The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “What are you doing?” the boy cried. “You’re lucky it wasn’t deep there.”

  “I know where it’s deep,” she said irritably, pulling herself out. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  This time, Lathias did nothing to help her, and she hauled herself out and stood dripping onto the bank.

  “You’ll freeze,” the boy said. “Let’s go home.”

  “I’m not cold,” she said, wringing water out of the hem of her dress.

  But when Lathias and the boy turned to walk up the draw, she followed.

  ——

  Finally, around the end of November, Lathias cut six blocks of wood, about three inches by eight, a little longer for himself, and wrapped each block around once with wire; then he ran a thin leather strap under the wire on the top side of each block and they all—Lathias and the boy and Elisabeth—carried these skates to the river and strapped them onto their shoes and boots. They spent the afternoon out on the ice, with Lathias like an old woman cautioning them back near the banks when one or the other strayed too far out to where the ice thinned and thinned and thinned until it became a narrow band of black, swirling water.

  From then on, as long as the weather was good, they spent most afternoons at the river. It was the boy, and not Lathias, who first noticed that Elisabeth never had enough clothes to keep her warm, and who suggested they bring extra. Lathias doubted whether she would accept them, and it was the boy, again, who suggested they bring a sack of clothes for all of them to put on when they strapped on their skates, so as not to single out Elisabeth. To Lathias’s surprise, Elisabeth accepted the extra clothing, watching carefully to make certain that Lathias and the boy donned theirs as well (though the extra and unnecessary layers made movement, particularly for the boy, somewhat strained). Lathias knew very well that Elisabeth was not fooled, but that she had decided, for whatever reason, perhaps of sheer necessity, to participate in their mutual deception, though she was always careful to remove all the borrowed clothing before leaving the river, in spite of the boy’s entreaties that she keep them.

  Only later did he realize it had nothing to do with pride, and began to suspect other, less noble motives; began to suspect that, for whatever reason, toward whatever end, she wanted someone—either Leo or her mother—to see her suffer.

  ——

  Around this time, around the end of November or a little later, Leo started coming to the river. Not all the way down into the valley, but just to the edge where the trail began its steep descent, where he could sit in his wagon and look down and see them—Lathias, the boy, Elisabeth—wordlessly gliding along on the ice that glittered harshly in the unbroken winter sunlight.

  The first time Lathias noticed, he called to Elisabeth, “Look, there’s Leo.”

  And she did look, but not directly, just out of the corner of her eye, as if she did not want Leo to know she’d seen him. Her lack of surprise made Lathias wonder if Leo had been there before, watching them. Elisabeth only glanced up calmly, and then she did a very odd thing, Lathias thought, very odd indeed. Though she was a good skater (rather the best of the three of them, those long arms and legs were all grace and lightness when she was on the ice, her red hair swirling out behind her), though she rarely so much as stumbled on that cracked and uneven and dirt-pocked surface, on this particular occasion, when Lathias said, There’s Leo, and when she’d looked at him, Leo, sideways, she tripped, hard, and fell face forward, banging her chin brutally on the ice. She’d cut her lip, or bit it, and blood ran steadily down her chin onto the ice. The boy and Lathias skated over and helped her up, but she brushed them away, saying she was all right, she was fine, and never mind, never mind, and she did seem to be fine, but there was blood everywhere, so red against the icy blue of the frozen river and her pale skin, that the boy in particular was quite alarmed, teary-eyed almost, Lathias could see by the way he scrunched his face up and reached out tentatively to touch Elisabeth’s sleeve. She wiped the blood away and said, “It’s nothing,” but Lathias saw her look up the valley, to see if Leo was still there. Lathias looked, too, and he wasn’t, and he wondered if Leo had seen the fall. But when he turned back to Elisabeth, she had finished wiping the blood from her chin and was already skating away from them, as if nothing had happened.

  Leo came back a few times; he never stayed long, and there was no repetition of the incident, or anything like it. Eventually, the boy noticed him too, but, oddly, never mentioned it to Elisabeth.

  Once, though, Lathias watched as the boy lifted a hand tentatively in greeting, a casual gesture, easy enough to return, but Leo did nothing of the kind, just sat there in the wagon staring down at them. Either he had not seen the boy wave, or he had simply ignored him, out of spite, or history (for though Leo Krauss had little enough to do with Stolanus Schoff now, the bad blood between them, and between Pius and Gus, and before that, back across decades and an ocean, still seemed to run in a sour vein). Or perhaps it was simply the perverseness of a man completely unconcerned with rightness or propriety or plain old common neighbourliness and civility. After a moment, the boy dropped his hand, and Lathias looked quickly away, so that the boy would not know that he had seen.

  Elisabeth, on the other hand, simply ignored Leo’s presence completely. He might never have been there at all. And so, after the first two or three visits, Lathias and the boy did the same.

  ——

  Around that time, too, Elisabeth happened to mention—as they rode toward the river, the breath of the horses pluming out into the cold—something about Leo’s barn. Lathias pulled up his horse and turned to her in real shock.

  “But,” he said, “you don’t mean you’re still sleeping out there?”

  Elisabeth blinked back at him. “Why not?”

  Lathias stared a moment in annoyance, and she back at him, with the boy between them, looking from one to the other, until she said, “What are you waiting for? Let’s go,” and rode on.

  Later, when they were alone on the riverbank, the boy said to Lathias, “Does she?”

  “No,” Lathias said. Then, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  But, truly, he could not have said; it didn’t seem possible, and yet, why wasn’t it? With Leo, it seemed, anything was possible.

  “But she must be freezing out there,” the boy said. “How does she stay warm?”

  Lathias shrugged vaguely. “The mule would be in there, too. And the cows, maybe. It might not be so bad.”

  But it did not make sense to him, either. And there was, for the first time, an idea forming, an unpleasant idea, but so obvious he wondered that it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  Elisabeth was already out on the ice and Lathias hurried with his skates and caught up to her, wondering should he ask or should he not.

  Finally, he said, “Elisabeth, does Leo bother you?” Feeling his face flush up hotly from his collar.

  She barely gave him a glance, said coolly, “Doesn’t he bother everybody?”

  And Lathias said, “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” Flashing him a dark look before bending on the pretense of adjusting a skate. Angry now.

  Lathias thought she would skate away from him then, he was sorry he’d brought it up at all, it was stupid of him, beyond stupid. But when she rose, she turned her bright eyes upon him, her nose running a little in the cold, and she said darkly, viciously, “So full of yourselves. All the same. You think that is the worst thing a man can do to a woman? The worst that can happen? There are things worse than that.”

  And then she did skate off, her feet cracking at the ice, her red hair fanning furiously behind her.

  “Did you ask her?” the boy said, skating up beside him.

  Lathias turned in surprise, both at the question and at the boy’s presence at all; he had forgotten about him. He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “What?” the boy said, seeing the expression on Lathias’s face.

  Lathias just shook his
head and squinted out at the frozen river.

  “Did you ask?” the boy said. “About the barn?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  They both looked to where she skated downriver, a dark shadow against the blaze of ice, and Lathias, for some reason, felt compelled to give the boy’s shoulder a little squeeze. The boy looked up at him, frowning a little, his face against the winter light.

  “You should ask her,” he said. “She shouldn’t be sleeping out there.”

  “No.” Lathias removed his hand from the boy’s shoulder. “She shouldn’t.”

  ——

  There are things worse than that. Far worse. Had she said that? Had she said far? Lathias turned it around in his mind all the rest of that week, in spite of himself, in spite of not wanting to imagine worse things, in spite of not being able to imagine worse things. Proving her right, as she must have known he would.

  ——

  Around that time, also, during that first cold snap of winter, Elisabeth began to ask about the braucha. They had seen the old woman sometimes, more often in summer, ancient, working around her yard, her sprawling garden, or coming down to the river for water, lugging across her shoulders the branch, on which hung the two big wooden buckets that must have been terribly heavy when full.

  The boy often said, “But we should go help her, she is so old.”

  Lathias had thought so, too, but he always said, “No, she doesn’t want help.”

  “How do you know?” the boy would say.

  He didn’t, of course. But something about the old woman always stopped him from approaching her the way he might approach someone else; something about her kept people away, made everyone forget she was even there until a difficult labour or influenza or something else the doctors could not cure. Then they were all quick to pound on her door, no matter the hour, and summon her, without discussion of payment (most paid, of course, and generously, though it be in meat or flour or lard or coal; and if they did not, it was only because they could not, and this, too, was acceptable to the old woman), summon her into the dark hours of a prairie night, knowing they would not be refused. Sometimes Lathias thought it was not something about the old woman that kept people away but something about people that kept them from going to her. Something he felt in himself. Fear? Scorn? Partly those things, but not quite those, either. Something, rather, that made him think of the phrase close to the bone. And yet he couldn’t have explained it.

  When the boy was younger, before the accident, he’d had nightmares about her. This was when she had still come to church, draped from head to toe in thick, dusty black even on the hottest days of summer, walking in her slow, rolling gait the three miles there, sitting alone at the back of the church, walking the three miles home. When the new church was built at Knochenfeld, two miles farther each way, she stopped going. A witch, that is what the children called her, some of them, risking cuffs on the ears from their parents. But the braucha paid them no attention, only nodded if someone greeted her and went on her way.

  There had been one time, though, when they—Stolanus and Helen and the boy and Lathias—had crossed paths with her at the door to the church, and, all of them pausing awkwardly to let her go ahead, the braucha had stopped also and looked up at Helen sharply and nodded and then quite unexpectedly laid a curled hand, a claw, upon the boy’s head and muttered something, nodded again and walked on. So quick, it was as if it had not happened.

  The boy, very young at the time, said, “Who was that woman?”

  And Stolanus said quickly, lightly, “That is the Grandmother.”

  “My grandmother?” the boy said.

  And Helen snapped, “Don’t talk so silly, you know it is not.”

  The boy had begun to cry, then, perhaps because of Helen’s sharpness, though none of them really knew the reason.

  Helen reached down and wiped his tears and took him by the hand. Then, turning to Stolanus, she hissed, “What was that? What did she say?”

