll do as I tell you!” Mary Bee cried at him. “I am in charge! I saved your life!”
“Suit yourself,” said Briggs, starting the mules and moving the wagon away.
She stood her ground. He wouldn’t dare.
“Stop!” she shrieked.
It was inconceivable that he would leave her here alone, without food, water, mount, or friend, but minutes passed and he did exactly that. She must run after the wagon, she had no choice, but pride rooted her, and fury. Then the vehicle disappeared, driven down into a draw evidently, and she was in fact abandoned.
All at once the dark familiar deep was in her. She was going void. But when she shivered, and felt the first crystal of fear form in the void, she commenced to run, headlong, in panic. Her heavy boots and coat burdened her, and she could not run far. Soon she was exhausted and slowed to a walk, and in a while came to the edge of the draw. There, below, was the wagon. He had stopped it out of sight to wait for her, cocksure she would, she must, follow. She descended to it in long strides, reached the front end, and climbed to the seat beside the driver. Without a look or word he clucked to the mules.
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