The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  That is what they said, while the boy lay for days as if dead, while that August sun glared on undiminished, while the crops lay too long in the fields—and they spoke of this, too, the waste of it, though the Schneider brothers and Art Reis and some others had done what they could, and if no one else had come to help them, didn’t they have their own crops to worry about? And if rain had come, and it had, wasn’t that God’s way of saying, Let it be, for I mean it to be thus?

  That third morning, with the autumn rain falling heavily upon the felled crops beyond the window, the boy looked her straight in the eyes and said, though he could not have meant anything by it, was not even yet conscious, “I will.” Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

  And Helen still kneeling there by his bed saying, “What? What? What will you do?” Until Stolanus led her away, and down the darkened stairs, to rest.

  By evening, she had miscarried.

  ——

  Yes. Helen miscarried again, as if in the sparing of one life another must be sacrificed, as if they—her and Stolanus—could not be allowed too great an allotment of grace. Helen miscarried, her last, though she may or may not have known that at the time. When she woke that evening with terrible cramping in her abdomen and a taste of blood in her mouth she would not let Stolanus send for the braucha.

  “What can she do?” she said. “If God wants all my children, what can anyone do?”

  But God did not take all her children. The boy lived, though everything had changed for him, and for Helen and Stolanus, and for the hired man, too. For all of them. And everyone said, “That’s how it goes sometimes.” It wasn’t, after all, so unusual. Too much work. Too many children. The cemeteries littered with the graves of the momentarily unwatched.

  That first evening, before the doctor arrived to stitch him together, the braucha came and washed and dressed his wound and covered him in her ointments and mumbled her prayers over him and laid crosses and sacks of herbs at his feet, while Helen stood frowning in the corner, and she came back every day after until the boy spoke (though if the doctor was there, she waited downstairs in the kitchen until he left).

  When the boy finally spoke, she nodded and said, in German, “He will,” nodding still, “live.”

  Though when the doctor came later he said, “Sometimes this kind of thing happens. I don’t expect you to understand. It happens. Sometimes the all-but-dead will get up and walk around, talk a little. So don’t make too much of it. Don’t raise your hopes, if you see what I’m saying. He is not out of the woods yet.”

  And Helen spent the rest of the evening reciting those words to herself, Not out of the woods, he is not out of the woods, until they began to take on a comic, mythical ring, as if it were from some fairy tale she’d once heard, and she began to laugh a little, to herself, after Stolanus had led her away from the boy. Not out of the woods. How funny. And she lay on the bed and laughed herself to sleep, dreaming briefly of the vast, black, treeless prairie.

  ——

  “A blessing,” Father Reiger said that following Sunday in church. “Let us give prayers of thanks on behalf of Stolanus and Helen, let us give thanks for the sparing of their son’s life. God is good. Let us praise Him for this blessing.” And they did.

  That was before they saw the scars. The ones on the outside and, later, slowly, over time, the ones on the inside.

  “Minor damage to the brain,” the doctor said.

  But minor damage was enough. And then, on top of it, the seizures. It seemed that was what marked him most of all, more than the scars on his face or his mangled skull or his thickened speech, that was what really rattled people. Maybe he had escaped death, some said, after his first seizure in the schoolyard at recess, he had escaped, but by whose intervention? Maybe blessing had nothing to do with it. Vom Teufel besessen—possession—that was what they had called it in the old country (blaming, as always, what they did not understand on God or the Devil).

  So the boy was spared, to be tortured and laughed at, poor child, who could not help the scar healing badly over his eye, pulling it down at one corner so that it seemed he looked in two directions at once, who could not help his slow speech, could not help himself when a fit came on, and it was awful to see, it horrified everyone, and so they made a joke of it, of him, to hide their fear—death so close to the living—the children following their parents’ lead. They were cruel to him during school when Sister Canisia was distracted, and after school much worse, such a long walk back to his farm. Sometimes Lathias, the hired hand, would be there waiting for him by the caraganas at the edge of the school steps, waiting to walk him home, and then they would fall back, only the meanest and oldest of the boys trailing them, throwing clumps of dirt and stones. But Lathias was not always able to be there.

  Things worsened, until finally Helen pulled him out of school, kept him home except for Saturdays when he would go to town with Stolanus on errands and on Sundays when he would sit between Stolanus and Helen at the front of the church, and Lathias behind them, not beside them, for reasons of his own.

  It was Helen who insisted they sit there in the front row where everyone could see, thinking all the time to herself, To hell with you all, I will keep my son at home to protect him, but I am not ashamed, don’t you ever think I am ashamed of him. And he would sit there, small and pale and scared looking, or not scared, amazed maybe, the way he would roll his eyes around, looking at everybody and not looking at anybody, his face so skinny, as though it was just bone there and that awful scar and the whites of his eyes so big, like the eyes of horses in a lightning storm. And Helen and Stolanus sitting there straight as boards, staring ahead at the pulpit as if Father Rieger was so interesting they just couldn’t tear their eyes from him; they sat like that every single Sunday without once turning until the recessional hymn had been sung and even then not stopping in the yard to talk a moment like everyone did, though Stolanus might have liked to. He would nod, sometimes, say hello, but never pause, and Helen already seated with the boy in the wagon, straight-backed and implacable as iron.

