The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  The boy did not say anything, just lay with his eyes closed now and his arm up over his face, to block the sun, Lathias thought, and he shifted his own body to further shade him. But then he could see the boy was crying a little, and so he stopped talking, too, and pretended that he had not seen the tears streaming out from beneath his arm, and he just sat and held him and watched the green, sweet grasses rippling across the Horseman’s graves.

  He sensed her behind him before he saw her, and that feeling of distrust, dislike, rose within him. What business had she there? He glanced over his shoulder, expecting that old familiar look of revulsion, or even fear, that the boy’s fits seemed to inspire. But she just stood there beside the boy’s horse, much as she had while the boy had been telling her about the Horseman, with the reins in her hand and that bottom lip sucked in, that lip the exact colour of wild roses. Lathias turned away.

  Finally she said, “What’s the matter with him?”

  Lathias told her, briefly, grudgingly. She said nothing, only sat down in the grass, a little apart from them and facing slightly away, and Lathias had to respect her, in spite of himself, for that small courtesy. Surely she had seen the tears, too.

  After a moment, she said, “You should stroke his hair,” and Lathias asked her why, and she said, “That’s what I’d want someone to do. If it were me.”

  The boy uncovered his eyes and looked over at her then, and Lathias was astonished to realize by the look on the boy’s face that, though his tears were real, he had been pretending, had faked, the seizure. His cheeks were rosy and pink from the sun, not bloodless and deflated, the way they always were when he came to. And he had none of the drained exhaustion in his eyes. They were reddened and puffy with tears, but they were not hollow; they glittered brightly beneath lids half closed against the light of that veilless sky.

  And for the first time since they’d known each other, Lathias felt angry with the boy. Angry and shocked and disgusted, yes, he had to admit it. He had never known the boy to deliberately deceive that way, had not even thought him capable of such pure and calculated dishonesty. Such manipulation.

  Lathias opened his mouth to say something, to give some voice to his anger, but then, for the second time that morning, he shut it just as quickly. What could he say? So he helped the boy to sit up and then he turned his head away and pretended that he had not noticed the pretending. And thought to himself, So we have begun to deceive each other. And her, too. We hardly know her and already we are tied to her in this deception, this deception because of and for her.

  And yet, even as he blamed her, even as he resented her presence, the way she had changed things between them, between him and the boy, in spite of all that, he liked her. Could not help himself, the way she sat there so unobtrusively, with her back to them. He liked her quietness, her seriousness, the way she frowned and considered before speaking. She was not like any other girl he had known. She seemed older, yes. Wiser and sadder. And he liked that, also, her sadness. Liked that most of all, not because it made her vulnerable, but just the opposite: somehow, her grief made her stronger. And there was something else, too; something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “It wasn’t hate,” she said then, quietly.

  Lathias did not answer at first. He sat looking out over the Horseman’s graves, thinking about it. Finally he said, without turning to face her, “What was it?”

  “It was love,” she said. “Just love.”

  EIGHT

  Father Rieger agreed to baptize the girl in a small private ceremony, not out of generosity or devotion or enthusiasm or duty even, but only to have the thing done and Leo out of his hair (knowing, as did everyone else, that were he, Father, to refuse the rite, Leo would not let it alone: the girl must be baptized, and soon). And like everyone else, Father had to wonder why, what exactly Leo was up to now.

  “Ach,” Mike said, “he’s just concerned for the girl.”

  And everyone else, including Marian, exchanged looks which Mike chose to ignore.

  “Anyway,” he said, “that’s his business, not? That’s between him and God.”

  And someone said, out of the corner of his mouth, “I thought he was God.”

  And Mike chose to ignore this, also. “Let them have some privacy, anyway,” he said, “if not for Leo, then for the girl and her mother.” And he nodded, pleased with his words. “Live,” he added, “and let live.”

