The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  And then the wives did believe them and they sat at their kitchen tables over coffee and thought a while and then they said to their husbands, So she is not dead after all. And the men said, No, I don’t think so. But, Christ Almighty, I don’t know. And the wives said, Don’t be stupid, of course she is not dead. She ran away. From Leo’s. And us all the fools for it, and her poor mother, besides. Good God. She ran away. And you let Leo Krauss drag her back.

  In defence of themselves, the husbands said, But he did not drag her exactly, there was nothing violent about it.

  And the wives said, I thought he had her by the hair.

  The men admitted this was true.

  It was that girl, they said, how can it be violent when she goes along with it that way?

  And the women said, Oh, but you are stupid. They said, Tomorrow I will pay a visit to Mary. I will go and see for myself.

  SEVENTEEN

  The next afternoon, Ma Reis drove over in the wagon to Rausches’ and collected Ronnie’s mother, Erna, who brought her two youngest children, and from there over to Weisers’ and picked up Marian, Mike standing in the doorway, his arms at his sides, watching them go.

  Marian eyed the Rausch children in the back of the wagon and said to Erna, “Well, and is that such a good idea?”

  Erna shrugged. “I couldn’t leave them alone. Not with that crazy new bull of Roy’s not even penned, and Ronnie and Roy God knows where.”

  Ma Reis said, “I’d put that bull in the icehouse if I were you, Erna. I’d make sausage out of him. That’s what I would do.”

  “You go ahead and do it, then,” Erna said. “It won’t break my heart.”

  “Art would just as soon see me in the icehouse,” Ma said. “You should hear how he goes on about that thing. A bull yet, imagine that.”

  “These men and their bulls,” Erna said, “always comparing.”

  The women laughed a little. Then they were quiet, and Marian said, “Well. What do you think of all this, anyway?”

  Ma said, “Ach, those old fools,” meaning the husbands.

  “I don’t know,” Marian said. “It doesn’t sound right, but where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

  “Well,” Ma said, “we’ll know soon enough. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything, those Krausses. God knows what goes on there. What went on. It makes you wonder, what did that girl have to suffer there, with Leo?”

  “All right, now, let’s not forget,” Marian said, and inclined her head meaningfully toward the children again.

  Erna narrowed her eyes at them shrewdly, then turned back around. “Ach, they don’t hear nothing, those two. Ears like their father.”

  The two children, a boy and a girl, listened from where they sat in the wagon box but could not decipher, in spite of their efforts, what the women were talking about or where they were going, either. It would be impossible to ask. And, then again, they did not really care. What could it matter to them? The girl, especially, did not care where they were going, only that they were going somewhere at all, anywhere. But years later, decades, when she was grown with grown children of her own, she would tell them, “I remember that day like it was yesterday. Ma Reis was driving, not Mom—Grandma, I mean—or Marian Weiser. I know that because we were flying along at a pretty good clip the way Ma always drove—you know she died many years later, in a car accident, she was an old woman then, I never heard the details, but I remember thinking, Well, she must have been the one driving—anyway, it was Ma Reis that day, and Uncle Dale and I had to grab on to the sides and to each other to keep from being tossed out onto the road.

  “We had no real idea what was going on, only that it involved the drowned girl we had heard about and Krausses (I hoped that was not where we were going), and that it was somehow terribly important, though Uncle Dale seemed not to care much at all and I remember this bothered me, his not caring. And so I tried to make him care. I said to him, quietly so the women would not hear, ‘They say that dead girl is alive. That one that drowned in the river. She was dead and now she’s alive.’ Uncle Dale would just hitch up his shoulders and say, ‘So, she’s alive, what is it to me?’ and that would just make me try harder, until Grandma turned around and said, ‘Lizzie, what are you talking about back there?’ And then I was quiet.

  “I was trying to scare Uncle Dale because I felt scared myself. But Uncle Dale would not scare and in trying to scare him I only succeeded in making myself more afraid. I did not want to see Leo Krauss, of whom I was terrified, a lot of us were, he was so strange and so awful, but worse than that, I did not want to see the dead girl, oh, she was always odd-looking anyway, and I imagined her climbing out of the river with her long wet hair all down over her face that way and coming toward me. It scared the daylights out of me.

  “When we pulled into Krausses’ yard, Grandma forbid us to budge from the wagon, to so much as put one finger outside of it (as if I would have). She handed us each a scotch mint from a paper sack she always kept in her purse for just such occasions, and reminded us of the lickin’s we would get should we leave our seats, and then she followed Marian Weiser and Ma Reis up to the house. We sat and watched and sucked our scotch mints while the women stood on the stoop and knocked and called out.

  “I was crying a little bit then and I sucked my mint harder to stop the tears which I knew would have made Grandma furious, they always did. I was certain that any minute the dead girl would come out that door and send them all—Grandma and Ma Reis and Marian Weiser—shrieking back to us (and part of me looked forward to that, a little bit, to see the adults afraid for a change, especially these adults, who never seemed afraid of anything). That’s what a silly imagination I had. Oh, I could really scare myself back then. There was always so much talk of ghosts and spirits and the devil, everyone so superstitious. I don’t think it was healthy. It sure wasn’t for me, anyway. Uncle Dale, well.

