The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Hell of a good neighbour.”

  “Yah, that’s for sure, that’s a real Christian there.”

  “Love thy neighbour, eh, Schoff?”

  When they said that, Pius just smiled a hard little smile and said not a word. Of course, everyone was careful never to say anything to Old Krauss or even within his hearing, because, like Pius, they were not willing to bet on what he was or was not capable of as far as sheer meanness and spite went. And from the way he treated his wife, well.

  Old Ida never saw fifty. “Wear out a wife faster than a plow, that’s for damn sure,” that’s what the old folks used to say about Krausses, the ones who had known them in the old country, though not trying to be funny, or coarse either, just stating a fact. Of course, Old Krauss was the first to condemn laziness in others, that old human foible, hating most in others what one hates most in oneself. Though Old Krauss would never have admitted as much, could never have, cursed as he was with the blind stupidity of the self-righteous. He reminded many of that old saying, Wer es nicht im Kopf hat, muss es in den Beinen haben. He who hasn’t got it in his head has to have it in his legs. But Old Krauss had nothing in the head, and nothing in the legs. Ida did all the work around their place, trying to keep the children fed and in some kind of clothing. The children were expected to work, too, though they all turned out just as lazy as Old Krauss. But he was fond of bragging that he expected his children to work, and they damn well worked, that is how he put it. He would boast how the last child out the door and back to work after mealtime got a swift boot in the arse, just for being last. That much was true. The old man took his own plate and stood by the door, waiting for them, and all the children bolting their food, hardly bothering to chew, the little ones crying already, barely able to eat but so hungry they couldn’t help themselves, crying and choking on each mouthful, knowing it would be one of them who would take the blow, which was, if all accounts could be trusted, not delivered lightly. It was really no great wonder Leo turned out as he did. To hell in a handbasket, every last one of them.

  “Sure enough,” they would say around town in later years, “sure enough, Old Krauss made those kids what they are, just like his own father made him what he is. If not by blood, then by example.”

  TWO

  Leo was the only one of the Krauss children to remain on the family farm at the edge of the Sand Hills. The others, the ones who lived, left as soon as they were able. A sister east of Fox Valley was the nearest, having married a man much like her father, as sometimes seems to happen. (This same sister would, many years later, begin but not finish piecing together a family history of sorts, her notes discovered and burned—after her premature death from liver disease—by her own eldest daughter, a nurse from Medicine Hat only too happy to keep her Krauss blood a secret.) All the rest were long gone by the time the old man breathed his last on a stifling day in late August of the summer of 1917 and Leo took over the farm, if it could be called as much. Some of the others came home for the funeral, not out of grief or respect or even propriety, but only to take whatever rubbish was worth the taking and good riddance.

  Leo—it must have been Leo—arranged to have a family photograph taken around the pine coffin with Old Krauss stretched out there between them looking just as miserable as he ever did when alive. God knows what made Leo do it, have that photograph taken, but he did it sure enough. Then, after all was said and done and Leo’s brothers and sisters had crawled back to whatever holes they’d crawled out of and Leo was settled in the old farmhouse, shack really, all but empty now since his siblings had picked over it like a swarm of army worms on ripe barley, Leo nailed that photograph up right over the kitchen table, maybe out of some latent sentimentality, maybe as a reminder of what sort of blood it was that ran in his own veins, or maybe just to convince himself that the old bastard really was dead and gone. Either way, Leo—he was barely a man then, not yet twenty, as far as anyone could figure—lived out there eight long months with nothing but that photograph of his dead father for company and none of the neighbours in much of a hurry to make a friend of him.

  That first winter, Leo might have died for all anyone knew. Old Pius Schoff—who, of anyone, would have been the one to look in on Leo—had been gone a few years, Mrs. Schoff following not too far behind, and so now Leo’s nearest neighbour was Pius’s eldest son, Stolanus, and his young wife, Helen, and they could not have cared less what Leo did or did not do, especially now, wrapped up in their own troubles: their only child—a little boy—badly hurt in a farming accident the very day Old Krauss was buried. And so they had nothing to do with Leo, or anyone for that matter.

