River People

by Margaret Lukas

  The traps were his possessions now, and he stowed them in the buggy’s boot and marveled again at the Lord’s divine orchestration. Even in the burly man who’d knocked on his door asking to have his traps and knives brought from the shed to Omaha. “They’re my property,” the bearish man had insisted. “Traps cost good money.”

  Good money? He’d tapped the deed in his pocket. “My property now.”

  The man’s insistence that Widow Deet couldn’t sell what she didn’t own proved him a thief and made the trip to the lodge necessary. Before the thief came to take what no longer belonged to him.

  With his second trip into the shed, grabbing the last knife and trap, Effie moaned, semi-awake, writhing even in her stupor. He didn’t know where Rooster had gone, but she’d be back soon with a neighbor or the sheriff.

  He took the back ramp in two long strides, pushed aside the bed, smashed the empty box, turned over the mattress, and searched the rags of Effie’s dresses for the rest of his property: the silver spoons. Had she sold them, stealing from her own husband?

  His back screeched with pain as he climbed into the buggy. Rooster was most likely to bring help from the direction of Bleaksville. Despite his suffering, he’d best take the road going the other direction, circle clear around. In his agony, he didn’t deserve confrontation, too.

  “Git up,” he shouted at Nell and snapped the reins. “Git up, you damn mule!”

  Seeing Rev. Jackdaw head for the shed, the tails of his black coat spreading and flapping behind him like a hawk with crippled wings, Bridget ran. Her arms and legs pumped and her lungs heaved with the effort. She raced through the trees, stopping at Old Mag to drop both palms on the trunk and suck in air. I shouldn’t run. She wasn’t big enough to pull off Rev. Jackdaw, and she wasn’t brave as Nera. Ashamed, she ran on.

  She reached Chief ’s fence, squeezed between two strings of barbed wire, and ran across his pasture with her side in painful stitches. She’d made another terrible mistake. She should have first grabbed up two pans—as Grandma Teegan told her to do with Rowan—and banged them the whole way.

  Going over the gate into the barnyard, she screamed for Chief. He wasn’t in his yard or on a roof and his house looked dark. She screamed again. Wire barked from inside the smaller barn and the doors flung open. The dog bounded out and Chief stepped into the doorway. His eyes full of question.

  “Rev. Jackdaw’s going to hurt Effie! Right now! It’s a red fight.”

  Chief turned, disappeared back inside. Bridget feared he hadn’t really heard, or had decided again that he couldn’t be “that man.” She ran in after him. He banged up the latch on a stall gate, made a loud clucking sound in his throat, and Smoke rushed out, his head high, his eyes wide, and his powerful legs trembling. Chief slid a bit into the horse’s mouth, as easily as sliding in a sugar cube. “Jackdaw carrying a gun?”

  She couldn’t remember. “He has a shotgun.”

  From a box in the wall, Chief grabbed something with shine, tucked it into the back of his belt, and dropped his loose shirt over it. A gun or a knife, she wasn’t absolutely sure. He swung onto Smoke in one motion, drew the horse up beside her, and before she could jump back, leaned down and grabbed her around the waist. Smoke was leaving the barn and her feet were off the ground. She screamed and found herself sitting in front of Chief.

  “Heigh,” he yelled at Smoke though the hoofs thundered and Bridget’s hair flew back. “Jackdaw got the rope again?”

  She’d thought only Cora knew about the rope burns. “Maybe,” she shouted.

  He drove Smoke on, the motion in his shoulders and the arms she gripped rhythmic, pumping, matching the horse’s strides. Chief ’s breath quick against her cheek, mixed with her own panting. They breathed each other.

  They skirted the pasture and came through trees and out onto the road through some narrow back way she’d not known existed. When they rounded the second bend, Mr. Thayer and Pete came into view riding ahead in the distance. Smoke didn’t break stride as Chief let out a piercing whistle. Pete turned back. Chills ran down Bridget’s spine. Mr. Thayer turned too. They drew up their horses, waited. She’d done the right thing. The three men would help Effie better than she could have done alone. But reaching the lodge and seeing Nell and Rev. Jackdaw’s buggy gone, she nearly cried out.

