The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  The girl decided. The following week Leo and Cecilia were married at the little church at Johnsborough with full Nuptial Mass and Benediction (though everyone thought Mike must have had something to do with that, since they could not believe Father would allow it without some incentive and God knows the church could always use a little extra money). Cecilia wore a dress sewed for her by Marian, white, patterned with sprigs of flowers and with a row of covered buttons all down the front; a wreath of wild roses in her hair. As they stood before the altar, Cecilia reached up and plucked one of the pink blossoms and tucked it into the buttonhole in Leo’s old suit, causing Father Rieger to pause and scowl down upon them just before the first notes of the recessional hymn, led by Ludmila Baumgarten, rang out, and, though she could not help but roll her eyes and make sour grimaces, Ludmila sang,

  “Happiness and God’s best blessing

  Descends on you from Heaven above.

  May love be with you on your way,

  The peace of God around you.

  Let no discord mar the peace

  Of lasting pious tenderness,

  For through peace upon this earth

  Your life’s joy will be renewed.”

  Many in attendance that day thought Mike wrong, immoral even, not for the bribery, but for allowing the marriage at all. And, Marian, what could she be thinking? Still others, mostly the men, declared that a lousy husband was better than no husband at all. And it was supposed, too, among this same group, that women weren’t so eager to be alone, that they wanted a husband, children, a home of their own, and Cecilia presumably no different from the rest when it came right down to it. Maybe she felt lucky anyone had been interested at all. Or maybe she didn’t think much about it. Or—and this was what they found really hard to swallow—maybe she saw something in Leo that none of the rest of them could; maybe—was it possible?—surely not—could it be she even loved him? Who was to say, maybe Leo and Cecilia were a match after all.

  “Yah,” people said, nodding and shrugging, “even a crooked pot has got a lid, not?”

  Either way, Leo and Cecilia were married and settled into Leo’s little shack that June. Cecilia worked hard, scouring the walls and floor and ceiling of the shack with boiling water and lye, sewing neatly trimmed curtains with mismatched fabric from Marian’s endless sewing supplies and rubbing the cheap windows with a soft cloth until they gleamed brightly. She quickly got to know her neighbours (though not Schoffs—Helen and Stolanus and their boy—who still kept to themselves) riding over with Leo, who would sit in the wagon and trim his fingernails with a paring knife while she visited with the women in their front yards and sipped at their coffee sweetened with a little condensed milk, if they had it, and smiled and nodded and made a friend of everyone she met, they could not help themselves, no matter what they thought of Leo.

  ——

  Apart from Schoffs, Krausses’ nearest neighbours were Art and Ma Reis (her name was Hady though everyone called her Ma, not because of any particular maternalness—though she had borne twelve children—but simply because that is what she insisted they call her, and when Ma insisted upon a thing, people generally complied). Ma was a force to be reckoned with, didn’t like to take things lying down, as she said, and she quickly made Cecilia Krauss her business, walking over across the fields nearly once a week to have coffee with Cecilia and, as she said, to see which way the wind blew.

