The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  Ronnie and his mother sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When Ronnie’s father stepped through the door, they lifted their heads in unison, and Erna said, “Well?”

  Ronnie’s father sighed and pulled off his coat.

  Ronnie and his mother exchanged a look. “Well?” she said again. “What happened?”

  Ronnie’s father rubbed a palm across his face and came to the table and sat, and Erna rose and poured him out a coffee and sat too, and they waited.

  “Ach,” he finally said. “All this trouble. How is it our business, even?”

  “Did you see her?” Ronnie said.

  He nodded. “Yah, I saw her.”

  “And the blood?” Erna said.

  “Yah. The blood.”

  “And?” she said. “Is she cut, or what is it?”

  “How should I know? What would you have me do, wash the blood off to have a look? She would not even let us look closely.”

  Erna clucked her tongue in annoyance. “So,” she said, “is he putting blood on her, maybe? Is that what he’s doing? Some kind of punishment?”

  Ronnie said, “Why would he do that?”

  “Does he need reasons?” Erna said. “Has he ever?”

  Ronnie’s father shrugged. “I don’t know what can be done. The girl is not hurt. The blood, well, I don’t know. She wants to stay in the barn, that’s what she said. He feeds her, or Mary does. McCready doesn’t care. If anything’s to be done it’s up to the mother, it’s up to Mary. It’s their business, not ours.”

  But Erna was not yet willing to concede. “Maybe Father Rieger could go.”

  “No,” Ronnie’s father said, “he will not. He has already said he has had enough of Leo, that he will have him excommunicated.”

  “Excommunicated? Was Leo even baptized in the first place?”

  “Who knows?” Ronnie’s father said, already tiring of the problem. “Come on, time for bed.”

  He rose from the table, and then Ronnie did.

  “Good night, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie did not reply, just climbed the stairs to his room and closed the door.

  But Erna would not be deterred. “What about the braucha? Has anyone talked to her?”

  “Put out the lantern.”

  “Someone should talk to the braucha.”

  “Ach, leave well enough alone.”

  “But that girl …”

  “What about her?”

  “Just … the way she is.” Following her husband into the bedroom. “She’s … I don’t know how to say.”

  “Don’t say, then. Come to bed. She was always strange, that one.”

  “This is different.”

  “Don’t see things where there is nothing. Don’t make a bad situation worse with imagining.”

  Erna nodded, vaguely, climbed under the covers beside her husband and sighed. Then, turning suddenly, she said, “I know.”

  “What?”

  “I know what it is, what she makes me think of now.”

  “What?” he said, already feeling sleep settle over him.

  “Die laufenden toten Gestalten.”

  “Don’t talk so stupid,” he mumbled.

  And pulling the covers tighter about him, he soon fell into the deep sleep of the untroubled.

  But Erna lay awake, staring up into the darkness, thinking, Tomorrow I must go see Ma Reis, and Marian, too. They will know what I mean. That blankness about the girl, as if she was there, but wasn’t there, either. She edged a little closer to her husband, who grunted in his sleep. Thinking, That is what she is, that girl, and Leo, too, and Mary, my God, all of them, all those Krausses, I see it now, Die laufenden toten Gestalten. The walking dead.

  EIGHTEEN

  Miraculously, word had not reached Schoffs’—of the girl’s so-called resurrection—and they might not have heard at all, they so rarely saw anyone now, hardly left the farm, the boy himself never even left his room any more, that’s what they’d heard, hardly spoke at all (and some still saw this as a confession of his guilt in the matter, though that had pretty much blown over, as most things did, given enough time).

  Ma Reis, who, of anyone, would have been the one to go to them, was reluctant, knowing very well the state of things over there since the girl’s drowning. And now the hired man gone, too, or so Art had claimed. She sat mulling it over, wondering exactly how it should be said, the best way to go about it. But Ma mulled a little too long. It was Ludmila Baumgarten herself who came by after Mass the Sunday following the girl’s resurrection.

  “Good God,” Stolanus said, watching from the window as she hoisted herself down from her wagon. “And what is this about now?”

  “Must be something”—Helen paused dryly—“important.”

  Stolanus moved to open the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Letting her in.”

  “And what for? I have nothing to say to her.”

  “You have nothing to say to anyone,” he said, and opened the door.

  Ludmila ballooned into the kitchen.

  “Here, sit,” Stolanus said. “Helen, is there coffee?”

  Helen folded her arms across her chest.

  Stolanus took the coffee and poured out another cup. Ludmila, seated now at the table, watched all the while, her hands pressed together to keep them from betraying her excitement.

  “Thought I might see you in church this morning,” she said.

  “I don’t know why you would think that,” Helen remarked. “You never saw us there before.”

  Ludmila raised her eyebrows. “But maybe you’ve heard already,” she said, addressing her coffee, so jittery she scarcely dared to raise the cup. “Maybe your hired man might have heard,” she said, nodding pleasantly at Helen, “in town or something.”

  Helen and Stolanus exchanged quick looks. Helen turned away, busying herself at the sink.