  Stolanus shrugged. “Nothing. ‘Good morning,’ probably. What does it matter?”

  And Helen said, “Don’t be so stupid.”

  “Well, why not?” Stolanus said. “It was nothing. A blessing, maybe. I don’t know.”

  And Helen rolled her eyes and stepped inside the church, the boy still sniffling at her side.

  Lathias, who had been walking behind them, had heard what the old woman said, or thought he had: Grace of God. That’s all. Grace of God. A simple blessing, as Stolanus had said.

  That night, the boy had his first nightmare about her—or at least they all assumed it was her, the old woman he would speak of—and it was the first of many to come. Hot, babbling, sweaty, wide-eyed nightmares. And, then, when he lay senseless after the accident and Helen had finally agreed to send for the braucha, and the old woman had come and leaned over the boy smelling of earth and garlic in the dim swirled light of the kerosene lamp, and brushed dried herbs across his face and dangled her rosary there and daubed her saliva mixed with ashes on each of his eyelids, and muttered strange phrases and prayers beneath her breath, and closed her own eyes and said, in slow German, Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood. And as you lay there in your blood, I said to you, Live. I made you grow like a plant in the field. You grew up and were the most beautiful of jewels, your breast was formed and your hair grew, you who were naked and bare, fingering her rosary over him, while Helen stood tight-lipped and pale in the corner, then Lathias had changed his own prayer from, Please, God, let him live, to Please, God, don’t let him wake now, not yet, not now. And he had not, the boy, and it was only years after that it occurred to Lathias that the nightmares had gone away, or at least, the boy did not mention them and neither did Helen or Stolanus.

  So one day as they sat at the river, staring up at her hut, Lathias had asked him, did he ever still dream of the braucha, and the boy said, “Why would I dream about her?” And Lathias said, “You used to,” and the boy said, “Used to what?” So Lathias said, “Nothing,” and he did not bring it up again.

  But they would see her sometimes, when they were down at the river, carrying water or hoeing her garden or tending her chickens, and Elisabeth had asked once, that first summer, who she was and they had told her, and she had just nodded, yes, there had been a braucha in Dakota, too, and no more was said.

  But this one mild Sunday early in December—Lathias was leaving the next morning with Stolanus for Maple Creek, to get supplies and treats for Christmas, oranges and peanuts and those hard bright candies the boy loved, and Lathias had it in mind that he should get something for Elisabeth, something from the boy, it would please him so and God knew she would likely not get anything at home, and so he was tossing it around in his head, wondering should he, shouldn’t he (though he already knew what it would be: a hair ribbon, a yellow one)—they were sitting on the bank in the thin dusting of snow that had come the night before, sitting there unstrapping the skates from their boots, the pile of dry brush they had gathered for a fire between them. It was already near dusk, they had skated longer than usual, because of the mildness of the day, and now hurried to warm themselves at a fire before returning home. Elisabeth happened to look up, then, to see the old woman, the braucha, crossing the draw below her place, with a sack slung over her shoulder.

  “Look,” she said, pointing with her chin, “St. Nicholas.”

  Though neither the boy nor Lathias laughed.

  “What’s she got in there?” Elisabeth asked.

  Lathias said, “Cow chips.”

  He didn’t want to say any more about it, knowing that they—Elisabeth and Mary—burned chips for fuel, also. Hardly anybody else did, almost everyone could afford coal, and the odour from the chips was strong and unmistakable. Lathias could sometimes smell it on Elisabeth’s clothes and in her hair, a terrible smell, though on her it was not terrible, but rather earthy; a good smell, like dirt.

  So Lathias knelt before the brush pile and reached into his coat pocket f
or matches.

  Elisabeth was still sitting there, staring up at the old woman.

  “I wonder if she ever gets lonely,” she said, “living like that.”

  Lathias struck the match and held it to the brush. It flamed up instantly, the dry twigs snapping and crackling. He tossed the match into the flames. “She keeps busy.”

  Elisabeth turned her gaze upon him then, and he realized how stupid, how thoughtless, he had sounded. And so to try to cover it, he said, “I don’t think everyone who is alone is lonely.”

  “You’re not alone,” she said, annoyed.

  Lathias felt himself flare up. “That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s what you meant.”

  And before Lathias could reply, the boy—who had, as he often did of late, lingered on the periphery of the increasing familiarity between Lathias and Elisabeth, who had sat looking back and forth between the two of them as they spoke to each other now instead of through him—said suddenly, loudly, “Anyway, she’s a witch.”

  Elisabeth frowned. “Don’t talk so silly. You sound like Leo.”

  The boy’s face reddened. “She is a witch,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

  Elisabeth and Lathias both looked at him in surprise, and Lathias thought, My God, he is jealous. Of course he is. It is like that day at the Horseman’s graves. Him playing the fool, trying to shock her, scare her. And so he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, simply, “It doesn’t matter.”

  But the boy ignored him, shrugged his hand away and leaned toward Elisabeth, who was unstrapping the skates from her shoes. “She is a witch,” he insisted.

  And Elisabeth said, very casually and without looking up, “Oh, like Baba Yaga, you mean?”