  If it was gossip Ma was after, she could find only good things to say of Cecilia, and if there was nothing good to say of Leo, there was certainly nothing bad either. In fact, the little yard that had once swarmed with scabbed and snot-nosed Krausses scrabbling among the garbage now seemed quiet and neat and peaceful. Cecilia made it so. Though it was already the end of June, she borrowed seeds from Ma Reis and other neighbour women and put in enormous flowerbeds around the porch of the little shack, digging in buckets of chicken manure and eggshells and coffee grounds and vegetable peelings for the sweet peas and daisies and larkspur and bachelor’s buttons and peonies and sunflowers, and she planted every kind of marigold in the old coffee and tobacco tins she found littering the house and yard and set them up all along the porch railing and down the rickety steps, and made paths with them, to the barn and the chicken coop and the outhouse, and ringed those buildings around with her flower tins, too, hundreds of them. And though Ma Reis and the others told her it was too late to plant, that she was wasting her time, and though they smiled and rolled their eyes and shook their heads, all those flowers blossomed like crazy, in pinks and blues and yellows and reds and oranges and violets, as if by magic, even the hundreds of marigolds in their tins (and the women said, “But for God’s sake, why doesn’t she just plant them in the dirt?” and they shook their heads again and said, “Well, that’s Cecilia”). She put in an enormous garden out back—carrots and corn and beets and turnips, potatoes (this in addition to Leo’s own patch reserved for the rotgut liquor he would brew come September), kohlrabi and tomatoes and radishes and rhubarb, garlic and green onions and white onions and yellow onions, squash and pumpkins, melons and cucumbers, raspberries and blackcurrants and strawberries (these last three courtesy of the teenage girls who “worked out” for the English families and brought home cuttings wrapped in wet rags to their mothers only to be scolded by them for their dishonesty), sweet green peas, waxy yellow beans, dillweed and chamomile and parsley and two kinds of lettuce, everything she could think of to plant—and everything bloomed and flourished under her touch. Even Leo, it seemed—Ma Reis had to admit—looked brighter and cleaner, had put on some much-needed weight and lost that blurry sunken look everyone had noticed when he’d finally emerged from the shack after Old Krauss died.

  Leo was always with Cecilia—where else was he to go?—sitting on the porch watching her weed the flowerbeds, or haul water from the well to the garden, or chop at the hard earth there with her hoe and scatter the manure she raked and bucketed and carried over from the chicken coop; or waiting at the kitchen table while she stirred big pans of plump dampfnudeln she served to him steaming hot with cinnamon and bowls of stewed plums or crabapples, or watching as she neatly hacked the heads off chickens with a little axe and then strung them up to bleed while she boiled vats of water into which she would plunge them before plucking out their feathers by the fistful. They seemed to have a little money then, most likely Cecilia’s, or maybe money Mike had given them to set up house with, and Cecilia replaced her buttoned wedding dress with a pretty blue dress that she sewed herself and that matched exactly the shade of her eyes, and she wore it every Sunday. They rode together in Leo’s wagon over to Johnsborough and knelt together and took Communion together, and everyone shaking their heads in wonder, thinking, So maybe Leo has changed after all, or else, Give it time, you will see.

  By August, Cecilia was pregnant, but still she worked tirelessly all through September, putting up in preserves what she and Leo did not eat fresh from the garden, pickling cucumbers and beans and carrots and beets, canning rhubarb and tomatoes and crabapples left over from the neighbours’ trees, making jams and syrups and jellies from chokecherries and saskatoons she and Leo picked out in the Sand Hills, until her fingertips were stained deeply blue and the very air around that old place smelled of dill and garlic and vinegar and sugar. There were so many jars and bottles, people wondered how they would ever eat it all. Though it was still too hot to store any of the jars in the house, Cecilia had begun to line the north-facing porch wall with them, from floor to ceiling (“Well,” some of the neighbour women remarked to each other, “let’s just hope she has the good sense to bring those in before it freezes”), and when there was no more room on the porch, she began to stack her jars in the barn, and they all looked just as pretty as anything, especially there on the porch, glittering like jewels when a bit of light hit them, red and orange, purple and green and yellow, as if the entire front of the house was made of the most intricate stained glass.

  And each time they emptied a bottle or jar, Cec
ilia washed it and polished it on the nearly white apron of bleached sacking she always wore over her dress, rubbing and rubbing the glass until it gleamed, and then she tied a length of string or binder twine around the mouth of it and carried it out to the big cottonwood tree that grew in front of the house and tied it to one of the branches.

  “But, Cecilia,” Ma Reis said to her in amazement, “you will need those bottles.”

  Cecilia did not seem to care. When there were enough of them, they tinkled together musically in the wind and Cecilia clapped her hands in delight. The women who came by to visit exchanged a look that was meant to say, “Wait until the next big wind comes up, then they’ll tinkle all right,” and, “What silliness, what a waste of good bottles.”