  “Heard what?” Stolanus said, though he did not especially care, either. Talk, talk, talk, what did it all matter?

  “Everyone else seems to know,” Ludmila went on, “but then that sort of news travels fast. I’m surprised you haven’t heard nothing. And every Catholic from here to Fox Valley in church this morning—except you, of course—and a few Lutherans to boot. Everybody thought she’d be there, that they all would. I kind of thought so too. I was amazed they weren’t.”

  “Who?” Stolanus said, growing annoyed. “What’s this all about?”

  “Leo especially,” she went on. “You know how funny he is about church. I thought for sure, but then you never can tell, I guess.” She lifted her coffee cup, propping her elbows on the table to steady herself. “But maybe I shouldn’t have come after all. I don’t want to be responsible for upsetting anyone. You know what they say, Kill the messenger—”

  “What is it, Ludmila,” Stolanus interrupted, “that you came for?”

  “Well,” Ludmila said. “I hardly know how to say it”—she lowered her coffee cup, looked from Stolanus to Helen and back again, then leaned forward and spoke, dropping her voice—“Elisabeth Brechert, she’s alive.”

  ——

  After Ludmila had gone, they sat together in the kitchen, the pot of coffee growing cold between them.

  “But this is good, not?” Stolanus said. “We must tell him.”

  “What,” Helen said, in a low voice, “and upset him further?”

  “But that makes no sense. He is upset because he thought the girl was dead—”

  “Keep your voice down. She is dead. As far as he is concerned.”

  Stolanus lowered his voice too, and leaned forward across the kitchen table. “This is insane. He must know. Can’t you see how he suffers?”

  “Can’t I see? Can’t you? That is all I see.”

  “So let’s tell him, for God’s sake.”

  “Shh. No. He will not be told and that is that.”

  “Be sensible. He will find out one way or another. Eventually. And then what? Better to hear it from us.”

/>   “Not if we send him away.”

  “What? Now you want to send him?”

  “With Lathias gone …”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “If we have to.”

  “Where, to Battleford?”

  “If the girl is alive … tomorrow, even. You can take him, first thing.”

  “We can send him if you like. But it will take time. We can’t just drop him there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. We need to write to them. Make an application. Or something.”

  “If he were to just turn up there, they would not send him away.”

  “God, you must be crazy, you want to abandon him there?”

  “That’s not abandoning.”

  “We can take him but we must do it right. And we must tell him about the girl. He should know.”

  “Never.”

  NINETEEN

  The boy knew, certainly, that something had changed. Knew that his mother and father talked to each other more now than they ever had, in hushed, urgent voices that he could not decipher floating up the stairs to his room. Though he hardly tried. What could their conversations matter to him? And Lathias? He had not seen Lathias since that day Leo Krauss had come in the wagon and stood shouting in the yard. About him, he imagined, though he could not hear that, either. And he supposed Lathias had gone on a trip to Maple Creek for his father. Usually, he would come to say goodbye, if he were not already with Lathias, helping him to load the wagon, making sure he had food for the trip. But not now. Now he was alone.

  Only, sometimes, his mother would come to the top of the stairs and stand looking at him, her hand on the doorframe, as if she might say something. But she would not. She would just nod and turn and disappear back down the stairs, speaking only when she brought his meals. “Won’t you come down?” she would say. But he could see she did not want him to; his tray already in hand. And so he would shake his head and she would slide the tray onto the bedside table with a quick motion that made the boy think of that sick dog they’d had penned by the barn a couple years back, how Lathias showed him to shove the food beneath the rail with a stick and step back quickly, in case the dog should snap. The dog was rabid, it turned out, snarling and frothing and snapping at invisible enemies. One night after supper, after he had already gone to bed for the night, when he was almost asleep, he heard a shot crack the dusk, and he climbed from his bed and went to the window and saw Lathias there with the shotgun, standing over the dog, just standing there, as if he thought maybe the dog was not really dead after all. The boy watched a moment and then he climbed back into his bed. He was not sad, not about the dog. He was only sorry because he knew Lathias did not like to kill a thing. And that dog used to follow Lathias everywhere, helping him keep the herd together when they moved pastures, or cutting calves from their mothers at branding time, keeping coyotes away from the chickenshed, deer and antelope out of the garden. But the dog he had been was not the dog he was after the rabies. And now he was dead. Lathias had killed him. And he wondered why his father had not been the one to do it. He pulled the blankets tighter around himself and said a Hail Mary for the dog. And as he fell asleep, he promised himself, I will not have a dog. Not when I’m older. Not never.

  It occurred to him now that no one had ever said anything about that dog, once it was gone. It had troubled him at the time, and it troubled him now. The empty pen, the dog dish gone, and everyone walking around like there had never been a dog there at all. He had climbed into the pen the morning after the dog had been shot, just to look around, to see if anyone would say anything. But Lathias passed him on the way to the barn and, later, his father, and neither of them even glanced in his direction. It was as if he was gone, too.

