The Glovemaker

by Ann Weisgarber

Once past Grace’s cabin, I didn’t let myself turn around to look. I kept on following the man’s tracks. The wood bridge rattled as I crossed it. The creek was iced over close to the banks but ran clear in the middle. To the east, the Fremont roared where it converged with the creek. I drew in some air. I couldn’t smell smoke rising from Nels’ cookstove chimney. He and the man had been gone long enough for the fire to burn down.

  I headed toward the cabin, shuffling over the hoof prints, then stopped. Nearby, another set of hoof prints, not the ones I was walking over, came from the cabin and veered east. Something was wrong. Nels and the man should have left together. There should be two sets of prints.

  Staying where I was, I looked around. I didn’t see a second set. Nels had sent the man off on his own.

  He wouldn’t do that. He’d never done it before.

  This was January, though. Something about the man might have felt wrong to Nels. Maybe he refused to help him.

  I couldn’t believe that. Nels didn’t take chances. He wouldn’t want the man to go back over the bridge to Grace and Michael’s. Or to Len and Laura Hall’s place a half-mile down the river. He wouldn’t want them pulled into this.

  Think. Slow down. I peered at the tracks. They weren’t the same as the ones I’d shuffled over. These prints were wider apart. It was a different horse.

  Nels’ horse. A single set. I looked around again. No second set of horse tracks. Yet, I’d followed the man’s tracks that crossed the bridge. His tracks ended here.

  I went on to the cabin. A jumble of prints covered the area in front of it. Most were boot prints. The paw prints were Sally’s, Nels’ dog. If a person didn’t know different, it looked like a place where someone had gone about his business without concern for his tracks. The boot tracks and paw prints went to and from the front door to the woodpile on the side of the cabin. Some led toward the outhouse that was in the back and on down a ways. Tracks went toward the water well by the barn, and some went around the corner of the cabin to the trash heap. The snow was trampled like it should be when a person went about his morning.

  That must have been Nels’ intent. I pictured him, tall, wiry, and yellow-haired, doing all this walking around his cabin on purpose. He wanted the deputies to think nothing was amiss. He’d done it to cover the man’s tracks.

  Just one set of horse prints, though, that led away from the cabin. Something was wrong.

  “Brother Nels,” I called out, standing close to the cabin, the barn off to my right. “You here? It’s Sister Deborah.”

  No answer. Nels was a widower and didn’t have children. He lived alone and even though I listened hard for his voice, I knew he wasn’t here. Everything about the place was quiet. The air felt empty like I was the only one breathing it in. The lamp in Nels’ window wasn’t lit and smoke didn’t rise from his cookstove’s chimney. His dog would come bounding if she were anywhere in hearing distance.

  Stay with the plan. Don’t look around. Someone might be watching. Deliver the milk.

  Pulling the toboggan, I went to the front door and knocked, my gloved knuckles dull thuds. “Brother Nels,” I said, my voice loud. “I’ve got your milk.”

  No one was here.

  Deliver the milk. That’s your excuse for walking over the tracks. But I couldn’t leave the milk outside by the door. It’d freeze. Once it was brought inside and thawed, the milk would curdle. If the deputies showed up here before Nels got back, they’d find it peculiar that a pail of milk was outside by the door. No one would do such a thing in this weather.

  I thumped the sides of my right boot, then the left, against the cabin wall to knock off the worst of the snow. I had to make it look like Nels was here when I arrived. I had to fool the deputies into believing this was an ordinary day. Then I could go home like none of this happened.

  Carrying the pail, I opened the door. It was dark inside. The man might be hiding here.

  “Brother Nels?” I said. “Anybody?”

  No answer.

  I’d known Nels since my marriage to Samuel. He was Samuel’s stepbrother and was younger by a year. Samuel was twelve when his mother married Nels’ father. The two boys were as close as blood brothers, and when Nels staked the first claim in Junction nearly six years ago, Samuel and I followed him a few months later. As well as I knew Nels, though, I’d never stepped a foot inside his cabin without Samuel with me. It wasn’t something a woman did.

  I went inside. The cabin was cold. My skin prickled with unease. I kept the door open for light. Hurry, a voice drummed in my thoughts. Don’t get caught here. It’s nearly full daylight. The deputies are on their way. Hurry.

  I tried to shake the voice away. Rushing made mistakes. There was time.

  My footfall was loud as I walked to the kitchen table. The cabin was empty but I felt I was being watched. I told myself that no one could hide here. It was one room with two chairs at the kitchen table and a low-slung bed placed sideways along the back wall. The cookstove was pressed against the south wall. A few dishes were stacked on the cooking counter. A skillet hung from the wall nail. No one was here. Just me.

  I put the milk pail on the table. I took off one of my gloves and touched a pan of water on the cookstove. It was cold. Nels hadn’t eaten this morning. The bed was unmade with the blankets tossed to one side.

  An empty washbasin was on the counter. I took it outside and scooped up some snow to line the bottom. Back inside, I placed the basin on the floor and put the pail of milk in it to keep it cool. I started to leave, then stopped. The tossed blankets, the cold fire. The person who lived here had left in a rush. That was how the deputies would see it if somehow they got here before Nels was back.

  Rushing made mistakes. I took a deep breath and willed myself to slow down. I found a few pieces of split wood in the corner of the kitchen, put them in the cookstove, and blew on the embers until a fire took hold. It wouldn’t last more than a few hours but at least it wouldn’t look like a fire that went cold during the night. That done, I went to Nels’ bed.

  The hollow in the middle of the pillow where he’d rested his head was a deep shadow. I smoothed the top sheet, leaving my gloves on to keep distance between me and the bed clothing of a man who was not my husband. I untangled the three dark blankets. The wool was coarse and I didn’t want to think what it was like for Nels to sleep in this bed alone for almost six years. