River People

by Margaret Lukas

  “Olyhay hitsay,” he said. Holy shit.

  “How did you get here?” Had she already asked? Had he already answered?

  “Train to Omaha, then here.” He motioned to Cora, a shake of his head in her direction. He might have been trying to flick off a fly, a pesky mosquito, his concentration still on the lodge, taking it all in.

  Effie scraped a chair back from the table. “Sit down.”

  Cora wasn’t leaving, only taking her time unpacking. Effie tried to concentrate on Skeet, but she saw each item rise out of the basket: a pie, its top high and round, a square tin of tea, a bag of beans. Charity. But driven by something even more this time. Was she afraid Skeet wasn’t really a brother, and she aimed to act as protector? Had something Skeet said in the mercantile frightened her? Or was it his drunkenness?

  “How are the little boys?” She wanted to hear about everyone at once: Johnny, Curly, Henry, the twins, the baby. “How are Ma and Pa?”

  Skeet sat. He ran a palm over a gouge in the wood. “Olyhay hitsay,” he said again. Not surprised this time. Delighted.

  Cora cleared her throat. “This is your brother then? No need to involve the sheriff ?”

  At the mention of the sheriff, Skeet looked ready to bolt. Go on, Effie thought. She wished them both gone and that Bridget was there in the lodge with her. They’d try to eat the pie quick, before they woke and it was gone.

  Cora leaned in, closer to Skeet’s drunken face, her eyes holding his. Maybe trying to gauge the amount he’d had to drink. “The livery needs that horse back by dark. The train leaves then too.” She gave him a hard, hands-on-her-hips look. “But if you plan to sleep here tonight, I’ll take the horse back with me.”

  Skeet looked around the room again, his gaze fixing on the sole bed with Granny’s quilt on top. “I’ll get the horse back.”

  A quick answer that struck Effie right then left. She was relieved to know he wasn’t staying, wasn’t expecting she’d give up her bed, but knowing he’d leave her as fast as he’d come, hurt.

  Bridget came through the back door, smiling. Her fair cheeks were rosy, the tip of her nose red. She hadn’t just stepped out. Had possibly been out hours. Effie reached for her hand, wanted to show her the pie, but Bridget glanced and frowned at Skeet and hurried past to Cora. “I saw your horse coming down the road.”

  Effie’s stomach dropped. “You empty the pot today? You carried in enough wood for the night?’

  The blush on Bridget’s face deepened. “Yes.” She hung Rev. Jackdaw’s coat and dropped in front of the fire with her back to them, removing her shoes. Effie thought to scold again. The floor is too cold; leave your shoes on. But the rags covering Bridget’s burns, the awful dress.

  Cora left, and while Skeet paid no attention to Bridget, Effie cut the pie. Cherry. The filling spilling over plates that were once slick with blood.

  “Didn’t think I’d ever see a place hitched up in the air,” Skeet said.

  The pie was sweet and tart. Effie savored the taste before swallowing.

  Skeet sneered. “Ain’t really a house, is it?”

  They’d grown apart since what she thought of as the pre-Granny years. Pre-Baby Sally’s death. She didn’t care. Years of his meanness had severed and burned away the ties. They were different people now, and she didn’t care about the separation. She was no more interested in trying to foster a relationship with him than she was with the Injun up the road. “It’s temporary,” she said of the place. “Rev. Jackdaw is building us a house in Omaha.”

  “The man I saw begging on a street corner?”

  Effie pumped water, set the pot on the stove for tea. Skeet thought her as gullible as Johnny.

  “He ain’t building you a house. He ain’t building no church either.”

  He lied. He couldn’t stand the idea of her having something nice. “Did Ma send a letter with you?”

  “I didn’t stick around.” He grinned at Effie’s surprise. “You think I was going to stay locked up in that room forever?”

  “You weren’t locked up. The bar across your door was your idea.”

  His eyes leveled on hers like two gun barrels fixing. He’d drawn a flask from his coat as soon as Cora left and taken a swig. She hadn’t thought much then, but he’d taken more long draws since. Pa never kept a bottle, never drank a drop that she knew of. Maybe he had once and witnessed the whole bloody scene in his kitchen same as Granny had. Maybe he feared with whiskey in the house the ghosts would get likkered up and haunt even harder.

