The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  When Leo heard their horses, he started up, the shotgun clattering to his feet in the dust. He gripped the back of the chair to steady himself and bent to pick up the gun and Stolanus turned back and lifted a hand and said, quietly, “Wait here.” Then he added, “If he starts to act crazy, you ride home. Understand? I will take care of myself. All right?” The boy nodded. “Wait here,” the father said again, and then he turned and urged his horse forward a bit and then stopped and called, steadily, “Leo, guten tag. Wie geht’s?”

  Leo stood there, one hand on the chair, the other clutching the gun. He peered at them, as if he could not quite make them out. Eventually, he nodded, and said, “So. It’s you.” And nodded again.

  Stolanus glanced back at him, but he did not move or say anything and he did not know if that meant he should ride home or not. He wanted to, wanted to go, but wanted to see her also, wanted to look around for her but was afraid to take his eyes from Leo who was stepping carefully toward them.

  “It’s you,” Leo said again. “I thought so. I thought as much.”

  “Leo,” Stolanus said. “I have a favour to ask of you.”

  Surely then, the boy thought, his father will let him see her, wants them to be friends again. And the boy urged his horse forward a few steps.

  “Stay back,” his father said to him sharply, across his shoulder. And then to Leo, “I need to see your girl. I—the boy does. For him. I heard—” He faltered. “If she can do what they say. If she can heal, then maybe—”

  Maybe what? the boy wondered. Was this about Lathias? But Leo came toward them, then, and his father glanced back at him and he wondered if that meant he should go. But he would not, not until he had seen her, seen that she was alive after all. And where was she, in the house or the barn?

  “You think,” Leo said, walking forward, “you think after all that happened I would let him near her? Do you think I am a fool?”

  “No, Leo,” Stolanus said, “I’ve never thought that.”

  But Leo was not listening. “That is what everyone thinks, not? Isn’t that what they say? You think I don’t know? Is that what you think?”

  “No, Leo,” the father said, shooting the boy a meaningful glance as Leo approached. But the boy would not move. He sat there, staring past Leo, into the yard.

  “So high and mighty,” Leo went on, “but who has fallen now, I ask you.” Leo was right before them, his eyes burning. “I will bring you all low. Now I have something everyone wants. They pay me to see her. They come to me now. And you, too, Schoff. You and your kid, too.”

  “I will pay, Leo,” the father said. “Anything you want. If she can help him. If she can … fix it. Anything. Anything you say.”

  The boy was aware of Leo’s presence now, there, a few feet in front of them, staring them down, his eyes red and fierce. But he was not afraid of Leo Krauss. He was not afraid of Leo Krauss. He was not afraid.

  “Where is she?” he said, stepping his horse toward Leo.

  “Go home now,” his father said to him. “I’ll see you at home.”

  “I don’t need your money, Schoff,” Leo said. “High and mighty. I don’t need nothing from you. It’s you who needs from me now. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Leo stared at them a moment, going very still, as if something had just occurred to him. “That’s right,” he said slowly. “It’s you that needs from me.” And he nodded and scratched at his ankle with the muzzle of the gun. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Not because I need nothing from you, Schoff. Don’t you never think that. I don’t need a goddamned thing from you. Your high and mighty money.” And he looked at the boy now. “But he might do a little something for me. An agreement of sorts. Maybe we can work something out. I’ll think about it. Maybe. I’ll do that much.”

  “Can I see her?” the boy said.

  “I’ll let you know,” Leo said. “All in good time.” And he nodded and smiled and waved them away. “All in good time.”

  SIX

  When Schoff and his boy rode away, Leo stood in the yard watching them go. He rummaged the flask from his pocket and unscrewed the cap, slowly, and drank, and coughed, and replaced the cap and rubbed his eyes. He lifted the gun and stared at it and rubbed his eyes again. He had hardly slept in days, not since the girl had said she would kill him. He had walked around dazed and bleary-eyed and stupid with exhaustion, moving just to stay awake, the gun slung across his shoulder. It gave him little comfort, but he kept it with him anyway, driven by one thought: he must get Cecilia back. The girl kept the baby out in the barn with her all the time, now. And Mary was no help, just as glad to have the baby gone, she had never cared for it. But the girl had no right keeping her out there. No right at all. And what was he to do? What had she said? She would kill him.

  But the boy, that kid. Now there was something. Get the baby, he would tell him, and you can see the girl. Get that baby and the girl is all yours.

  In the meantime, his flask was empty and he had all that money, just sitting there in his pocket. He could use a little something. Just a little something to keep a man warm.

  SEVEN

  When he was certain they were asleep, the boy climbed from his bed fully dressed and inched his way down the stairs, shoes in hand, and across the darkened kitchen and out the front door into the mild blue night. The sky was absolutely clear. Crickets sang from beneath the porch stairs. The moon, full or almost full or just beyond full, he could never tell which, cast enough light that he could see quite clearly—the barn, the stables, the granaries, the wagon, the pump, the windmill—all blue and swollen with moonlight, casting shadows on the earth.

