The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  And Leo just sitting, watching it all.

  After he had gone, Tilda, her face flushed up in shame and humiliation, told her mother. (“A greasy look,” she said, and shivered and began to cry again.)

  Tilda’s mother’s face darkened, just for an instant, and then she said quickly, “Nonsense, but really you can be a stupid girl,” and Heinrich, Tilda’s youngest brother, sang,

  “Not long ago it rained,

  The roof’s still dripping wet;

  I used to have a sweetheart,

  I wish I had him yet,”

  for which he was given a good smack on his backside and sent crying to bed and Tilda after him for her foolishness.

  But at her first opportunity, Tilda’s mother told the other mothers what Tilda had told her (“a greasy look, yes, that is what she said”), and the mothers raised their eyebrows and told the fathers, who lowered theirs. Soon it was clear to them just what Leo was up to. He was looking for company, all right, and in a hurry, with the prospect of another long winter staring him blank in the face.

  ——

  But things would not move quickly for Leo. He carried on that way through December and into January, courting—without actually seeming to court—the neighbour girls, first this one, then that. Every Saturday night he’d slick back that hair that refused to stay slicked and put on his suit and take his old wagon and his old mule and ride over to one of the neighbours’ and sit at their kitchen table and leer at the girls (how had they not noticed it before?) and wait to be offered a drink. For a while, at first anyway, they would pour him out a whisky, perhaps out of some confused sense of helplessness and propriety and goodwill, or maybe because they were missing a drink themselves and could not drink without offering him one as well. Either way, it did not last long, that forced hospitality, once they discovered how quickly and easily he dispensed with their liquor. Soon they poured him black coffee instead, and then, when he sat there (glancing peevishly at his untouched cup) so long that most of the family would have gone to bed, the unfortunate girl he had come to court weeping hotly into her pillow from shame and outrage (it had become somewhat of a joke around the parish, one in which the teenage boys—the ones without eligible sisters—took particular delight), leaving only the father and one or two of the older sons sitting and yawning into their hands at the table, they finally ceased pouring even the coffee.

  Then, Leo started turning up drunk. It was difficult to tell at first, he carried it pretty well, but his decorum soon began to dissolve until he would just pull into the yard behind his gassy mule and sit there in the blasting snow, shouting from the wagon for Caroline or Amalia or Saraphina or whomever he’d come to court (not always getting the name right). Everyone in the house would do their best to ignore him, going about their business, until eventually someone would say, “What, and will we let him freeze out there?” And no one at first either answering the question or moving to let Leo in, until finally someone would get up and open the door and shout, “Well, don’t sit there and yell, you dummkopf, come in if you want to come in.”

  And so he would come in, stagger in sometimes, and the men would prop him up at the table and try to feed him strong coffee and cajole him, rather roughly, into some semblance of sobriety, out of neighbourliness and necessity, but how those fathers and brothers wanted to kill him. Sometimes he would pass out right there at the kitchen table, or be close to it, and everyone so sick of him that the men would just toss him over their shoulders and carry him out to the wagon, tie up the reins and give the old mule an especially hearty swat, thinking, He will make it home or he won’t and it’s no skin off my arse either way.

  After a while, people stopped opening their doors to him and instead let him sit out there in his wagon in the subzero night, hollering, until in the end he gave up and went home. And still he showed up every Sunday morning at church like clockwork, nodding to the left and to the right, just as though he hadn’t seen any of them since the previous Sunday. And that infuriated the men most of all. They wanted nothing to do with Leo, but they did not want to be ignored by him either.

  “What,” they would say, “he sits and drinks my liquor and ogles my daughters and come Sunday he nods at me like he’s the goddamned Pope?”

  And it was true. There Leo was, Sunday morning, with a kind of affected dignity so absurd that it should have been funny, they should have laughed at him, but instead they were insulted by it. There was something infuriating in the way Leo behaved, as if he did not know exactly what kind of a horse’s ass he was. Leo could have been tolerated, forgiven even, possibly, if at least he would show some humility, some shame. If only he would show that he knew how low he was. He was a Krauss, after all, a Krauss, for God’s sake.

