Bittersweet

by Nevada Barr

  Imogene nodded shortly.

  A wind had risen with the sun and blew steadily from the northwest. Moss Face was standing guard before the tackroom door. Sarah scratched his ears as they slipped past him and inside.

  Karl’s room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Against the wall, opposite the narrow cot where Karl’s body lay, was a nail keg containing the entirety of the hired man’s estate: a jackknife, a silver chain with a silver nugget, a faded photograph of a middle-aged woman, and, tucked in a tobacco tin, every penny they had paid him in wages since the day he arrived.

  Sarah looked at the shrouded figure of Karl Saunders. “Somehow I expected to find that he was all right this morning, not to see him just like we left him.” She started for the bed to turn back the cover from his face, but changed her mind.

  “We haven’t the lumber for a coffin,” Imogene said. “We’ll have to bury him in a shroud.”

  “I read somewhere that they sew sailors into sails before they bury them at sea,” Sarah replied. “Could we do that for Karl? A horse blanket—a sheet is so thin it wouldn’t keep out the damp.” Her eyes strayed to the feet of her friend, thurst out from under the cover, so human and vulnerable in their mended stockings.

  “Karl’s too tall for a horse blanket,” Imogene said kindly. “We would have to sew four of them together.”

  “We couldn’t spare four.”

  There was a long silence while the cold seeped through their clothes and the coyote whined at the door.

  “The best blanket in the house,” Sarah declared finally. “The one the bishop’s wife gave me.” It was of fine wool and brightly colored. Sarah felt good for the small sacrifice.

  Moss Face squeezed in as she opened the tackroom door, and was across the room like a shot. He stopped short of Karl’s bed as though someone had jerked an invisible leash. A low moan built in his chest until it broke free in a howl. Imogene reached for him, soothing words forming on her lips, but he growled and darted under the bed. Imogene murmured and coaxed, but though he whined and thumped the floor with his tail, he wouldn’t come out.

  Sarah watched from the door, the wind whipping her skirts into the room. A gust caught up a handful of ashes from the stove and scattered them over Karl. “Let’s go on with it,” Imogene said as she stood up. “Moss Face is all right where he is, I guess.” While Imogene fetched the long needles and strong waxed thread from the harness-repair kit, Sarah ran to the house for the blanket. When she returned they spread it on the floor beside the dead man’s bed so they could lower the body down onto it.

  Tentatively, Sarah pulled the cover back. Karl was gone; only the pale, lifeless husk remained. She looked at the bloodless face, the stiff shoulders, and knew with a rush of relief that she could bury him.

  The moment they laid hands on Karl’s corpse, the coyote went wild. Snarling, he exploded from under the cot like a wolverine defending its whelp. His usually soft brown eyes were narrowed, and hackles ridged his back. Crouching by Karl’s body, Moss Face bared his teeth in silent warning. The women retreated to the far side of the room. Immediately Moss Face sat down, the hair along his spine settled, and he looked up at them sheepishly, the picture of canine remorse.

  “Look at him,” Sarah marveled.

  The coyote crept toward them on knees and elbows. In the middle of the blanket he laid his chin on his paws and wagged his tail apologetically. Sarah started forward but the older woman stopped her. “We’d better give him a wide berth for a few days,” she said. “He is pretty upset.”

  “We’ve got to get him out of here. We can’t just leave Karl.” Sarah lowered her voice and glanced furtively around the room. “Mam says till you’ve been buried and last rites said, the spirit wanders. It can do people harm.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Moss Face feels it,” Sarah insisted.

  “If you don’t stop, I’ll be feeling it.” Imogene resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. “Still, it isn’t suitable to leave Karl any longer. Take the far corner of the blanket, I’ll get this one. At the count of three we’ll wrap Moss Face in it. I’ll lock him in the house until he settles down.” Their stealth put the coyote on the alert, but they were too quick for him. They folded him in the heavy wool and Imogene scooped him up. Inside the bundle, Moss Face fought, but the blanket was thick and Imogene held him tight.

  Karl was so tall they had to lay him on the blanket corner to corner and fold it into a triangle like an apple turnover. The lack of dignity disturbed Imogene, but Sarah knew the big taciturn man would have enjoyed the joke.

