The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Bring her along,” they said. “The women help too, with the coffee and dinners, and the painting and cleaning up.”

  And Leo blinked back at them as if they were stupid and said, “But there is work enough for her at home.”

  So Knochenfeld was hammered and sawed into place that spring without the hand of Leo Krauss. He and Cecilia would ride by in the wagon now and then with the kids all loaded into the back and a baby under Cecilia’s arm and they would sit at the end of the road and watch a while and sometimes they would have a lunch of what appeared to be hard-boiled eggs and pickled beets and bread, the older kids flinging rocks at birds with their slingshots until Cecilia waved them wearily into submission, and then they would just pack up and roll away as quiet as they had appeared, infuriating everyone, though they all bit their tongues because Mike Weiser, and Marian, too, had worked harder than anyone and donated a good deal of money besides, and, then again, Mike was a pretty good sort and no one wanted to make him feel bad, being now a relation of sorts to Leo (though no one would have said as much to his face).

  ——

  There was a stretch of time, then, when no one saw them. Not even Ma Reis, busy as she was with the work at Knochenfeld. It seemed as though Leo and Cecilia had disappeared again. And people waved their hands and rolled their eyes and said, “Another baby.”

  The church was almost complete. The new bell hung gleaming in the tower, and everyone was so busy and preoccupied that no one thought much about Leo or Cecilia, not even her sister Marian, carefully embroidering the elaborate cloth that would grace the altar.

  And then one Saturday, a day as windy as they’d seen that spring, the dust lifting up from the fields and sifting across the roads like water, Krausses turned up again. The crew at Knochenfeld had about decided to give up on the outside finishing, the wind so strong it was knocking them all around like sparrows, when they saw Leo’s wagon coming down the road.

  Someone said, “They must be bored out there, they picked a hell of a day for sightseeing,” and someone else said, “Or else that Christly wind blew them this way,” and everyone hurrying to finish what they had started and to pack up paint and clean brushes and store tools, the dust blowing into everything, their teeth even, and no one noticing that Leo did not stop the wagon at the end of the road to watch but instead pulled right into the yard, right up to the front steps of the church, with the dust from his wheels blowing over him, and no one even yet paying him much mind until he stood in the wagon and called out for Father, not even getting out, just standing and yelling for him like that over the wind and the hammers and Dionysius Eichert’s screechy old adze saw that he insisted on using—though it drove everyone half crazy—because it had once belonged to his wife’s uncle’s stepbrother or someone back in the old country and it had been used to build the old cathedral at Culelia and had been reported to somehow have saved someone’s—maybe the stepbrother’s—life or something, God knows how, when he’d fallen from the roof, and so it had long been believed among the Eicherts to be somehow blessed. No one could hear a thing when that old saw was going and it drove Father half mad; he locked himself in the rectory with cotton stuffed in his ears and would not come out except now and then to stand scowling in the yard to see if it still looked all right, the church that is, or, troubled as he was by bad bowels, to hustle across to the outhouse by the shelterbelt.

  So Leo stood there in his wagon with the wind howling and the saw screeching and the hammers knocking, and hollered for Father, and finally a few stopped what they were doing and said, “What? What is he saying? What does he want?”

  It was only then that everyone noticed that, though the five children were all in the back of the wagon in their usual places, Cecilia did not sit beside Leo on the seat. Mike Weiser descended his ladder and walked over and looked in the back of the wagon where the kids sat around a long bundle wrapped head to toe in old sheets, swaddled up like a baby, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus.”

  FIVE

  Someone went to summon Father Rieger and he came out onto the steps then with his black cassock snapping around him in the wind, and everyone stood silenced, watching, some of the women’s hands up over their mouths, until Leo hollered again from the wagon, and this time they all understood: “If that graveyard’s ready, I got a burial to make.”