  And yet, Sunday morning, there he would be, as if he were above them, and every week take Communion with a soul they could only assume was as black as his teeth with sin. It was enough to drive them mad.

  So they locked their doors to him, and when he sat in their yards and hollered for their daughters, and the mothers, out of exasperation, finally said, “Oh, for God’s sake, let him in once, all the neighbours can hear,” the fathers said darkly, “He can sit there until our cows shit flowers, that sonofabitch will not drink at my table again.”

  ——

  When Leo finally realized no doors would open for him and he grew weary of spending his Saturday nights freezing in his wagon, he stayed home. He stayed home Saturday and he stayed home Sunday, and at first everyone was relieved, elated even.

  “Good,” they said, “let him sit in that shack of his. Let him rot there.”

  But soon his absence became more of an outrage than his presence had ever been, as if he stayed away just so they would notice, and wonder about it, in spite of themselves. Even the girls wondered—though they would have admitted it to no one—whether he had found himself a woman after all (and wondered, too, in spite of themselves, who that woman was and if she was prettier than they), and hoped that he had, so as to put an end to their own shame and mortification.

  So after months of suffering bitterly his presence, they found themselves having to suffer his absence.

  “Ach,” some said, “be glad he is out of our hair. Be glad it has not come to some trouble.”

  But others—the Ludmila Baumgarten crowd—began to talk. What should be done? They were Christians, not? And what if he was sick out there? What if he’d drunk himself dead? Someone should take a ride out there, but who? Father Rieger, not present at the time, was selected, unanimously.

  “After all,” Ludmila pointed out, “what is the church for if not to look to the low and the fallen?”

  “Why, Father would be offended if we did not ask him.”

  “It would be an insult.”

  “An affront to God and clergy.”

  “No, we would not place ourselves above the cloth.”

  That is how they put it to Father Reiger, too, in spite of those who thought well enough should be left alone, and so, the following Saturday, Father bundled up grudgingly in his buffalo-skin coat and headed for Leo’s, his eyes stinging in the frigid wind. Halfway there he saw a wagon approaching and he lifted his hand to wave.

  It was Leo, dressed in his everlasting suit and with several blankets tied cape-like around his shoulders (it had never occurred to any of them that Leo did not own a coat), and one around his head, over his hat, babushka-style.

  “Leo,” Father said, when Leo had pulled his wagon alongside Father’s horse. “I was just coming to see you.”

  Leo’s teeth clacked. “Well,” he said, “here I am, then.”

  And Father, flustered at the best of times, said, “But where are you going? I had wanted to have a talk with you.”

  Leo said, “About what?”

  And Father said, “Why, about the salvation of your soul.”

  Leo shrugged and shivered and said, “It’s not my soul that needs tending, Father. But you know about that as well as I.”

 
And with a nod and a chuck of the reins, Leo left Father—whose cheeks flamed in spite of the cold—there in the middle of the road, which was slowly sifting over with snow, and he drove on into town, down the main street, past the post office and the bank and the Chinese laundry, past Wing’s with its smell of grease and coffee and soya sauce, its pink door still gleaming warmly with the last of the February light, past the hardware and the livery, past the brown Protestant church set well back from the street behind a row of leafless caragana bushes softened by a light dusting of snow, past the town office and Stednick’s Dry Goods and the grey two-storey house from which Doc Hamilton had briefly run his practice before returning permanently to the greener pastures of Ontario, abandoning his cats to live and breed among the cast-off furniture that still graced, eerily, the parlour and bedrooms and kitchen, past the tall, stiff, white-planked Catholic church of St. Michael’s built the previous summer by the town parish, past the lumber yard, the sweet smell of sawdust lingering well into winter, past the red-brick convent of the Sisters of St. Ursula with its neatly shovelled drive and the warm yellow lights in all its several immaculate windows, and on to the Catholic community hall just outside of town, where he pulled his wagon up and sat waiting in the cold and the gathering dark, listening to the dry hiss of snow blowing now and then across the bare and frozen earth around him, shivering and stomping his feet, waiting almost an hour until, at last, the first wagons began to arrive for the social that night in honour of St. Valentine’s Day.

