The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Why don’t you ride up here?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Where?” the boy asked.

  “Up here,” he said. “Beside me here.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  And so they kept riding along that way, one after the other, through the blown pasture, the horses stepping steadily across the rolling hills, over barrel cactus and gopher holes, through great pale patches of speargrass rippling softly, toward the river, the minty smell of sagebrush all around them, and Lathias began to relax into the rhythm of the ride, as he always did. The sky and the wind and the hypnotic pull of the horse beneath him. So he was startled a little when the girl called up, “What are those?”

  Lathias pulled back on the reins and turned.

  “What?” the boy said.

  “There,” she said, pointing at the long line of grass mounds rising up from the prairie just to the west of them. “They look like graves.”

  “They are graves,” the boy said.

  “Whose?”

  “Don’t you know about them?” the boy said in baffled amazement. “Die Pferdekenner? The Horseman?”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Lathias can tell you,” he said. “Can’t you, Lathias?” Lathias leaned on the pommel. “It’s just an old story.”

  “It’s not. It’s true. Tell her. About the soldiers. And all the sugar.”

  “Oh,” Lathias said, not wanting to tell the story, not wanting to tell her, but not really knowing why, either, “it’s nothing.”

  “Please.”

  “You tell it. You know it as well as I do.”

  The boy sat staring at him, hurt by his tone.

  Lathias sighed, glanced briefly at the girl, who sat waiting behind the boy, her hair blowing crazily about her head. He watched as she brushed it back from her face.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just, all this land here, this pasture, used to belong to this German. He had a lot of money. He was crazy about horses. Those are his horses, right there.” He turned and clucked the mare into motion.

  “No,” the boy called. “That’s not right. Tell the story. About how he loved them. About the soldiers. Lathias.”

  Lathias stopped, turned again. The girl was watching him, but he did not look at her. He could see from the corner of his eye how she gathered her wild hair and tucked it into the collar of her dress. He fiddled with the reins, looked out at the horizon. Finally, he draped the reins on the pommel and swung a leg over and sat sidesaddle. He pulled some tobacco from his shirt pocket and some papers and he rolled a cigarette against his leg and licked the paper shut and smoothed it and said, “Well. This old horseman, die Pferdekenner the oldtimers called him, or sometimes die Pferdefreund,” he said, “he was crazy about horses. He hadn’t ever married and he’d come over alone and he didn’t have nothing in this world but his horses. They were beauties. Not the heavy farmhorses everyone uses, but long-necked, high-stepping, warmblooded beauties. They were something to see. People claimed he would sometimes let one or two of them overnight in the house with him, but I don’t think anyone ever knew that, it was just one of those things people say.

  “Anyway, the war come along and the army sent soldiers around to all the farms, taking horses to use in the war. Sometimes they paid a little bit for them, mostly they just took them, but only from the Germans. That’s how it was. Enemy aliens, that’s what they called the Germans.”

  “And everyone tried to act like they were not German then,” the boy put in, “right? If a child was born, they put ‘Russian’ on the birth certificate. Even some of the towns changed their names. Triumph used to be called Prussia.”

  “Right,” Lathias said. “So the soldiers came to take horses, sometimes they took the only horses people had, but what could they do? They had to give them up. Well, someone got word to the Horseman that they were coming. I don’t know if they thought maybe he could hide them or something, all those horses, God knows where, but they came to warn him. So this old horseman, he takes his shotgun—he wasn’t supposed to have that any more either, they’d taken everyone else’s, all the Germans’, but somehow they must have missed that one—so the Horseman, he takes his shotgun and, while this neighbour’s watching, he goes out to the pasture and he whistles all his horses over and he dumps a big sack of sugar right there in the field, real white sugar, God knows where he’d got so much. But he dumps out this sugar for the horses and then he ropes them all together. Then he sits down beside them and he waits and waits, and the neighbour’s wondering what the hell he should do, whether the Horseman’s gone a little crazy or what, and just then, they both see the military truck coming down the road, and the neighbour shouts to the Horseman, but he just sits there with the shotgun across his knees, calm as anything, just looking up at the sky and waiting. When the military men stop the car and get out and start walking toward him, he stands and raises the shotgun and the neighbour shouts and the military men shout and point their rifles and shout some more. But the Horseman has no intention of shooting them. He turns his shotgun upon his horses. After the first shot those horses go crazy, flailing their hooves and shrieking and pounding at each other, all knotted together with that rope and trying to run and the dead ones falling, and the Horseman just keeps right on shooting, reloading and shooting again, and again, shoots every last one, and then, before the military men can even think what to do, he puts the gun in his own mouth.”

  Lathias turned the cigarette between his fingertips. “When it was over, the military men just stood there, and the neighbour, too. I can’t even imagine it. God, those beautiful horses. That poor bugger. How he must have loved those damned horses. That is the way it is, you know, when you don’t have much.”

  “And the soldiers just left him,” the boy added, after a moment, “they left him lying there in the field, didn’t they, Lathias? Just left him there. Dead.”