  Effie moaned on the shed floor, glassy eyed. At the sight of her, the blood and the trap, Bridget screamed. Pete and Chief cussed words of disbelief. Mr. Thayer barked loudest, “Jesus Christ!”

  Pete held Bridget while she sobbed against his chest. Chief knelt behind Effie, wrapped his arms around her and held her still. Thayer slowly stepped on the trap’s spring, and the teeth began pulling out of Effie’s flesh.

  Outside, birds exploded from the trees, their screams echoing the sound of Effie’s.

  Hours after the doctor, the sheriff, and Mr. Thayer had gone home, Chief and Pete remained. They sat in the two hard-backed chairs while Bridget rocked. They all turned to Effie each time she moaned through the heavy dose of laudanum the doctor administered.

  “You think she’ll want to live now?” Pete whispered. His gaze was distant, and Bridget wondered who he asked. Chief, her, the room? “I expect,” Pete went on, “today will feel something like losing a baby. It’s a death anyway . . . Jackdaw doing what he did to her.”

  Bridget watched the nearly imperceptible rising and falling of the quilt covering Effie. The slashes of red darker as evening turned to night. But she was still breathing.

  “That where you sleep?” Chief asked Bridget. He nodded at her hide in the corner. “You ought to try. Come morning, she’s going to need your help.”

  “I have to stay awake.” She wouldn’t tell him about Uncle Rowan. Her hands twisted in her lap. “I have to stay awake.”

  “She ain’t likely to die from a broken hand,” Chief said.

  He’d done it before: Answered her thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them.

  “Having the baby ain’t what killed Ma.” Pete’s voice slurred with emotion. “He was born and looked whole enough. I thought they’d both live. Then his face turned blue and Ma was weeping, blowing into his mouth and rubbing his back hard.” Pete’s lips pressed tight. “After, she wouldn’t give him up. Hours till I could coax him out of her arms. He didn’t weigh nothing. I told Ma I’d lay him with the others. I could do that for her so she didn’t have to make the walk. Thayer was at the bar in Bleaksville. She didn’t answer me, just stared at the ceiling. Not dead, but a terrible quit look. Turned my blood cold.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know it then. She was done talking, done with this world.”

  Bridget wished Chief would read Pete’s thoughts and know what to say, but his lips were still.

  Pete’s shoulders lifted with a deep breath and sank again. “I buried my brother under the same tree, shoveling in a different spot this time so I didn’t hit tiny bones. Doc said there was nothing he could do for Ma. After a day, two, Thayer carried her out of his bed and to the floor by the fire.”

  Bridget shuddered to think of Pete seeing his mum laid out on the floor.

  “He claimed she’d be warmer there.” Pete leaned hard on his elbows. One hand was fisted and the other over the top like the fist needed held down. “All Thayer wanted was her out of his bed. He didn’t want to wake and find her dead beside him. I didn’t cuss him, figuring Ma would want away from a man more worried about his night’s sleep than her dying. Or the baby they’d lost. And I wanted her where I could lie down close. I thought if I had her alone, I could talk her into living.” He swallowed. “I thought I could talk her into living for me.”

  Chief rose, swung the back door wide open onto the night. Along the river, bullfrogs croaked and groaned, the sound rumbling in around him. “All this talk,” he nodded in Effie’s direction, “ain’t of any use to her.”

  Bridget considered how Chief hadn’t been able to stop his boy from dying either. Just as she’d not been able to stop Rowan. Maybe everybody car
ried a death on their backs. She glanced up to where she knew Grandma Teegan’s braid watched them. Grandma Teegan carried several deaths.

  “I tried to make her drink,” Pete said. “Poured water on her lips, tried to close her eyes. Thayer said I was wasting my time. Said I needed to be a man about it and go do my chores.”

  What would Pete say, Bridget wondered, if she told him she’d seen the death space around his mum? She turned quick to look at Effie. With only a single lantern on the table, Effie lay in shadows, and even squinting Bridget wasn’t certain what she saw or didn’t see.

  “The night Ma died,” Pete went on, “even lying right there beside her, I didn’t know when it happened. She left me that easy. Didn’t wake me, never said good-bye. Thayer came out of his room in the morning and toed her. ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s cold as a log.’”