  The graveyard wasn’t ready, though Father agreed later, after much hushed negotiation, to consecrate it that afternoon. Some said afterwards that Mike must have been involved again, since Father wasn’t the sort to bend the rules, not for anyone, and this made twice he’d done so for Leo, the least likely recipient of Father’s—anyone’s—grace.

  When Marian had been taken home by two or three of the other women, Mike, who stood gripping the edge of the wagon box, finally managed, “Leo, when did this happen?” but Leo only shook his head, as if he did not understand.

  The oldest girl, Magdalen, who, though only a child of about six herself, juggled a fussing infant on her knee, said, “Saturday she couldn’t get out of bed. For the washing. Then Sunday—” The child stared blankly at Mike a moment and then dropped her face, though not in grief, it seemed, but in confusion.

  “Sunday,” Mike breathed. “Good God, Leo. Why didn’t you send for someone?”

  And Leo still standing there as if he did not understand what on earth Mike was talking about.

  Ma Reis came out of the church basement, then, wiping paint from her hands onto her apron, with Art behind her. “What is it?” she said over the wind, looking around. “What is going on?”

  Mike opened his mouth as if he would say something. Then he wiped a hand across his forehead and turned away, studying the horizon beyond the church, and Ma stepped forward, looked into the wagon.

  “Oh, dear God,” she said. Her hand up over her throat and Art holding her elbow.

  Leo stood and waited, for once, without speaking, his suit jacket flapping loudly against his side.

  Art and Ma Reis took the Krauss children home with them. Once they were gone, Mike said tightly to Leo, “Come now, bring her to my place. Marian will take care of her.”

  And Leo blinked and said, “But it’s too late. She’s dead.”

  Mike just nodded and took the reins from him, climbed up and said, “Marian will take care of her.”

  ——

  Cecilia Krauss was buried late the following afternoon in a wooden coffin Mike patched together with extra wood from Knochenfeld and this time Leo did not arrange for any photograph to be taken. He just stood around in the churchyard, in the wind, looking puzzled, pointing to the coffin whenever someone spoke to him and saying, “But that has to be good, not? That wood is holy.” And the Krauss kids—all but Magdalen, who stood holding the baby—running around and shouting and tumbling, as if they did not comprehend, either, what had happened.

  And what exactly had happened, no one ever did find out. There was some talk at first, mostly from Marian, and from Ma Reis, too, though Mike and Art must have done their best to dissuade them, about an investigation, but nothing ever came of it. What was there to prove? Cecilia was overworked, certainly. Maybe she was sick, too. Probably she was.

  “And anyway,” Mike said, “a man cannot be charged with working his wife to death. If he could, half the men around would be guilty.” Which Ma had to admit was true.

  No, there was nothing that could be blamed on Leo, not officially, and eventually even Marian gave up trying and was made to console herself with taking the three youngest of Leo’s blue-eyed children to live with her and Mike and to raise them as their own, hoping something might still be done with and for them. Leo did nothing to stop it—what would he have done with little ones? Maybe he thought it was just as well. That left the two older children, Henry and Magdalen, who did not want to go and whom Marian would not take anyway, since, as she said, they were clearly already Krausses and beyond her help.

  In the weeks following, the church at Knochenfeld was finished and Marian’s cloth o
n the altar and the walls painted a pale blue that reminded not a few of the colour of a certain familiar dress, though that had not been the intention. The cemetery, too, was completed, enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence, now an officially consecrated cemetery, Cecilia Krauss the first to grace it; Leo, some said, the one who put her there.

  SIX

  It was no great surprise that Leo no longer came to church, and at first the barren pew where he and Cecilia used to sit with their children was such a distraction it was as if the eye of God himself peered down upon it. But, as with most things, Cecilia’s absence eventually became so familiar that it was, with few exceptions, as if she had never been there. After all, hardly anyone had known her well. And so, in time, over that first long winter in the new church, most thought little about her, unless they happened to catch the blue-eyed gaze of one of the three small children who now sat scrubbed and dumbfounded between Mike and Marian.

  Leo did not turn up again until the following spring. He appeared, but not back at church Sunday mornings, as might have been expected. Now he came to town on Saturday nights, riding in, not broken and bereaved as everyone expected him to be, but sitting straight upright on the wagon seat as he used to, no perceivable trace of sorrow on his bony face; it was as if he’d never been married at all. He would ride in Saturday nights and he would go to the social, or if there wasn’t a social, to the bar (with, they could only presume, what was left of Cecilia’s money), still wearing that godforsaken suit, usually three sheets to the wind already, but sitting there looking pleased with himself, and everyone turning the other way as he passed or casting him scornful looks, thinking of those kids alone back at the shack, but what could they do about it? And Leo just nodding the whole time, to the left and to the right, just like he used to do in church. No one realized—though they surely should have—that he was not coming to town just to drink.

  One night close to Christmas, Leo, looking particularly smug, rolled through town and straight to the hall, where he went strutting in, the pockets of his suit, every single pocket, bulging. He crossed the dance floor and walked right up to Viola Hahn—a dark-eyed, plump little thing, known far and wide as a beauty, a real catch, half the young men around were mad for her—sitting at a table with some friends, all ruffled up with vanity, and Leo stood before her a moment. Then he reached into his pockets and pulled out handfuls of Japanese oranges, not just one or two, but handful after handful, and plopped them on the table in front of Viola and into her lap. Then he just stood there grinning, as if he’d offered her a pile of diamonds, while those oranges rolled all over the place and out onto the dance floor. Whatever else Leo thought Viola would do with those oranges, or with him for that matter, it was quite clear to everyone there that he hadn’t thought she would laugh at him, which is what she did do, after plucking an orange from the table in disgust and tossing it into Leo’s face. It thumped dully off his nose, and half the people there laughing right along with Viola, the younger ones anyway. The older ones just shook their heads and thought of Cecilia and thought of the children alone back at the shack and then they thought quickly of other matters in case they should begin to feel ashamed that they had not so much as been out to Leo’s place even once to check on those children.

  As for Leo, he stood there in front of Viola, looking surprised, hurt even, but only for a second, no one would have noticed it if they had not been watching him closely (which no one ever was, since they had already decided what they would see there). Then he looked around at everyone laughing, and he started laughing, too, and nodding, as if it were a joke he’d played, as if he’d meant to be funny, and everyone was reacting just the way he’d hoped they would. Just standing there nodding and laughing and everyone thinking, He’s so stupid, he doesn’t even know he’s being laughed at, and this, since they were certain they knew when they were being laughed at, was what they found funniest of all.

  But Leo did know. He stood there and laughed a minute and then he did a little dance and turned to walk away, pretending to slip on one of those oranges, pretending, though most thought he really had slipped and that just made them laugh harder. He pretended to slip on one of those oranges and then he walked right out the doors into that December night, reminding Mike Weiser, who was not laughing, of that night seven or eight years earlier. Some of the young people had picked up the oranges and were tossing them at the door after Leo. But Mike got up from his table and, taking a paper sack from behind the bar, he walked around quietly, between chairs and dancers and tables, collecting the oranges, dropping them into the sack, scraping up for the garbage the ones that had been smashed or stepped on. Then he tucked the sack under his chair.

  On the way to church the following morning, Mike stopped at Krausses’. While Marian waited tight-lipped in the car, he knocked at the door and, without speaking, handed the paper sack to Magdalen, who stood in the doorway, rubbing her eyes against the winter light.

  No one saw Leo for a long time. Not at church, not at the hall, not even at the bar. No one saw hide nor hair of him, that is what they said, except maybe Mike Weiser, but when anyone asked, he just shrugged and shook his head and said obliquely, “Oh, well, that’s how it goes,” and spoke, instead, of the weather.

