River People

by Margaret Lukas

  Carrying the rope, Effie finally stepped out and faced Jake the hesitant way she’d faced the door. Bridget chuckled at the window to see her fumble with Rev. Jackdaw’s knot in the rope until she’d widened it enough to put it over Jake’s head. Though it was the second day, she was still scared to get close enough. Jake watched her and the loop hanging from her hands. Finally, he started forward, the lug, lug of his shoulders, and he walked into the loop himself. Nose first as Effie jumped back, then lifting and shaking the barrel of his head so that the rope wiggled down over his face and settled around his neck.

  With Effie gone, the lucky one who got to be with Jake outside, Bridget knelt in front of the bed and pulled out the box holding the silver spoons. Only two left now. Four already hidden in the walls. She took the spoons, clicked down the lid on the empty box and admired it. Chief had a box like this, though his was prettier. She shoved it back under and fisted the spoons.

  She and Grandma Teegan’s braid had talked it over the night before, while Effie slept. Yesterday Effie, returned after hours outside, told how she’d found a pair of boots in a gunnysack. She knew they must be Mr. Thayer’s because he traveled the road twice a day. “He was kind to me at the depot.” So she walked to his house where he looked in the sack and smiled down at her. “You found my boots.”

  Pete sat at the table cleaning a gun, Effie went on. “Pieces laid out and him shining everything with an oily rag. He didn’t say anything about Mr. Thayer’s boots, but there was something in his eyes. I could feel him laughing at me, thinking how I hadn’t helped with his mother. He isn’t river people like us. I wanted to tell him, ‘Just you wait. Your mama was, just you wait.’”

  Using one of the spoons as a trowel, Bridget scooped out a patch of dry mud and weeds from the wall, letting it crumble into her pail. The spoons fit snug between the logs and with a bit of water into the dry, she had plaster to put over them. Seeing them disappear, it hurt less thinking about Effie being with Jake. And how Pete wasn’t river people.

  A knock on the door of Rev. Jackdaw’s rented room made him lift his weary head from his prayers. After his days of repentance, had an angel finally arrived?

  Taking advantage of the spring weather, he’d walked up and down the streets of the burnt district. “REPENT” written across his slate in large chalk letters. People snickered at him. Still, he’d marched in front of their pleasure dens, the cheap cribs and the houses with red lights in elaborate windows. Until a gang of young men in caps, with the same trouble in their eyes as he’d seen in Skeet’s, approached him. Most of whom were already infected, he was sure, and didn’t even know.

  The jeering spiraled around him like the torment of his brothers in childhood. The months of failing to make any progress on a church, the hunger in his own loins for Effie, and then the heckling dropped him into despair, made him lock himself in his room, pull on the dress—degrading as a sackcloth—and drop to his knees. There, at the nadir of his soul, he’d been praying and waiting for God to send an angel of deliverance.

  The knock came again. Harder, more insistent. He rose, stepped out of the dress, stood in his pants and shirt, and shoved the red into his valise. He opened the door of his room to a specter in black. A black-gloved hand lifted a black veil off a face and hooked the shroud over the wide brim of a black hat. “I’m the Widow Deet.”

  He wasn’t certain he’d heard correctly. “The Widow Deet?” The mourning garb proved he had. “Your husband has died?” What about the lodge?

  “A month ago at that horrid place . . .”

  She rushed into a squawk’s tirade about how she’d known for years the lodge was her husband’s den of sin. A place where he drank and played cards. She dared not think what else went on when men left their wives and went off like a pack of prowling wolves. “We wives couldn’t bear asking. Fitting, he died as a result of going there.”

  Rev. Jackdaw tugged his beard, tried to make the tug distract his suddenly ticking eye. “Died, you say?”

  Her gray brows narrowed, but he saw no grief in her glum eyes. “You haven’t heard? Shot. Infection it was that kilt him. God’s will. I intend to have the place burnt to the ground.”

  He thought he ought to ask how Deet died, but he hardly cared. “My wife, a chaste,” he nearly said girl, “woman, has need of the shelter.”

  “He never asked me to join him. Not even when the place was new. I won’t concern myself with it now.”