  But privacy was not in Leo’s plan. He insisted things be done right, as he said to an already irritable and impatient Father Rieger one morning after Mass—while Mary and Elisabeth waited, a little apart from the others who chatted in the vestibule with one eye fixed on Leo and Father—insisted that nothing be left out, either because of, as he said, laziness (here Father flared up silently, excused himself and walked stiffly down the aisle to the confessional, entered and closed the door firmly behind him, leaving Leo sitting and staring after him, then emerged a moment later, crossed himself, and returned), or, said Leo here, because of miserliness either (to which Father could only excuse himself again, adjourn to the confessional and then return), after which Leo sat blinking at him and said, “That’s not the outhouse, you know,” at which point Father excused himself again, walked back down the aisle, through the vestibule, out the double doors, climbed into his wagon and disappeared down the road, leaving Leo to sit waiting, until the stained-glass windows began to turn shadowed, at which time he must have realized that Father had no intention of returning, and, feeling not a little put out, walked outside to find that Mary and Elisabeth had gone home without him. He climbed into his wagon and snapped the reins.

  When he pulled into his yard, he found Mike Weiser waiting for him, sitting in the old cane chair on the porch.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “Where’s Mary?” And he hollered for her across the yard.

  “No,” Mike said, “no, no, that’s all right. We can talk out here. No need to trouble Mary.” Though no one had come to the door when he’d knocked, anyway. “Father was to see me.”

  “Yah,” Leo flared up, “and what does he mean leaving me sitting there? What kind of a shepherd is that, who leaves his flock?”

  “Ach, Leo.” Mike shook his head. “Father says he will baptize the girl. Saturday.”

  Leo blinked. “Sunday, not?”

  “No,” he said. “Saturday.”

  “And what kind of a baptism is on Saturday? It must be Sunday and that’s that.”

  “But, Leo, a little privacy is not so bad. You know how people talk. And Mary so shy, and the girl …” He glanced toward the barn and lowered his voice. Though there was no sign of her, Mike knew somehow that she was there, listening from the shadows. “Well,” he said, looking back up to where Leo still sat in the wagon. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “What is better? Sunday is the Holy Day, the Lord’s Day, and Sunday it will be.”

  Mike sighed. “After Mass, then.” Though he knew it was no use, the man was stubborn as a post and, Mike was only now beginning to see, just as dumb. “Meet Father halfway at least.”

  “What halfway? Limbo?”

  Leo slowly climbed down from his wagon and walked up his porch steps. Then, with one hand on the latch, he looked down at Mike and said, “We’ll be there Sunday. At Mass. If he don’t baptize the girl, I will.”

  And nodding, he entered the shack, letting the door slam shut behind him.

  ——

  Sunday came, and with Mike and Marian Weiser standing by as godparents, and with Leo and Mary and Lathias and the boy and his parents and the rest of the congregation looking on, the girl bent her wild head over the font. Father, tight-lipped, dipped a bit of water (to which someone quipped, “Give him some soap while he’s at it”), and the girl claimed Jesus Christ as her Saviour and was thereby officially baptized, as far as anyone present knew or cared, into the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Heaven, without incident or upheaval, earthly or otherwise.

  NINE />
  If Leo cared one way or another that Elisabeth spent every Sunday down at the river with them—with Lathias and the boy—he certainly gave no indication, at least not that any of them noticed, not at first anyway.

  Each Sunday after church, the girl would walk over to Schoffs’, cutting across the fields, past the row of granaries, skirting the edge of the yard, to the barn where Lathias and the boy waited with the horses, the boy toting the lard tin that held the lunch he had packed, enough for the three of them and a little extra for Elisabeth. They would mount the horses, Elisabeth riding behind the boy, and cross the yard toward the river. Helen was often at the window watching them go, though no one but Lathias seemed to notice her there. And Stolanus, in his heavy, pleasant, baffled way, lifting a thick hand at them from wherever he happened to be occupying himself in the yard, calling after them lightly, each time, “Yah, don’t go too fast, but make home come quickly,” which didn’t quite make sense, as it was generally a farewell to departing visitors. But that was Stolanus, always just missing the mark; how he managed to prosper, no one really understood, and so they could only assume it must have been by the grace of God.

