In Open Spaces

by Russell Rowland

  Katie screamed at regular intervals, her voice weakening each time. Dad brought a pot of steaming water from the kitchen. Mom dipped a cloth into the pot, wrung it, and laid it across Katie’s forehead. Mom tried to feed Katie a spoonful of hot tea with whiskey and honey, but she wasn’t conscious enough to drink. She knocked the spoon from Mom’s hand with a jerk of her chin. The sheets had turned gray with sweat.

  The fits eventually drained Katie so that she fell into an exhausted sleep between each spasm. Her eyes would close peacefully, sending a shiver of fear through me each time. But after a minute or two the pain would wrench her from slumber, back to the struggle, and the pain in her face made me wince right along with her.

  At four in the morning, she uttered her first words of the night. “Pull ’em in, pull ’em in,” she pleaded.

  Mom panicked, trying to figure out what to pull in, what she could do to ease her daughter’s misery. She tugged at the blankets, then looked at Dad, puzzled and scared. Then she turned back to Katie and pulled her lips inside her mouth. Her brow pinched. Dad and I studied the floor.

  “The fish?” Dad said. “She probably means the fish.”

  “Or George,” I offered.

  One of the last times that Katie and I played homesteader in our little prairie house, Katie approached me with her arms wrapped around the blanket-swathed figure of her favorite doll.

  “Blake, honey,” she announced in a strong, steady voice, a voice very much like my mother’s. “We need to get ahold of the preacher.”

  “Oh?” I answered. “What for?”

  “The baby’s dead,” Katie said matter-of-factly. “We need to bury the baby.”

  Katie was six years old at the time.

  “I’ll put the baby in the barn,” she told me. “And I’ll send a note to the preacher. And then I’ll get some supper ready. Can you start on a coffin, honey?”

  I guess we all knew, or suspected, how the night was going to end, although we tried to hope otherwise. We looked to the door whenever any small sound echoed through the night’s silence. But soon after she spoke, the final gripping vise squeezed the life from Katie. She died eyes, mouth, and hands open to the ceiling, her last sound so weak that it was little more than a groan, followed by a sigh.

  Jack and Doc Sorenson arrived an hour later to find us in a silent vigil around the body. Mom wept, while Dad and I simply sat in exhausted amazement at what had taken place that day. I hurt so bad inside that I couldn’t hold my head up. It seemed that I’d been awake forever, and that a year’s worth of life had been packed into the past twenty-four hours.

  Jack barely responded when he learned that Katie was dead. He turned and left the room, going directly to bed. Doc Sorenson examined Katie and determined that what we thought was the flu was actually spinal meningitis. He said that he couldn’t have done anything even if he’d gotten there sooner, which was a very small consolation at the time. But a relief nonetheless. He checked Bob, and determined that he just had a cold, and not meningitis. Dad thanked Doc for his trouble, offering him a bed for the remainder of the night. But it was only a few hours before his first appointment, so he had to hurry back.

  Because of the state of George’s body, the funeral had to be hastily arranged for two days later. There wasn’t time to make Katie a funeral dress, and none of George’s clothes fit his bloated torso. So we wrapped him in one of his blankets, and we laid Katie out in her favorite frock—a calico with lace. Pastor Ludke from the Little Missouri Lutheran Church performed the service the afternoon after he had buried the Glasser baby.

  The coffins looked strange side by side—one too large, to hold George’s swollen corpse, the other seemingly too small to hold any corpse at all. Pastor Ludke stood behind the odd pair, his thinning hair oiled in parallel lines across his scalp. His ruddy cheeks shone with sweat.

  “We come to this barren world with high hopes,” he said. “And then the land takes our children from us, and we ask why. We ask how a just God could let this happen. And I say that perhaps it is a price of risk, of adventure. Perhaps if we remained safely in our old worlds, we would not have to pay this price. Perhaps God is telling us that the earth will not yield unto us what we ask without first asking that we yield unto Him. It is a question I have searched this book for answers to…” He held up his Bible. “And I have yet to find one that satisfies me.”

