The Homesman

by Glendon Swarthout

  But she was mistaken. It was not the ague, because Hedda Petzke stayed feverish all the long, miserable day in the wagon, and that night after supper, after Briggs and the other women were bedded down, Mary Bee sat up with her by the fire wetting the rag, wringing it out, replacing it on her forehead, herself as miserable as the day had been. The night was starry and still except for the sounds of the sick woman, prostrate by the fire under blankets, and the snuff and click of the animals out in the dark, picketed and grazing. In the middle of it, Briggs came to the fire from his bed by the wagon.

  “Can’t you quiet her down?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know. It can’t be the ague. Oh, dear, oh, dear, I’d never forgive myself if I lost her.”

  Briggs went back to his bed, rustled about, and returned with his buffalo robe, a blanket, and his precious jug. He laid the robe over Mrs. Petzke, pulled the blanket around his shoulders, sat down, and treated himself.

  “She needs to sweat,” he said.

  “She’s already on fire.”

  “Never mind.”

  Mary Bee took off her rabbit hat. “How long now to the river?”

  “Two weeks. Less. Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how much more time you fritter away.”

  He was cross. He was losing sleep.

  “I can’t wait,” she said. “I want to see a real town, with streets, and trees.”

  “A real saloon,” he said.

  “And houses made of wood.”

  “With lamps.”

  “And people.”

  “And a fiddler.”

  “A hot bath.”

  “Corn for the mules.”

  “In a big tub.” She sighed. “Hebron. Hebron, Iowa. I dream of it.”

  The fire was low. Mary Bee got up, poked at it, added wood, sat down again. “Where do you plan to cross?”

  “Kanesville maybe. I dunno yet.”

  “How far is that from Hebron?”

  “Mile or so.”

  The blanketed woman groaned, a series of groans that carried far from the fire. Mary Bee came to her knees, rewet the rag, and bathed her face with it, then lowered her covers and bathed her throat and hands.

  “Oh, I feel so helpless. I pray God for her. When her husband came home, and her boys, they found four dead wolves—I told you. She’d killed four wolves. She’s been through so much already, and now this. To come this far and lose her would be sinful. It would break my heart.”

  Briggs commented with his jug. “You mailed that money?”

  “You saw me, in Loup. I’m sure Mrs. Carter has it by now. As soon as we meet her you’ll have it and be free to go.” Mary Bee covered her patient again and sat for a time staring into the fire. At length she said, “I wish you’d treat me decently the rest of the way.”

  He was silent.

  “I have said some things that I regret. I apologize. I’ve been under a great strain.”

  The new wood blazed, and she looked into his face and found nothing.

  “If it will make you more kindly to me, Mr. Briggs, I’ll confess something. I’ll confess I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “Well, well,” he said.

  “Saving you from hanging—you’ve repaid that ten times over. I wouldn’t have made it a week from Loup by myself. You’ve been right more often than wrong. Mrs. Svendsen, for example. I had no idea how dangerous she could be. You were wise to strap them in. And then the Indians.”

  “I hadn’t swapped ’em your horse, we’d be dead, the lot of us.”

  “I know. You were right about the wagon train, too. I couldn’t imagine they would turn us away.”

  “The wagon,” he said. In case she forgot, he was glad to remind her.

  “I could never have repaired it.”

  “The botts.”

  “I simply don’t know how to doctor stock. Charley Linens has always done it for me. I could never have tracked Arabella Sours either.”

  “She saved my bacon. Freighter had her. She hadn’t shot him, he’d have killed me.”

  “Mercy. And when the mules wouldn’t go, and you tricked them into it. Well, it’s a very long list, and I’m truly grateful.”

  Briggs hawked and spat into the fire. The cool night air affected his catarrh. Then she said something she shouldn’t have but couldn’t resist.

  “And you dance very well.”

  He scowled. She bit her tongue. But she was spared his response, whatever it might have been, because Hedda Petzke twisted and turned and groaned again, loudly.

  “Hell,” said Briggs. “Get me a cup.”

  She did as bade, searching in the grub box nearby until she found a cup. He poured whiskey into it from his jug, sloshed the jug, listened, poured a bit more, and set the cup in the coals of the fire. The higher fire and the lack of his hat let Mary Bee have a sharp look at him. His cheeks and chin were stubbled. He shaved only now and then. His hair had considerable gray in it. If eyes were the windows of the soul, he was short a soul, for in them there was nothing she could discern or guess, nothing. His was an ordinary face. He was an ordinary man. Neither the ripped sleeve of his coat nor the ragged red scarf always about his neck set him apart. Except for the charred grip of the revolver under his belt, and the special bowie knife, he was nondescript. In a crowd you could lose him and never care. For that matter his name was probably not “Briggs,” he had intimated as much himself. Summed up, he was a cipher, and just as it made no sense to witch for water in a place where none was ever found, so it was absurd to plumb for depths in him there couldn’t possibly be. His age stumped her. He had to be on the shady side of forty, that was certain, but a difference of ten years between them made no difference. The balding widower Clara Marsh had married was at least fifteen years her senior, but so far as Mary Bee knew, she was content as a cow in clover.