  But beyond the yard, the prairie yawned darkly. He had not really been out of the house since that night at the river. He sat on the step, just looking, and then he bent and laced his shoes, and rose and walked to the edge of the yard. Beyond lay the Sand Hills, blue also, and he wondered briefly if that was what things looked like underwater, under blue water, lakes, oceans, those Hills there could be at the very bottom of the Pacific, he could be walking on the ocean floor, the water huge above him, miles and miles of dark water, and through that water, stars, the moon. It would not do to be afraid. Lathias had not been afraid, not of anything.

  But Lathias was gone. The boy still did not believe, had been wanting all day to go out to the loft, but had not wanted his parents to see him go, for what reason he could not say. But they were asleep now, and they thought he was asleep, too. His mother had come up once, shortly after they had returned from Krausses’, they had thought she was already asleep, but she had climbed the stairs and eased herself down on to the edge of his bed and sat there a moment and then she had stretched out beside him, right there on the bed, and he’d had to force himself to breathe evenly so that she would believe he was asleep. She had just lain there a while, he thought she might say something, but she did not; she only rose after a few moments and smoothed the blanket over him and went back downstairs, to her own room, her own bed, his father already there, asleep, he could hear his snores coming up through the iron grate in the floor, a comforting, barnish sound.

  Now they were both sleeping; sleeping inside the house and him awake outside of it, and it was night. He crossed the yard and stepped into the barn and stood in the darkness. Something scrabbled past his boots and he stepped back a little.

  “Hello?” he said softly, though he knew there would be no one.

  He waited some more, then climbed the ladder and felt along the beam at the top for the lantern and he lit it.

  Nothing had changed. The rosary there on the wall, the crate Lathias used as a bedside table, the covers on his bed pulled neatly over, the chest where he kept his things. The boy lifted the lid. Lathias’s books, books that the boy could not read, a Bible that he could not read either, some photographs of people he did not know, his hunting knife. The boy picked it up.

  If Lathias had gone away, as his father had said, he would not have gone without his knife.
And not without that rosary either. It made him wonder if his father was telling the truth after all. Had Lathias really gone away? And then, too, he had not said Gone away. He had said Gone. And that was different. That was something else. He did not like to think about that, about the possibility that Lathias was not gone away, but that he was gone. And so he put back the books and the photographs and closed the lid of the chest. He strapped the hunting knife to his belt. He crossed himself. He blew out the lantern.

  ——

  The prairie seemed darker than the yard, perhaps only because there were fewer things upon which the moonlight could reflect: the earth, some cottonwoods and wolf willow in the slough there, a couple of stone piles, the far fenceline on his left, and off to his right, the eerie blue rising of the Sand Hills. Though it was difficult in all that darkness to keep his course as the crow flies, he would not, dared not, hug the line of the Hills, as he used to in daylight. No, tonight he kept his distance from that place. Tonight it was easy to believe that the stories Lathias had told him about it were true, the place where the dead walk. He wondered, briefly, if Lathias was there now, his soul. But, no, he wouldn’t think it. He couldn’t. It made his heart too heavy, the grief of it all, the whole sad world. And so he walked on, his feet sinking softly in the newly seeded fields, and he did not think, Gone, but only, Gone away.

  Soon he could make out the Krauss place before him and it seemed, though it could just as easily have been his imagination—stirred already by the night and the vast plains and the moon and the stars—it seemed that the buildings and trees there did not reflect the moonlight as did the other shapes on the prairie, but only absorbed it, devoured it, the barn and the shack and the granaries and the stables, even the scraggly shelterbelt, were not blue as was the rest of the world, not silvered in the moonlight, but were rather made darker, as if they were only the shadows cast by other things. Neither did any light, whether lantern or stove or candle, shine from the windows of the little shack, nor any light from the barn, and the boy had the strange feeling, as he approached, that everyone there was gone, too, that the place had long been abandoned, that he came fifty, a hundred, five hundred years too late and that everyone had gone; that, as in a fairy tale, he had been sleeping all that time, and now they were all gone, even his parents behind him in his own house, gone, only the dim depressions their bodies had made on their bed, until that, too, was gone.

  He stopped and looked about him at the farms in the distance, some with small lights glowing warmly from windows, and he was comforted a little. It was silly, of course, he knew it was, all that life around him, farm after farm, silly to imagine it could ever die out. It could only keep growing, that is what his father always said. He imagined a great city would be there one day, right where he stood, a great city with great tall buildings and roads and cars and trucks and lights, oh, the lights, it could make one dizzy, and all that noise, engines and people, where did they all come from, all those people, walking and riding bicycles and driving in cars and on buses, too, and trains, and calling to each other, and there would be bridges there and big, billowy trees and flowers and parks and ponds with white ducks in them, as he’d heard of in stories, and so many people in that great vast city, oh, the land would be covered with it one day, right there where he stood. He would like that, he thought, all that brightness and bustle. Someday, when he was older. But for now there was only the soft soil beneath his feet and the night around him, the moon and the stars, those stars, how they poured over him in one long bright stream, a river of stars. Lathias had told him the name once, of that celestial river, but he could not now remember it. And thinking of that made his heart grow heavy again. Gone away. He looked up at the Krauss place, hunkering before him in the darkness. He thought of Elisabeth.