  “You were always their favorite.” He breathed heavily as if the alcohol clotted his lungs. “Even Granny’s. You the one in her bed. Her giving you her good dress, the quilt. Why’d you do it?”

  “I did the same as you. I needed to get away.”

  “She’s here. You brought her here. The dress, the quilt, her dishes. I see you even got the rocker.”

  She looked away. Bridget sat on her hide, leaving them the two chairs. “You didn’t know I was sent the rocker? You didn’t help take it to the depot or see Johnny paint it?”

  Bridget turned a page in Dr. Chase’s book, pretended to read, but Effie knew she listened to every word, her ears big as plates.

  Skeet took another swig.

  “Did Granny suffer at the end?” Effie asked.

  “The old windbag. Screaming all night for you.”

  “She had a hard life. Living through what she did.”

  “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “Had to go this time.”

  Had to go this time?

  A hand larger than Pa’s, larger than Rev. Jackdaw’s, lifted the flask, tipped it. Skeet hadn’t known she was sent the rocker which meant he left before Pa shipped it. But seeing it, he wasn’t surprised, which meant he somehow knew Granny was dead. How, if he left before she died to escape her screaming? The alcohol was mixing up his mind. She didn’t want to think about how things could scramble in a person’s head. She closed her eyes. Be still. She wouldn’t question. She’d stay out of the darkness.

  Skeet ate more pie. His flask was empty though he couldn’t remember and tipped it up every few minutes, lips sucking. His eyes were red as Bridget’s nose had been.

  “Where will you go?” she asked.

  He took his time as if looking for an answer. His drunken brain, she could see it in his eyes, chugged. “Denver,” he said finally. “I planned on Denver all along.”

  Iarlay. Liar. He’d run off with no plan other than getting far away. She wanted him gone. “Livery is waiting.” Because he was nothing to her. Because he was her.

  When he finally started up the slope to the horse standing in the dark, Bridget stepped to the door to watch beside Effie. “He can’t walk. Will he be okay?”

  “If he can climb on that horse, the horse’ll get him to Bleaksville. The livery’ll be open waiting for him. He can sleep there. No colder than what we got here.”

  Bridget watched Effie, her eyes wide with questions. “He said a lot of things about your granny.” A question even in that.

  “Not you too. Come and eat your pie.”

  Wind howled through the trees, rocked the lodge on its stilts, squealed and blew snow in under the door and around loose windows. Skittering sounds echoed from the walls. Not mice or even the big rat that too often at night showed his red eyes, but mud daubing crumbling with the blizzard and rattling down like loose gravel. The sharp slices of cold, knifing in between logs threatened to dig out Matron’s pen, Effie’s spoons, and throw down Grandma Teegan’s braid.

  In the glow of the nearly burned-out logs, Bridget peeked out from where she’d cocooned herself in the buffalo hide close to the fire. Effie, with her bed also pushed to the fire, finally lay still beneath her layers: two dresses, her shoes, her black cloth, the Never Forget quilt, and on top, Rev. Jackdaw’s coat. For hours she’d cried over how the noise was Injuns whooping. At other times, when the wind lulled, “I’m left here.” And later stil
l, “I hate him. He don’t care if we die. I can’t give him sons. I’m so skinny now, I don’t even bleed. I’m as dried up inside as Granny.” Finally, exhausted and with paper packed in her ears, she slept.

  Bridget pulled her knees up and hugged them. She didn’t fear Indians circled the lodge; she wished Chief would come and carry them to his warm house. She did fear for Effie. Effie mumbled and cried too much. Jake, suffering out in the blizzard, was a worry too. After weeks of snow, with only half days of spattering sun, his haunches and ribs had floated up to where only his skin held them together. She needed to go and steal more hay from Chief ’s stacks. She’d done it before, walking over snow so frozen she didn’t leave tracks, and the barbed wire fence separating the trees from his pasture was only a single strand rather than four. Using the gunnysack she found in the skinning shed and used to carry Effie’s shucks, she crouched into the caves of hay the cows had made by all eating at the same spot. Out of the wind and out of sight of Chief ’s buildings, she filled her sack. Cows milled around her, their pools of frozen pee on the ground making shiny, emerald plates.