  Now and then, one of the other neighbours, for reasons best known to them, would suggest that it wouldn’t be out of line to take a ride over and see if Leo was all right out there by himself, but with no one willing to be the one to do so, the uneasy memory of Old Krauss still too fresh in everyone’s mind.

  So they forgot about Leo, more or less, until the spring, when he emerged from that house like something lain dormant, emerged shrunken and thinner than anyone remembered, as if his bones jutted just short of breaking skin and those two flat black eyes sunk even deeper, but with a kind of fuzziness—and this was the strange thing—a kind of indistinctness about him, in spite of his edges. Indistinct in a way that made people squint up their eyes when they looked at him, as if it was not Leo but their own eyesight that was faulty. He emerged from that shack one bright Sunday morning in spring, wearing a dark suit far too short in the arms and legs, making him appear taller, and with his black hair combed straight across his head, and the bright crocuses dotting the field beyond the yard and a bit of snow still banked up bluely against the north side of the barn, and he hitched up Gus’s bony old mule to Gus’s bony old wagon and he drove through that blinding spring sunshine over to the little country church at Johnsborough parish, and there, while everyone stood gaping in the yard, he climbed down from the wagon and nodded to the left and to the right and grinned blackly and said, “Good day to you, God bless you, good morning,” just as if he had done so without fail every Sunday of his life.

  It was not only the appearance of Leo Krauss that made everyone stop and stare, but where he’d chosen to appear. Ida had been the only Krauss ever to attend church (when the weather was good enough that she might walk, or when one of her neighbours thought to—dared to—offer a ride). Neither Old Krauss nor the children ever accompanied her, whether because Ida preferred it or because Old Krauss forbade it, no one was ever certain, though when Old Krauss would happen to run into Father Rieger in town and Father Rieger would invariably ask, Gustav, when will we see you in church?, Old Krauss would invariably reply, Wenn des Papstes Arsch blümt, when the Pope’s ass blooms. He loathed religion in general and Catholics in particular. Cannibals, he called them. Perhaps some principle kept him from church, or possibly something from his shady past, but many suspected it was, again, simply his laziness.

  “Ach,” he would say, “all those rules. Don’t eat meat on Friday. Fast before Communion. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Good God, a man would marry a goat if that old Mottenschitter over there in Rome said to do so. And the opa norsch we have here (meaning Father Rieger), they would all shit in their own pants and call it due penance to please him.”

  Sometimes the older Krauss boys, perhaps at their father’s instigation, would ride over to Johnsborough Sunday mornings and throw snowballs or small rocks or even chunks of frozen cow shit at the church windows during Mass and once, on Lenten Friday, a small fish they’d caught in the river, over and over against the window nearest the altar, while Father, who, liking to stray from what he felt was a too-confining Latin Mass, carried on stoically, advising his parishioners that God was angry, yes, angry, and that sin could only be atoned for by the shedding of innocent blood, that God in His wrath and anger had sent Jesus to be punished in their sinful stead, saying (at which point he raised his voice in order to be heard above the fish thumping against th
e window) of the Lenten fast, “In the words of Matthew, do not look sombre as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their sinful faces to show men they are fasting until, until, fasting … is … it’s to put oil on your head and, sinning …” Then, reddening, he lapsed into the Nicene Creed, stammering, “Credo in unum … in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem … factorem …” at which point he finally slammed the Book shut and flew down the aisle and out the front doors, bellowing after the boys as they rode away laughing and hooting across the muddy spring fields.