  But when the next big wind rose and swirled the earth up from the fields in tight funnels and set all the buildings creaking and whipped and bent the trees, the jars did not crash against each other and shatter, but only tinkled more loudly, and the women were amazed and said, “It doesn’t make sense, that tree must catch some shelter somehow, maybe from the house,” and, “Wait until the wind changes direction,” and, “Such a waste. All those good jars. I guess they have money to throw away.”

  And, though the wind changed, though it rose and fell and rose again, and blasted and eased and blasted, though it piled the soil up in drifts along fencelines and nearly sucked the eyeballs from the heads of the beasts in the fields, Cecilia’s jars never did break, not a single one.

  Leo began to find little coloured bottles for her, too, out at the nuisance grounds where they would sometimes drive on calm evenings, Cecilia sitting in the wagon, with her mending propped gently against her waxing belly, Leo scavenging the growing mounds of refuse for the rare blue and green and amber medicine bottles the English people—the Smiths and Bells and Martins who raised their vast herds of cattle on the best grazing land along the river and who occasionally hired the young German girls as live-in housekeepers good enough to wash their soiled underclothes but not to catch the eyes of their sons (though this could not always be avoided, in spite of their efforts, and often the girls would have to be dismissed without pay or honour, as the English women put it)—sometimes discarded there.

  Cecilia would wash these bottles, too, and shine them on her apron and hang them from the cottonwood branches among the clear jars.

  “Listen,” she would say to Leo, “how they sound different from the clear jars. Listen how the blue ones sound blue, and the amber ones amber, and the green ones green. All a different sound.” And then she would stand there listening and smiling until nightfall, when Leo would go inside and she would follow him.

  ——

  No one saw much of them once winter set in, not even Ma Reis, who in recent years had become increasingly sensitive to the cold and spent much of her time in mending or sewing in front of the blazing coal stove. Leo and Cecilia were seen only at church on Sundays, without fail, where they continued to sit in the second row behind the good sisters from the convent, who would often smile at pretty Cecilia—who could resist her?—and then frown vaguely at Leo as they slid into their seats (some of them, the older ones, still remembered having taught Leo and his siblings on the blessedly rare days they came to school).

  After Christmas, people began to remark how tired Cecilia looked.

  “Ach,” the older women said, “that’s how it is with the first. She’ll get used to it.” And then went on to tell how they had prevailed through their own more difficult pregnancies, and then they all agreed, “But these young ones, they don’t make them like they used to. So fragile.”

  Late in April, Leo and Cecilia missed two Sunday services in a row and, as Ma Reis had been laid up with the rheumatism, everyone asked Mike Weiser how the newlyweds were doing.

  “I wish I knew,” Mike told them. “We were over twice last week and both times the doors locked and no light.”

  “Didn’t you knock?” they asked.

  “Do you think I am stupid?” he said irritably. “Of course I knocked. Either they were not home or they did not answer.”

  The following Sunday, Leo pulled into the churchyard as usual, with Cecilia by his side. But when she climbed down from the wagon, Cecilia was clearly no longer pregnant and she held what appeared to be a baby swathed several times over in an old patchwork quilt cut up into swaddling blankets.

  “But did she have it alone?” the women speculated.

  “Did she call the braucha?”

  “Was anyone with her?”

  “With those two, who even knows if that’s a baby in there.”

  Eventually, Mike and Marian arrived, with Art and Ma Reis coming in behind them, and stepping down from the wagons they all spotted Cecilia juggling the thick bundle against her bosom. It was not difficult to see, by the looks on their faces, that they had not known, either. Marian straightened her skirt and hesitated and glanced toward where the women stood staring and clucking. It was Ma Reis who took charge.

  “Cecilia,” she said, firmly, walking toward her, and everyone holding their breaths to hear but not really needing to since Ma Reis spoke loud enough that everyone could hear, “Cecilia, that baby is bundled much too warmly.”

  And, taking the baby, she stripped off five layers, chucked the little thing under the chin and handed it back.