  From Schoffs’ they would ride, always single file—Lathias, then Elisabeth and the boy—across the Horseman’s wind-rushed pasture, past the graves, off the plains and into the valley, another world. They took the raft across to the fort most days now. Elisabeth had begun to collect a few glass bottles there of green and amber and blue that she would wash in the river and tuck into the pockets of her dress, “For the cottonwood tree.”

  Of the three of them, it was she now who found and kept the most things, who would continue to scour the fields around the fort and the cutbank long after Lathias and the boy had tired of it and waited for her crouched beside the raft, hoping she would notice their waiting, though she never did, or if she did, she did not care. She would search until her pockets were filled—sometimes only with stones that had, for whatever reason, caught her fancy—and then she would take her collection to the river’s edge and wash and then dry and polish them on her skirt, holding up to the sunlight the objects rescued from obliteration, every conceivable scrap a treasure. Once she found a ragged length of yellow sateen ribbon, quite wide, dirty and pale with age and fraying at the edges where the threads had come unwoven. But she took that down to the water, too, and scrubbed and scrubbed and wrung it out and smoothed it on a rock in the sun. When it was dry, she tied it up in her hair, and Lathias crouched there watching her, thinking that old rag was probably the prettiest thing she’d ever had in her life; or if it wasn’t, she sure wore it like it was.

  Sometimes they would not cross the river, but stay on the near bank beneath the Bull’s Forehead, where the boy would paddle and float in the cool, murky water while Lathias sat and smoked and watched, and Elisabeth waded around the edge and hummed and sometimes talked to herself or repeated nonsense rhymes in the old tongue:

  “A B C

  Die Katze liegt im Schnee,

  der Schnee geht weg,

  die Katze liegt im Dreck,

  Dreck geht weg,

  Katze isch verreckt.”

  But she never entered the water past her shins. The boy would tease her sometimes, splash at her where she waded in the shallows, believing it was the water that she feared. But Lathias knew better. Elisabeth cared nothing for the slow, swirling, opaque river, or even for the venomous rattlesnakes that sometimes hunted mice and rabbits in the brush at the water’s edge and which they could sometimes, in high summer, hear humming there; rather, she detested, even feared, in a disgusted, superior sort of way, the enormous, benign bullsnakes and for no other reason than that they had once come upon one with its jaws around the head and upper body of a young rabbit (though the boy, out of intentional blindness, insisted it must be a rat, or at the very least a gopher, and so Lathias let him believe it was so). All three of them had crouched there in the brush and watched while the snake inched its mouth, with impeccable, slow precision, down the rest of the animal until the entire rabbit had been consumed and the snake lay there in the sun, swollen and sluggish, unable to move even when Elisabeth jabbed a stick at it, and clicked her tongue in disgust. Lathias knew, too, that it was not the gross predation she disliked, the devouring of the prey, but rather the dumb and satiated defencelessness of the predator.

  “If I had a hatchet,” she’d said suddenly, “I’d hack that thing in two.”

  The boy had looked up at her in surprise, shock even, his eyes glazed with fascination and a mild horror.

  “Why?” he said.

  But Elisabeth ignored him.

  “I’d chop its ugly head off,” she said. “I’d shoot it,” she said, “if I had a gun.”

  But she had only the stick, so she gave one vicious whack that curled the bloated snake in upon itself with surprising suddenness and made the boy jump—as if he were the one who had been struck—and then she ran off.

  From then on, Lathias noticed, she spent most of her time in the water at the edge of the river, where she poked her long stick into the mud at random, as far out as she could reach (since, by her own admission, she could not swim), looking, she claimed, for the pits of quicksand that Lathias had told her peppered the river bottom beneath the Bull’s Forehead on either side of the fording place and at least as far east as the ferry-crossing at Estuary, probably even beyond.