  Soon those Sunday mornings in church were very nearly the boy’s only outing. His Saturday visits to town almost nonexistent now since the day that little pink-cheeked Sylviana Lenz, who had been a grade behind the boy at school, claimed that he had touched her.

  “Touched how?” her mother had asked.

  But Sylviana could only shrug and say, “Just touched.”

  It had all come about one afternoon when Stolanus stopped with the boy at Stednick’s Dry Goods to pick up a few things for Helen. He was at the front counter and the boy must have wandered around to the back of the shop where Sylviana stood wondering what to buy with the egg money her grandmother had given her as a special treat, on the occasion of her tenth birthday. She was standing at the back where all the sewing things were kept, fabric and buttons, and lovely shimmering rolls of ribbon (Stednick’s always kept two colours of ribbon and Sylviana checked each time she was there, just to see if the colours had changed) and puzzling over whether to buy herself the dark, serviceable blue, which would go with both her good dresses and would not get dirty, or, less practically, the softest, palest pink she had ever seen, pink the way wild roses were at the Sand Hills in June (knowing in her heart it would be the pink she would choose, but deliberating over it just long enough that she could feel later she had made a wise and not simply an impulsive choice).

  Just as she was running her fingertips over the roll of pink ribbon, imagining how it would look tied up in her hair on Sunday and how envious it would make her very best friend Clara Schmitt, who always got everything she wanted, the boy appeared at her elbow.

  Poor Sylviana (who, if truth be known, was prone to nightmares, her brother Art whispering in her ear each night, Hope you remembered to use the outhouse, hope you won’t need to pee in the night, so dark out there, hope the Schoff boy won’t get you), poor Sylviana was so startled that she dropped the roll of ribbon and it unfurled across the floor
and settled under a shelf of lye soap. So startled, so afraid, she just stood there.

  The boy looked at her and looked at the ribbon and said, quite reasonably, “I will get it.”

  Which is just what he did, though when he had wound the ribbon back up on its cardboard spool and handed it to her, she could not, somehow, lift a hand to take it from him, and so she just stood there and the next thing she knew, she was crying, her grandmother there at her side, and old Mr. Stednick with her.

  “What is it?” the shopkeeper said harshly. “What’s going on?”

  And both of them looking at the boy standing there dumbly with the pink spool of ribbon unravelling in his hands.

  Then the boy’s father was there too, saying, “What is it? What has happened?”

  But the father was looking at her, at Sylviana, and not at all at his son, as if it were she who had done something, and that made her feel she should cry harder. Perhaps Sylviana should have spoken up then, should have told them just what had happened, but she could not, poor thing, she just could not speak for crying. Grandma Lenz, who felt so bad for her granddaughter, bought the entire spool of pink ribbon.

  And so, not wanting her grandmother, who had spent all that money, to think that she had not earned the ribbon, did not deserve it (Just think, Clara, the whole roll), she told her mother later that the boy had touched her and then she went to bed with the spool of ribbon on the top of her night table where she could see it. But then, sometime during the night, she got up and tossed the ribbon into a drawer and slammed it shut. She did not sleep well, and when she rose the next morning Sylviana took the spool from the drawer and threw all that ribbon down the outhouse.

  When her best friend Clara Schmitt said, “But, Sylviana, why? Why would you do such a thing?” she said that just the thought of that boy touching it made her skin crawl, made it the ugliest thing she had ever seen. That is what she said.

  Years later, a lifetime later, when Sylviana told the story to her own grandchildren, she chuckled, and then frowned and shook her head, and said, “You know, I can’t even think of his name, that awful boy. I don’t think I ever knew it.”

  ——

  Of course there were those who were kinder, who were guilty only of making no effort to befriend him. Others, the cruellest ones, teased and bullied, even the girls, yanking out clumps of his hair in the schoolyard, throwing rocks, slipping prickly pears into his coat pockets so that his fingers bled, filling his lunch pail with dog shit. And worse. So Helen and Stolanus kept him home. Or, Helen did.

  Stolanus said, “Ach, he’ll be fine. It’s just boys, not?”

  And Helen said, “But you are stupid.”

  And so he stayed home. It must have been very lonely for him, there on the farm with only Stolanus and Helen locked in their private griefs, and Lathias his only companion, and Krausses of all people their nearest neighbours, though it was just Leo there then with the two older children, and no one ever saw any of them, it was as if the place were abandoned. At least, that is what the boy sometimes thought when he stood at the edge of the yard chewing sunflower seeds and looking toward the Krauss farm, eerily idle there against the hills. Only a mile or so distant, it might as well have been on the moon.