  He bowed his head, showing a certain guilt about not being able to provide the kind of hope or comfort that someone in his position might be expected to provide. “Let us simply pray, then.”

  Mom and Dad stood very close to each other, their hands only an inch apart, their brows low over their eyes. Neither of them shed a tear. No one in the crowd showed any sign of tears. Jack eased off to one side, as if he wasn’t invited.

  I held my face still but felt the full force of a sadness and loneliness that were new to me. I had been to more funerals by this time than I had weddings, birthday parties, or Fourth of July picnics combined. I knew the routine. And I had always felt a little strange about the stoic demeanor that was common among our people. I had always looked around at the faces at these funerals and wondered how everyone could appear to be so unaffected, unmoved, by death.

  I studied my father’s face. And I thought about his favorite bit of philosophy, the one and only phrase he repeated with a sense of religious conviction. “Always expect the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed,” he’d say. He said it about everything. I had never been comfortable with the phrase, and although I didn’t then, I now understand why. Because my father didn’t live by it. Although he did expect the worst, expecting the worst had never prevented disappointment. In fact, my father not only experienced disappointment, day after day, but he had built his life around it. And I see now that it was a common quality among our people, to live with a wary knowledge that things could always get worse. To not enjoy accomplishment because of the certainty of more disappointment. It was an attitude born of experience, as a bumper crop of wheat, and a bountiful year, could change to failure in the time it took for a hailstone to bounce off your head. We expected the worst because it often happened, and the disappointment was buried deep in all of us. For some, it served as a motivator. My father was a perfect example. He acted on the disappointment by working harder. It was all he knew.

  On this day, I looked around at the faces, and for the first time in my life, I did not see stony, lifeless expressions. I felt the loss of my siblings. I thought of Katie’s pathetic garden, and her unwavering dedication to it. I thought about our little homestead house, which I had ceremoniously burned the day before. I hadn’t even bothered to clean out the trinkets before I doused it in fuel and held a match in it.

  I thought about my brother, and realized to my horror that I had held some hope that he would show up again someday. Part of me hadn’t allowed myself to accept that he was gone. I pictured him in the barn. I thought of how he loved lingering there after we’d unsaddled the horses, telling jokes or wrestling in a pile of straw. I thought about him lacing a single to right. And as I thought about these things and looked at the faces around me, I realized for the first time in my young life that there was something behind those stoic expressions. I looked at the people there and realized that there was only one family among them that had not lost a child. The Purdys, who didn’t have children. The Glassers had just buried their baby that morning. And I saw in the eyes of these people a sympathy that only someone who shared their experience could see. I had never seen the pain because I had never felt it. I was now part of the community. I was one of them.

  And I realized that despite the fact that our homes were so far apart, the open space between us was much smaller than I had always assumed.

  I stayed and watched while Gary Glasser, Art Walters, and others lowered the coffins into the graves. The holes bookended the graves of my grandparents.

  Dad stepped forward, reaching for a shovel.

  “George, goddamit, we’ll take ca
re of this,” Gary said. “Did I help you bury my granddaughter? You stubborn old bastard. We got it.”

  Dad backed up, still watching our friends. He stood next to me, hands behind his back, jaw set. I studied him, his narrow face drooping, blue eyes squinting and moist.

  Looking at his face, I wondered what could be worse than outliving two of your own children, watching the earth swallow them up when your own body was still strong, healthy, and full of life.

  “You coming?” Suddenly Dad’s arm fell heavily across my shoulders.

  “Nah, I’ll be along in a second,” I said.

  I watched him walk away, his eyes lowered to his boots. Three men shoveled dirt, heavy scoops of soil thumping against wood. I stood between the graves, digging through my jacket. The smell of damp soil filled my nose. I gazed at the open pits, and before I turned to join the rest of my family, I dropped a fishhook into Katie’s grave, and the piece of chalk into George’s.