  “I’m a man of the cloth.” He looked around for his Bible, but it was in the valise. He couldn’t lose the lodge, couldn’t have Effie in her ragged dresses be seen on his arm, couldn’t have her piling into his already cramped room. He needed privacy to work and think. And when necessary, the privacy to atone for his weaknesses.

  “I want nothing more to do with it,” Widow Deet said. “Hunting lodge? And I can fly! Did he really think me such a fool?”

  Rev. Jackdaw scarcely listened. Effie’s presence in Omaha might also stop the generosity of the few elder women in the community who pitied a man without a wife to look after his needs. Their foodstuffs and invitations to tea, even their bits of financial aid—a pittance though it was—might end, leaving him hungry. Suppose they frowned at Effie’s age and mistook his reasons for acquiring such a young bride.

  “I see by the light in your eyes, Sister.” He laid a hand on the woman’s fleshy shoulder. Her dress smelled of musk and long storage. “You are one of God’s elect.”

  She flinched ever so slightly at his touch, but then nodded. The black veil slid slowly, falling back over her face.

  “The Lord’s work has need of the lodge,” he said. Opening his wallet, he revealed its contents: twenty dollars—the whole of his money but for two coin dollars in his vest pocket. The week before . . . was it a week already? For how many days had he been on his knees? How long since he’d had real sleep, real food? He looked again at the money. The incredible sum had been passed to him by a grubby-handed old man with palsy. Near death no doubt, the bum hoped the sum could buy him a chariot ride to heaven.

  Widow Deet lifted her morbid gauze veil a second time and peered at the money.

  He fought the urge to slap his wallet closed, but he couldn’t have Effie in Omaha. “Let me . . .” His Job’s eye worked his whole cheek. Surely she wouldn’t take the money. “Let me,” he began again, “lift the burden of the lodge from your shoulders. I’m offering you the whole of my capital, so I may continue the work I’ve been commissioned to do.”

  The gloved hand plucked out his wealth. “I’ll send a bill o’ sale.”

  Alone again, the swish of the thick black skirts vanished, Rev. Jackdaw clicked the lock on his door. He stepped into his dress and pulled the vile thing up to his bearded chin. He’d lost to a woman. A loss as raw and ugly as any failing.

  The next morning, his body was weak with hunger, but he’d slept better. He’d take a few days away from unredemptive Omaha, a city consumed only with building and profits. He’d escape to the lodge he now owned, tell Effie the news, bed her—a husband’s duty—take an afternoon over his journal, and return to his commission reinvigorated.

  First, he’d visit a few of the hens who cackled with their Christian piety.

  The sun was low in the west when Nell finally reached the lodge. Looking down on his purchase, Rev. Jackdaw felt sick. The place didn’t look like it could survive the next good windstorm. He started down the miserable drop on foot. After the long, jolting ride from Omaha, each step of the short descent radiated new pain in his back.

  The slope was worse than he remembered. The only way to fix it was to hire a man with a couple of mules and a heavy drag. No money for that. No money to fix the chimney or roof either. In his passion to keep Effie at a distance, he’d let Widow Deet swindle him.

  He kicked at a runnel. He was too smart to be fooled again by squawks. Whether it was Widow Deet, Ma, or the wicked Miss Myra. The only schooling he had came from Miss Myra. Sitting at her kitchen table once or twice a mont
h, always with a penny or a few eggs Ma had sent for her, it was Miss Myra who taught him his numbers and started him writing in journals. Sliding a ledger across her table, telling him to write out a Bible verse or what had happened to him so “the truth wasn’t lost.”

  Sitting on her stool all those years ago, he’d trusted her and looked forward to that writing most. An hour longer in the kitchen where something good smelling always baked, free of Mister and his brothers. At home, he was a freak in his dress, his face twisted with scars not yet muffled by time and age, but at Miss Myra’s his writing seemed atonement for his sins. First was the sin of showing a weakness for horses when the Bible stated man must have dominion over the animals. Second was causing his father to lose three fingers on his right hand.