  Finally, the doors of the hall were thrown open and he could see into the blaze of light, the hall done up in pink and red crepe-paper streamers with white paper doilies and red cut-out hearts the girls had made, and all of them in their prettiest dresses with the snow coming down on their hair as they walked from the wagons and Leo just sitting there under his cloak of old blankets, rubbing his bare hands together painfully in the cold.

  Everyone was surprised to see him, of course, though they tried not to show it, and the girls secretly horrified, each one certain he was there for her.

  Leo lost little time in making a nuisance of himself, to the single girls and some of the married as well, and the poor, quiet Eichert sisters whose well-meaning mother had told them, “If I ever hear you refused someone a dance, it will be the last time you go,” kept on their feet by him all night, one after the other, as he lurched them around the hall, the bottle of liquor he kept in his jacket pocket thumping against them so that they complained of bruises on their hipbones. The Eichert girls left well before midnight, out of frustration and humiliation and plain exhaustion, and the rest of the girls, bolstered by sips from the bottles in their companions’ own jackets, turned their backs when Leo approached them, or laughed in his face, or said unkinder things, the way it often builds, one feeling cockier than the next, trying to outdo each other in boldness, impressing their companions, until Leo just took a chair and sat in a corner by the cloakroom, watching and waiting until the last dance was played and everyone thumped the tables and stomped their feet and sang,

  “The Sweep-out, the Sweep-out,

  Now the girls are going home.

  And had they wanted to be good,

  They’d have been home long ago.”

  Leo was the last to leave, sitting there in his chair by the cloakroom, and everyone laughing and brushing past him to get their coats, just as if he wasn’t.

  And so when Mike Weiser, on hall duty that night, finally said, “Leo, I’ll be locking up in a minute,” he said it gently, for he felt a bit sorry for Leo, sitting there in that chair at the back of the emptied and echoing hall. Mike was a widower and knew better than the others the miseries of being alone. So he stopped and leaned on his broom and said lightly, “Ach, Leo, women, who needs them?”

  Leo just blinked at him a moment and then he said, “I do.”

  Then he sighed and nodded, stuck his hat on his head and his blankets on top of that, and walked out into the February night where that sorry old mule stood waiting for him, cloaked now in snow, and the wagon, too, and he did not bother to brush off either the mule or the seat, he just climbed up and sat and clucked the white mule into motion and drove that long dark road home to his farm, and Mike stood there in the snow and watched him go and thought, for the first time, that maybe they’d misjudged Leo, had been too hard on him, the sins of the father and all that. Mike thought maybe, just maybe, Leo did have a heart there after all. Even if it was fed and pumped by Krauss blood, it was still a heart and he was still a man, not?

  THREE

  That very night, after the St. Valentine’s social, Mike Weiser stoked up his coal stove and sat down at the kitchen table he’d built for his wife, God rest her soul, with his own hands shortly after their marriage, and by the light of a gleaming kerosene lantern wrote a letter to this dead wife’s spinster sister down in North Dakota. He wrote, Dear Miss Marian Dunhauer, and then, Dear Miss Dunhauer, and finally,

  Dear Marian,

  You and I both know what it is to be alone. Come and be my wife and I will always treat you good. I have already one full section and some pasture besides for the cows, they are good beef cows and so you will not have to do so much milking as I know you do at home with your father’s Jerseys that are not even good for eating, only if you stew them. There is chickens and sows and I will get a new boar come spring. There is crabapple trees that are good producers. I think you would be happy here and not lonely. It is a good farm and Eugenia—the dead sister—Eugenia kept a nice house. Some of the windows are stained-glass.

  Then he added quickly, If it is not too much of a shock for you, come as soon as you get this letter.