  Each time Bridget carried a bulging gunnysack home, she rationed the hay, making it last a few days. But over the last two days, leaving the lodge to steal hay with the blizzard roaring outside had been too dangerous. Even going out for firewood stacked at the side of the lodge made Effie slip the lasso around Bridget’s waist and tie the other end around the back of a chair. Then, at the door left open a crack to allow for the rope, Effie sat on the chair and gripped the rough braiding, letting it slide through her fingers, then tugging it back in when it grew slack with Bridget’s return.

  Taking wood from the snowy pile, Bridget called to Jake, but the wind sucked away her yelling before it reached her own ears. Snow blew sideways and whipped up and down in great sheets of white that blocked even a view of the skinning shed and Wilcox. Glimpses of what she at first thought was Jake’s outline whirled, and disappeared.

  Effie moaned in her sleep and turned over, the corn shucks in her mattress crackling.

  Bridget sat up. She’d suggested to Effie that Jake could eat some of the corn shucks, but Effie shook her head and refused. Bridget even showed her the page in Dr. Chase’s book where he prescribed boiled husks for sickly animals.

  Effie’s eyes had filled. “Give up even my bed?”

  Another twelve hours had passed since Effie’s refusal. In all that time, the storm had continued to pound against Jake’s hungry body. Had he found bits of loose bark, tips of edible hanging limbs?

  Bridget slowly folded back the heavy hide, felt the cold, and wished she could avoid doing what she knew she must. Nera, Nera. Effie didn’t need all the shucks in her mattress, only the thought of them. If some were taken while she slept, she wouldn’t know the difference. Just a small hole, a couple of inches along the bottom seam, would be enough. With that space, two fingers could be poked in and one by one, a dozen corn shucks slid out. Effie could mend the place easy enough if she ever discovered it.

  Bridget worked herself to her feet, took a small step and winced. She slept in her shoes too, and over the last several days her feet had grown raw and painful. The shoes, like her dress, had been given to her before she boarded the train. Tight at the time, and now her feet had grown. And each time the leather got wet—almost daily—the shoes dried harder and smaller.

  She tiptoed, clenching her teeth with each step, to the table and the knife she’d last seen lying there. With each board’s creak and each gust of wind knocking against the walls, she stopped and watched for Effie’s eyes to open. Would the paper in her ears be enough?

  The large knife felt cumbersome and too big for the delicate job, but Bridget had no choice. At the foot of Effie’s bed, she hesitated. Effie lay curled in the center of the mattress, leaving the thin ticking exposed at the bottom, but the room was too dark to see much. Bridget squinted and probed with her fingers to find the puckered seam. She fitted the blade tip between what she hoped was two stitches. She pushed. One nick. One popped thread. Then another. She pulled out a fistful of crisp husks.

  A wind gust struck the back wall with such force Bridget jumped, felt the lodge sway and feared this time the box of it would topple off its sticks.

  Effie’s eyes opened. Wider. She screamed, the shiny blade in Bridget’s hand catching firelight.

  “It’s me,” Bridget screamed just as loud. “It’s me. I’m not an Indian.”

  Effie scrambled out of her bed, yanking the paper wads from her ears. “You were going to kill me!”

  “No.” Bridget swung the knife behind her back and let the handle slide from her fingers. There was a soft thud as the knife tip stuck upright in the old floor, then a plink as it fell over.

  Effie spotted the corn husks and descended on Bridget. “Oh, God!”

  “Jake will die!” Bridget squatted and covered her head against the slaps raining down on her.

  “It’s my mattress. You have your hide.”

  “Rev. Jackdaw won’t build you a house if Jake starves.”

  Effie slapped again, sank back onto her bed, and stared unblinking at her hands. After a long moment, she dropped her face into them. Sobs dragged and sucked behind her fingers. “I’m sorry, you scared me. I can’t do this any longer.”