  Briggs poked the cup out of the coals to let the liquor cool a trifle. He tilted his jug again and discovered it empty.

  “Goddammit,” he said.

  He stood up in a temper, held the jug at arm’s length with a finger through the handle, and taking two steps whirled and hurled it into the darkness. Next he picked up the cup, knelt beside Mrs. Petzke, put an arm under her shoulders, raised her, and forcing the rim between her lips, poured the warm whiskey into her with the same solicitude he had shown the off mule while getting tobacco tea down its gullet. She spluttered, choked. When she had somehow got it down, he laid her back, pitched the cup, and seated himself in his blanket.

  “There,” he said. “That’ll do. She’ll sweat or she’ll croak.”

  They waited.

  “You have no use for women,” asserted Mary Bee after a spell.

  “So you think,” said Briggs.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I lived with one once.”

  “Oh?”

  He didn’t take the bait, but could not have anyway because Hedda Petzke groaned suddenly and lifted herself on her elbows and Mary Bee crawled to her and found her gushing sweat.

  “The fever’s broken!” She uncovered the woman again and washed her face and throat and hands with the rag. “She’s wringing wet, oh, I’m so glad!” And when she had finished, let her down and watched over her as she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  After a few minutes, on his own initiative Briggs lifted Mrs. Petzke in his arms, blankets and robe, carried her to the wagon, laid her underneath, tied her wrist to a wheel spoke, and rolled himself into his bed, leaving Mary Bee alone by the fire. Soon she heard him snore.

  Before she bedded down herself, on her knees, hands clasped, eyes open to the stars, she thanked God for the deliverance and asked Him to bless George Briggs, thief and cull and dancer, for the sacrifice of his whi
skey.

  She found a second reason, in the ensuing days, to be thankful. It seemed to her the condition of the four women was much improved, at least physically. The bondage of their lives to the frontier, to husbands and children and weather and pain and solitude, was behind them now. Someone else fed them now, washed hands and faces, combed and brushed hair, attended them in every way with constancy and affection. They had color. Their tireless hands were now at rest. And they were more at ease with each other. In the beginning, each one had claimed her own space in the wagon, her own isolation; now they impinged upon each other daily, shoulders, elbows, hips, and did not appear to dread or resent it. Mrs. Sours could walk now—indeed, could run away if she wished, as she had done. There was nothing hostile in Gro Svendsen’s manner or movements. Time and kindness and absence from the marriage bed had washed away her hatred as surely as lye soap. Hedda Petzke had regained mobility of arms and legs. The size and shape of her eyes were normal. She no longer whimpered. The wolves she had slain were slain forever now, and forgotten. Theoline Belknap, who only weeks ago had bitten through the radial artery of her wrist, was a different person altogether. Her wrist had healed. She did not cast her eyes this way and that. She ate heartily, slept well. But though Mary Bee tried often to speak to her friend, her replies, as they had been, were only monosyllables. “Dear Line,” she would say, “how are you today?” “Dar, dar,” was the response, or “Im, im, im,” or something equally meaningless. Communication with the others was no more possible. She could address them directly, looking directly into their empty eyes, to no avail. They had simply lost the power of speech. That was the sadness. There was no mental improvement whatever. She likened them in a small way to herself. They, too, were void inside, but whereas she was filled on occasion with fear or fury, in their case neither love nor memory nor light would ever suffuse that total darkness. Mary Bee was of divided opinion about them. If they had been defeated, in defeat they were also victorious. If they were free now, that freedom had been won at awful cost. She wondered sometimes—in which state were they better off, sane or insane? Suppose, she mused, suppose she were to wake one morning and find these women restored in mind and body by a miracle. Would she turn the wagon round and take them back to drudgery and hardship, to babies and loneliness, to disease and the demands of men who would ask of them more than they had power to give? Perhaps not, perhaps she would stay the course. They were going home, after all, ghosts of what they had been, yes, but going home, to their roots, freedwomen, to the arms of their kin and the mercy of their Maker.

  Arabella Sours’s recovery most pleased Mary Bee. Nineteen! By that age the girl had lived a lifetime. Wed at sixteen, toted all the weary way out west from Ohio with a doll for a child and a boy for a mate, keeping house in a dugout, mothering three babies in three years to stand by, helpless, while they perished one by one in less than three days—only someone as young and strong as Arabella would survive such dire events and bloom as she was blooming now. Her step was light again, her cheeks rosy. Though she was speechless, she smiled sometimes, particularly at Briggs. This vexed Mary Bee until she could construct a logical explanation. The girl was grateful to him. She had lost her children, and lost her mind because she was unable to save them, hence blamed herself for their deaths. On the other hand, she had indeed killed the freighter during her runaway, and in so doing saved Briggs’s life. To the extent that this deed redeemed her, and reduced the burden of her guilt, she was therefore grateful to him. She smiled at him during meals. Mary Bee was touched. ­Arabella then began to look long at him in the evenings by the fire. Mary Bee was alerted. The next evening young Mrs. Sours offered the man food from her plate. Mary Bee was alarmed.