  One All Hallows’ Eve, they almost burned the whole place down, and Father Rieger into the bargain (no one ever did discover what Father was doing there in the middle of the night, but it was not for them to question the cloth), and the youngest of the Krauss boys, who had, for whatever reason, been abandoned by his elder brothers, was left standing in the yard snot-nosed and bawling while Father Rieger flapped back and forth between the well and the fire. Of course, the Krauss boys denied it, in spite of their young brother’s presence at the scene of the crime, but everyone knew it had been them. No one but a Krauss would have braved the cemetery there—any cemetery—at night without a rosary and fifteen of his boldest friends.

  So on that spring morning when Leo stepped through the church doors and dipped his fingers in the urn and crossed himself just as natural as if he’d done it every day of his life, more than just a few heads turned and stared in disbelief. He strode up the aisle, genuflected, yes, genuflected, and edged into a pew, not at the back of the church as one might expect, but right there in front, right behind the prim row of nuns who had ridden out in a wagon from the convent on the edge of town, as they did on Sundays and special Holy Days. He nodded to this person and that as he knelt and then he bent his head piously over his folded hands while everyone stared in shock and outrage at him and then at one another, and Mother Superior—Sister Benedicta—who sat directly in front of Leo, turning and giving him a long, pale stare, as if he were Lucifer himself, and someone in the back of the church muttering, “Gott im Himmel, but now I’ve seen it all.”

  Of course, they had not seen it all, not yet, not by far, for when Father Rieger delivered the Communion Rite and broke the bread and ate of the body and blood of Christ, and when Kaspar and Remigius Fitz, the altar boys, roused themselves long enough to ring their little golden bell, and when Ludmila Baumgarten, seated at the piano, rose to lead the Agnus Dei, and everyone filed up for Communion, Leo Krauss—having never, as far as anyone knew, made a good confession, made any kind of confession at all—without a glimmer of hesitation took his place in line, head bowed, arms folded across his chest, moving in that slow, aimless way he always had of moving, as if his very leanness slowed him where another man would be slowed by weight. More than just laziness; it was as if he was afraid to get where he was going.

  When he stepped to the front of the line and the altar boys looked at him and then at each other, Father Rieger seemed suspended in time, standing with the Host pinched dryly between his fingers before Leo’s closed eyes and open mouth. Father, too, looked to the right and to the left, as if someone might tell him what to do. But everyone just stared back at him, Mother Superior narrowing her eyes ever so slightly and drumming her gnawed fingers against the hymnal in her lap.

  And, so, his face all flushed up above his collar, Father said between clenched teeth, “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam,” and much to everyone’s disbelief moved to put the wafer on Leo’s tongue.

  It is difficult to say what exactly happened next, whether it was Leo who made an unexpected move or whether Father simply dropped it, but that little wafer went fluttering to the floor while everyone gasped and watched it fall, almost in slow motion, as if it were a cottonwood leaf blown down by the wind, and someone behind Leo making a motion to grab it, but missing, and all the commotion then, someone jostling Remigius Fitz, who sloshed the goblet of wine he held onto Kaspar’s white surplice, and Father saying, “Please, please, everyone, a moment,” and Leo just standing there calmly while everyone searched the floor, saying, “Where is it? Where did it go? It’s disappeared,” and Ludmila Baumgarten standing up from her piano bench to announce, “A miracle,” and all the shuffling and confusion then, until Leo slowly lifted his big old boot, and there the wafer lay, crushed as a stale biscuit, and no one knowing what to do.

  Eventually, Leo bent and brushed the crumbs into the palm of his hand and said, “But it’s still good, not?”

  Then he popped it into his mouth, dabbed the crumbs from his lips and walked back to his pew, kneeling there as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Afterwards, after Leo had climbed back into his wagon and driven away in the same placid and unhurried manner in which he’d arrived, the more superstitious of the congregation stood around in that unbelievable sunshine and talked darkly of what it all could mean, what kind of misfortune Leo had brought down upon himself, upon them all, what wrath of God. There were those for whom it always seemed to be doom of some kind, Ludmila Baumgarten first among them. And they talked, too, of that strangeness about him—Leo—that fuzziness, and wondered if perhaps he had begun drinking.