  Pete leaned toward the open door, then picked up his cap and stood. He stepped closer to Effie, running the cap brim through his fingers as he’d done the day he came asking her help in dressing Mae. “I wasn’t asking much.”

  “She didn’t mean you harm,” Bridget said. “She didn’t know how.”

  “Ain’t just that. Telling Ma she couldn’t gather wood for the fire she needed. Not asking her in the day she came calling. Her just wanting to sit a spell in a woman’s company.”

  Bridget was glad Effie, strands of her thin hair in tangled clumps and clotted with blood, had had enough medicine not to know of Pete’s anger.

  He stepped out and vanished in the dark. Bridget wanted to call out to him, ask him to stay longer. Someday, she’d marry him, and they’d live right there with Jake in the lodge Pete would fix up nice. She’d be a doctor then and never let anyone’s mum die and leave them alone.

  “Come on now,” Chief said. “Time you got some sleep. I’ll keep one eye open for Jackdaw.”

  Effie woke and tried to focus through the slits of her fevered eyes. Night, again. The pain in her hand burning as if she clutched red-hot coals.

  “Bridget,” she moaned, “my medicine.”

  Feeling the laudanum roll down her throat, she closed her eyes and struggled not to cry out again. She’d taken the drug enough times to know it would only take a minute. Less than two.

  Caught in fevered loops of time, sleep, and wakefulness, the days and nights wheeled around her without divisions.

  The pain in her hand—sharp as it remained—was grinding down. She sucked in air and tears stung her eyes when she rolled and bumped it, but she didn’t cry out as often for laudanum. There were memories of Cora fussing and Chief—not even the Indian leaving her alone to die—and Bridget spooning in bitter broths. Along with the child’s constant, “You have to fight death. You have to fight death.”

  Footsteps. Hard boots struck the floor. A man stood over Effie’s bed, looked down at her, his badge leering. “I see she ain’t going to die. Nothing else I can do.”

  The boom of his voice, like the boom of his boots, made her head pound. Using her good hand, she felt for Granny’s quilt under her chin, wanting to drag it over her head. The pulling shifted the position of her wounded hand and throbs of pain made her stop, lay motionless. “I got no jurisdiction,” he said. “How a man treats his wife ain’t my business.” He faced others Effie only now realized were there. “This here’s private. And there ain’t no witness to say how she provoked him. Maybe got her hand caught.”

  “He did it,” Bridget cried from somewhere in the room.

  “How you know that? You said you ran.’ Less you lied to me earlier, you didn’t see he did. Didn’t see he didn’t.” He hawked phlegm from his throat. “Don’t matter. A child’s word don’t hold in court any more than a wife’s. Like I said, this here is husband business.”

  “God spare us!” This time it was Cora from somewhere near the stove.

  “My job is upholding the law. Follow the letter.”

  “Don’t you listen to him,” Cora said. “His man-made laws, made by men for men. Same as your Rev. Jackdaw’s. Church laws made to serve men. This madness has got to stop. And it will, just you wait. We’ll get the vote.” If the sheriff wanted to say something, Cora wasn’t done yet. “Effie, a woman is half. Half of this world, and as long as men keep beating her down she’s going to have to stand up again and say so.”

  Effie closed her eyes, ached for the strength to tell Cora and the sheriff both to leave. They didn’t understand. Their arguing had nothing to do with her. She was caught and neither of them could help her.

  “Effie? Tell me the story,” Bridget’s voice was hushed.

  She opened sleepy eyes. Bridget was pestering again. Cora and Chief with his bitter broths were gone, but Bridget sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. Same as she’d been doing for days. At first, she’d told Effie to “fight death.” Over and over. Now the harping had changed to “Tell me the story.”

  “Let me sleep. I told you before, I don’t want to talk.”

  “Grandma Teegan said stories heal people. You need a lot.”

  “Go.”

  “You’re the princess and you were taken away and trapped in a dark forest by a wicked man. I’m taking care of you like the dwarfs in the woods. I comb your hair and keep cool cloths on your head and make you swallow Chief ’s soup. Cora is my helper, too.”

  “Please.”

