The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “That drowned girl.”

  His father and mother both stopped and looked at each other.

  “Gott im Himmel,” his mother breathed. She set down the pot and crossed herself.

  “Where,” his father said, sitting down, “in the brush?”

  “No,” Ronnie said, “not in the brush. Not in the river.” He shook his head as if to clear it.

  “Here, have some coffee. Sit down. Give him a minute, already. Can’t you see he’s upset? Look how his hands shake.”

  Ronnie sat, took the cup of coffee, set it down without drinking. “It was her.”

  “Yah, all right, then. Where was she?”

  He looked from his father to his mother and back again. “At the braucha’s.”

  “What?”

  Ronnie added, “Alive.”

  “Ach.” His mother swatted her hand through the air. “He’s been drinking. Smell his breath.”

  “I haven’t. I saw her. Running from the shed to the house. It was her. That hair. It was blowing all out behind her. Clear as day.”

  “He has been drinking,” his mother said.

  “Have you been drinking, son?”

  “No!”

  “And you saw the Krauss girl?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you want people to think you are crazy?” his mother said.

  Ronnie did not want people to think he was crazy; he almost thought he was a little crazy himself. He looked at his father.

  “It was her,” he said again.

  “Think now,” said his father. “Maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you.”

  Ronnie shook his head, rubbed his hands through his hair. Maybe he had been seeing things. It all seemed so distant now, fuzzy, like a dream.

  “I don’t know. It looked like her. I think it did. God.”

  “Wasn’t Foxy with you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but he wasn’t looking …”

  “Yah, all right, enough of this,” said his mother. “I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  His father raised his head in astonishment. “Breakfast?” he said. “Before Communion? On Easter Sunday yet?”

  “The boy needs to eat. He is seeing things.”

  “And if I see things, will I get breakfast too? Look, out the window, der Osterhase.”

  “Ach, you old fool. Easter bunnies, yet.”

  Ronnie sat there staring at the table, then at the eggs and sausage his mother set before him.

  “Eat,” she said, “so you don’t talk so stupid. I’m going to dress.”

  And so he ate a little, his father sitting across the table with his black coffee, watching him. Finally, he put his fork down and just stared at the plate.

  “Maybe, Ronnie,” his father said after a while, “you should not go talking about this to others. Maybe it was nothing. You don’t want to make something out of nothing.”

  “Are you still talking about it?” his mother hollered from the bedroom where she was pinning her Easter hat just so. “Enough already.”

  His father glanced over his shoulder, then dropped his voice. “If you’re not going to eat that, pass it over. No sense going to waste, not?”

  Ronnie passed his plate over.

  “And maybe keep it to yourself,” his father said, between quick bites. “Maybe that’s best.”

  Though Ronnie was not sure whether he referred to the breakfast or to the girl. And so he sat there and stared into his cup of coffee, beginning to doubt what he had seen, wilfully perhaps, trying to come up with some other explanation. But when it was time to leave for church and he had still not come up with anything, he did what most do when faced with the inexplicable, the mysterious, the inconceivable: he told himself it could not possibly have happened, that he must, somehow, have been mistaken.

  ——

  Later that morning, Ronnie sat beside his mother, watching as Ludmila Baumgarten straightened the silk flowers on her new Easter hat and moved from the piano bench to the lectern to give the reading.

  Ludmila cleared her throat, touched the hat once more. “’Now upon the first day of the week,’” she read, “’very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spice which they had prepared and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?’”

  Here, Ronnie looked at his mother, who pointedly fixed her gaze forward, frowning a little.

  “‘He is not here,’” Ludmila read, raising her voice for effect, just as she had practised, “’but is risen.’” She lifted her hand, pausing near her hat. “‘Remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. And they remembered his words, And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.’”

  Ludmila bowed her head a moment over the text, then said, “Praise be to the Lord, Jesus Christ,” and made the sign of the cross and descended from the lectern.

  And Ronnie answered, along with his mother and father and the rest of the congregation, making the sign of the cross, “Praise be to the Lord.”

  When Father returned to the lecturn, he looked out over them a moment. Then he began, “Luke reminds us not only of the power of the Lord, to lift from the dead His only begotten son, but also he reminds us of our own journeys. Like the women who journeyed to the tomb, we are all on our own slow walks toward death. Each step we take is another step closer to our own tombs. And the question we must ask ourselves is this: ‘Is it the tomb I seek or life everlasting, a dwelling-place in the peace of the Lord?’ The women came seeking death, at that tomb, but what they found was a sign, of life everlasting, and they went forth, to spread the good news. But these women, they were not believed. Another old wives’ tale, that is what was said. And in the same way, there are those among us who reject what Christ has offered us, life everlasting. Life everlasting! Because they do not want to believe.”