  3

  winter 1918

  I opened one eye, feeling the cold air against my eyeball, wishing dawn would put off its arrival just a little longer. I pulled the blankets tighter around my ear, which was numb. A still, warm body lay next to me, and I knew that Bob had crawled into my bed again to get relief from the cold. A square of dim sunlight broke the frozen air, casting a faint glow into the sparcely furnished bedroom. I heard animated voices and smelled bacon and coffee, and after savoring a few last moments of relative warmth, I crept from my bed, adjusted my union suit, and dressed.

  When I entered the kitchen, the conversation between my parents stopped. Mom sat at the table, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. She was bundled in her coat and hat, having just come in from the milking. Dad scrambled eggs in our iron skillet. I immediately knew two things—they had been fighting, and Dad was the one who was angry. It was the only time he cooked. I winced as I sat, thinking about his undercooked eggs, with glistening slugs of whites oozing between what managed to get cooked.

  “Mornin’,” I said.

  “Morning, son,” Mom answered.

  Dad didn’t say a word. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the saucepan on the stove and stood with my back to the heat. Outside, the snow fell steadily, as it had for a week—soft flakes the size of downy feathers.

  The next several minutes were silent aside from the simmering eggs. I finally decided to prompt whatever discussion I’d interrupted and leave it to them to tell me to mind my own business. “Well?” I said.

  Dad responded immediately. “Your mother volunteered to go to Alzada to help with the balloting.”

  I looked at Mom, then back to Dad. “The election’s today, right?”

  Mom nodded, sucking her upper lip under her lower one.

  I shrugged. “So what’s wrong?”

  Dad turned, glaring at me, indicating that I should know—which of course I did. He shifted his gaze outside, indicating the storm. Then he wrapped a flour sack around the skillet handle and lifted it from the wood stove. He scraped helpings onto three plates.

  “It’s not that bad out,” I offered. “We’ve traveled in a lot worse.”

  “Not alone,” Dad muttered. This was true.

  “I’ll go with her,” I said.

  They both raised their brows at this suggestion. I actually knew before I even said it that I couldn’t go—that I had to stay and help with the feeding. I shrugged, then sauntered to the table.

  “Why don’t you go, Dad?” I sat down.

  Dad set full plates in front of Mom and me, then one at his place, where he settled. “Son, you know it’s going to take both of us and Bob too to get the stock fed in this storm. We’ll be most of the morning just finding a place to water them.”

  “I’m going,” Mom said, scooping a bite of eggs. “If I can’t vote, I’m going to at least do what I can, especially with Jeanette Rankin on the ballot.”

  My mother’s reputation for being tough and independent was well chronicled, and well deserved. It actually began with an event that occurred on the day she met my father. She was in her mid-twenties, and her outspoken, direct manner had apparently scared off several potential suitors, a situation that would have devastated many young women of that time. But Mom had taken a job as a bank clerk in Spearfish. She liked the job and was in no hurry to find a husband.

  One day in the fall of 1897 three men came into the bank and drew guns, announcing a robbery. They demanded that all the cash be stuffed into the worn saddlebags they tossed across the counter. Mom happened to be in the back when they came in, and she ducked down and crept over to the bank manager’s desk, where she knew he had a small derringer stashed in a drawer. She quietly retrieved the gun and stood up, drawing the gun, telling the robbers to get the hell out. They took one look at that little gun and busted out laughing. They told the other clerk to keep bagging the cash. So Mom pulled the trigger. But the gun wasn’t loaded, and the harmless click only amused the robbers more. They laughed louder, and one of them called her Wyatt Earp. So Mom threw the gun at him, nearly smacking him in the head.

  They got away, of course. But the story gave Mom a legendary status. A status that was enhanced when they found out later that the men who robbed the bank were none other than the Hole in the Wall Gang. It was Butch Cassidy and his boys.

  Coincidentally there was a young ranch hand in the bank who was quite taken by the character of this clerk. Dad had also been informed by his boss just a couple of weeks before that he would give himself a much better chance of moving up to the foreman job if he could find himself a wife.