  Lathias nodded. “They left him there, dead or dying. They were so disgusted. All those good horses, you know, the senseless killing, that is what they said. ‘Leave it to a goddamned Kraut,’ they said, ‘a stupid Rooshian.’ All that senseless killing, that is what they said; as if there could be sense in another kind. Then they just drove away, leaving the Horseman there in the field, one less German, the neighbour standing over him. He went away then, the neighbour did, and came back later with some others and buried the Horseman and his horses, too, right there where he’d shot them. Some people thought that was wrong, that he should have been buried proper. But he was never a religious man. It seemed right, to bury him out here with his horses. What would he have wanted in a churchyard?”

  They sat quietly, then, the three of them, watching the wind feathering the long grasses on the mounds, their own horses shifting their hooves and pulling at the shorter buffalo grass beneath them, oblivious.

  “They wouldn’t have buried him in the cemetery anyway,” Elisabeth said. “Would they?”

  Lathias shook his head.

  “Why?” the boy asked, looking from one to the other.

  Lathias said, “He shot himself.” And then they just sat some more, just staring at the graves.

  “Which one is his?” Elisabeth asked. “The Horseman’s?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lathias. He pulled a packet of matches from his shirt pocket and lit the cigarette he’d been holding. “I never wondered.”

  “You used to cross yourself every time you passed here,” the boy said. “Remember that? You told me you always would do that, when you first came here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I did.”

  “Why?” the girl said.

  Lathias looked at her, at the hair pulled free from her collar and whipped up again by the wind, how she reached up and gathered it, as if it were flowers she plucked from the wild air.

  “Because you were afraid?” the boy said. “For protection?”

 
“No,” Lathias said.

  “Why, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just seemed like the thing to do.”

  “But not any more,” Elisabeth said.

  “No,” he said, and took a long pull at the cigarette. “Not any more.”

  She nodded, as if she knew what he was talking about, though he could not have explained it himself.

  “Do you remember,” the boy was saying, “how they said he took such good care of those horses? Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how he would brush them and talk to them and feed them carrots from his hand and oats in great china bowls—they were china, right, blue china, from the old country?—and how he loved them more than anything, those horses. Remember? Those were china bowls, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy climbed down from his horse then and took the reins, stepped over to the graves and stood looking at them. The girl climbed down too, and stood beside him.

  “But,” the boy finally said, just as he always did, “he killed them.”

  “Yes,” Lathias said. “He killed them.”

  “That’s not killing,” the girl said. She stood there in the wind, her skirt pressed tight against her legs.

  “What is it, then?” the boy said.

  “I don’t know. But not killing. There wasn’t any hate in it.”

  “It’s still killing. Isn’t it, Lathias?”

  Lathias thought a moment, watching her.

  “So,” he said, “the war was not killing, because there was no hate in it, no hate between the soldiers?”

  “No, that was killing. There was hate there.”

  “But they didn’t even know each other.”

  “That’s the easiest way to hate.”

  The boy was quiet, listening to them, just standing there in the wind, and Lathias noticed that he did not keep his face turned away from her any longer, whether by fault of memory or familiarity. He stood staring at the graves, and staring at her, and then he said, earnestly, just as he always did, “But he shot them.”

  And Lathias said, “Yes.”

  When they had stood there a long time, all three of them staring at the grass rippling smoothly across the graves like water, she sighed and said, “Well, that is a sad story, anyway. I am sorry for them all.”

  Lathias looked at her, at all that red hair flying out around her and thought, No, she is not like others. It is not that she is kinder, or gentler, there is nothing of that. It’s something else, something … older.

  The boy stood looking at her, too, his forehead all furrowed up, and then he said, as if she did not comprehend, “But, he shot himself.” His voice rising a little.

  “Yah,” she said. “And? So, what of that?”

  “It was the head. He shot himself in the head. Don’t you understand?”

  And she said, “Yes, I do.”

  “But that’s not sad,” he said, “it’s … I don’t know, it’s horrible.”

  Elisabeth shrugged. “Yah, and sad, too.”

  The boy shook his head, threw his hands up in frustration. “But there was blood,” he said, shouting almost, “there was blood everywhere.” And he bent down and said, “Look, look here,” pointing at some rusty lichen. “Blood,” he said.

  Lathias expected her to laugh, smirk even, the boy was acting such a fool. But she did not, only stood there watching him through her blowing hair. Lathias could not figure out what had gotten into the boy, or how to stop him, either, without embarrassing him further.

  “Red,” he went on, “from his blood.”

  When Elisabeth did not bend to look, did not seem to react at all to what he was saying, the boy dropped the reins he had been holding and said, “And that is not all. Sometimes at night you can hear a hissing, a rattling—have you heard it? Some say that’s crickets or grasshoppers or even rattlesnakes. But it isn’t. I’ll tell you. It’s the Horseman trying to saddle his horses and ride right up out of the earth. Isn’t it, Lathias? Tell her. Lathias has heard it. Haven’t you, Lathias? And so have I.”

