The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  Marian’s brother wrote: He is lucky he is alive. If Otto had let me, I would have shot that sonofabitch right where he sat. Come home, Marian. Already two of your sisters dead up there. Who knows but that you could be next.

  The brother did not, thanks to Otto, shoot Leo, but after chasing him out of their yard, the brother got on his horse with his shotgun and followed Leo down the road to make damn good and sure, as he said, that the bastard dog did not come back.

  Leo was not unaware that the brother rode behind him, down the long dusty road lined thickly with brown-eyed susans just beginning to bloom, a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Another man might have cracked the reins to his mule and made a beeline north. But Leo drove on, in his shambling wagon that looked as if it would bust apart at each bump in the road, to the next farm, where he said, “My wife is dead. I need another.”

  And the brother behind him on his horse, calling out, “Yah, that’s right, give him a wife if you want to send your daughter to an early grave. Better still, bring her out and I’ll shoot her here, save this dog the trouble.”

  And so, everywhere he went, doors closed to him.

  Until, as always seemed to happen for Leo, one finally opened.

  “What do you want? What are you selling?” the man asked from the doorway before Leo’s mule had planted its cracked hooves in the dust.

  “My wife,” Leo—exhausted, incoherent almost—began.

  And the brother, who, though not tired, was growing bored and feeling that it soon must be suppertime, said, “I’ll shoot her here.”

  The man in the yard frowned at them. “Have you been drinking? Get on with you.”

  “I need a wife,” Leo said.

  “He put the last one in her grave,” said the brother. “Up in Canada. That is what they do with wives there.”

  “Canada, eh?” the man said.

  “That’s right.”

  The man narrowed his eyes a minute at Leo and then, ignoring the brother, said, “Come inside.”

  “All right,” the brother said to the man, “don’t come crying to me when she’s dead.” And, swinging his horse around, he rode off toward home. In spite of himself, and because he secretly disliked—though he knew only by reputation—the man whose yard he had just left, he thought, Good riddance, then. At least he won’t be our problem.

  ——

  Good fortune, indeed, had been smiling upon Leo that morning when he rode into the yard of Anton Brechert, a man who considered himself largely put-upon, who considered even the smallest of human trials a burden and the greatest of human trials an outrage and who was still burdened mightily by the child his eldest daughter had borne out of wedlock fifteen years earlier; a man who felt the burden of that shame—as he was wont to call it—just as keenly on the day Leo Krauss pulled into his yard as he had on the day the bastard child was born.

  When Leo had said, I need a wife, Anton Brechert had eyed him carefully up and down and felt for the first time that here was someone who might just help ease his, Anton Brechert’s, burden at least, if not his shame.

  Leo climbed down from his wagon slowly, as though it required great effort, as though he were undecided whether he should do so. It would not do to appear too eager. He ducked into the house behind the man, folded himself into the chair offered at the kitchen table, and sat waiting.

  Anton Brechert stood a moment, studying him, this unlikely suitor with his wrists thrusting from the frayed cuffs of his suit jacket, knees straining the faded grey fabric of his trousers, hands gripping his dirty cloth hat like a wheel. Maybe he was trouble, and then again, maybe he was not. Who was he, Anton Brechert, to judge? He looked again at Leo, his old suit, his lightless eyes. Impossible to guess his age. The whole effect was of something left too long in the sun. Leo sat hunched, crumpled almost, though from the length of his body and the size of the room or from simple humility, Anton Brechert could not tell. And from his clothing, from his pores, came a smell; not only the musky, human, identifiable smell of an unwashed body, but something else. Something sulphurous.

  “I need a wife,” Leo said at last, then turned his eyes to where a young woman stood over a pot at the stove, her fair hair curled up prettily in the steam. “I have land,” Leo said. “My wife is dead. There are two children yet at home. They need a woman.” Watching all the while the girl at the stove, plump and shining in the steam and the sunlight streaming in through the small window with the smell of fresh earth.

