The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  And then they would bundle themselves back into the winter night, under blankets and robes, and race their horses home at breathless speeds, bells singing, tired but too cold and excited to sleep, and those horses and those bells and those icy stars, uncounted and uncountable, and that sky so black it was as if the nocturnal river had opened above them, poured over them. And the fathers would carry children into houses where they would sleep, dreaming of candles and the smell of oranges and the clanking of Kristkindl chains out in the winter night. They would sleep and wake and sleep again and finally it would be morning, Christmas, the sun glinting red and yellow off the hard snow. And they would bundle up and go sledding in the Hills, or skate on the slough or the river, even the adults. They would throw snowballs and build forts and throw snowballs again, and when they were done, another meal, enormous, with roasted meats and potatoes with cream and pies and cakes and Christmas breads, and then, when they were finished, some more singing again and maybe a few hands of cards, by the warm light of kerosene lanterns, long into the winter night.

  (“Yah, but,” the men around the coffee shop considered, thinking of the dirt blowing in drifts down the streets beyond Wing’s pink scrubbed walls, of the hard, frozen fields, the near-barren, brown valley and the slushy black coursing of the river beneath the ice, giving voice to the boy’s own thoughts, “if there is no snow, it will hardly feel like Christmas at all.”)

  Once, the boy was certain (it must have been, for he remembered it being so), Christmas had been celebrated that way for them, too (in spite—though the boy would not have known this—of the other women’s dislike of Helen, because of their fondness for Stolanus, and because of Pius and the missus, too, who had always been well liked and respected). Yes, they had all gathered at Pius’s home, the family homestead. The boy was not wrong. Lathias remembered it, too, from his first year with them.

  Then, the accident. That first Christmas afterwards, some of Stolanus’s family came, and the Schneider brothers, out of tradition and goodwill, out of the desire to support Stolanus, and Helen, too, yes, in spite of her ways, out of the need to say, Everything’s all right, you see, nothing has changed. But it had changed. They all sat around uncomfortably, Helen staring out the window as she often did back then, her grim silence casting a pall over everything, and everyone pretending not to look at the boy, his ugly scars, and the fiddles and accordions sitting untouched in the corner and the food growing a skin on the table, until the Schneider brothers excused themselves, and everyone else counting the hours until it was time for church, and then, well before the appointed time, the others, too, trickled out. (Better to sit freezing in the cutter, they all said, than freezing in that house, and, But she could make a little effort, at least, the boy is not dead, after all, she could try to make us welcome, not? It would not kill her.)

  And, other than the Schneider brothers’ brief visits each Christmas Eve, they had been alone ever since.

  In his heart, and in spite of his hazy memories of a warmer time, the boy knew this year would be no different, except that this year there was hardly any snow, what little there was the wind had taken and plowed into hard brown drifts that didn’t look like snow at all. There would be no tobogganing. But they could skate on the river at least—him and Lathias and Elisabeth—all Christmas Day, if they wanted to. There was that.

  THIRTEEN

  Christmas came and went and the weather turned colder, thirty below with a wind that made it feel like fifty, and so Lathias and the boy did not see Elisabeth for a while, not even at church, for Leo, it seemed, had stopped attending, again, as was his whim, though no one knew whether it was the cold or something else keeping him away, and truth be known, no one much cared. No one but Lathias and the boy, and even Lathias thought it was just as well. Though he was no longer angry with her for the incident at the river, the way she had tried to scare the boy—what was the point in anger?—he mistrusted her more than he used to. Hadn’t he good reason to? That is what he told himself. And so when the boy would speak of her, as he frequently did, Lathias would just shrug and nod or shake his head and say nothing, leaving the boy to stand there with a watchful, puzzled expression. And if he thought about her now and then, it was nothing, and the boy needn’t know.

  One Sunday after Mass the boy said to Lathias, “We should just ride over there maybe, just to check.”

  “No,” he said, “don’t worry. It’s just the cold.”

  Though he had considered it, too, riding over, just to check. But he never did. He told himself it was the weather that kept him from doing so.

  ——

  Then it was February and Stolanus’s cows began to calve. Lathias would ride out into the brutal cold, during the night and then again before dawn and all through the day, sometimes with the boy, if the wind had died down and if Helen allowed it. The only blessing the lack of snow which made riding easier, in spite of the cold. Nevertheless, they lost many. It was terrible. Lathias hated to come upon them that way, especially if the boy was with him. They would hear her before they saw her, the cow, bawling out across the cold plains. He could follow the sound at night and find her, standing there over her dead calf, bellowing, charging at him sometimes, or butting at him violently with her big head, as he packed the calf up over the saddle and took it away to the rock pit.