  But Lathias was good to him, and when Helen would allow it, he would take him places, would take him riding down to the river, especially in winter if it was not too cold, for that was when Lathias had the most free time.

  They would ride, those mild winter days, Lathias leading the way on his buckskin mare and the boy always following a little behind, mounted on a gentle old half-blind sorrel that had been with Schoffs longer than Lathias had. Across the frozen fields they rode and off that flat, predictable land into the sudden, striated, prehistoric river valley, astonishing in its random, canyonlike contrast from the geometrical perfection of the tableland above and around it. Often they would sit their horses a few moments on the Bull’s Forehead above the old fording place, looking down into the river valley and across for miles in every direction: upriver toward the Forks, where the muddy Red Deer and the blue Saskatchewan flowed their separate though destined courses; across the valley to the bad-blood place where the traders’ fort had stood and then the halfbreed village, nameless, its existence so brief it was almost as if it had never been; and downriver, beyond the brown, near-bald hump of Sturgeon Island, hardly an island at all, parting the waters on its ancient back, blindly nosing its way toward the rail town of Estuary (which in less than a decade would be a ghost town, victim of a whim of Canadian Pacific to build a branch line diverting grain flow south), and on, beyond the townsite to the ferry there mired eerily in half-ice. If they turned around to look behind them, upriver, along the lip of the valley and partially obscured by brush lay the old woman’s place, the old braucha, the crumbling slant of sod house primordial, squat as a toad, and outbuildings almost indistinguishable from the cracking earth and the strangling, stunted bones of wolf willow and chokecherry and birch, leafless and bewildered, silvering in the thin and nocturnal-like light of late November. And beyond the old woman, Schneiders’ and Weisers’ and Eicherts’ and others, hazed by distance. And the boy’s home, too, and beyond that, sunk into a slight depression in the level earth and backed up to the edge of the Sand Hills like a cornered cat, the Krauss place.

  Later in winter, when the ice was good, they would go out on the river with skates Lathias made by wrapping a length of number-nine wire around blocks of wood cut to match the size of their boot soles and secured with pieces of old leather, cumbersome but functional.

  In the summer, if Lathias had the time and the water was low enough, they would fish, the boy wading in sometimes, or even swimming, though Lathias, who sat and smoked and watched him, would have preferred that he did not. Or, if the water was high enough, they would pull from the brush a raft they had made and pole slowly across the swirling, muddy water to the other side where the fort used to be, gone now but for the rotted remains of foundations where the buildings had once stood. They would find things, arrowheads, of course, and beads and flint and stone tools, which Lathias said were for cutting and pounding and scraping, and, once, the boy plucked from the mud a miniature buffalo carved from an unidentifiable pale wood. He had spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting on the muddy riverbank staring at the carving in the palm of his hand, turning and admiring it from every angle. He had taken it home, intending to drive a hole into it with a nail and run a string through to make a necklace, a gift either for Lathias or a charm to keep for himself, he had not yet decided which. But as soon as he put the nail to the charm, it split in two, and just as it did, his father came in. The boy saw him hesitate in the wide doorway, as if to go out again, but then he stepped toward him and said, too loudly, “So, what have you got there?”

  The boy said, “Nothing,” and slipped it all—charm, string and nail—into his pocket and stood staring dumbly at his father, the hammer still hanging from his hand.

  Later, he tied the two halves together with the string, wound round and round, and he tucked it into his shirt pocket, then took it out again and, compelled by some faint notion of ritual and rightness, moved it to the other pocket, the one over his heart, and crossed himself, as he often did in moments of great solemnity, and said, “The Lord be with you,” and, because no one else was there, he answered, “And also with you.”

  At night, he slipped it under his pillow and fell asleep dreaming of herds of buffalo crossing the unbroken prairie, and of the buffalo jumps Lathias had shown him and the piles of bones partially unearthed in coulees near the river by spring mudslides and which the boy now kept in an apple crate out behind the barn, along with the shed antlers of whitetail and mule deer he sometimes found in the brush around the Sand Hills.

  He had other treasures, too, kept in a box beneath his bed—lead musket balls, teeth, the petrified bones of animals even Lathias did not recognize, arrowheads of all colours and sizes—things they found at the old fort and the trading
post, things Lathias said had belonged to the surveyors and the traders: bent and rusting forks and spoons, cans of tinned vegetables and meats that Lathias split open with his hunting knife on a rock, a woman’s high-heeled boot, impossibly small, with the lace still in it, buttons, shotgun cartridges, a single perfect silver coin.

  Sometimes, when they had tired of digging around the old foundations and root cellars and in the mud of the cutbank that occasionally revealed buried treasures as the steady water washed the earth away, they would just sit on the bank and eat their dinner and Lathias would tell him stories, about the old days. The boy never seemed to tire of them, and Lathias did not mind the telling, it was a way of going home.