  “Yah, sure,” Anton Brechert agreed, sensibly, “a child needs a mother. And a father, too.” Then he followed Leo’s gaze to the girl at the stove. “No,” he said, frowning, “she is not for you. She is the youngest. She will stay home and care for us.”

  He studied Leo a moment, as if deciding something, then jerked his thumb toward the corner behind the stove and said, “You take that one.”

  Leo looked to where a heavy woman with dark hair sat hunched over some mending. Though the room was narrow and cramped, he had not noticed her. The woman did not look up but continued the smooth motion of her needle.

  Leo wondered if she was deaf. But what he said was, “How old is she?”

  “Old?” Anton Brechert said, “What does old matter? You are young?”

  “No,” Leo admitted, “not that, not young.”

  “Well, then, what do you want with young? Young is nothing but trouble. You take this one. She is a good worker. She won’t give you any trouble.”

  “What is going on here?” said an older woman, stepping from the doorway of an adjacent room. “What are you talking about?” Snapping her eyes from Anton Brechert to Leo and back again.

  “Nothing.” Anton Brechert shrugged. “Just business.”

  “What business?”

  Anton Brechert stared at her, then said, roughly, as if he were accusing the old woman of something, “This man needs a wife. He’s a good man. He has a good home.”

  “And you plan to send Mary? Have you lost your mind? Do you even know him?”

  “I know enough.”

  “What? What do you know?”

  Anton Brechert turned to Leo. He sucked his teeth. “Are you Catholic?”

  Leo glanced at the old woman in the doorway before nodding.

  “There,” Anton Brechert said to her, “what more is there to know?”

  “Well, she can’t go, and that’s that.”

  “And why not? She should go, before there is more trouble.”

  “More trouble. My God, she’s more than thirty.”

  “And what about the girl? She won’t be any trouble? They are all the same. One as bad as the next. She should go. And the girl, too. She will be as bad as her mother—worse.”

  “The girl? My God. You’ve lost your mind.”

  “Pack your things,” he said to the big woman in the corner.

  She did not move, but kept sewing, placidly, untroubled, and Leo thought surely she must be deaf or an idiot.

  “What,” the old woman in the doorway said, “and you expect them to just go, without a marriage even?”

  “Marriage,” he sneered. “When has she ever cared about marriage?”

  “But this is madness.”

  “Mary,” he barked, and the woman in the corner raised her head, and her expression was mild and uncurious. “Get ready,” Anton Brechert said. “Tell the girl to pack her things too, or she goes with nothing.”

  “You cannot send the girl,” the old woman said. “I forbid it.” Though there was nothing of conviction anymore in her voice, and the big woman, Mary, had already put aside her mending, and risen in heavy obedience.

  “The girl goes too,” said Anton Brechert.

  And Leo, who had been looking from one to the other of the Brecherts, finally said, “What girl?”

  She was brought into the kitchen to stand beside her mother. Leo, who had been sitting looking at his hat, slowly raised his eyes to the girl who was not really a girl (and not even a very clean girl at that), but a woman almost, or she
seemed to be, it was hard to tell, and the longer he looked the harder it became. Her hair was pulled back severely from a dirty, freckled face and covered over with a dotted black kerchief, the pale face of a child, though the front of her dress, a loose dress of bleached sacking which might have been white were it to be washed, was stretched tight across breasts that seemed far too developed for a girl otherwise so thin and long-limbed. Her eyes, large and such a glittering reddish brown they looked almost reptilian, stared fiercely back at him without curiosity or shame either. Leo dropped his gaze to his hat again. He was not, at first, aware that everyone was looking at him, waiting, as if he should say something; the girl, her mother, the old folks, the pretty sister at the stove, even she had stopped what she was doing and just stood there, waiting, too, the ladle dripping onto the scrubbed floor.

  “Mary,” Anton Brechert finally commanded, “tell her to take down her hair.”

  Leo looked up then.

  “What for?” snapped the old woman. “What does it matter?”

  “Tell her.”