  Bridget sat beside her, a hand on Effie’s back feeling the knuckles of bones that made Effie’s spine.

  They sat shivering to the sounds of the howling wind and rattling windows until cold forced them back beneath their covers. Bridget watched Effie stare out into the dark room, her fight for sleep with the wind and cold beginning all over again. Would this be the time her mind went too far and couldn’t find its way back? Or didn’t want to try?

  “What if he never returns?” Effie asked. “What if we die here?”

  “We aren’t dying today,” Bridget said. “And we aren’t dying tomorrow. We are fighting death.”

  She wasn’t so sure about Jake. She fought back a moan that sounded in her heart like one of Effie’s.

  Carrying the smelly pail, Bridget entered the trees to the left of the lodge, opposite the path leading to Old Mag, and dumped her and Effie’s waste from the last two days. She gagged and banged the tin against a tree to knock out the frozen layer in the bottom.

  Jake was nowhere to be seen, but she prayed he’d spent the storm in the trees, seeking what shelter he could. She’d return the pail, rewrapped her stinging toes, and go look for him. Stepping from the trees, a wide whirl of snow like a summer dust devil lifted off the frozen river. The shape, thin and empty, looked like Effie’s white underslip. The bit of ghost clothing danced onto the shore. Bridget stood fixed as it waltzed a few feet more before stopping and falling away. Was it an omen? If Grandma Teegan were there, she’d know. Would she say shadows around bodies aren’t the only warnings?

  The sound of wagons rumbling made her spin and look past the lodge to the road. The noise grew louder, squeezing her stomach: four large draft horses, four jingling traces, sixteen hoofs, four rolling iron wheels beneath a large, creaking wagon. Deet! That first wagon always carried the supplies she was now familiar with—bottles of beer and whiskey, piles of shiny rifles and shotguns with names engraved on the stocks, cages of pigeons under tarpaulins.

  The sound swelled: four more draft horses, four more jingling traces, sixteen more hoofs, four more rolling iron wheels beneath the second wagon. That wagon held men.

  The caravan stopped at the top of the ridge. Bridget looked again for Jake, this time willing him to stay out of sight. If Jake couldn’t be found, he couldn’t be yoked and mistreated.

  Deet came around the corner of the lodge, a trail of men on his heels, and a long gun over each shoulder. He stopped at seeing Bridget. “Where’s the ox?”

  She wished she could lie and say Jake died in the blizzard, but Deet with his big ears and beady eyes would want to see the bones. Then to punish her for the lie, he’d send her and Effie away for sure.

  “There’s the bea
st,” Bear-man said from the steps of the shed. He growled around a thick cigar.

  Jake was coming from along the river, his eyes straight ahead, his ears up, his gait steady. Had he heard the wagons and knew to come? Too obedient, too trained and well behaved to save himself. He came to her and nudged against her chest, but she didn’t wrap her arms around his thick neck.

  “He ain’t eating enough.” Deet ran a gloved hand over Jake’s ribs.

  Bridget couldn’t have another run-in with Deet. “There’s been too much snow.” She looked again at Jake, hoped he could hear her thoughts. Do everything he says.

  She had a very bad feeling. She couldn’t name all the signs. There weren’t little sheep leading rams in the sky, but she’d seen a snow dress form and die. There was too much to try and make sense of. Last time, she’d followed the trappers and Jake only a short way, and she’d seen Jake fall and Mr. Deet yell and use his whip. She’d wondered why men thought they owned the world, thought everything in it had no more feeling than stone.

  She took the ramp slowly and went inside. Effie sat close to one back window, the curtain lifted off. Huddled and silent, she stared through the frosty pane. At the second back window, Bridget lifted the curtain and saw Johnny’s marbles. She touched them, longed to take them. If she stole them, her mind would be consumed with wondering how long before she was caught instead of worry for Jake. All Effie’s spoons were buried in the walls now, and she didn’t even know it. So were two of her copper combs, taken on days when Effie had stared straight ahead for hours and Bridget needed to keep the lodge from closing in on them.