  Little did Dad realize when he married Mom a few months later that she would inspire him to seek more than the position of foreman. They filed their first homestead claim a year later, and the Arbuckle Ranch was born.

  We ate silently Dad and I both aware that the decision had been made. I tried to keep my eyes away from my plate and swallow quickly so that I didn’t see the runny whites mingling among the scrambled eggs.

  “What about Muriel?” Dad asked in a last-ditch effort. “What are we going to do about her?”

  No doubt anticipating this, Mom answered without a pause. “I’ll drop her off at Glassers’. She’ll be fine.”

  Dad nodded—a concession of sorts.

  I hefted a sack of corn onto my shoulder, my gloved fingers stiff after only fifteen minutes in the cold. I carried the sack out of the barn, then flopped it into the wagon bed. Back inside the barn, I dug George’s baseball from inside my coat, pulled my right glove from my hand with my teeth, and flung a pitch toward the stick figure I had whitewashed on the inside wall for winter practice.

  As much as I was convinced that I would never consider doing what George had planned, I had been thinking a lot since Katie’s death about the train ticket buried in the corner of the barn. And of what Art had said about life out here beating hell out of you. I had noticed more than ever how right he was. I practiced my pitching whenever I had a spare moment. I started a scrapbook, collecting box scores from major-league games. I had one section devoted to the Cardinals. And I began sending away for whatever I could get my hands on about the cities in America that had baseball teams. I had a box filled with pamphlets about New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. And I read through them time and again, trying to imagine what it must be like walking among thousands of people.

  The ball bounded back to me. I tucked it back in my pocket, put my glove back on, and retrieved a second sack of corn, flopping it next to the first.

  Dad hitched the team to the wagon. Bob loaded the pitchforks and a couple of axes.

  “Where were Mom and Muriel going?” Bob asked.

  I was worried that Dad would be brooding about Mom’s decision, so I shot Bob a warning look, shaking my head. But Dad answered him, although his mood was far from happy. “Your mother’s gone to Alzada to help with the election. And Muriel is at Glassers’ for the day.” His tone was dismissive, and Bob looked at me with wide eyes, wondering what he’d done. I shook my hea
d again, trying to convey with a look that I would explain later.

  Bob and Dad climbed into the wagon, where our dog Nate was waiting. I mounted Ahab. Dad clucked his tongue, and Pint and Ed started their trot toward the haystacks, as they had every morning since the first winter snowfall.

  It had been a dry year, the first in ten, leaving us with less than our usual amount of hay. It also followed the worst winter we’d had since 1896, with temperatures consistently lingering around twenty degrees below zero. The snow came in great flurries, throwing itself against the east side of everything that had sides, piling in hard drifts as high as horses. We lost almost fifty head of cattle, and we were among the more fortunate. Many families left once the thaw came. The new homesteaders had their first introduction to what Montana winters could be like, and the loneliness got to many of them.

  Riding along behind the wagon, I had so little feeling in my limbs that as I maneuvered Ahab’s reins, it felt as if I was watching someone else’s hands. Streams trickled from the corners of my eyes. I had to wipe my nose every few minutes to keep the moisture from freezing on my upper lip.

  At the stack, Dad and Bob wordlessly pitched clumps of hay into the back of the wagon. The stack was crowned with a thick blanket of snow, and as they tore chunks from the stack’s belly, tunneling into the core, the top hung down, and sheets of snow slid to the ground. I grabbed a pitchfork.

  “Dad?” Bob paused and looked up at him from beneath the brim of his hat.

  “What?” Dad answered brusquely.

  “When’s Jack coming home?”

  I groaned at the mention of this topic, as I suspected this was the last thing in the world Dad wanted to talk about that morning.

  “I don’t know, Bob. Let’s just get this job done, what do you say?”

  A year and a half had passed since the funeral. And in some ways, it seemed like only a matter of days. The silence in the fields became more profound every time we were out there. And any effort anyone made to break up this silence only reminded us of who used to provide that distraction. So we remained silent, bending our backs to our work, keeping our heads low, eyes averted.