The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “I’ll go with,” she said, “if you want.”

  “No.”

  She nodded. He lifted his hand from the pommel, shifted the reins, pulled on the brim of his hat.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what happened?”

  “No,” he said, “what for?”

  “Just to know.”

  “What would it matter?”

  “You think I wouldn’t tell you the truth.”

  “Why would you?”

  “I’ve never lied to you before.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You have.”

  “So have you,” she said.

  He stared down at the river. He wanted to say that was not true, either, but he did not. Could not. She was right. And what did it matter, now, what was true and what was not? What did it ever matter?

  They sat there, the wind blowing between them, and he thought, So this is it, then. Her and me. That’s all there is, that’s all there goddamn is.

  “I kept something for you,” she said, reaching inside the pocket of her dress.

  She rose and walked over to him and stood there while his horse nudged its muzzle against her, mouthing her blown hair. Then she held it up to him in her palm, a carved buffalo wound with a length of binder twine.

  He looked away again, shifted in his saddle, the leather creaking beneath him. After a minute, he said, “That’s nothing to me.”

  She raised her palm higher. “I thought you might want it.”

  When he did not answer, she closed her fist, withdrew it. He could feel her eyes upon him, but he would not look at her.

  “I didn’t steal it,” she said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  She bit her lip. “He had it. In his shirt pocket. I knew you’d come back, once you heard.”

  He looked down at her, at her bright, strange eyes, her hair whipping across her face.

  “I guess that makes it yours,” he said, harsher than he meant it.

  She stared at him.

  “All right,” she said finally. She looked at the buffalo in her palm, slipped it back inside her pocket and pressed her hand against it. “Well,” she said. “I might see you sometime, then.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  He flicked the reins and the mare turned, and she stepped back, her hair in her face.

  “I’ll tell you something,” she said suddenly, her voice cracking a little, had it? Did he imagine that, too? Had he imagined it all? “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You might not believe me, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I would have stopped it. If I could. I would have. But I didn’t even see it coming. And neither did he. For what that’s worth. He never saw it coming.”

  “No,” Lathias said, putting his heels lightly to the mare. “No one ever does.”

  EPILOGUE

  There is a cemetery in a country churchyard—down where the South Saskatchewan River crosses the Alberta-Saskatchewan border—that has almost completely disappeared into the land that holds it, as if, one day soon, it too will be buried.

  Oh, the church is still there. No one uses it any more, there are no regular Sunday services, or special ones, either, but if you telephone the caretaker who lives nearby on one of the few farms still occupied (and who, in less than ten years, will be dead too, killed instantly when a semi slams into her truck at the Highway 41 intersection, and buried in the new cemetery in town, beloved wife and mother), she will, with a bit of notice, bring out the key and unlock the church’s big front doors and you can look around.

  If she’s feeling particularly generous and not in a hurry to get back to the housework or the chores, she will let you pull the rope that hangs in the vestibule and ring the bell and you will marvel at the sound of it, ringing out across those fields, as if it would go on into eternity. You will ask if she would like to ring it too, but she will say, no, she does not want to disturb the neighbours and you will look around at the vast barren fields and she will say, a little sharply, “People still live here, you know, it’s not dead yet,” and you will nod and say, “Yes, of course, I didn’t mean—” but already she will have turned away to close the big cupboard that encloses the bell rope.

  She will tell you not to miss looking around the old cemetery, it hasn’t been used in years, but the wrought-iron crosses there are really something, a real old Russian-German tradition. Beautiful workmanship. She’ll walk out there with you, through the long brown grasses and the weeds that no one bothers to cut any more and the grasshoppers that sting your bare arms and legs and the mosquitoes, if it is a calm day, and she will say, “I told Harv he should of sprayed for the hoppers this year, but he said what’s the point, so they don’t bother the dead? But that’s Harv. Can’t tell him nothing.” And she will say it sure has been a hot one, and the grasses will tickle your bare shins as you follow her, stepping through the wrought-iron gate, into the cemetery.

  There are some sixty or so graves. She’ll tell you there are others, but that the markers have been lost, rotted, the wooden ones, or blown down or God knows what. “Stolen?” you will say, and she will just look at you like you’re crazy.

  She will tell you a few records survived the fire in ‘53, but there’s a lot of people down there that history just kind of forgot, she guesses. “Not just here,” she will say, “all over. Family plots, unmarked graves.” Then she will shrug and wave her hand dismissively out at the endless fields and tell you it would be amazing what you’d find, if you started digging around. “Gone now,” she will say. “All gone.”

  You will wander around a bit and marvel at some of the names—Valentine and Pius and Lucius and Remigius and Aloysia and Kaspar and Balthasar and Emmanuel and Heironimus and Magdalen and Timotheus and Samuline and Barnabas and Leonhart and Balzar and Longinus and Clementia and Franciska and Ottillia and Isidore and Dionysius and Canisia and Benedicta and Hildegard and Bernarda and Florentine and Celestina, these last six being followed by the designation O.S.U. and marked by a small white cross. The caretaker tells you it stands for Order of St. Ursula, the nuns there, from the convent at the edge of town, you will pass it on your way out, you can’t miss it. You will remark upon the oddness of the names and she will tell you those were old country names, no one around there is named Valentine any more, that’s for sure.