  Mary said something quietly to the girl. But the girl just stood there, paying attention to neither of them, looking only at Leo, viciously now, as if in confrontation or disgust.

  The pretty sister at the stove spoke then, hesitantly. “Papa,” she said. “Why?”

  Anton Brechert nodded. “He will know,” he said, pointing his chin at Leo.

  “Do as he says.” It was Mary again, the mother, speaking quietly, without looking at either the girl or the old man, but only at her feet.

  The girl stood there so long Leo thought she would surely not obey. But, then, without taking her eyes from him, she raised a thin and filthy hand and slipped the kerchief off her head, shaking out brutally, perversely, a mass of hair so deeply red it did not look like human hair at all, but like the coat of some animal. It was not beautiful, that hair, but savage. Or the expression in her eyes made it so.

  “You are crazy,” hissed the old woman in the doorway. “You have lost your mind. Would that I had killed you when I had the chance.”

  The girl laughed then, a strange sound, more a bark than a laugh, perhaps at the old man, Anton Brechert, perhaps at the old woman who defended her. She might have been laughing at some private recollection or at nothing, for all that her expression gave away. The old woman shook her head and, turning slowly, left the room, followed shortly by the sound of a door shutting somewhere in the house. In the silence that came after, no one seemed to move, to know what to say or do, waiting, perhaps, for some sign from the girl herself.

  Finally, the pretty sister at the stove, Anna, said softly, “Put on your kerchief, Lisbet. Go and see Mama.”

  The girl paused a moment before dropping the dark kerchief at the feet of her grandfather. Then she turned and walked out, exposing with each step the soiled bottoms of her feet, moving as easily as if she had just excused herself from the breakfast table. As if there had been no public or private humiliation. The old man made a noise in his throat, part fury, part disgust, the kerchief lying there between them until the pretty sister bent to retrieve it, saying, almost under her breath, “Why, Papa?” and Anton Brechert sucking his teeth and nodding again, said darkly, “No one can say I am a dishonest man. I want him to know what he is getting. There, you see how he looks away. He knows what I mean. He cannot even raise his eyes.”

  Leo glanced up at the old man, then down again.

  “Whores,” Anton Brechert breathed. “One made a whore, the other born one.”

  “Papa.”

  “Hold your tongue, Anna. And take care yourself. I would not be so easy a second time.”

  Anna, the pretty sister, blushed furiously and glanced once at where Mary still stood, waiting. But Mary would not look at her, and so Anna grabbed her ladle and stirred the steaming pot with studied intensity, her back turned stiffly toward them.

  “Well?” the old man said. “Will you take her?” He did not say them.

  There was a long moment, then, in which there was no sound, no movement, among them, but for the steaming of the pot and the bluebottles bumping their weightless bodies against the bright window glass.

  “What is wrong with her?” Leo said finally. “With the girl.”

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong with her?” Anton Brechert said, too quickly. “Didn’t I just say? She’s a whore begot of a whore. She bears the mark of her mother’s sins upon her. What do you mean what is wrong?”

  Leo did not know exactly what he had meant. Only that, looking at the girl, and looking at the others, he had felt that something was wrong. Not what the old man was saying. But something else. Something in the way those reddish eyes had looked right through him. Into him.

  “But there is something …” he said again.

  And Anna, turning suddenly at the stove, cried, “Oh, no, nothing, only that she used to bite her tongue until it bled, only that she sees—”

  “Anna!”

  “—she knows things. She’s just a child, Papa, you can’t send her, don’t—”

  “Enough,” said Anton Brechert, thumping his fist on the table so that the cups all jumped and clattered. “Enough talk.” He breathed heavily, looking around at them all. Then he said, “Anna, make yourself useful—get some flour and potatoes, two sacks. A bag of sugar. Put it in the man’s wagon.” Then he turned to Leo. “Well?”