  He had lost her. Then he had lost Lathias. If he could find her again, then maybe … But it was too much to think of. For now, he must see her, that is all. He must walk on and on through that dark night, toward Leo Krauss, with the dead walking beside him and the Horseman maybe somewhere at his back. He stopped and listened for that distant rattling of bones. But there was nothing. And so he felt the sheath of the hunting knife at his side for comfort and he walked on, quietly, toward the barn.

  When he passed the henhouse, there was a quick stirring and chortling and he stilled himself. If he hadn’t felt so afraid he might have thought it was funny, all those hens in there, all ruffled up and bead-eyed, thinking he was a coyote, maybe. He would have liked to tease them a little, give a little growl, sniff at the door. They were funny animals, chickens. Funny, but vicious, too, pecking each other to death sometimes, the weaker ones, the wounded or sick. But they were pleasant when they were out in the yard all feathery white in the sun, peaceful, it was hard to imagine that other side to them, hard to imagine they were capable of eating each other, those mild, pleasant, funny birds scratching placidly in the dust. And he thought of the chickens and it reminded him of the joke Art Reis had once told, about this poor farmer who had three sons, and the first son came to him and asked for a new horse and the farmer said to the son, “No, we just bought a new plow, until that plow is paid for you won’t get a new horse,” and how, a few days later, the second son came and asked for a bicycle and the father said, “No, your brother won’t get a horse and you won’t get a bicycle, not until that plow is paid for,” and finally, the youngest son went to his father one day and asked for a tricycle and the father said, “No, your brothers won’t get anything and neither will you, not until that plow is paid,” and how the boy stomped off in a huff and saw a hen come across the yard with the rooster chasing her and when the rooster tried to get onto the hen, the boy kicked the rooster aside and said, “You can walk too until that plow is paid for.”

  He had always remembered that joke, not because he thought it was particularly funny, but because of the sons—brothers—and it seemed so wonderful to him, all those boys. And so he had laughed along with the other men, pretending.

  The hens fussing in the henhouse because they thought he was a coyote, now that was funny. But then it occurred to him that the sound might wake Leo or Mary who could be sleeping already in the house, and so he whispered, “Shh, shh, quiet now, don’t worry, I don’t plan to eat you,” but that only made them cackle louder and so he moved quickly away and toward the barn.

  Now that he was closer, he could see that, in fact, there was a light coming from inside the barn, though the doors had been pulled shut and so he could only see it shining through the chinks between cracked and rotting boards, and it seemed so unbearably bright in all that darkness, it was like the light of God.

  Odd that when he was so close, after coming all that way, through all that vast dark prairie, with the ghost of the Horseman at his back, he decided at that moment to turn and go home. Yes, that is what he would do. What did it matter if she was alive or not? What was it to him, in the end?

  But it did matter. Of course it did. It was everything.

  When they had ridden home from Krausses’ earlier that day, he had asked his father what kind of an agreement, and his father had not answered and so he had asked again, and his father had said that it could be nothing good, knowing Leo Krauss. He said he thought he at least knew better than to make any kind of deal with a Krauss. He said at least he knew that much. And when the boy had asked when he could see her, his father had said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to stay away after all. Maybe that’s best.” And the boy had said nothing. Had thought, But maybe there is still a chance. Maybe it will work out after all. But as they were putting up the horses, his father told him they would send him away, to school, to Battleford, a long way off.

  “How long a way?” he had wanted to know.

  “Long.”

  “Can you walk there?”

  “No.”

  “Then how will I get home for supper?”

  “You will have your suppers there.”

  “Every night?”

  “Yes, eve
ry night. You will sleep there, even.”

  “Then it is not school.”

  “Yes, a little bit. It’s seminary.”

  “What is that?”

  “A school. For boys. Where they teach you about God.”

  “Like church.”

  “Yes, a little bit like church.”

  “But I can go to church here.”

  “Well, no, not like church, then. More like church-school.”

  “What will they teach me about God?”

  “Just—I don’t know, about the church and God and, I don’t know. It’s—they will teach you, they will teach you … it’s more like, how to be a priest.”

  “A priest?”

  “Yes. That is an honour, that is a real calling.”

  “But I have not been called. Priests have to be called, by God.”

  “Well, no. Not all of them. Some of them just choose.”

  “So I can choose?”

  “Yes, you can choose to go.”

  “Can I choose not to go?”

  “No. It has already been decided. It will be good. You will like it. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to be a priest.”

  “Well, just go and try it. Maybe you will like it, once you are there.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “It has already been decided.”

  “When will I go?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  And so it did matter. Tomorrow he would be gone, he would never see her. And if Lathias came back? But he would not think of that yet. It only mattered that he talk to her, that he see her. Part of him still believed it must be a mistake. She had drowned. She was gone. But now she was back. She had risen. Like the medicine man’s daughter. But, no, she had not risen, that girl. Not at all. Why had he thought she had? And anyway, that was just a lie. He knew that now. It was the Horseman. That’s who had risen. Who would rise. Was that a lie, too? He gripped the hunting knife at his belt and approached the barn.