  That silence. That was what bothered him. Lathias no better than his mother and father, really. And all those stories he told, it was as if he were just filling the silence. He never talked about real things, about things that mattered. Just stories. Lies, Elisabeth had said.

  She had been different. Elisabeth had talked. He did not like to think of her, tried to stop himself, but she forced herself in, nevertheless. Just as she always had. And she had talked to him. About the accident, even. A thing no one else would. And about Lathias. Of course, Lathias.

  “You really are stupid,” she had said to him that night from the frozen river.

  And he had hunched himself down, stabbing at the ice with a stick.

  “You believe everything he tells you,” she sneered.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because he’s a liar,” she said, “that’s why.”

  And he looked up at her then, and he said, “Don’t say that.”

  And she laughed a little and stepped out onto the ice even further and he watched her and he said nothing.

  “You really don’t know why he stayed, all these years?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “I wouldn’t want a friend like that.” She kept stepping farther and farther out. “You really don’t even know,” she said, and shook her head. “Guilt,” she said.

  And he thought, Through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.

  “It can make a person do funny things. Love, too.” Stepping once more. “And they don’t even know why. Don’t know the real reasons. Love, they say. Hate. As if it was so easy to tell them apart.”

  The boy stood up. Elisabeth was a good distance out on the ice, out near where it began to thin and darken.

  “Friend. You think he loves you?” she said. “Is that what you think it is?”

  And the boy dropped his stick, and told her he was going home.

  “Go, then,” she said, in an ugly way. “And ask Lathias what happened in the field that day. When you had that accident. Did you ever ask him if he was there that day?”

  “I’m going home,” the boy said, and he turned and walked up the draw and she called after him.

  “Who was driving?” she called. “Ask him that.”

  But he just kept walking and that was when she hollered all those things about dying, about her dying there, freezing to death, how it would be his fault, and about the Horseman coming for him, all those horses, the air around him darkening, as if the horses roused the night from the earth.

  “Can you hear it?” she yelled. “Can you hear them now?”

  And he ran, then, scrambled up the draw, in the dark, his feet slipping against the loose banks of shale, his hands catching against barrel cactus and prickly pear, and not caring, not until he was almost to the top, and he turned around, to give her one last chance, panic growing in his chest. But she was gone. And he called out, once, twice. And then he thought she was playing a trick on him, maybe, that she was hiding and would scare him, and he did not want that, for her to scare him, and those horses, he could hear them now, rattling and rattling, and so he ran, he ran, past the Horseman’s graves, and the earth thundered there beneath him.

  The next thing he remembered he was at home, and Lathias there beside him. And he had learned Elisabeth was missing and they had asked him questions that he could not answer. And then they had gone to the river. And he’d seen the hole there in the ice.

  In time, he had realized Elisabeth was right. About everything. Hate and guilt and love. Fear. They were all one. He felt them all. They sickened him, all those feelings. And Lathias, how he had looked at him afterwards. As if he felt them, too. And he had thought, She was right, then. About Lathias. She knew.

  He had thought about it a long time, about Lathias and the accident. And he could not hate Lathias for it. But he could not love him any more, either, not because of the accident, but because Elisabeth was right, he had lied. And he had looked at Lathias and he had seen it all there in his eyes: love and hate and fear and guilt. It was all there.

  And Elisabeth was dead, and he had thought, What could it matter, anyway? What could any of it matter?

  TWENTY

  Ronnie
Rausch slept little. Always the same dream, always the river and the ice and the girl pulling herself out of it, coming for him across the darkened plains. During waking hours, the only thing he could think of: her. It was enough to drive someone mad. How long, he wondered, was this to go on? He had done nothing to her. Had tried to help her, even. In a way. It was Erv. Erv had been the one, Erv who had come upon him suddenly behind the barn last Wednesday, shouldering him up against the planks before Ronnie’d even known what hit him, too shocked to fight back, Erv’s face above him, spittle flying, “You keep your goddamned mouth shut. You shut it. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do a goddamned thing,” and Ronnie, thrusting him off into the dirt, “I didn’t say nothing,” and then adding, “But I should have. Pants-pisser,” and Erv coming at him again, and rolling around in the dirt until they wore themselves out, just as they had as children, shoving each other away and kneeling there, panting, wiping their mouths against their sleeves and spitting in the dirt, until Erv hauled himself up and said, “You just make goddamned sure,” and Ronnie saying nothing, seeing the fear there in Erv’s face now and letting it go, they were cousins after all, letting him disappear around the side of the barn and home to his wife and child (the child who would be dead of rheumatic fever before the year was out, a tragedy from which Erv would never really recover, in spite of the children that followed). Yes, Ronnie thought, Erv had been the one who grabbed the girl, the blood was on his hands, and so why should he be the one to suffer? And was she dead or alive or what was she, for Chrissakes? What was she?

  And so, in spite of himself, one morning (after a long night in which he’d lain awake after dreaming, or imagining, that he’d felt the drowned girl climb under the blanket beside him in the dark, her naked body pressed against him, still icy wet from the river), he saddled his horse and rode across the fields to Krausses’.