  Ronnie shifted on the pew beside his mother and coughed and felt too warm, and his mother frowned over at him, but he could not sit still, the air was too close—why would someone not open a window?—and so he rose, and saying, “Excuse me, pardon, excuse me, please,” he squeezed down to the end of the pew and into the aisle and toward the door, while Father Rieger frowned down at him, saying, “And so on this Easter Sunday morning, we must all ask ourselves”—his voice following Ronnie out the door and into the bright morning—“‘Is it life everlasting which I seek, or only the tomb eternal?’”

  The following day, Easter Monday, at around four in the morning, Penny Rausch, young Erv Rausch’s wife (Erv being second cousin to Ronnie on the fathers’ sides), went into labour, her first, and Erv, still in his underpants, ran out the door and hitched up the wagon in a frenzy, Penny’s mother calling from the doorway: “For God’s sake don’t kill yourself, you idiot, this baby has got a while yet.” Then, rousing her youngest son—Penny’s brother—from his bed, the mother said, “But go with that horse’s ass to see he even gets to the braucha’s,” and the younger brother making it to the wagon just in time to climb in as Erv lashed the horses and rode like hellfire out into the pre-dawn prairie.

  But Erv Rausch was not a man known for his composure and good judgment at the best of times, and the panic and bleariness of the hour and the occasion had robbed him of whatever sense he might have had, so that when he reached the braucha’s and leapt down from the wagon before the horses had even stopped moving, and the younger brother grabbing the reins and calling after him, though Erv was already running across the yard, slipping in the mud as he went, hollering for the braucha, and without even a pause, flung the door open to find crouc
hed like a startled harpy on a pallet by the stove a girl with long wild hair, he, in fact, thought he had the wrong house. He was just about to turn in his confusion and run back to his wagon and drive God knows where, when the old braucha’s voice came from a corner of the hut, “What is it? What do you want?”

  Erv, who stood looking from the girl to the old woman emerging from the darkness, said, “My wife, the baby,” and ran back to the wagon, where he sat tapping his foot there beside his young brother-in-law until the old braucha came out and climbed into the wagon, and he cracked the reins once more, the braucha clutching the edge of the seat to keep from being tossed out into the mud, heedless of the girl who stood watching from the doorway behind them.

  Around noon, a healthy baby boy was born, Ervine Junior, and a neighbour who had stopped by on his way to town offered the old braucha a ride home to save Erv the trouble. Erv pressed some coins into the old woman’s palm, saying, “Yah, yah, thank you, good,” still dazed with the morning’s events and, in his near delirium and the celebration that followed, thinking no more of the braucha or the girl until the following morning, Tuesday, when he sat thick-headed and bleary over his coffee in Wing’s.

  The men were teasing him, as they usually did (for though, as the men were fond of saying, Erv was a couple tines short on the plow, and he had an unparalleled reputation as a bullshitter and became aggressive and sometimes violent when drinking, he was also a hard worker and quick to help out a neighbour and that counted for a lot among them). So they were having a few laughs at his expense, and one of the men said, “I hear you gave the old braucha a shock,” and another one said, “Maybe next time you’ll remember your pants,” and they all laughed, and Erv, wincing from the loudness of the laughter in his thumping brain, said, “The old woman, nothing. It was that girl that had the shock. Now that one jumped.” Looking around in anticipation of the men’s laughter. But the men only exchanged a look and said, “What girl?”

  Erv said, “That girl at the braucha’s. She jumped all right. God knows what she thought. But was I supposed to sit in the wagon and wait? Even old women need a fire lit under them, not?”

  And someone said, “There’s a girl living at the braucha’s?”

  “Who was she?”

  And Erv thought a minute and then he said, “I don’t know. It was dark, but the stove was going and she had a bed there in front of it, on the floor. I didn’t get a good look at her. She had long hair, all messed up and hanging in her face. She kind of looked like a witch. Or something.”

  So the men sat there, trying to figure out who the old woman might have out there, if anyone.

  “She’s got no family around here no more, does she, the old woman?”

  “Never had much to begin with.”

  “Just that one son who lived.”

  “Wasn’t the husband dead already when they got here?”

  “It was just her and the son. Strange bugger.”

  “But he’s been gone for years.”

  “Maybe it’s a granddaughter or something, come back.”

  Erv was starting to feel he was part of something important, and that was a position he was not used to, everyone taking what he said so seriously. And so he leaned forward and said, “I’ll tell you something else, too. She”—here he lowered his voice—“she was stark naked (it was a lie, of course, but what of that? How were they to know?)—stark naked,” he said again, “as the day she was born. If you get my drift.”

  This did not have the effect upon the men that Erv had hoped.

  “Maybe it was one of them Rescher kids.”

  “Rescher?”

  “Remember Reschers, used to have all that land over there—left in that drought year.”

  “Which drought year?”

  “Didn’t she kind of take up with Reschers?”

  “That’s right, I remember that, too.”

  “Might be one of them Reschers come back.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “How do I know? I’m just saying maybe it’s a Rescher.”

  “How old did you say she was?”

  Erv shrugged. “She wasn’t a little girl, but she didn’t look that old neither. And she had—” Here he paused, then cupped his hands at his chest and raised his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Christ, Erv, don’t you know what they’re called yet?”