  Since the river was low, the boy sometimes suggested they wade across along the gravel bars visible just beneath the surface, but Lathias would forbid it, remembering his grandmother’s stories of those who had disappeared—an older cousin; a guide for the fur traders; a young officer from the detachment at Harrison’s Landing—as if pulled by the devil himself into the dark river bottom when the water was low enough to tempt them across.

  His grandmother had told him once about the two Mounties who had crossed there, right beneath the Bull’s Forehead, right where they now sat, how the first made it across, but the second, the younger, who, for whatever reason, had not followed carefully the footprints his companion had left in the mud, became trapped, struggled, the other Mountie trying to pull him out, trying, trying, until the mud was at the man’s chin, in his mouth, and he begged his companion, Shoot me. And the other man had pulled his revolver, cocked it and aimed, and the other praying, begging, eyes squeezed shut, For God’s sake. But in the end, the man could not pull the trigger, could only sit and watch as his friend went down, or maybe he did not watch, but sat with his eyes shut tight and only listened.

  Lathias would look out at the shallow, dark water and he would think about the fabled bodies down there suspended upright in a watery darkness, airless and permanent and cold even in the heat of August, the river flowing endlessly above them and the long frozen winters there beneath the ice and he would feel cold, too, in spite of the heat that settled into the valley, and then he would rise and call his companions and they would return home, wondering at Lathias’s silence. But most days, he would just sit and smoke and not think of those darker things. He would watch the boy swim, and watch the girl, too, but only out of the corner of his eye (her hair wild and the hem of her white dress wet with the river). He would not turn from the boy while he was in the water, not for an instant. (Though he did not say, Not even for her. Instead he told himself, Especially not for her, and he could let himself believe that was the truth.)

  On those days, they would eat a slow lunch and then, while it was still half light, they would ride back up one of the draws, Elisabeth and the boy in the lead and Lathias following, watching the hem of her dress drying in the desiccated air, stiffened and brown with river water, her slim and dirty ankles against the horse’s flanks, rising palely out of the ugly dark shoes like the stems of cattail reeds in winter; the horses lunging and picking their way across the barrel cactus and the prickly pears closing their brief yellow blooms to the coming dark, and up and out onto the prairie where the morning’s wind had finally begun to settle, as it almost always did before s
unset, as if its cycles, too, relied upon the rising and the setting of the sun, and all that great grassy land stretching before them, calmed and stilled, and even the Horseman’s graves quietened now with the slow coming of evening.

  TEN

  By August, in those long, airless, languorous days before harvest, Lathias had more time to spend with them, with Elisabeth and the boy, and they would ride down to the river most afternoons, when chores were done and there was little to do until supper but sit and mend tack and smoke, watching through narrowed eyes the rippling crops ripening in the sun (though sometimes now Elisabeth came much sooner, came almost before breakfast was through, and sat wordlessly on the rails in the barn or the stables, fiddling with a thread on the cuff of her dress and watching, from beneath her hair, Lathias go quietly about the morning’s work; sometimes she was already there waiting for him in the shadowed corners of the barn when he rolled the big doors open, though he would not admit that he looked for her there, would not admit that he could sense her before he even saw her, as if she were not a living, breathing being, but only the memory, the ghost, of one who had once been, one he had known; as if, even upon seeing, he did not see, but only remembered. They would not speak as he went about the chores, but just exist uncomfortably there together in a hot, disturbing mutual silence, the dust motes turning in the morning light and the slow scratchings and mutterings of the farm coming to life around them.

  Once, as Lathias was scooping buckets of oats from the feed bin in the barn, she said, quite unexpectedly, “I heard something about you.”

  Lathias stopped and stood looking at her, the bucket half raised in the bin.

  When he did not reply, she said—looking smug, he thought, but a little frightened, too, or watchful, as if she was not sure how he would react to what she would say, whether she should say it at all—“He told me. Leo did.”