River People

by Margaret Lukas

  The redheaded creature in the buggy watched her with large eyes. A girl—worthless as herself. How did Rev. Jackdaw expect her to accept that and forget these little boys? The child looked sweet enough, not yet the way newspapers depicted the Irish. At what age would her face change and take on the ugly features of a bulldog? Rev. Jackdaw ought to climb back in his contraption, slap the reins on his old mule of a horse, and take himself and the one he called Rooster away.

  She kissed Curly’s cheeks and hurried for the baby. There was no going back. Rev. Jackdaw had married them himself, and night after night he’d done to her. She’d not been pregnant with Jury’s seed, but she was ruined now. She belonged to the preacher.

  Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and Johnny screamed, “Effie!” Carrying the baby on one hip and the basket of laundry on the other, she let Curly hold a fistful of her skirt to help tug him along. On the porch, Granny hooked the handle of her cane over her chair, laid the shotgun across the rail and let Ma steer her inside. “Lith.” She grabbed at Ma’s hair. “Lith.”

  Effie followed with Johnny on her skirts now too, remembering how Ma’s hair had once been a golden yellow. Would her new life in Nebraska turn her own hair white before its time?

  Rain hammered the roof. Evening faded to darkness. Effie couldn’t bear seeing the orphan huddled in the buggy, alone and wet. Earlier, Rev. Jackdaw told the child to get down, but he hadn’t insisted—as though it hardly mattered to him. The girl hadn’t obeyed.

  “Come in,” Effie shouted. She stood in her wool cape and cotton bonnet at the edge of the covered porch as water rattled overhead and rolled off in a screen. “You’ll catch your death.” Her yelling didn’t make the orphan stir, but the next lightning strike, so close Effie jumped back with a shriek, sent the girl running through the rain and onto the porch. Standing beside her, Effie bit her lip. Weren’t the Irish all trouble? Thieves, even murderers?

  The house was warm and dry, but Skeet was there with his meanness and Granny who’d screamed at the child.

  “Stay out here.” Effie hesitated. “Ma don’t want water dripping on her floor.”

  The girl turned toward a dry porch corner where the pups curled with their mama.

  “Anyway,” Effie said, “we’re leaving as soon as all the packing is done.”

  Lightning flashed again and for a long second, night blinked to day. Rev. Jackdaw stood just inside the barn door looking like the storm itself. He watched her.

  She turned back to the orphan. It would be the two of them traveling alone with Rev. Jackdaw. “What’s your name?”

  “Bridget.”

  Nearly an hour passed before the rain slowed to a mist. Effie watched from the window as Rev. Jackdaw pulled the wobbly cart he’d concealed behind the barn to the back of the buggy. Days earlier, he’d found the two-wheeled thing along the road and recognized “the gift the Lord sent him.” She hadn’t asked why he needed to hide something sent from God. He set a burlap sack of oats in the corner of the cart—found, no doubt, in Pa’s granary. She hugged herself thinking of the small mouse-proof granary. Cement walls, windowless, so that no matter the hour of the day it held a pitch blackness as deep as hell and just as full of evil.

  Rev. Jackdaw punched at the top of the burlap bag, making it squatter and less visible. He laid his new rope, thick and heavy, on top. With wire he’d also claim he found in the barn—as though Pa saved wire especially for him—he began lashing the cart to the buggy.

  “Come on,” he shouted through the glass.

  She hurried out with the first of what she planned to take: mostly scraps of housewares stored in the barn for thirty years.

  He finished twisting and bending the wire. Water dripped off the brim of his hat, and he frowned at what she carried: two dented pans and a tin coffee kettle. “You’re bringing nonsense. Consider the weight.”

  She hurried back inside, glancing over her shoulder at the tired horse. Nell was accustomed to pulling the buggy with Rev. Jackdaw, but now she’d have the additional weight of the cart, Effie’s things, and the heaviness of two more people. Suppose the old horse died on the way to Nebraska? Would they end up walking, carrying what they could on their backs? Abandoning the rest?

  Granny sat at the table muttering, her cane jittering on the floor, her mind winding up now that darkness had descended. She pushed at items on the table. “Take!”