  “I thought he had a kid now.”

  “Awful bashful for a married man.”

  “He only knows them on the cows—isn’t that right, Erv?”

  Ronnie Rausch, who had been sitting there quietly, shooting funny looks back and forth with his father across the table, finally, Ronnie, seeing that the conversation was taking a different direction, piped up: “I’ve seen her, too, that girl.”

  But the father quickly said, “Ach, don’t listen to this one, he sees a coyote and falls in love.”

  Erv said, “Did she have long hair?”

  And Ronnie said, “Yes, she did. She had long hair. Red hair.”

  Someone said, “Must have been a fox, then.”

  The men laughed and Ronnie, known as a bit of a hothead anyway, he got all flushed in the face and stood up, sloshing coffee out across the table, and said, “That was no coyote and no fox. I know exactly who it was.”

  “Who?” Erv said, “Who was it?”

  And the father said, “Sit down already, Ronald, and shut up now before your mouth gets you into trouble.”

  But Ronnie was not listening. He looked once around the table and then he said, “It was that Brechert girl that drowned in the river.”

  The men stopped chuckling then and exchanged glances across the table, and Ronnie’s father said, “But for God’s sake, Ronnie, use your head once,” and then to the men, “You know how it is, these youngsters. Remember when Tony Beier thought he saw a grizzly out in the Sand Hills there, attacking a heifer? He swore up and down, and hauled a bunch of men out there with rifles.”

  “And he said how the grizzly had been hunched over the animal, beating at it and roaring?”

  “Turned out it was Eichert’s bull he’d put out to stud.”

  “Shot the damn thing before anyone could stop him.”

  “Or what about that Cross girl,” Ronnie’s father added, “when she said someone grabbed her leg when she was swimming?” He laughed a little, nervously.

  “Yah, she wished someone had.”

  A few of the men nodded and someone said, “They are not thinking with their heads, those young ones.”

  “Tony Beier still shits his pants every time a bull looks at him sideways.”

  A few of them chuckled again, but Erv said to Ronnie, “Come to think of it, she did look like that Brechert girl. Skinny.”

  “Enough,” Ronnie’s father snapped, “enough, all this stupid talk. The girl is dead.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Finally, one of the men said, “Does anyone know that for sure?”

  “Ach, you’re crazy.”

  “Probably one of them Rescher kids.”

  “Anyway, what business of ours?”

  “Yah, and these two dummkopfs here, are we to believe what they say yet? I’d just as soon listen to Ludmila Baumgarten.”

  “Rausch, you need to get your boy a woman already.”

  “Rausch barely got one himself.”

  “Is that it, Ronnie? Are you looking from between your legs?”

  “Just make sure you look up and not down.”

  “Ach, leave him alone.”

  “That’s right, Ronnie. Never mind these old noodle-steppers. They haven’t looked up in a long time.”

  While Ronnie sat frowning into his cup of coffee.

  ——

  That night after supper Ronnie Rausch saddled up his horse and rode over to Erv Rausch’s with a bottle of his father’s whisky in his coat pocket. It didn’t take much convincing for Erv to agree (What, and will you let them all laugh at you that way? Treating you like a boy, not even a man?
), and so sometime that evening the two of them were hunkered down, shivering, behind the braucha’s shelterbelt, passing the bottle between them.

  “You really think it’s that drowned girl?” Erv said, after a while.

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Sure looked like her. Now you mention it.”

  “Sure did.”

  “Doesn’t make much sense, though.”

  “Sure doesn’t.”

  They sat and drank a while in the gathering twilight. An owl hooted from the far edge of the shelterbelt.

  “Hey, Ronnie.”

  “What?”

  “You believe in ghosts?”

  “No.”

  “No, me neither.” Erv shifted his position against a rotting stump. “I heard some stories, though.”

  Ronnie reached for the bottle. “Like what?”

  “Well.” Erv shifted again. “You know about the Horseman? The bones rattling and all?”

  “Yah. I heard that.”

  Erv started. “You heard that? Tonight?”

  “What?”

  “You heard bones rattling?”

  “No. Christ. I heard the story before. Sit down. What do you think? What did you even say that for?”

  Erv eased back again. “I thought you meant—”

  “I know what you thought. Quit talking about it already. Christ.”

  They each took a swig from the bottle.

  “Probably wouldn’t hear those bones anyway, down in the ground there.”

  “Shut up already.”

  Erv shifted again.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Ronnie said. “Sit still for once.”

  “I need to piss.”

  “So, go piss.”

  “Where?”

  “How the hell should I know? Over there somewhere.”

  Erv looked over there, into the darkening row of caraganas. The owl hooted.

  “I can wait,” he said.

  ——

  Just around dusk they saw her.

  “Hey,” Erv said, dropping the empty bottle in the dirt.

  Ronnie grabbed him. “Shut up. She’ll hear us.”

  “Well, and so what?”

  “Christ, you’re drunk. Keep your voice down.”

  Watching as she crossed from the hut to the chicken coop with a basket.