  Feeling all those eyes upon him—the old man’s as vicious as the girl’s had been, daring him to decline, Anna’s spilling with tears, Mary’s veiled and placid—Leo was reminded of his own father, his mother, docile and beaten, the vicious intimacy of his brothers and sisters, his childhood in the cramped little shack.

  “Well?” the old man said again. “Will you take them?”

  And Leo rose, nodded, and went out to the wagon.

  TWO

  When Leo arrived home with his new family, he found that the last of his old family had gone, the girl, Magdalen, to the convent run by the Ursuline sisters on the edge of town, of her own choosing, or so Mike and Marian told him, and the boy, Henry, to no one knew where (or if they did know, they did not say). And who could blame them? is what people said. The younger three were still with Weisers, and if they had any inkling or intuition or even outright recollection that Leo Krauss was their father, they certainly hid it well; they seemed to have forgotten they were Krausses at all, and so everyone else seemed to forget it, too. Marian even changed the children’s names, whether legally or not no one knew, so that when they started school they were Weisers, and better off for it, as far as anyone knew or cared.

  And so the last of Cecilia’s children were gone. Leo stood in the doorway of the empty old shack and knew he would not have them there again.

  Someone, possibly Marian, whether from charity or guilt, had tidied the place, swept and scrubbed the floors, wiped clean the crusted counters and opened the windows to the June air that seemed, like everything else, to sour and darken upon entering the Krauss shack. She had even dusted and righted above the kitchen table the old skewed photograph of Gus in his coffin. Leo stood there staring a moment, then he held open the screen door to let the two women inside.

  “Well,” he said, when they had stepped past him, “here it is, then.”

  ——

  Ma Reis walked over to Krausses’ that first Saturday with some freshly baked cinnamon buns (the very quality of which she felt was enough to establish without delay to the newcomers her position as an irrefutable authority in the community) to welcome the two women, and, of course (Ma would see no reason to deny this), to find out a little more about them.

  Ma told later how the yard was as bad as it always had been before Cecilia, perhaps worse, stinking of blood and chicken shit and all that garbage everywhere (though it looked to Ma as if one of them—the two women, surely not Leo—had attempted to rake it into indiscriminate piles which the June winds had made short work of redistributing), and Cecilia’s flower tins blown around, too, caked with dirt and rust
, the desiccated plants still hanging tenaciously in withered strands, and that impossible garden all gone to kocia weed and Russian thistle that had dried and regrown and dried again so that you could no longer tell there had ever been a garden, had you not known where to look for it, and the flowerbeds, too, that had once spilled with larkspur and bachelor’s buttons and hollyhocks and sunflowers: all gone. Only a few bottles remained hanging in the branches of the cottonwood; most, whole or in shards, lay scattered across the dirt beneath the tree.

  Ma stood in the yard at the foot of the unpainted porch, just looking around, taking it all in, thinking someone would come out to greet her since they must surely have seen her coming down that long, open road, how could they not? But no one came. She called out. Once, twice. Still, no one.

  She said later, “I was never a one for superstition, but there was something about that house of Leo’s that always gave me the shivers. And so I just stood there, hoping someone would come out, thinking I might have to climb those rotting stairs and knock after all, and thinking how foolish it was that I was afraid to do just that, kind of going back and forth with myself, and wondering, too, what on earth I should do if someone did answer and invite me in to sit and have coffee at that table with that picture of Old Krauss dead in his coffin hanging over us. And so I stood there and waited and crossed myself, I surely did, knowing someone might very well come to the door after all and invite me in and that I would have to swallow my disgust at all that filth and sit and drink my coffee and be pleasant.”

  But she needn’t have worried, that’s what she said later. Just as she was telling herself she was behaving like a schoolgirl, that she should get up there and knock, for heaven’s sake, the screen door creaked open and a girl—the daughter, Ma assumed—stood staring down at her, she wouldn’t say unfriendly, but not really pleasant either.

  “Hello,” Ma said, “you must be the new girl.”

  The girl tilted her head slightly in what Ma took to be a nod and they stared at each other some more.