  The sewing finished, Sarah brought the wheelbarrow from the shed and they loaded the body onto it. The grave was to be on the shoulder of the hill behind the house, and they trundled their sad cargo up through the sage. Tools were fetched and Sarah was sent back to the house, out of the cold.

  Imogene broke through the frozen ground with a pick. When the crust lay like paving stones by the side of the grave, she took up the shovel and began to dig. It was slow going in the rocky soil. Once, Imogene’s spade struck a stone the size of a man’s head. “Alas, poor Yorick,” she said, and smiled a little as she threw the rock into the sage. Two hours later the grave was four feet deep and just over six feet long.

  Sarah came up the hill with hot tea and stayed on to keep Imogene company and to avoid being alone. In the house, by herself, she kept hearing things. Looking down over the weathered buildings and gray alkali flats to the blue of the Fox Range beyond, Sarah sensed the emptiness of leaving and pulled her coat closer around her throat. “I’ve gotten so used to it here, I even like the alkali water. I don’t smell the rotten-egg smell anymore.”

  Imogene stopped working and leaned on her shovel for a moment, the sweat shining on her brow and upper lip. “I love it here. It’s a hard land, but it’s clean. Clean of people.”

  “You haven’t much use for people once they’ve turned twelve, have you?”

  Imogene laughed. “Not much. I do love the children, they are so full of what people could be. But they almost never make it. The humanity is shamed or beaten out of most of them before they have turned twenty. They plod down the same narrow track their parents did, and never see the sky.”

  “We have got to go back,” Sarah said softly. “We have to, now that Karl’s gone. Back in among the people. Out here, we made the rules.” A sad howl echoed up the hillside, adding finality to Sarah’s words.

  Imogene plied her shovel in silence.

  After another hour the grave was dug. The two of them dragged the body, shrouded in its blue-striped envelope, to the edge of the hole. They tried to lower it gently, but it got away from them, and the remains of Karl Saunders tumbled the last few feet. In the pocket of her coat, Imogene carried the Bible. As she read the words over him, the wind snatched them from her lips. Sarah hoped that if they were blown to where Karl could hear them, they brought him comfort.

  Working with both shovel and pick, they filled in the grave and, stone by stone, made a small cairn to keep the animals from digging it up. Imogene promised to build a cross.

  Finally all that remained was to clear away the few personal effects Karl had left behind, the work of half an hour. “I guess we’ll be packing our own things next,” Sarah said, and Imogene crumpled as though she had struck her.

  Sarah ran to her, clung to her, patting her back and shoulders. Imogene burst out in fresh cries, the dry sounds of a person unaccustomed to tears. “Please, Imogene! Please!” Sarah rubbed her neck and held her, kissed the rough cheeks.

  “I’m going to lose you,” Imogene cried. “I cannot bear it. We’ll leave this desert and I’ll lose you.”

  “My love, my love,” Sarah murmured. “No. Never. Don’t cry. It’ll be the same. Just you and me. I promise. People won’t make any difference. I promise they won’t.”

  Even as she said it, Sarah knew it wasn’t true and Imogene only sobbed harder, her face buried in her hands.

  “Imogene!” Sa
rah cried frantically. “Please, stop it! Listen to me, Imogene!” Sarah tried to pull the schoolteacher’s hands from her face. “We’ll stay. Here on the Smoke Creek. I’ve got an idea. We can stay, honest to God. Damn you! Listen.” Sarah swore fervently and tugged at Imogene’s wrists. Imogene quieted a little. “We won’t tell anyone Karl’s dead,” she went on hurriedly. “We’ll sign the lease for him like we did for Sam last time. We’ll pretend he’s not dead, that he’s still here.”

  Imogene shook her head, but she wasn’t crying. “We can do it,” Sarah pressed. “Noisy’s quit the run and Mac would never let on. The other people that come through here are mostly strangers going someplace else, they’d never know a thing. Jensen never comes, and after the licking you gave Maydley, I bet he wouldn’t dare. If somebody asked, we could say Karl had gone here or there and wouldn’t be back for a few days, Karl didn’t have any people, so there would be nobody to tell.”

  A momentary light showed in Imogene’s eyes, but it faded quickly. “It wouldn’t work, Sarah. Word would get back that there was no man here. Freighters would talk. Even Mac. Mac is as transparent as glass. You know he couldn’t hide a thing.” A bleak emptiness settled over Imogene’s mind and, sad-faced and silent, she succumbed to it.