  “When the door of Krausses’ shack finally opened, the three women all took a step back, all at once. I remember how funny it looked and I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so afraid. And I leaned back in the wagon, too, as if those few inches could make a difference, could keep the dead girl from me.

  “But it was not the dead girl who stood there in the doorway. It was Leo Krauss. Uncle Dale and I could not hear what they said to each other, Leo and the women. Leo did not seem angry, as I had thought he would be, but only aloof and annoyed, as he always did. He waved them all away and slammed the door in their faces.

  “Ma Reis straightened her hat and marched down the steps and across the yard. I remember little puffs of dust came up from beneath her shoes, like smoke. Grandma and Marian followed and they all disappeared inside the big dark barn door, and then we were alone there in the yard.

  “Uncle Dale and I waited a long time for them to come back out. Uncle Dale said to me, ‘Is your candy gone?’ It was, but I said no and made sucking motions so that he would believe it wasn’t. Then we sat like that some more. I remember there was a meadowlark sounding from one of the rails by the barn. There wasn’t much of a wind and so we just sat there listening to that meadowlark and picking bits of wood off the wagon box, with Uncle Dale looking at me sideways and me pretending to give that candy that I did not have a good suck every now and then.

  “Finally, Uncle Dale stood and looked around the yard, and I said, ‘Sit down once, do you want to get a lickin’?’ And he started climbing out of the wagon. I tried to stop him, but you know Uncle Dale. Sometimes things don’t change very much at all, do they?

  “So I sat and watched him sneak across the yard and thought with some small satisfaction about the lickin’ he would get when Grandma caught him. I did not want to go with him, but I did not want to stay there alone, either. Leo Krauss was there in the house, maybe watching me from behind one of those dark windows, and then somewhere, too, was a dead girl come back to life. And, thinking of it that way, a lickin’ didn’t seem so bad after all, and so I climbed down and ran after Un
cle Dale. He had gone around the back of the barn, trying to peek in through the chinks in the boards. I stood so close he kept elbowing me back. ‘What do you see?’ I kept asking. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I don’t see nothing.’ We went all around the barn that way, just looking for a place to peek, or Uncle Dale was looking and I was just trying to stay close to him, glancing over my shoulder every now and then. Oh, it was awful. I tried to convince Uncle Dale to come back to the wagon with me. I even said I would give him the rest of my scotch mint, and he said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid? You don’t have any scotch mint.’ And I said yes I did. And he said show him then. And I said I’d show him in the wagon, and that was when someone grabbed us by the backs of our coats. I screamed something terrible, and Uncle Dale did, too, though he denied it later. Oh, how we shrieked. Grandma must have thought we’d been killed. I closed my eyes and screamed and screamed and when I finally opened them and turned to look and I saw that it was Leo Krauss, I screamed some more. It didn’t seem to bother Leo one bit, all that screaming. He just hauled us by our coats around to the front of the barn where Grandma and the other ladies had run out looking for us.

  “Leo kind of dangled me and Uncle Dale in front of the women and then tossed us toward Grandma and said, ‘Your kids can’t mind their business either.’

  “I wasn’t screaming any more, but I was crying pretty hard and Uncle Dale had a death grip on Grandma’s leg. I looked up at Grandma then to see how mad was she at us. But when I saw her face, it stopped my tears. Of course, I thought it was because of us, because of Uncle Dale and me, but then I saw the other women and their faces were all twisted up too, with an emotion I couldn’t then name, and I thought, But that’s not because of us. It couldn’t be.

  “Grandma said to Leo, ‘You cannot keep her in there like that. After all that girl has been through.’ And Leo said, ‘Keep her? I don’t keep her nowhere. That is where she wants to be. Ask her yourself.’ And Ma Reis said, ‘McCready will hear about this.’ He was the constable at Triumph back then. The one that drowned in the river a few years later when the boat he was fishing in, or drinking in, more likely, tipped over. So Leo said, ‘What does McCready care?’

  “And while they’re going back and forth that way, Uncle Dale tugs at my sleeve and points to the barn. I looked behind us then, for the first time, through the big barn door. And there was Elisabeth Brechert, the dead girl, sitting on a straw pallet in a corner.

  “Of course, she did not look as I had imagined her, not ghostly, not deathly, but somehow seeing her that way, alive after we had all thought her dead, was more terrifying than anything I could have imagined. She was so utterly human. Only human. And that was the most awful realization of all. She was not dead. But one day she would be, that’s what bothered me then. She would die, and so would I. So would we all. And so it was as if we were already dead, a little bit, anyway.

  “I didn’t understand it then, I don’t even really understand it now. But I think it was the first time in my life that I realized just how complicated things are. One thing about getting older, you realize there aren’t any answers. All those mysteries you spend your life trying to figure out. Well, they’re mysteries for a reason, aren’t they? Some of them, anyway. You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out.”