  Matters came to a head that very night. She woke, soon after falling asleep, to hear a voice, a man’s voice, speaking in low tone. She raised herself on her elbows. She had bedded down as usual on one side of the wagon, Briggs on the other. There was yet light enough from the fire to let her look under it. She could see only three sleeping, blanketed forms. One of the women had untied her wrist from the wheel spoke and risen. Mary Bee got up and in bare feet slipped around the rear end of the wagon. What she saw shocked the breath from her body.

  Arabella Sours had freed herself and come to Briggs’s bed. She knelt beside him, bending over him, his face in her hands. She was kissing him passionately, his cheeks, his forehead, his lips.

  Mary Bee went void. In the dark deep inside her a light flared, and instantly she was full of flame, which was fury.

  She ran to them.

  “In the name of God!” she cried.

  She seized one of the girl’s arms and pulled her to her feet, then hauled her round the front end of the wagon and over the shafts, and pushed her roughly down and over onto her bed, crawled in after her, and tied her wrist tightly to a wheel spoke. Arabella Sours did not struggle. The other women were awake now, and watching.

  Mary Bee then crawled out from under the wagon, and standing, bending, glared beneath.

  “Shame on you, Arabella Sours,” she said. “Shame on all of you. I’ve seen you look at this man.”

  She waved a finger like a switch.

  “You stay shy of him. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know anything.”

  Briggs didn’t trust his ears.

  “I warn you, mind your p’s and q’s or you’ll be sorry!” she threatened. “I’ll leave you to shift for yourselves! D’you hear me? I’ll leave you!”

  She was beside herself. She strode to Briggs to loom over him, gasping for breath, hands clenched into fists.

  “You beast!” she cried. “How dare you!”

  Briggs propped his elbows, looking up at her.

  “To take advantage! Of a girl lost her mind! The lowest thing! A man can do!”

  Her words came in bursts as her lungs labored.

  “None of my doing,” Briggs objected, his face poker. “She came to me.”

  “Did I bring you along? For a bull? To service us all?”

  “Shit,” said Briggs.

  “Damn you! None of us safe! Damn, damn, damn you, Devil!”

  This outburst used her up, her breath and strength. And this time, for the first time ever, she was entirely consumed by the flames within the void. Mary Bee fainted dead away, falling heavily over the man on the ground as a tree falls in fire.

  She was shocked again, into consciousness, minutes later. He had carried her back to her bed, covered her against the damp, found a cup in the grub box, filled it, and slapped her face with cold water, after which he went back to his own bed.

  • • •

  She did not utter a word to him the next day, early morning to evening, did not address him with so much as a look. Briggs knew she was madder than a wet hen, but this was more than one of her fits. She had been het up before at him, but today was different. She seemed to drive the wagon, to cook, to see to the women as though she were alone, separate and remote, as though she had left the party and gone off by herself somewhere. And that was exactly what she did that evening after supper. She washed the dishes in a red sunset and walked away into a twilight hush, and when she was gone too long, he went out on the prairie in search of her. He had strolled perhaps a hundred rods when he heard a woman singing. He moved silently in the direction of the song until he could understand the words.

  If thou should hasten

  To lands wild and wide,

  Take thee this token,

  My heart from my side.

  Take thee this token,

  My love with thee bide.

  He moved closer. A middle moon was rising, and that, with the last of the twilight, enabled him to tell that she was seated on the grass, her back to him, and spread out before her was a long strip of cloth with dark and white markings which looked to him—he squinted to be sure—like a keyboard. Her hands moved over it, her fingers touched it. Damned
if she wasn’t playing a piano keyboard made of cloth, and accompanying herself as she sang. It was a fact. Make-believe music, sort of. He’d heard everything out here—wolves howling and buffalo bellowing and Indians whooping and bugles blowing and the roar of a prairie fire—but never anything like this. He shivered. The woman’s song hunted the dark plain like a hawk.

  If thou should prosper,

  Hear my heart pray,

  Send me a summons

  To wed thee one day.

  Take thee this token,

  And love me alway.

  But if I should perish,

  Thy promises keep,

  Take thee our two hearts

  And bury them deep.

  Take thee our tokens,

  In love let us sleep.

  Briggs backed away, slowly, turned, and headed for camp. Well, hell, he thought. If she’s ready, there’s room for five in the wagon.

  • • •

  And when, during the night, someone or something touched him, he was instantly awake with a hand on his Colt’s, and when he saw her seated beside him, he shivered again. This was batty, too, her being here, just like singing and playing a cloth piano. Not a word out of her to him all day yesterday and here she was. Look out, he said to himself. She might have a knife. She could harm you or, just as likely, harm herself.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “I could,” he said.

  She sat between him and the remains of the fire so that she was outlined, and he noted the breadth of her shoulders. Cuddy was a big woman. In bed she could break a man’s back.

  “How long now?” she asked.