The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  Soon a pot of water was boiling on the stove and Mary took the dough she had cut into strips for the schnittnudeln and scattered it into the water. Ma was so busy watching Mary, wondering at the heaviness in the woman, that it was a moment before she looked to see what Leo was doing. In fact, he was looking out the window into the darkness. Looking right at her, it seemed, and Ma caught her breath, clutched at the window ledge to steady herself. But then Leo pulled his hanky from his pocket, wiped at his nose and put it back, and Ma said she could relax again.

  Ma was just about to sneak down the stairs and out of the yard, when Leo rose suddenly from the table, his chair scraping brutally against the floor, and she heard him say, his voice distorted through the thin, cheap glass, “Come now, Mary. Kneel down with me and pray.”

  “But,” Mary said, gesturing to the stove, “supper.”

  Leo raised his voice. “Come,” he said. “And pray for your daughter’s soul, as well as your own.”

  Ma told Art later that it was all she could do not to pound against the glass, she was outraged, furious, as she watched Mary leave the pot of boiling water there on the stove and go to the table and cross herself and kneel with Leo.

  But the fury passed quickly, was replaced by a kind of sickened awe, that Leo was not putting on a show after all, that piety of his, if that’s what it could be called, that he was the same in his own home. Ma said she felt awful, ashamed, yes, ashamed, wished she had never stayed, crouched there in the dark spying on them, watching them kneel in the light of the stove and that pot that had begun to boil over, hissing and splatting and smoking, yet neither of them moved. She said it was worse, seeing that, than anything else she could have imagined going on over there. Mary giving Leo what no one else, except Cecilia, had ever given him, not because she loved him, as perhaps Cecilia had, but because she felt it was owed to him. She said it was awful, and yet, she had been wrong, yes, she could admit it even as she crouched there, seeing how they knelt shoulder to shoulder, so close in that cramped little shack. Yes, she had been wrong: it was not just awful; there was something beautiful about it, too, and touching.

  And so Ma crept off the porch and walked home in the darkness, a terrible, tender feeling in her heart, a burned smell filling the air.

  TWELVE

  The good people of Knochenfeld parish waited until the end of that week, not out of any hope, however dim, that the girl’s body might be recovered, it was too late for that, but only out of respect for the mother, who still walked the frozen banks each day, the dark river coursing on and on beneath the ice, walked, but without rage or hope, as some thought she might, her arms hanging at her sides, seeking, others said, neither miracle nor enlightenment, but only proximity, and that, too, only illusion, the girl’s body could be anywhere by now.

  They waited, and then, when it seemed pointless to wait any longer, they went to speak to Mary, though Mary was, as always, at the river (who would disturb her there?), and so they asked Leo instead, and Leo said, “Do what you want, what is it to me?”

  Then they waited some more until, on Saturday morning, the church bell was rung a full ten minutes (no one knew what made Father Rieger so generous in this mark of respect and condolence; usually, as Ma said, he acted as if ringing that bell might wear it out). They rang the bell a full ten minutes and it was a cold clear day and the sound of that bell was like angels calling across the snowy fields. Most went to the Mass, bumping in wagons and motorcars down the frozen roads, even those came who had not known the girl, even those who had felt an acute loathing toward Leo, for the death of a child is a particular tragedy existing outside the bounds of both amity and rancour. They came wordlessly, as was only right and proper, to pay their respects and to pray for the soul of the dead girl. They came, their breath puffing out in plumes, their bodies bundled darkly against the cold.

  But Mary and Leo were not there. The front bench where Leo used to sit with Cecilia, and then with their children, and then with Mary and Elisabeth, was now empty. There was no one.

  And across the aisle, where Schoffs used to sit—the old folks, Pius and the missus when they were yet alive—and then Stolanus and Helen and the boy and that hired man, too, who was as good as one of them, he had been with them so long, that pew stood empty also. It was impossible not to notice, impossible to keep one’s mind only on the girl and the brief eulogy delivered by Mike Weiser, who had known little enough about her; impossible not to think of the ancient rift between the two families—Schoffs and Krausses—and how it seemed there was, had always been, something between them, some darker destiny waiting to be fulfilled, it was not over, anyone could see that, sitting there staring at those two empty pews

  No, none of them attended the service, the long Mass for the dead, not Krausses, not Schoffs, not even the hired man, the halfbreed. Not even he had made an appearance, though he had been a friend of sorts to the girl, not? Hadn’t they always been down poking around the river together, him and the girl and the retarded boy?

  But Lathias would not have gone to the service, not even if Stolanus and Helen and the boy had gone. He went to the river instead, not down beneath the Bull’s Forehead, where the girl had gone missing and where the mother would surely be (her, of all people, he did not want to see). Instead, he went upriver, nearer the fort, and he would have taken the boy with him had Stolanus and Helen allowed it.

  But Stolanus had said, “And what will people think, then, if he is not at the church, and then not even at home, but at the river yet? How does it look for none of us to be there for the service? It is as if we are confessing to something.” Lowering his voice, though the boy was up in his room with the door shut, as always now. Stolanus tried, God knows, reasoned, insisted even, that they go to the Mass. But Helen just cast him a cold glance and set her shoulders firmly.

  And he was right, Stolanus was. Already there were some, a stupid few, who blamed the boy, not out of some sense of justice or grief—for they had hardly known the girl, not known her at all—but simply out of instinct, to have something concrete amid all the uncertainty, blame the most concrete instinct of all, harder even than hate; and for the intrigue of it, also, though they would not admit to something so base, but it was true nevertheless. The same who had always been disgusted by the boy, afraid of him, even. First that girl, they said, then who’s next? Just a few, but it is always the ignorant who make themselves heard, as Ma Reis observed. None of our children are safe, they said. And, Children? You mean our daughters. They never did find the body, God knows what else had been done to her.

  Someone had begun leaving dead animals nailed to the fencepost at the entrance to the Schoff farm. The first a rabbit, gutted stem to stern. Helen found it there and quickly tore it down before the boy could see. Then other things: a cat, though not one of theirs; a prairie chicken; a sparrow. All gutted and bleeding coldly. It rattled Helen, though she knew it was stupid. Not the deaths themselves, nor the shock of it, not even the violence itself, but only the implied threat. Stolanus said it was just pranks, some young people maybe, without thought or reason or even courage behind them, only the tongues of their parents.

  “Ach, you know how they can get caught up,” he said, “listening to their parents talk, the parents sometimes stupider than the children.”

  But Helen took a darker view; she insisted it be reported to the police.

  So Stolanus drove over with Lathias one morning to Triumph and they sat in McCready’s cramped waiting area looking down at their dirty boots while Mrs. Ivy McCready cast them disdainful glances from where she sat at a little table sucking on a raspberry drop and typing a letter to her old girlfriend in Saskatoon. You should just see now, she had begun, when her husband opened the door to his office and nodded the two men in.

  McCready sat and listened to Stolanus a while and then he said, in the tone he always used when talking to the immigrants, “You let me know if anything worse turns up, do you understand, if it gets worse. Do you get what I’m saying
? Then you let me know.”

  When Stolanus and Lathias arrived home, Helen said, “And? What did he say?”

  And Stolanus replied, without looking at her, “Nothing.” Then he shut the door to the bedroom behind him.

  ——

  So the boy was no longer allowed to leave the house. Helen was certain he would be harmed somehow, though Stolanus and Lathias did not agree. Whoever was leaving the animals was doing it out of sheer ignorance. There had been a couple other things: gopher heads tossed on the doorstep; the bowels of some unidentified animal. Lathias suspected Leo, though it was hard to say; would he really make the effort? But it was, without a doubt, an act that recalled Leo’s father, old Gus; that vengefulness without sense, or without even clear reason.

  And though he could not have explained why, Lathias was not really worried about Leo. Did not think much about him at all. He was worried about the boy. He had not been himself since the drowning, which, given the circumstances, was only natural, one could scarcely expect anything else. None of them had. He himself had not wept for her—why would he?—but only felt as if he walked around in a kind of fog, going through the motions of his life without really being in it, feeling strangely distanced from everyone, everything, from his own thoughts, his own body even. He did not want to think of her. It was better that he think of the boy.

  But it seemed, when he sat in the boy’s room, watching him stare out the window as if he were absent, too, to be more than shock, more than grief; the boy had become secretive and suspicious and fearful in a way he had never been before. He didn’t seem to mind being kept at home, and he seemed to have no desire now to leave his cramped, sour bedroom, where before he had been eager to get out, go places.

  And so, Lathias knew that what he had once wished to change about the boy appeared to have been changed after all: he had retreated, had hardened. And Lathias was sorry for it. And then he wished that it had not been changed after all, that his wish had not come to be, the way it often goes with wishes.

  ——

  One afternoon, Lathias thought, Has anyone talked to him even, really talked to him, about what happened? It seemed they had not spoken in weeks, though it could not have been so long. He had not been up to the boy’s room since the day after the dredging of the river, when they had sat together in a cold and bewildered silence, until the boy had said, “Lathias?” and Lathias said, “Yes,” and the boy said, “Did they …?” and Lathias said, “No. There was nothing.”

  Since then, they all—him and Stolanus and Helen—tiptoed around him, ignoring him, almost, as if they believed he had done something to her. He must think we all believe it, Lathias thought.

  So he went up to the boy’s bedroom, listened, and then knocked. When no one answered, he opened the door and looked in. The air was hot and stagnant and the boy lay sprawled in fitful sleep across his bed, the hair at his forehead and temples damp.

  Lathias entered and closed the door behind him, then stood, wondering if he should wake the boy. Finally, he reached out and touched his hand gently to the boy’s shoulder and the boy started up and blinked at him, as if he could not decide whether Lathias really stood there or whether it was still a dream, or who Lathias even was.

  “Hey,” Lathias said gently.

  The boy settled back then, still watching Lathias with the veiled look he had assumed since the drowning, and it occurred to Lathias that perhaps the look was not distrust at all, or at least, not distrust the way he had thought—that someone might hurt him, might do something to him—but rather, simply fear that Lathias might disappear, too, that anyone could.