  Then you will notice a grave off in the far corner, all by itself, marked by a weathered, wooden cross, and you will ask her about it and she will get a funny kind of look on her face, just ever so slightly, and she will tell you that story would take hours. And you will say maybe you could buy her lunch or at least a cold drink in town. She will touch a hand to her hair and say, “Well, now, that sounds awful nice. I got a stew in the slow cooker but I wouldn’t say no to a pop.” You will look around once more, at the flat yellow prairie and the dome of blue sky and the white steeple that rises up into it. Then you will walk toward the grave in the corner and the caretaker will follow you and say, “It’s kind of sad. All these old souls here. They’re pretty much forgot, nobody talks about them any more, families all died out or moved on. A real shame. There’s a whole lot of stories buried here.” You will step over to the lone grave and say, “I’d like to hear that one.” And she will nod and say, “I’ll tell you about him, that boy. His name’s all scratched off the marker here, always has been, kind of looks like somebody was at it with a knife sometime or other. Shame. Be damned if I can find anyone who remembers it.” And she will shake her head, and sigh, “That’s a sad story, that one. But I can tell you, if you want to hear.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the following: my remarkable editor, Phyllis Bruce; Esi Edugyan for her perceptive reading of an early draft; Nita Pronovost and Allyson Latta for their editorial insight; Anne McDermid for her efforts on behalf of this book; Judith Bode and Daniella Gatto for aid in translations; those wh
o cared for my children while I stole time to write, especially Alke Germain; my husband, John, and my mother, Lorraine, as always; and, most of all, Steven Price and Timothy Birch, whose contributions continually exceed friendship.

  My thanks also to the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for making the writing of this book possible.

  As this is a work of fiction, I have taken some creative licence with minor geographical and historical details.

  Many sources were useful in researching this place and these people. Deserving particular mention are Paradise on the Steppe and Homesteaders on the Steppe by Joseph Height.

  I am especially grateful to all those who keep the old ways alive in their hearts and memories.

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  2 Author Biography

  About the book

  6 Meet Jacqueline Baker

  Read on

  12 Stained Glass Bluegrass

  15 An Excerpt from “Sand Hills” in A Hard Witching and Other Stories

  18 Jacqueline Baker’s Recommended Reading

  20 Web Detective

  About the author

  Author Biography

  JACQUELINE BAKER grew up near the Sand Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan, the landscape of shifting sand dunes that forms the backdrop for both her acclaimed collection of short fiction, A Hard Witching and Other Stories (2003), and her first novel, The Horseman’s Graves (2007). In her heart and in her writing, she is drawn to this stretch of the Prairies that straddles the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, where residents struggle with isolation, identity and an often savage climate.

  Yet Baker eschews labels such as “Prairie writer” and asserts that human experience is universal, that her characters suffer the same doubts and fears as real people. She has said that the Prairies form a “fabulous setting—the hauntedness of the place and the people.” As an author, she is drawn to this. But the land represents a way of life that is disappearing, and so she writes partly to record impressions of the past.

  Like most writers, she has been an avid reader since childhood. As a teenager, she was delighted to discover stories by writers such as Margaret Laurence and Sinclair Ross, which featured small towns like her own; however, ghost stories and horror novels are what captured her imagination most. She confesses a long-time fascination with the mysterious and the macabre: “I don’t want everything explained. That’s not appealing to me as a writer, nor as a reader.”

  She attended high school in Burstall, Saskatchewan, where her mother still lives, and went on to journalism school at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. She pursued journalism mostly because it was a practical approach to a career as a writer. “Where I come from, everything is about practicality. You don’t make a decision unless you’ve looked fifty years down the road to see how it will affect you and those around you. Studying literature for the sake of studying literature or because you might want to be a writer never even occurred to me.”

  Her first job out of journalism school was as editor of the Calgary-based Canadian Funeral News. This led to a communications position with Loewen Group, a funeral home corporation in Kentucky, and entailed a move south. She “failed miserably” at public relations, she admits. (“Hard to be a good PR person and not want to answer your phone.”) But she soon discovered a passion for the Southern writers and continues to be inspired by masters of the Southern Gothic tradition, particularly William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. In the American South, she sensed a weight and a sadness, “a hauntedness” that reminded her of home.

  “In the American South, she sensed ‘a hauntedness’ that reminded her of home.”