  Effie considered the copy of Dr. Chase’s Third Last and Complete Receipt Book. The tome was nearly a thousand pages and covered everything from making pies, to diseases of the bowel, to curing horse tumors with arsenic. She couldn’t read—though Rev. Jackdaw could—but the weight?

  Granny’s cane lifted like a skinny, wooden arm. The tip poked the book. “Nith!”

  “The recipe’s in here for getting rid of lice?” Effie slowly picked up the book. She hesitated longer when Granny nudged her gun. “Are you sure?”

  “Nebrathka full of Injun.” Granny’s remaining teeth clicked. “Thoot ’em!” Then almost instantly, “Who will thleep with me? Not thupid one!”

  Effie put the book on top of a crate of old dishes packed in straw and carried them through the door. She faltered before stepping off the porch. Bridget remained huddled in the same dark corner, the odd red scarf Effie noticed earlier still around her waist. Puppies slept in her lap, and another in the warmth of her neck. Effie fought an urge to set down the crate and join her. They were both heading into the unknown, both scared of what lay ahead in the world and with a man driven by his passion. A man who saw only his passion.

  She took a deep breath and stepped off. New worlds took courage, and at the moment, she’d have to rely on Rev. Jackdaw’s.

  He waited at the cart. “They got nothing better for you?”

  She set the box next to the sack of oats and stared at it. After the Sioux massacred Granny’s husband and children—all but Pa—Granny was taken to a hospital with half her teeth knocked out and a deep gash in her back. When she’d recovered enough to leave, she wanted nothing to do with Homeplace, or the fourteen-year-old son who’d been off fishing that Sunday morning and “not there to die like a man.” She traveled straight to her brother’s house in Chicago, not even informing Pa she was going. Neighbors helped the boy Pa was then. They picked up the salvageable plates and cups strewn across the floor. But Pa had seen the blood of his family splashed across the white clay. He built crates and packed the dishes away in the barn, praying that one day his mother would return to him. On that day, she’d want her things.

  Effie brushed past Rev. Jackdaw’s scowl and headed back for the house. How had Pa stayed on the farm after the massacre and survived living alone in the house haunted by his dead family? Was it all for his mother? Waiting for the day she’d come home to him? Even knowing she’d ran not just from the horror, but from him as well? Still, he’d milked, slopped, and plowed because his dead father would expect him to “heed the chores.”

  Rev. Jackdaw grabbed the next crate from her hands and dropped the box into the cart. “No more. Git in.”

  “My clothes.” She ran back before he could grab her arm and stop her. Ma was walking into the bedroom where for the last seven years Effie had slept slept with Granny. Ma had one arm around the old woman’s waist, nearly dragging her, and with the other arm she held the baby on her hip. Once in the bedroom, Ma kicked the door closed behind her with such force the lantern on the kitchen table flickered. Granny’s increasingly loud and guttural wails had the baby crying, Curly sticking a dirty thumb in his mouth, and Johnny squatting in a corner staring at the marbles in his hand.

  Effie’s tears bubbled over as she knelt down to Curly and the twins, pulling each one close, squeezing and kissing. Henry at five years old stood with his arms folded across his chest, not wanting kissed, but standing near enough to be caught and hugged despite his seeming protests. Johnny shuffled over, his body heavy with uncertainty, and she held him, aching at his desperate clutching.

  “Don’t go,” he cried
. “Don’t go.”

  She peeled his arms off as gently as possible and kissed his forehead. Skeet, from his head-taller stance glowered at her. “Leave him be,” she said. “Don’t torment him.” She paused, softened her tone. “Please, leave him be.”

  “Indmay ouryay ownway usinessbay.” Mind your own business.

  He had no intention of letting up. She grabbed Johnny again, wanting suddenly to even put her arms one last time around Skeet. As children, before everything went bad, he’d pulled bee stingers from her arm and they’d shared apples, passing them back and forth, each biting into the sour green where the other left teeth marks and an opening. The day she fell climbing the hen house roof, after being told numerous times to stay off, Skeet washed the blood from her knee and kept quiet about her injury. When she found him sobbing behind the barn at eleven—the first time he’d been ordered to and had finished drowning three unwanted puppies—she put her arm around him. They sat in the dust talking while his soaked sleeves dried. The awful puppy-drowning job would be his every year now, and realizing the new burden he faced made her want to sob with him. But how would that help? She had to make him brave. “Stop crying. You’re not a baby anymore.”