  ——

  The next time anyone saw Leo Krauss was the following spring, he just kept turning up that way, that’s what people said, like a goddamned dandelion, you couldn’t get rid of him. The next time they saw him he was heading through town. Mike Weiser was standing with some others outside the hardware and when Leo rolled by he called out, “But, Leo, where are you off to?” and Leo just lifted a hand and kept right on going, kicking up a trail of dust in his wake.

  SEVEN

  Eight years earlier, on that same airless day in August that Leo Krauss and his siblings had committed their father to the old cemetery at Johnsborough, their neighbourwoman, Helen Schoff, had stood in the doorway of her own farmhouse watching her husband, Stolanus, in the home field with the other men, as he moved in the heavy, rippled air with an attitude solemn, spare and unflagging, and her son there, too, stretched out under the shade of the wagon box, out of the evening sun. Usually he perched on top, with his bare feet plunged to the ankle in hot grain. She would have liked to sit there with him, their feet buried in that strange soft grain, soft like the Sand Hills or the way she imagined beaches made of the tiniest pebbles could be just at nightfall, warm and alive with the remembered energy of the sun. She would often stand and watch him as he sat sifting the grain through his hands, knowing that he was picking out mangled heads and torsos of grasshoppers, light as paper, to collect in his pockets for her to find when she was doing the washing, so that she would pretend to shriek and throw her hands up in the air and he would giggle and hide his face. He would sit there all day, were they to allow it, moving from his perch only to pet the draft horses that stood patiently drowsing in the heat, or when the thresher came with another load; then he would scramble away to the edge, being careful to keep out of the men’s way as they stabbed and heaved with their shovels to disperse the incoming grain to the four corners of the box, knowing that any interference would mean the worst shame: he would be sent home. Usually, if she agreed, he would stay with the crew until dusk, flushed and giddy with the teasing that always came at coffee time.

  “Stolanus, where’s this one’s shovel?”

  “Look here now, his hands are not even cracked, you are too easy on him.”

  “You got a man here almost. He should work like the rest of us.”

  And he would sit with his mug of cold water, ducking his head and bouncing a little with the effort of not looking too pleased, heels thumping the sides of the wagon.

  But today he did not sit and tease with the men; the heat had worn him out and now, in the evening light, he lay still and sprawled in the shade beneath the hot and gilded wood of the wagon box, eyes closed, as if he might already be sleeping. It was no wonder. The heat had burned them all out, radiating as it had
between earth and sky in blistering ripples since dawn, the risen wind at noon whipping it up with dust from the field and the harvest until even breathing became a task too exhausting, the fine chaff sticking to wet skin, creeping beneath collars and cuffs. The price to pay for a bumper crop, the best they’d seen so far, though she and Stolanus had always somehow managed to do a little better than the farms around them.

  Helen reached inside her dress and scratched beneath the damp straps of her underclothes, then straightened her skirt and examined again the basket on the porch, a late supper to take to the men in the field: cold chicken from last night’s meal, leftover boiled potatoes dressed in onion and vinegar, bread and pickles, thick slices of cream kuchen. A fresh jug of water still cool from the well. It was not a large meal, certainly. She could not bring herself to cook, particularly meat, the sickness hanging with her all day now, the mysterious, impossible weight of the new life in her resting like a stone, heavy and yet precarious too, as if it could topple her, again—a dangerous illusion, that weight, with its suggestion of perfect solidity, a subtle, as-yet-formless permanence. It would be easy to be lulled into false security, infallibility. She had made that mistake before.

  But this time would be different, that is what she told herself. She would not work so hard. She would do only what needed to be done, nothing extra. She and Stolanus had agreed, and to hell with the tongues that would wag should they find her in the middle of the afternoon stretched out in bed with dishes in the wash basin and dirty clothes piled up in the corner and even the breakfast table yet to be wiped. She would rest more. She would eat well, as much as she could keep down. What else could she do?