  Eventually, Baker realized she wasn’t cut out for journalism. She was “too shy, too unassertive, too respectful of the privacy of others. You can’t privilege mystery and be a good journalist.” But writing still beckoned her. She left Loewen Group to begin a B.A. in literature at Northern Kentucky University before returning to Canada to complete it, along with creative writing courses, at the University of Victoria. There, in the English department, she met her future husband, John, and together they settled in Edmonton for two years of graduate work at the University of Alberta and a further two years for her husband’s education degree. During what she calls “those rough few years,” she completed an M.A. in literature, with an emphasis on creative writing, and also gave birth to two daughters.

  At the University of Alberta, and under the guidance and encouragement of novelist Greg Hollingshead, Baker worked on developing her short fiction. Just two years later, her authorial debut, A Hard Witching and Other Stories, was published to great acclaim. It won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction. The book was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. At the time, she remembers feeling that publishing those stories was more than she’d thought she would ever accomplish as a writer.

  “Publishing those stories was more than she’d thought she would ever accomplish as a writer.”

  The following summer, Baker moved with her family to an acreage at Tete Jaune Cache in the Robson Valley of the Canadian Rockies. They intended to stay only the summer—to enjoy some breathing space away from the city and a more rural lifestyle. There, her husband (now a high school teacher) earned a living building log homes while Baker stayed home with her young daughters, Gabrielle and Julian, and worked on her novel. Her writing regimen involved tiptoeing to her computer at 4:30 A.M. so as not to wake the girls (now ages eight and five). She wrote when and where she could—sometimes in a café or in the little log cabin on her babysitter’s property, and sometimes, in order to be near her children, in a back bedroom of her babysitter’s mobile home.

  When the summer drew to a close, Baker and her family remained at Tete Jaune Cache and she kept writing. Her creative efforts were rewarded two years later with the publication of The Horseman’s Graves. Set in the early twentieth century, the novel explores religion and superstition, love and betrayal in a community of German settlers who, though they had left behind the war in Europe, brought with them their many dark secrets. Baker is attracted to the myths and mysteries not just of her own Russo-Germanic heritage but to “the darkness in all cultures, and also the darkness of the human heart.” A writer’s preoccupations, she says, end up on the page.

  She and her family still live at Tete Jaune Cache, but she often returns to her mother’s home in Burstall. From a nearby cemetery where her great-and great-great-grandparents are buried, Baker says she can look across fields in one direction and see the homestead where her grandmother grew up, and looking across fields in the other direction she can see the homestead where her grandfather grew up. “It’s the one place on this earth where I think, ‘This is home.’”

  As well as writing fiction, Baker has been writer-in-residence at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton and has mentored through the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is at work on a new novel set in the Robson Valley and on another collection of short fiction.

  “Baker is attracted to the myths and mysteries not just of her own Russo-Germanic heritage but to ‘the darkness in all cultures, and also the darkness of the human heart.’”

  About the book

  Meet Jacqueline Baker

  “I always wrote, always liked writing, even as a kid.”

  How did you get your start as a writer? Did you always know you wanted to be one?

  I always wrote, always liked writing, even as a kid, but I had no plans for it as a career. Actually, it wasn’t considered a valid career, where I came from. It still isn’t. I think it’s largely considered a kind of unfortunate and incomprehensible quirk, kind of like being vegetarian. People lower their voices when they speak of it.

  The first thing I remember wanting to be was an archaeologist. My grade-three teacher, Mrs. Wagner, was surveying the class for the yearbook—favourite TV show, favourite food, w
hat you wanted to be when you grew up. When I said “archaeologist,” she scowled at me over her clear-plastic–rimmed glasses and told me to choose something else. When I couldn’t come up with anything, she wrote down archaeologist, grudgingly, but I always had the sense afterwards that she disliked me for it. (She frequently chastised me for picking my fingernails during catechism.) It occurred to me only recently, during the writing of The Horseman’s Graves, that studying archaeology and writing a historical novel have a similar appeal.

  In what ways has being published in a number of significant Canadian literary journals influenced your career?

  When I was a student, I thought that if I could just get (please, God!) something published in a literary journal, I would feel validated somehow. I had no thoughts of a book, no realistic thoughts, anyway. Publication in a journal was the goal. It seemed to take forever, though it wasn’t really that long at all.

  When those first few poems were published in Grain and Prism, I really did feel validated. Someone out there who wasn’t my friend or my mother thought my writing was worth reading. (I look back at those poems now and see how generous the editors of those journals were!) Then, of course, one always raises the bar. But it’s an important step in the process, I think. It’s a very lonely business, this writing, and there’s no one patting you on the back, saying, “Yes, keep going, it’s worth it.” Publication in a literary journal goes a long way to keeping one’s spirits up, particularly during those first few years.

  Your short stories and your novel are set in the Sand Hills region of Saskatchewan. What do you believe is the universality of their appeal?

  I guess I could say that, though I believe we are all shaped by our landscape and by the history of our ancestors, we are all still struggling with the same ancient struggles. I don’t mean the political or social struggles—I am certainly not a political writer—but those old internal struggles, the human heart in conflict with itself. I think the universal is found in the local, the minuscule, the intensely personal.