  He’d pushed her over and stalked off. Was that the start of their resentments toward one another?

  Rev. Jackdaw rapped hard on the window. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but there was no mistaking his growing anger. Kissing the top of Johnny’s head again, she wondered if she dared go into the bedroom and hug Ma. Fresh tears slid down her cheeks. She and Ma had not wrapped their arms around each other in seven years. Day by day, there’d been too much to say and no words. At night, Effie had lain in bed and thought, Tomorrow Ma will hold me again. But tomorrow had not come. Now, Ma knew she was leaving and chose not to say good-bye. Opening the door to her would set Granny off to new heights, which meant the baby too, and Ma would have to deal with both. Granny’s screaming would be the worst, though she had spoken loudest in favor of the marriage when Rev. Jackdaw asked Pa.

  Asked Pa. Man business. Bartering the daughter. Something that would never cross Pa’s mind when it came to the boys. Pa was nowhere around either. He’d slipped out in the night, wrestling with his emotions, avoiding telling her good-bye.

  The front door flew open and Rev. Jackdaw filled its frame, his face a sermon. His having to walk up the porch steps to fetch her had claimed the last of his patience.

  She dropped her arms from Johnny and lifted a corner of her cape to scrub her eyes. She’d have him remember her with a brave face. The other boys—though it broke her heart to leave them—would grow and survive, but Johnny? She turned again to Skeet. “Please.”

  His gaze cut her.

  She grabbed the pillowcase stuffed with her personal things: two bloomers, her three farm dresses, the green silk with its pond-damaged fabric, and the black funeral cloth. With her vision a teary blur, she clamped a hand onto the gun and the small box still on the table and ran out past Rev. Jackdaw.

  In the buggy, she kept Granny’s shotgun across her lap. Beneath it, the small cedar box that held her six silver teaspoons wrapped in flannel. The night she first unwrapped them for Rev. Jackdaw and candlelight fell on the silver, she’d expected him to be pleased. He scolded her for being proud.

  He wouldn’t want the spoons up front, but she didn’t own so much as a broach or ring—only the six teaspoons. She couldn’t risk them to the orphan’s hands or the wobbly, bouncing cart.

  She jumped and nearly screamed when Pa appeared at her side. In the bit of light streaming through the window his face was gray stone.

  “Not a blanket?” Rev. Jackdaw stood on the other side of the buggy, and like Pa, seemed to appear from the night itself. “You owe us a blanket.”

  Pa turned for the house and moments later, Granny’s screams rose higher. Before Effie could steady her breathing, Pa was back. He shoved Granny’s still-warm quilt into her lap.

  “You think you best take her? You ain’t the one she hates.”

  Shock parted Effie’s lips.

  His chin lifted, and he took a step back. Hatless in the mist, his hair lay flat over his scalp. “You’re married to that man now. I done my best by you.” His eyelashes wet with rain. “A wife leaves her husband, comes home, it shames the family. You understand me? This ain’t your home no more.”

  Her heart shook. “Bye Pa.”

  He stepped back and vanished. The orphan appeared as if she’d simply witched him away and replaced him. She held a sleeping puppy. “Can I bring him? He’ll keep bad things away.”

  “Put it down!”Effie wanted to blame the child for Pa’s disappearance. She clutched her spoons. She’d wanted a puppy, too, but Rev. Jackdaw refused her. She looked back through the drizzle at the house. “That pup isn’t ready to leave. It needs its family.”

  Soon enough, any puppies that hadn’t been traded to neighbors for eggs or a jar of canned beans would be drowned in the washtub. “Get rid of them,” Pa would tell Skeet, and Skeet would do the deed just as he did every year. Without her being there to prevent it, he’d make Johnny watch as the puppies were one-by-one held under water. They’d struggle and splash, but Skeet’s big hands would keep them under until they slowed and quit and the last air bubbles rose to the surface. Then he’d take the soaked and still-warm bodies, toss them over the sty fence, and make a horrified Johnny watch the pigs come.