  Then he’d learned the truth about Miss Myra. He’d thought the pennies or bits of food he carried with him were to pay for those afternoons of Bible learning and forming a nice script. Until the afternoon Ma burst into Miss Myra’s kitchen, and they shooed him out. He hadn’t gone home like he was told, but hid under lilac bushes in the yard and saw Ma take off her dress and bloomers and climb into Miss Myra’s bed.

  By the time his ma quit groaning and breathing as if she climbed a mountain, night had come on. He stepped closer to the glass without fear of being seen. Miss Myra lifted a baby from between Ma’s legs. A girl! He’d been so excited he’d wanted to run home and tell Mister the news. There was a baby girl. Somehow he’d believed that would make everything all right.

  But Miss Myra took the baby, wrapped her up in a small white blanket—Ma not even watching—and half an hour later, he followed Miss Myra when she walked out carrying the infant. Walked for an hour until she stopped at a house and passed his sister through a door. He hadn’t moved, though Miss Myra walked away. He watched until morning when a woman he’d never seen came out, carrying a small bundle against her shoulder. He followed her to the train station and watched her board.

  Now he knew why there were no little girls in the house. Maybe even no brothers after him.

  Nell’s harness jingled. Happy for the distraction, he glanced at the horse, swaybacked and graying. He’d show no weakness with her. She didn’t have many more miles in her, but those miles were his. He’d spend every one of them before nestling his shotgun into her ear.

  For now, the horse needed to remain in harness for the trip back to Bleaksville. On his way through town, he’d considered stopping and putting a silver dollar against Effie’s tally at the mercantile, but she needed to be there. He’d take her with him, have her stand facing him and Graf and, item-by-item, yea or nay every penny entry.

  He opened the lodge door, spilling light across the floor. Rooster sat at the table and looked up from Effie’s book.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Effie’s with Jake.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Ain’t that your job?”

  “I hurt my feet. Effie’s . . . helping.”

  There was more to the story. Something Rooster wasn’t saying. “Why you sitting there? Go git her.” Rooster lifted her pitiful black skirt a few inches, showing bare feet with bandaged toes. “Well, put your blasted shoes on.”

  “Rev. Jackdaw!” Effie burst through the back door out of breath. “I heard the buggy, I was just coming in.”

  He studied her. While necessity kept him occupied in Omaha, she’d grown even skinnier. Lean faced, though her normally pale cheeks had a pinch of color from the brisk air. She took off his coat, ruined now, and hung it on a rusty nail. Her worn dress hung over her flat stomach. Near a year into marriage, she ought to have a son suckling by now. She looked no more ripe with child than Rooster.

  She headed for the stove, keeping wide of his reach. She’d also betrayed him, letting him believe she was fertile as her mother. And he wouldn’t let himself forget how on their wedding night she gagged.

  He studied her hair, piled up like a nest on top of her head. Wildish, earthy. Something new in need of discipline and reining in. “Where’re your combs?”

  She didn’t answer, only opened the stove’s firebox. “Did you bring coffee? I’ll start water.” As though he might not notice how hardly moving, she slipped her feet out of her shoes. “Bridget,” she nudged the shoes in Rooster’s direction, “carry down Rev. Jackdaw’s things.”

  “She lose her damned shoes?”

  “Do you want Nell brought down?” Effie asked.

  “What kind of answer is that?” She wasn’t responding like normal. “Sticks in your hair? You lost your wits? That brother of yours, the stupid one, and your granny. Seems to me crazy runs in your blood.”

  He saw the sting of his comment. Her chin dropping an inch. Then her whole body pulling in as she moved to the fireplace for hot coals.

  “What’s that stink?” he asked.

  She stopped, a respectful fear in her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  He rose, grabbed her arm hard and pushed up her frayed sleeve. Sniffed. “A whore’s stench.”

  “My soap? Mr. Graf ’s wife, Cora, she brought me some to try.”

  “On my bill?”

  “No.” She tried to pull away. “A gift.”

  He gripped tighter. “Why would she give you a gift? What you two up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You think I want my wife accepting gifts from the likes of her?”

  “I didn’t think it—”

  “That’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t think.” He squeezed her arm until she yelped. “We’ll take it back.”