  “No!” Sarah grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “I won’t give up, not yet. We’ve got to try.” She took Imogene in her arms and the big woman hid her face in Sarah’s soft hair. Sarah hugged her close. “We won’t give up Round Hole without a fight! ‘One holy hell of a fight,’ as David says.”

  They tore down the stones that marked Karl’s grave and put his belongings back where he’d kept them. Imogene wrote a note to Ralph Jensen. She didn’t apologize for deceiving him the first time, she simply stated that she and Sarah would give up without a fuss if he would agree to lease the Round Hole stop to Karl Saunders and, if Karl agreed, let them stay on. She asked that he send the lease out with the next stage. She would see it was returned to him with Mr. Saunders’s signature.

  They posted the letter with the next wagon through, and waited. The reply came back with unexpected alacrity. A freighter, bound for Oregon with a load of cheesecloth, brought it to them late Saturday afternoon. It read: The hell you will. I’ll be out on the Wednesday stage to see Saunders sign it his own damn self.—R. J. Jensen.

  35

  THE NEXT DAY, SARAH WATCHED THE MUDWAGON FROM THE WINDOW of the tackroom as, tiny and toylike in the distance, it wound its way down from Sand Pass. It was Sunday, four days since Harland Maydley had left Round Hole with more threats than teeth in his mouth, three days before Ralph Jensen was due.

  “You’d better get to the loft now,” Sarah said without turning from the window.

  “You’ll tell Mac?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  The door between the tackroom and the barn swung shut. Sarah pulled her thoughts from the oncoming coach and went back to sweeping the floor. As the coach arrived at the inn yard, she finished and emptied the dustpan into the barrel stove. The smell of burning hair made her eyes water, and she sank down on Karl’s cot, dabbing at them with her dresstail.

  “Sarah, coach is in!” came the call from inside the barn. She ignored it and hid her face in her hands.

  Mac hollered for Imogene, then for Karl. There was no reply. He lowered himself gently from the high seat of the coach and stomped the life back into his legs and feet. Liam, looking like a man of ice, his chapped face colorless and his lips blue with the cold, steadied the team. Steam rose from the horses’ hides and puffed from their nostrils. The sky was low and leaden overhead. Hobbling and stiff, Mac opened the coach door. “Watch that first step,” he cautioned. “The ground’s froze and liable to jar your teeth out.”

  The coach was full. Groaning, the men helped one another with the women and the baggage. A slender, handsome woman and her two pert teenage daughters, traveling with their elder brother, were handed down last and stood in a tired, unhappy cluster, small and out of place in the desert landscape.

  Helpless under the distraught glances of the women, Mac looked around the deserted yard. “Gals are usually out to meet the coach. Miss Grelznik, at any rate. Miss Grelznik!” he called. “Coach’s in.” Smoke curled placidly from the chimney and the stovepipe behind the house; chickens, daring out of their coop in the bitter air, pecked the ground in a desultory fashion. But there were no faces at the windows nor Imogene’s usual call of “Company!” to warn Sarah.

  “Karl!” There was no answering shout. “What in the hell…” Mac muttered. “Begging your pardon, ladies. Go on inside, the gals must be tied up some damn place. Looks like they got a fire lit, anyway. Just make yourself at home.” Relieved to get his unaccustomed duties over with, he hurried back to the company of the livestock.

  In the dining room a fire burned high, holding winter at bay beyond the windows. A homey smell of onions and roasting meat permeated the air, mingling with the mellow smell of old wood and old whiskey. Cold enough to risk impropriety, the misses pulled their chairs close to the wide hearth and lifted their petticoats to toast their feet on the grate. Their mother hovered near, keeping a watchful eye on their modesty and on itinerant sparks. She had ventured a few hellos, but no one had come.

  In the relative warmth of the stable, Mac rubbed down the horses and covered them with heavy blankets. A rustling just louder than a mouse caught his ear and he looked up over the horse’s broad back.

  “Mac,” Sarah whispered. She was as pale as a wraith, her face the same dull pewter as the square of sky that filled the open door at her back. She wore neither hat nor coat.

  “Where’ve you two been hiding? I’ve a coach full—” Mac’s voice trailed off, then he said, “What’s happened, Sarah?”