  “Rev. Jackdaw almost killed you with a rope, then with a trap. Two tries. The third time something happens in a story is the worst.” Bridget’s voice was still hushed, as if that were any less annoying. “In the stories, the maidens get away from wicked people and survive. Even the Goose Girl. Her pet horse had its head chopped off.”

  “Go away.”

  “Grandma Teegan said in the old stories, girls find their courage and take finger bones and save themselves.”

  She groaned as Bridget scooted closer, wearing boy’s clothing. Likely things Pete had outgrown. A thank-you from Mr. Thayer for the return of his boots.

  “This is a story-telling house now,” Bridget said. “Pete told about his mum dying, and I’ve told you every story I know.” She whispered again, “I even told you my hardest story. Remember? Rowan died when I fell asleep.”

  Effie moved her gaze down the length of the bed, searching for the black cloth. Easier to draw over her head than Granny’s quilt. It lay at the foot, impossibly far away.

  Bridget propped her elbows on the bedframe, as if she planned to sit there another week. Two if necessary. “If you tell the story of Baby Sally, I’ll go away.”

  At Homeplace, Baby Sally’s death had been a forbidden topic. Even conversations that might lead to the death were stopped well ahead. Now Bridget, bright-eyed—the skin under her eye healed, but her still wearing a rag over her burned head—insisted on the telling. Burned and struck and starved, she’d still spent long days doctoring the one responsible. She deserved a bit of the story. “You promise to go?”

  She nodded.

  “Just after Granny came back,” Effie began, “two, three weeks—”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know, Bridget. I can’t think. Ten.”

  “I’m twelve now.”

  Effie closed her eyes, searched for the will to open them again. “I watched Baby Sally in the day and slept with Granny at night.” Thinking about Homeplace was painful, but the story coming off her tongue, greased on lingering traces of laudanum and exhaustion, wanted out. “With me in bed with her, Granny had someone to clutch and shriek awake when her dreams started. I slept with Sally before that.” She saw the toddler’s perfect little sleeping face. The soft skin, the tiny eyelashes. “Ma had the cooking and washing. She was big with carrying Johnny. Tired. Now she had the extra work of Granny, a stranger to her, but needing everything. Granny’s mind ‘flipped back and forth like a dunce worrying a coin.’ That’s how the doctor described it. One minute eating her oatmeal and the next seeing her children crying out for her to help them.”

  Effie sighed; she was telling t
he story she hadn’t told anyone since it happened. Somewhere, Pa was saying, “Be still.” But the story wouldn’t leave. “Ma was frayed to breaking. More than once, I heard her tell Pa that Granny had to go. The last time she insisted, Pa broke down. I’d never seen that. Her neither. Tears rolled down his beaten cheeks. He said he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t put her in an asylum. Said he’d prayed all those years for her to come back to him.”

  The touch of Bridget’s hand made Effie open her eyes again. The dusty beams overhead were thick with shadows, but the afternoon of the drowning hung closer, as though she could lift her good hand and pluck the story from the air. Was it the days of being drugged sluicing open her mind?

  “Pa and Skeet had another fight. Worse this time. That fighting started with Granny too. Pa was worn through, struggling to keep up with the farming and hewing down trees on winks of sleep so Granny would quit screaming at the sight of them, blaming him for their being there. He worried about Ma. Was scared and sorry for her, too. His ma hadn’t returned. This crazy woman didn’t love him like he’d dreamed she would. She wasn’t proud of how he’d kept the farm going all the years she’d been away. She blamed him for living when his brothers and sisters hadn’t. The harder things got, the heavier the work for Skeet, too. Only twelve, but Pa needing to work him like a mule. Worked himself the same way.

  “That day, Pa came down on Skeet for being lazy and . . . I don’t know. But the yelling went on quite a spell. It wasn’t our Pa from before Granny’s coming.

  “Pa left for the field and Skeet started in on me, saying I had it easy with just Sally to watch. He didn’t know how I wasn’t sleeping with Granny bawling beside me, and how spooked I was getting listening to her bloody stories. My hands shaking all the time, my eyes staring at the trees yet to come down, believing they were full of Injuns.”

  Effie lifted her good hand and ran it under her dripping nose. “You promise you’ll let me sleep?”