  “Mr. Graf may not know.” She pried at his fingers. “Maybe Cora doesn’t want him to know.”

  “What in your mind,” his words slow, “tells you there’s something right in that? A wife lies to her husband, and you being a party to it.”

  She jerked free.

  He hadn’t meant for his homecoming to sour. Was it seeing the place and being reminded of the poor deal he’d made? Was it the dread of telling Effie this was her home now? Or was it remembering Ma and Miss Myra? He carried too many weights. They hammered him down, and neither Effie nor Rooster with their easy lives cared about his load. They added to it. Effie couldn’t even give him a blasted son. Not even a dunce like her brother.

  In the buggy again, Rev. Jackdaw’s back throbbed. At other times, the pain fired and he held his breath as the spasm passed through. He cursed the rutted road, Nell for every pothole she dropped a buggy wheel into, and Effie for making the trip necessary.

  He slapped the reins without thinking and flinched as Nell jerked and the buggy wheel at his side lurched up a stone and bounced down. Why did he keep finding himself married to women who couldn’t give him what he needed? Decades back, he’d broken his wrist and gone to a doctor to have the bone set. Hoping to find an elixir for his then wife, he’d asked the doctor. The quack suggested a man on his third wife and still with no children likely had “cartridges shy of a full load.” The sawbones even asked if he’d suffered an injury to that area.

  The question had filled his head with thunder, the sound of a wooden plank against horseflesh, and the pain of day after day pissing blood. The memories had threatened to unseat him, make him curl on the floor like a girl.

  “Blasphemy,” he barked at the non-believer. Why had he bothered to ask? A man’s injury or no, if the Lord deemed a woman worthy, even if she were as dried up as Abraham’s Sarah, He’d send an Isaac. The Bible was the word of God Himself, not to be abandoned by a quack’s doubts, no matter how many pieces of paper he’d framed and nailed on his wall.

  Sitting beside Effie, he stretched his back and shifted his weight. He didn’t like the idea of putting her aside, young as she was. He had no other wifely prospects, and he didn’t have long months, certainly not years, to court one. At his age, he was already having trouble sustaining the march. If it came to putting Effie aside, though, he needn’t feel any guilt. If the Lord didn’t think her worthy of children, the Lord wouldn’t fuss over his leaving he
r.

  He scowled at finding only Graf ’s wife behind the counter, her hair stacked, a full bosom. Tawdry.

  “Rev. Jackdaw,” she said, her voice pinched. Then in a kinder voice, “Effie.”

  “Where is he?”

  The woman eyed him a moment as though answering a simple question took wits she struggled to muster. “Mr. Graf ’s gone on a delivery.”

  “Gone?” The Lord’s hand. No need to even discuss the bill. “She’s got something for you.” He scowled and turned to Effie. “Give it.”

  The corners of the bar Effie put on the counter were so well rounded he knew he needed to come home more often, keep a better eye on his own wife.

  Graf ’s wife let the soap lay. “Effie, how are you?”

  “Skinny,” Rev. Jackdaw said. He pulled his last coin from a pocket and dropped the dollar on the counter. The other had gone against Nell’s fees. “You tell him I paid that.” Then wished he’d hadn’t laid down the money; Graf wasn’t even there. Before he could reclaim the silver, the woman’s arrogant hand snatched it.

  “Don’t put that in your own pocket.” He tugged Effie’s arm. “Come on. No use waiting for a man who’s off and not minding his store.”

  “Effie,” Graf ’s wife called to their backs, “take care of yourself.”

  He stopped and fired the woman a hard look. A rich squawk in her fancy clothes, acting as though she were a friend to Effie, acting as if he were some sort of demon.

  “I hear you’re barren, too,” he said. “Not even a girl.”

  Enjoying the shock on her face might have held him up a moment longer, but there was no telling how soon Graf would be back. “Stay away from my wife.”

  He waited for Effie to climb back in the wagon. “Well, ain’t that something,” he said. “A man comes all this way into town to pay a bill and Graf ain’t even there. Man’s a crook. You don’t see that? I don’t want you buying in there. You hear me?”