  “Why do you have to take it away?” the boy, who had been sitting waiting on the horse, his face tucked inside his collar, his mittened hands jammed into his pockets, asked one afternoon, his lips stiff and white with cold.

  Lathias wiped crystals from his nose. “If you don’t, the mother will just keep standing there. Won’t eat, won’t drink. Pretty soon she’ll be dead, too.”

  Lathias said it matter-of-factly, to ease the boy’s concern, but the truth was he never got used to it, either. He hated it every goddamned time. But he did it anyway. He did not want Stolanus to have to do it. He’d get up extra early, just so that he could give the herd a once-over before Stolanus had even stirred, assure him that they had all been checked. And, Lathias knew, Stolanus allowed it.

  During those first winters that Lathias was with them, they’d ridden out together. That February a couple years after the accident was bad, too, worse even, and then a two-day blizzard knocking them out the beginning of March. That first blizzard night they lost three in a row. When they came upon the third, with the mother standing stupidly, bawling, the mucous hanging brutally from her near-frozen muzzle, licking the little dead calf and swinging viciously at Stolanus every time he tried to get near her, it was more than either of them could take, exhausted and nearly dead themselves with the cold. Stolanus kept trying to pick the thing up (it was freezing already, the calf, he’d had to yank at it where the cooling hide had frozen into the snow), while Lathias tried to distract the mother, but after a few minutes of fighting with the cow that way, dodging and shouldering at her, Stolanus just kind of lost control, bellowed senselessly back at her, the spittle flying from his mouth, the snow blasting him in the face. Lathias watched helplessly as Stolanus ran at the cow, throwing himself into her side, once, twice, hollering, trying to get her to move away, and when she just stood there looking at him stupidly, baffled, swinging her big head, he started pounding at her with his fists, in the face, the muzzle, hollering and swearing, kicking her in the belly. Lathias thought he was crying, too, though he couldn’t have said for sure. When a man goes crazy like that, he thought, you sure as hell don’t look him in the face too closely. You give him that at least, that little bit of dignity.

  Eventually, Stolanus just kind of wore himself out, and the cow, too, because when Lathias stepped toward her, she just stood there, they both did—her and Stolanus—while he hoisted the stiff body onto the back of his saddle. Neither he nor Stolanus spoke of it afterwards, but Lathias swore to himself that he wouldn’t let Stolanus ride out after any more dead calves. There’s some things, he told himself, a man shouldn’t have to do, and he had not suffered himself the kinds of loss
that Stolanus had, and him still a young man. No, he did not suffer losses, he caused them. Didn’t he? And so it was only right that he collect the dead. It was the least he could do.

  But this February was the worst spring as far as losses since that one year. It would warm up for a day or two, but then temperatures would drop right down and that crazy wind would pick up and it was as if that were some kind of signal for those animals to start to calve. It always seemed to work that way. Lathias was dead tired from riding, and distracted, as he had been at harvest. He did not see Elisabeth, or even the boy, who kept to the house most days now unless he was riding out with Lathias. He was glad they were not going to the river without him, the boy and Elisabeth, not only because of the danger of the thawing and refreezing ice, but also because, God help him, he felt a little twinge of jealousy. Not of them together, but of his own absence. It was a subtle difference, but a difference nevertheless. And then, too, he did not trust Elisabeth. Not since that night at the river when she had tried to frighten the boy. And the boy was so naive. He trusted everybody, everything. She could say anything, and it would be possible for him to believe her. She could scare him, terrorize him, if she chose, and he would take it, would not even recognize that her terrorizing was intentional. The boy could never believe someone would cause injury, however slight, on purpose. Like a little dog that way, willing to be kicked again and again, just sticking his tail between his legs and coming back for more. If Helen had not pulled him out of school all those years ago, he would have stayed there to be kicked. It was as if he thought it would all turn around one day, that tomorrow wouldn’t be the same as today.

  Lathias often thought that if he could have changed something about the boy, it would have been that. He would have made him see the world for what it was: one long grieving. He would have made the boy see the world in all its misery and ugliness. At least, that’s what he thought then. But he was jealous, by his own admission, and he did not know that jealousy can make you see things that aren’t there, make you miss things that are.

  FOURTEEN

  March came in like a lamb: the brutal weather broke and temperatures hovered just below zero, the skies big and blue and blinding with a cold, clear light. Calving increased but came easier, and, though tired, Lathias promised the boy an afternoon of skating at the river Sunday, before the beginning of spring breakup.

  Elisabeth began coming by the farm again that week, though not to see the boy, it would seem, but only to sit and watch Lathias work around the yard. The boy would sit there, too, of course, not realizing (or perhaps realizing quite clearly) that it was not him she had come to see. Sometimes she’d find Lathias in the barn before the boy was even awake and she would perch herself on the rails and lean her head against the post as she used to the previous summer and just sit there all morning if it wasn’t too cold, and sometimes even when it was. They spoke only to or through the boy, and so if he was not there, they did not speak at all, but by the end of the week Lathias had begun to relax again into her presence, into the companionship that was not really companionship at all but could not be called anything else either.

  One morning, he happened to look up at her, something he rarely did, and because he looked at her so rarely, and because she was therefore not expecting his gaze, he caught on her face an expression that startled both of them: he wouldn’t quite call it desperation, but something very near to it. She turned her face quickly away and he almost did the same, both of them surprised, embarrassed. He almost did, but he was struck by something else in that instant. As he stood there watching her through the morning light, he thought this: that he would like to kiss her, right there in the sweet, cool-smelling, unbreathed air of the barn, that he should kiss her, he must, and all those bits of light turning so bright and cold between them, and neither of them moving, it was as if it had already happened, and Lathias thought, If it has already happened, then there is nothing to fear, and it must have, I remember her lips now, it must have happened a thousand times.

  But it had not, and it did not, for just as he took a step toward her—had he taken that step or had he just thought it?—Helen came in and stood there in the sunlight streaming through the barn door.

  “Is he with you?”

  Lathias almost said, “Who?” but caught himself in time. “No,” he said.

  “But he has been gone from the house almost an hour,” Helen said, looking from Lathias to Elisabeth and back again. “Without even his breakfast.”

  “I haven’t seen him,” Lathias said, and they blinked at each other a moment, him and Helen, before following Elisabeth’s pointed gaze toward the hatch that led into the loft. And Lathias thought, Yes. Of course. And he closed his eyes, squeezed them shut. That old creeping guilt and despair.

  When he opened them, Elisabeth cast him a meaningful look, smiled a little, or smirked, for there was nothing of warmth in it, and nothing of desperation either, it was as if he had imagined it. And he thought, So she knew, then. She knew all along. And she was waiting for something to happen. She wanted it to happen. Maybe because of and for him. Was that it? He looked back at her, searching her face. But there was nothing. She hopped down from the rail and walked past Helen and out into the sunlight, gone.

  ——

  That night he dreamed her. It was not the first time. But where previously she had existed only on the periphery of other dreams, now she came toward him through the dusky night air at the edge of the Hills where he had been out riding, checking for fires that he could not find though smoke was all around him, drifting up from the Hills, she walked straight toward him out of the branches of a dried willow like out of the fleshless ribs of some desiccated beast, she came toward him and then she stopped and stood staring at him, the hem of her dress stirring a little in the last of the evening wind. He walked the mare closer, almost said, You startled me. I must be tired, my eyes are playing tricks. Sure was a hot one today. Out for a walk, are you? Nice night for it. But he did not.

  Instead, before it had even become a thought, he was down from the horse and before her, as if he had been there a thousand times, kneeling in the bruised air, her mouth scorched and unsurprised, kneeling in the hot soft sand.

  ——

  Later, in the early light, in his loft bunk, he would remember this: her hair fanned out like flames against the earth and the dry deafening rasp of crickets or bones in the still, dark air and the baked smell of smoke and sagebrush; the way her eyes seemed to darken and recede until he could no longer look at her face; and then the one cold, irrational thought that had, dreaming, struck him: Where is he? He had said it out loud, suddenly, Where is he? Who? she had said, Leo? Though that was not who he had meant. Good God, pulling back, into the night, Is he here? Is he with you?

  You’re afraid, she said. Is that it? Sitting up in the sand and him kneeling there. Kneeling there, and he knew she was right. Is he here? he said, Is he here? And before she had even answered, he thought, He must be home, then—he was home, he was sleeping.

  Is that it? she was saying. Standing up, and all that darkness stretching out. Coward, she said, coward. And then she was running, away from him, across the fields toward Leo’s shack. And all at once he was no longer afraid, the fear in him drowned by another feeling just as strong, just as old. In that moment, it was as if he existed in a place without time and geography, a dream place, as if he hurtled through all that darkness, not bound by gravity, but telescoping, travelling rapidly toward something so specific and finite it was as if he were looking at his own life in dilation, all that had come before flashing briefly, insignificantly, as he hurtled irrevocably forward, or down.