  And so dear Miss Marian Dunhauer did, by God, she came less than three weeks later with a hand-me-down trousseau packed in a small steamer trunk that her parents had brought over from the old country—and with her youngest sister, a sweet but simple-minded girl, of whom she had custody—and Mike and Marian were married in a small ceremony at Johnsborough with the younger sister serving as bridesmaid and they lived together in the house with stained-glass windows.

  The younger sister, Cecilia, lived with them. She must have been about sixteen, though she seemed younger. She helped around the house, taking particular delight in polishing the stained-glass windows; she would tend to them daily, though they hardly needed it, saving each pane for that moment in the day when the sun shone most directly upon it, rubbing away with an expression on her face of sheer wonder. It made people smile to see her.

  To look at Cecilia you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her at all, that is what everyone said, but, as Mike pointed out, she didn’t talk so good and she didn’t listen so good (sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, she would begin to hum and rock and smile to herself in such an easy, self-assured way that it made the speaker wonder if they had said something crazy themselves).

  But the main thing about Cecilia was she hated to be left alone. That’s what Mike said was hard, the girl could not be left alone, not for an instant, or she would start to howl and lash at anything within reach, curtains, bedding, furniture, crockery; she wouldn’t follow whoever was leaving, or go find whoever had left, she would just sit and howl and lash out, just like a baby. She even slept on a little cot in Mike and Marian’s bedroom and several times during the night she would get up and walk over to the bed in the dark and reach out her little hand and touch their faces just to make sure they were there and then return to her own cot and sleep again. Sometimes, on nights when there was no moon, she could not find their faces and her frantic patting at the pillows and whimperings would wake Mike and he would quickly reach out to find her hand and guide it to his own face and then to Marian’s, and then she would be all right and they could go back to sleep.

  Mike said it wasn’t him but his wife who suggested the girl might be happier in a home of her own, with a husband and children to care for.

  Unfortunately, no man around would have the girl, and her as pretty as anything—all
pink and golden—and a harder worker you never saw. She’d work just as happy as a lark from sunup to sundown so long as someone was always with her. But, should she find herself alone for an instant, you could hear her for miles around on a calm day. If Marian needed to use the outhouse, she had to take Cecilia with her. And Mike would, too, if Marian was not around. He’d prop the outhouse door open just enough so that she could see him from where she stood outside, at a reasonable distance. Or, if he insisted upon closing the door, as he sometimes did, he would leave one hand stuck out through the crack so that Cecilia could hold it while he, well … it wasn’t hard to imagine how Mike must have felt. And it was understandable that the young men kept away from her, as they did.

  When it became clear there would be no suitors, Mike and Marian considered sending her to the nuns at the convent on the edge of town, the good sisters of St. Ursula. But then they foresaw difficulties—the solitary prayers, the bathing—no, it would not do, after all.

  And so Cecilia continued to live with Mike and Marian, going wherever they went like a little shadow, from room to room, house to barn, outhouse to chicken coop, and they had pretty much resigned themselves that was how it was to be.

  Until one day a courter finally came.

  When Leo stepped into Mike and Marian’s kitchen and said, “I come to make an offer,” they did not at first know what he was talking about. When it became clear it was not a what but a who he was referring to, they both balked at the idea. Cecilia sat there with them at the kitchen table smiling, her blue eyes watering prettily over a bowl of spring onions she was trimming for supper. Mike and Marian lost no time in turning Leo out, and in no uncertain terms. Then, as Mike stood in the doorway fuming, watching Leo ride off in his wagon, he remembered that night of the St. Valentine’s social and how Leo had looked stepping out into that snow, and he said to himself, “But maybe he is not so bad after all. Maybe it is just a woman he needs.” He remembered those long evenings alone in his house before Marian had come, with nothing but the ticking of the mantel clock and the wind outside and the stained-glass windows black with the night that could not have been any darker and the fields that could not have stretched any farther on every side of him. And so he said, “Let the girl decide.”