  In fact, Leo had begun drinking, had even begun making his own liquor with his father’s old still and the stunted potatoes he grew on the south side of the shack, with the intention of making a business of it. Unfortunately, Leo drank the stuff as quickly as he could make it. But Leo was fortunate in that he was one of those drunks who hid it well, at least at first, and so, though many suspected, no one had absolute proof.

  ——

  In time, Leo’s presence in church became so familiar that no one even bothered to question it. There were other things to move on to: the rumour that the youngest Heironimus Schmitt girl—the fat one, not the pretty one—was to have a baby, and no one as yet claiming title of father; Mike Weiser’s new Ford motorcar; plans for a community threshing that fall; and, of course, the seeding. And so Leo came and went pretty much unremarked all summer, nodding and greeting and otherwise keeping to himself, while his fields lay fallow and choked with weeds. Apart from church, no one saw him, not in town, not in the country. It seemed as if he had settled into a quiet life of solitary, impoverished bachelorhood, and that perhaps he would be no trouble to the community after all, having risen above his history and his blood.

  Then, one frosty Saturday evening around the middle of October, Leo turned up quite unexpectedly at one of the neighbours’. Balzar and Ottilia Hech, who had known Leo’s father, were dead by then and their eldest son Roy had taken over the farm, and he was sitting there at the kitchen table playing cards with his sons while his wife and daughters pinched dough into crusts and stirred the big pot of apples stewing with cinnamon and nutmeg on the stove and the smaller children played horsey on the floor and begged morsels of dough. A knock came at the door and little Mary ran to open it and there with the huge night at his back stood Leo Krauss, dressed in that same cramped suit with his hat held in his hands and his hair combed particularly neatly across his head with something that stunk to high heaven (“Lard,” Roy’s wife Esther said later. “I’d bet my life on it, and none too fresh, either.”)

  Little Mary just stood there staring and Roy looked to the doorway in surprise and with a creeping feeling of apprehension and said, “Well, Mary, what are you thinking? Let him in once,” and the little girl stepped away from the door and Leo entered and was offered a chair at the table and he took it. The cards were collected and put away and then everyone sat there at the table exchanging puzzled looks and speaking little, and Esther Hech peeking out of the corner of her eye now and then from where she stood at the counter helping her daughters place the latticed dough across the sliced and sugared apples.

  Roy sat with his hands folded, waiting for Leo to state his business, wondering what in God’s name he could want, and was just about to ask, against all propriety and good judgment, Well, Leo, what can we do for you? when Leo abruptly n
odded, rose from the table, stuck his hat on his head, thanked them, blessed them and disappeared out the door, into his wagon and down the dark road.

  After a moment of perplexed silence, Esther said, without conviction, “We could have given him coffee at least.”

  Roy just shrugged, wondering to himself why, since Leo had done nothing to warrant it, he felt that creeping unease in his belly.

  At church the following morning, Roy learned that, after leaving his place, Leo had continued on down the road, to the next neighbour’s, and then on to the next and the next, until around midnight when everybody figured he must have gone home at last (or else to Stolanus Schoff’s, they said, and they snorted and shook their heads at the impossibility of that). But it was a mystery what exactly Leo could have meant by it all.

  The more sensible among them said, “Ach, he’s just lonely. It’s the company he’s after, and can you blame him?”

  And so it went, Saturday after Saturday, always the same thing, coming and sitting wordlessly and then without warning taking his leave, until around the end of November when the middle Brunhauer girl noticed that as Leo sat at the kitchen table with her father and brothers, it was her he was looking at, watching her with a greasy kind of look—that is how she put it, a greasy look—as she went back and forth between the table and the counter, fetching coffee or kuchen. When she noticed, she stood stock-still in the middle of the kitchen and dropped a full pan of plum kuchen, her favourite, right there where she stood and burst into tears.

  Her mother bustled around her, cleaning up the mess, saying, “Tilda, what is the matter with you, have you lost your mind?”