  FOUR

  So they had begun their family, Leo and Cecilia; Cecilia did all the work and Leo did not leave her alone for a moment, and somehow good fortune smiled down upon whatever Cecilia touched. They continued to have children, pretty blue-eyed children born in the spring, as if she and Leo were on the same cycle as the cows in the fields. They continued to take their young brood to church each Sunday, and everything continued to flourish. Leo’s ego certainly did. He strutted around more outrageous than ever. Cecilia, though, continued to look tired.

  Then one spring following a couple years of exceptional harvests and prosperity, work was begun on a new church closer to the Sand Hills, where there was a greater concentration of parishoners, a church twice the size of the old country church at Johnsborough parish, and with vaulted ceilings and a dizzying spire that outdid even St. Michael’s built in town by the wealthier Catholic merchants there. The countryside buzzed with the excitement of it. The frame went up quickly and the men had just begun work on the roof when the marble statue Father Rieger had ordered to grace the new cemetery arrived on a wagonload of supplies from Maple Creek seventy miles to the south. They unpacked the seven-foot monument of Jesus, hands outspread, eyes cast eternally to the heavens. It was truly impressive (and, further, exceeded by at least six inches the statue of the Virgin Mary in the front gardens at the Ursuline convent, a point which Father Rieger was quick to make within hearing of Mother Superior, “Not that it matters,” he added, humbly, “for we are all together in the Lord, are we not?”).

  Father insisted the statue be erected the very next Saturday. The women baked kuchen and strudle and brewed big pots of coffee, and Ludmila Baumgarten offered to play hymns (“Anything to get out of working,” the women said), and Father Rieger himself came forward to break ground and dig the first spadeful of dirt for the hole in which they would sink the base of the monument. Father raised the spade in both hands and heaved it into the ground only to have it clang painfully beneath his palms.

  Everyone chuckled and shook their heads and agreed, “But this land is not easy even on a priest.”

  Father rubbed his palms discreetly against his cassock, moved his spade and dug again, only to have the same thing happen, and again and again, until he waved his stinging hands and passed the spade to Lucius Haag, who happened to be standing nearest him, saying tightly, “I put the work of God into your hands,” and everyone clapped and cheered and Lucius began to dig.

  It took only a few spadefuls of dirt before Lucius stopped, scratched at the soil with the blade and said uneasily, “But, what is that, there?” He pointed with the spade to where he had uncovered what appeared to be long smooth ston
es of an unusually white hue.

  “Ach,” someone said, “some animal bones. Toss them over there on a pile. I’ll haul them away in my wagon.”

  Lucius did, digging up and tossing bones to the side and making generally good progress, and everyone standing and chatting and sipping at coffee and watching him. Then he found the skull. Poor old Lucius, a harmless souser, that is what people said about him, three sheets to the wind on a calm day, held the thing up and was about to say, Now what kind of cockeyed animal would you say this was, anyway? when it dawned on him.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he breathed, and dropped it in the dirt.

  At first they wanted to move the whole church. They said it was tainted ground. Some were worried what might come of having disturbed the dead.

  “God help us,” they said, and crossed themselves, and thumbed their rosaries. “It must be moved.”

  Father Rieger must have talked some sense into them, or somebody did, and they moved the cemetery instead, to the west side rather than the east, where it would get the setting sun if not the rising. And they put the bones back into the hole they’d been dug from, tentatively, trying not to touch them except with spades, and they covered those bones up and prayed over them and sprinkled holy water and then tried to pretend they hadn’t ever been found. But, by the end of that afternoon, though the sign at the gate would still read THE CHURCH OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL, Knochenfeld it had become.

  The roof was on the church within a couple of weeks. Everyone pitched in, everyone but Leo. No one really cared, just as happy that he stayed away, he was still such a thorn in everyone’s side, in spite of Cecilia, the way he came striding into Mass so pious and superior. Or, if anyone did ask him to come out and help, he would say, “But I can’t leave Cecilia. What would she do?”