  She opened and closed her mouth several times without producing any sound. Her eyes were distracted and her hand shook as she pushed back a loose strand of hair. A horse kicked in its stall. She jumped as though she’d been pinched, and sucked in her breath sharply.

  “Sarah?” Mac walked around the horse’s rump, the currycomb in his hand.

  “Imogene is dead.” Sarah moved her hands before her, the little unfinished gestures of a crippled bird.

  “Oh Jesus.” Mac looked at her, then at the floor. “Jesus Christ.” He set the currycomb blindly on the partition between the stalls, missing it by half a foot, and it clattered to the floor. Sarah came to take his hand, warming the maimed, gnarled fist between her small hands. “How did it happen?” His voice was thick. He looked for a place to spit, but didn’t.

  “Two days ago—she was feeling poorly Sunday, she hurt here”—Sarah pressed her hand to the side of her abdomen—“so bad she couldn’t stand up straight. The next day, Monday, she…” Sarah’s throat closed, choking off the words.

  “No need now.” Mac patted her shoulder clumsily.

  “No, I want to tell it. Monday it was read bad, sometimes she didn’t know who we were.” Sarah spoke in the monotone of a schoolgirl reciting a lesson she’s committed to memory. “Monday, late, she died.” Turning her face to Mac’s shoulder, Sarah cried, then abruptly stopped.

  “We—K-Karl and me—buried her. We—had to take a pick to the ground to break it.” She cried again and Mac stood miserably by patting her arm.

  “Karl was under the weather too. Is he up and around?” Mac asked.

  Sarah stared at him dumbly, then stammered, “Up and around. Yes. He is. Up and around,” she repeated. Then she cried, “Oh God!” and fell again to sobbing. In time she stopped and raised her eyes. “Do you want to see the grave?”

  Mac nodded and she led him from the gloom of the stable. After the close, animal-warned air, the west wind cut like a knife, brittle and clean and so cold it burned to breathe. Holding tightly to his hand, Sarah went across the yard and around behind the house. Fifty yards away, in a small clearing in the sage, a broken rubble of clods bristling with sparse brown grass was heaped in a mound. At one end, a rough cross of two-by-fours had been d
riven into the earth. There was no name on it.

  Moss Face was curled up near the unpainted cross, his nose buried under his tail. He whined as they approached, and Sarah gathered him in her arms and hugged him close. He’d grown long and rangy, a faded red bandanna was tied around his neck, proclaiming his domesticity.

  Mac pulled his hat off, his hands red and white with the cold. Sarah stood at his side, looking past the grave to the dark Fox Range. A narrow wedge of blue showed above the mountains. Pale rays of a cold sun shone through the break in the clouds, firing the snow on the peaks.

  After a time of silence, Mac dug his knuckles into his eyes and spat carefully downwind. “Where’s Saunders?”

  Sarah jumped. “Karl? Karl has gone to Fish Springs for a wagon part.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “Now is a hell of a time to be going for wagon parts,” he barked. “Why that goddamn, blockheaded, numbskulled, knucklebrained son of a bitch. If he had half the sense he was born with—”

  Sarah started to cry, wailing loud and frightened like a child, and like a child, she clung to his arm. “Please don’t. Please.”

  Subdued to a grumble, Mac walked with her to the house. Sarah’s nose was strawberry-colored with crying and the cold, and her teeth chattered. Mac took her to the warmth and privacy of the kitchen, where she recovered herself somewhat, the necessity of seeing to the guests making her dry her eyes and stiffen her back. When he left, she was tied into her apron and tending to a savory venison stew.

  Mac let himself out by the back door to avoid the clutch of people warming themselves with fire and whiskey in the main room. His grizzled head bent against the wind, his collar turned up around his ears, he walked to the barn.

  Gaps between the boards, widened each summer as moisture was sucked from the already parched wood, moaned as the wind blew over them. Hard white light filtered through, draining color until the straw, the worn wood, the horse blankets on the wall, the leather harnesses, the coils of rope, the cans lining the crossbeams—all the contents of the barn—looked dull and lifeless. Mac, too, looked bleached with time and life, his shoulders stooped under his sixty-odd years; his sparse, wiry hair was almost white, and the furrows that seamed his face made him look less gnomish than simply tired. He slumped down on a half-filled nail keg and the sharp, tearing sounds of grief, sobs robbed of tears from years of being strong, grated from him.