  “You plan on holding ’em spoons the whole way?” Rev. Jackdaw climbed up, his weight rocking the light buggy. He noticed the orphan and the puppy. “Put that down. I told you to git in.” When Bridget obeyed, he slapped the reins and scowled down at the box Effie clutched. “What you’re holding there is false gold.”

  The buggy started forward, but before they’d gone the length of the porch, the door opened and Skeet stepped outside. Not grinning now, his hands in his pockets, his face twisted with anger and jealousy. As if only now realizing what Johnny realized an hour ago: she was leaving.

  As if suddenly whacked with a stick, he rushed down the stairs, grabbed up a handful of mud, and flung it. The muck struck Bridget’s shoulder. Had she goaded him? Done something Effie hadn’t seen? Or did her seeming escape anger him too?

  Effie gasped as Bridget jumped up and stood wide-legged in the wobbly, rolling cart. Was she going to jump out and challenge Skeet? She leaned over the side, and as the cart passed the tree stump, she snatched the big washtub. The scrub board inside banged and nearly fell out, but she grabbed that too, bringing both in the cart.

  Skeet’s mouth opened and his eyes narrowed, but Effie wasn’t surprised to see him do no more than stand there gawking. He wouldn’t dirty his shoes and give chase for Ma’s washtub.

  “Git up,” Rev. Jackdaw shook Nell’s reins. He’d heard the tub bang too, seen Bridget pull it in.

  Behind Skeet, the door burst open again. Johnny ran out, jumped off the porch, but tripped and fell over the leg Skeet stuck into his path. Johnny scrambled to his feet, his front covered in mud, and started running again for the buggy. “Effie!”

  At his cry, Rev. Jackdaw slapped the reins harder. “Git up there.”

  “Effie!” Johnny’s outstretched arms reached toward her as he ran. “Effie!”

  She leaned around the side of the buggy. “No! You have to go back. Please Johnny, go back.”

  Slipping in the mud, he kept running, catching the back of the cart. “Effie!”

  Rev. Jackdaw cussed, “The damned fool.”

  “Stop the buggy,” Effie said. “Please, I love him.”

  “You can quit that right now. I got you a free girl.”

  She stared at him. “Quit loving Johnny?”

  “Change her name. Cut off that hair, make her a boy, that’s what you want.”

  Effie turned back around. With the help of the cart, Johnny was pulling himself up alongside. “Effie.” His hand reached out. “Effie, here!”

  The front of his clothes were dark with mud and tears streaked his face. Winded
and gasping for air, he still held on, dangerously close to the buggy wheels. She reached out to the hand he extended, and two muddy marbles passed from his wet fist into hers.

  She clutched the marbles and he fell back. What sort of life would he have without her protection?

  He’d been born only days after Granny’s arrival and then Baby Sally’s death. In Ma’s womb, he’d heard all the screaming. When he was born, the dirt on Baby Sally’s grave still loose and dry, Ma put him in the cradle and walked away. Effie let a day pass, then another, and finally on the third, with Johnny gone quiet, she carried him to Ma.

  “Please,” she begged. “I love him.”

  The front of Ma’s dress was soaked with breast milk. She didn’t look at the baby, only into Effie’s eyes. Slowly, she unbuttoned her dress bodice and took the infant. Johnny suckled as Ma remained standing at the stove stirring tomatoes she’d bottle. A few minutes later, she passed him back and began washing jars.

  Why, Effie wondered then and still wondered, when I killed Baby Sally, did Ma feed him for me? Pass him back to me?

  She turned to see Johnny still visible in the dark watching her, smiling through his tears. Skeet could never again steal the marbles.

  The trip to Nebraska took nearly three weeks. They slept fitfully in the buggy on rainy nights. Other nights, under. When they found wood and the wind was low and didn’t blow sparks across the dry fall grass, they slept around small campfires. They spent nights in haylofts and twice in rough homes that welcomed a preacher and his unlikely family.

  As the days dragged on, Bridget bounced in the cart on a crate stuffed with Effie’s dresses. More often, she walked alongside. She ached for Grandma Teegan and one of her stories. The story of Salt Woman said only by refusing to look back could you walk forward. Even the ancient gods advised against looking back. But how could she give up thinking about Grandma Teegan?