  It occurred to Lathias then that he was trying to scare her, really scare her, and he thought, What in God’s name for? At first he thought maybe the boy was just trying to get her attention, mimicking other boys he’d seen at school or after church, older boys, who would tease the girls they liked until the girls would grab their hands and squeal, Stop it now, stop it. You’re frightening me. But it was more than that, had become more.

  Lathias watched Elisabeth as she stood listening, her bottom lip sucked in so far it had turned white around the edges. She did not seem the type to scare easily. But when the boy quit his foolish antics, quit running around, pointing out depressions in the earth—“A horse lay here, and here, and just here, that is where the Horseman lay bleeding, before the neighbours buried them all. He’s down there now, waiting to ride up some night, all of them are waiting, isn’t that right, Lathias?”—when he stopped and stood panting, looking at her, waiting, she just released her bottom lip and sighed.

  “It’s a sad story,” she said again. Then she turned and stuck her foot into the stirrup and pulled herself up by the pommel and sat waiting for him.

  Lathias glanced quickly at the boy’s face—reddened with anger or hurt or embarrassment—and he tried to think what to say to him. But he could think of nothing. He was surprised at the boy, disappointed. And looking at him, it occurred to Lathias that the boy’s anger, his hurt, his embarrassment even, was not because the girl had simply refused to react, had refused to be shaken by him, but because of something darker: he had been operating under the illusion that he had finally found someone lesser than him, had finally found someone weaker, a Krauss foundling. Lathias could not believe his own blindness and stupidity. He had thought the boy’s reverence simply that of a boy for a pretty girl. But it was anything but simple. Not just her prettiness the boy revered, but her shame as well, what was pathetic in her, what was base, or more accurately, what others saw as base. That’s what appealed to him, what drew him. Here, at last, was someone he could feel superior to, not so much to put her down, but to raise himself up. And, yet, when she did not shun him, did not turn away from him in disgust and horror, he was disappointed, and he thought to impress her some other way. But he could find no way. She was not easily impressed. She was not easily anything, it seemed. She just was. The boy could not have chosen a more impossible audience, could not have seen or predicted, in fact (and maybe because of her hardness, her remoteness), that she was so far above him, she was all but untouchable.

  It was not so unusual, Lathias knew that, of course; everyone did it in one way or another, himself included, that defeating of the self, that old human folly; we are lonely, yet we need to be alone; we are afraid, yet we need to feel fear. Almost as if, in the absence of love or pain, in the absence not just of faith in God, but of God—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—for what is God without faith?—in the absence of all that, we look for other signs that we are not dead, that we are living, much as it can be said that we are.

  And even though Lathias understood it, he could only sit in helpless amazement while the boy’s face screwed up in humiliation, yes, and in rage, too; the repressed and unfathomable rage of the vulnerable, the castigated, the reviled. And because Lathias did not know what to do, what to say, he just stuck his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, swung his leg back over the saddle and lifted his reins from the pommel.

  “Let’s go,” he said over his shoulder, but the boy just stood there.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Elisabeth said, and when the boy did not respond, she drew up the reins herself. “Come,” she said.

  But the boy sat down on a small boulder and turned his back to them.

  Elisabeth watched him a bit, then she tapped the reins to the horse’s neck and rode past him, and past Lathias.

  Lathias waited.

  “Come on,” he said to the boy. “Ride on with me. Like old times.”

&nb
sp; Still he did not respond.

  And Lathias thought, He just needs some time, and so he followed the girl toward the river, slowly, so that the boy could catch up when he was ready, thinking, as parents have uncomprehendingly thought of their children, lovers of their loves, those who wait of those who leave, universally and throughout the ages, He has been foolish, and now maybe he knows it, he will just need some time. Not realizing that time can magnify as well as diminish.

  After they had ridden a bit, Lathias reined in and turned, but the boy was not there on the boulder. At first he thought, So he has gone home, then, and he looked back along their route from the farm but could see him nowhere. Lathias was just about to call out, though the wind would have made it pointless, when he did see him. He was stretched out in the long grass by the Horseman’s graves, and he thought, with some irritation, Well, and what is he up to now?

  When he saw that the boy’s arms and legs jerked in the grass, Lathias’s gut clenched. He yanked the startled mare around and dug his heels, sickened with the possibility that he might not get there in time, that the boy might swallow his own tongue. Sick with the knowledge that he had stood by and let the boy upset himself, had done nothing to calm him. That he had as much as walked away from him.

  He leapt down before the mare had even stopped, and stumbled to him, sliding to his knees, and he took the boy’s head in his hands.

  “Hey,” he said, “hey.” Wanting the boy to focus on him.

  But the fit had already passed. The boy lay motionless and spent, staring up at that impossible dome of sky at Lathias’s back, mesmerized, as if he could see through it to all that lay beyond, unmoved by what he saw there, however horrifying or glorious.

  Lathias held the boy’s head and talked to him, the way he always would, not really saying anything, just talking, the way you might talk to an infant. “Shh, shh, there now, it’s all right, there, there, all right now.”