  ——

  The children crouched there by the women, staring in at Elisabeth. And she stared out at them, as if they were nothing, as if they did not matter. And they didn’t, Ma Reis knew. That was the thing. They didn’t matter, not one iota. It reminded her of the way Leo Krauss looked at people. As if they were there, but not there. As if he was always looking through you to someone else.

  “Well,” Ma Reis said to Leo. “And what does Mary think of this?”

  And Leo said, “What should she think? She should be happy that God has brought her back to us. Resurrected her.”

  Ma Reis made that noise she always made when she was disgusted by something but was too angry to speak. “Resurrected,” she said. “Come now, Leo, you can’t really believe that.”

  “She was dead,” he said flatly, “and now she is alive.”

  Ma Reis said, “She was never dead, Leo. She was trying to get away. From you.”

  But Leo just stood there and stared at them blandly, as if it could not matter what they said. As if he was bored by them.

  Ma said, “And the blood? What about that?”

  And Leo said, “You tell me.”

  Ma Reis said, “No. It’s McCready who will hear it.”

  And Leo just stood there staring, sucking his teeth.

  So the women loaded the two children into the wagon box and climbed up onto the bench seat and left Leo, heading straight for Triumph and McCready’s office. They rode along in silence for a while until Marian said, “And do you believe that, then, what she said?”

  Erna shook her head and shrugged. They both looked to Ma, who stared steadily ahead down the reins. When she did not speak, Marian said, “Seems so impossible.”

  “It’s possible,” Ma said. “There isn’t much in this world that isn’t, when you think of it.”

  “But, still, it’s so—”

  “She fell in the river, she climbed back out. There’s nothing so marvellous in that.”

  “But that boy, he would have seen her.”

  “He wouldn’t have seen nothing. He said himself it was already dark. He was halfway up the draw.”

  “What I want to know is why she stayed at the braucha’s so long.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Did you see that place? Worse now than it ever was.”

  “And, then, Leo.”

  “Drunk again.”

  “Do you think he hurt her?”

  “There was blood on her hands, or on her wrists.”

  “He must have done it.”

  “Then why not show someone, why not show us?”

  “She’s afraid. You could see it in her face.”

  Ma said, “She’s afraid all right. But not of Leo. Of that I’m sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I told her to come with us. I told her to come home with me. I said I would take her back to the braucha’s if she wanted.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said no. She said she didn’t want to go nowhere.”

  “Now, what does that mean?”

  “It must at least mean she’s not afraid to be there with Leo.”

  “Or she’s too afraid to leave.”

  “No,” Ma said. “It’s not Leo at all. It’s herself she’s afraid of.”

  Erna and Marian raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances across Ma’s shoulder which Ma pretended not to notice.

  “Well,” Marian sighed, “we’ll see what McCready has to say.”

  When they arrived at McCready’s, the women had to knock several times before McCready’s wife came to the door. She told them McCready was not in, and Ma said, “But that’s his car right there.”

  McCready’s wife flushed and said, angrily, “And what is that to me? I told you he’s not here. If it’s his car you want, well, there it is.” And then she closed the door.

  The women did not look at each other, but just stood a moment, and then Marian said, “Well, that’s it, I guess.”

  “We’ll send the men over,” Erna said. “They’ll take care of it.”

  Ma said nothing. Just turned and led the women back to the wagon.

  Erna said, “You should have told about the blood, maybe.”

  Marian shot her a quick look and they were all quiet.

  Then Erna turned, as if suddenly remembering her children in the back of the wagon. She stared at them hard a minute and then she handed them the sack of scotch mints from her purse.

  When she had turned back around, the girl, who had taken the bag, threw it out onto the road. The boy was horrified. “What did you do that for?” he hissed.

  But she could not have told him. She did not know herself. There was just somet
hing about that day—about that whole situation, the dead girl and Leo and Mary and Ma Reis and that boy, too, that retarded boy, she couldn’t even think what his name was—there was something about all of it that gave her a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach, a sense that everything had gone wrong.

  ——

  The women felt it too, Erna Rausch and Marian Weiser and Ma Reis, and some of the others around the parish, that sense of things gone wrong, that perhaps there was worse even to come. And, of course, it was all complicated by everyone’s feelings about Leo, his history. Though they would not have admitted it, never have admitted it, they were all a little afraid of him, even Ma Reis. And the men, too. Not afraid of what he would or could do to them, but afraid of what he was and what he wasn’t. Maybe a person has to know someone like Leo Krauss, Ma Reis thought, before they can really understand that. It had something to do with his complete disregard for living by the same codes and standards everyone else did, and they held themselves and each other—even Ma Reis had to admit—to some pretty hard standards. But Leo, he couldn’t have cared less. And that bothered them. They were a little afraid of him, sure. And even more, they were afraid of the girl, Elisabeth Brechert.

  But they went over nevertheless, to Krausses’, the men did, perhaps at the insistence of their wives, perhaps out of their own curiosity and disbelief. Art Reis and Mike Eichert and Ronnie’s father. The two smaller Rausch children were already in bed when their father returned home later that evening, though only the boy was asleep; the girl lay staring into the dark, thinking of Leo Krauss and Elisabeth Brechert, and digging her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from falling asleep.