  Lathias pulled the chair out a bit from the corner and settled into it, perching his hat on his knee. They sat a while in silence, until the boy pulled the covers up over his chest.

  Lathias said, “Are you cold? You must be cold,” and he pointed to the boy’s wet hair.

  The boy reached up. “So?”

  “So, nothing. I just thought you might be cold.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  Then they sat together, the boy watching Lathias, and Lathias pretending not to watch the boy.

  After a while, Helen came up the stairs and into the room and stood there awkwardly and then, as if deciding something, crossed the room and put her hand against the boy’s forehead, awkward, too.

  “You are hot,” she said, then pulled back the covers. “Wet,” she said, in surprise, “soaked through.”

  Lathias sat and pretended to look out the window, wanting to leave, but unable to, not when Helen had just come in.

  She tried to touch the boy’s forehead again but he turned his head away. She hesitated, then went to the dresser and pulled out a dry nightshirt.

  “Put this on,” she said quietly. “I will dry your bedding by the stove. Come down and eat and I will dry your things.” She paused again, her eyes flickering to Lathias and away. And then she disappeared down the stairs.

  When she was gone, Lathias said, “She is worried about you.”

  But the boy did not reply, or even acknowledge that he had heard, just sat there twisting the damp bedclothes, and then he said, “It’s because you are here.”

  “What’s because I’m here?”

  “She never touches me,” he said, “when we’re alone.”

  Lathias just looked out the window, not knowing what to say because he knew it was true. He sighed. He did not feel like talking to the boy about it after all, about Elisabeth. So he got up and flapped his gloves against his leg and stood there stupidly, his hat in his hand, and said, “Well.” He said, “I guess I should get back to it.”

  The boy sat looking up at him.

  “I guess you know I was dreaming,” he said.

  Lathias shook his head. “Why would I know that?”

  “Don’t ask me to tell you about it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Because I can’t.”

  Lathias, in spite of himself, said, “Why can’t you?”

  “I just can’t. So don’t ask.”

  “All right, I won’t.”

  The boy squeezed his eyes up, like he was going to cry.

  Lathias sighed and sat down again. He rubbed his hand across his mouth. After a minute he said, “You had a dream about her, about Elisabeth?”

  But the boy just sat with his face all scrunched up.

  “That’s not real,” Lathias said. “That’s just a dream.” Knowing it was stupid, but what else could he say? “Just try and forget it. It’s nothing.” Thinking, God help me, I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to talk about any of it. “Maybe you could talk to Father Rieger,” he said, though he knew that was absurd. Why would the boy want to? Talk to Father Rieger, of all people. As if that were even possible. But who else to send him to?

  “What for?” the boy said.

  “Just … if something is bothering you, I don’t know, but maybe, just confession, just to make you feel better.”

  The boy stared a moment. “You think I did something?”

  And Lathias thought, Do I? Is that what I think? “No,” he said, “of course not.”

  And then it came to Lathias, all at once, so clear, he should have known all along.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looked the boy straight in the eyes. “Do you think you did something?”

  The boy just sat there, the bedclothes twisting and twisting.

  “Do you remember,” Lathias said, pulling his chair closer, “do you remember what happened? Before you blacked out?”

  “I told you already.”

  “You told your father. I was down at the river.” He did not say, looking for her. “Tell me now.”

  “She was on the ice,” he said. The boy looked down at the bedclothes in his hands.

  “And then what?”

  “And then she wasn’t.”

  That sick, heavy feeling seeped back into the pit of Lathias’s stomach.

  “Where were you?” he said. “When she—”


  He took a deep breath, unable to finish, though there was no reason he shouldn’t. What’s done was done. What did saying it matter? But it did.

  “I was up the draw. I was going home.”

  “Without her?”

  “She was angry,” he said. “We argued.”

  “About what?”

  The boy’s eyes flicked up at him, briefly, then back down to the twist of bedclothes.

  “About you,” he said.

  Lathias looked out the window then, watching Stolanus by the barn where he fiddled with some machinery or a bit of harness, anything to keep him out of the house.

  He sat staring that way so long that the boy finally said, “Don’t you want to know why?”

  When Lathias did not answer, he said again, “Don’t you want to know why we were arguing about you?”

  Lathias looked at him, steadily. “No,” he said. Feeling a creeping rage now in his belly, thinking, I cannot do things different. I cannot go back. Not now. So don’t put me there, don’t you put me there.

  But the boy screwed up his face again, as if he would cry, and Lathias said sharply, “It doesn’t matter anyway. Never mind about that now.”

  The boy sucked his breath in, to stop the tears, said, “It does matter.”

  Lathias shook his head. “No,” he said again, “it doesn’t.”

  “She called you a liar.” He said it quickly, and his eyes flashed and welled up again.

  Lathias nodded. Then he shrugged and said, “I’ve been called worse things.”

  What could it matter? She was dead somewhere in the river. What did it matter now what she had said or felt, about him, about anyone? And he said, “Just because someone calls you a liar, doesn’t make you one. Only you can do that.”

  “But she shouldn’t have said it.”

  “So you were angry with her.”

  “I didn’t want her to talk like that any more, about you. I didn’t want her to say that.”

  “To say I was a liar.”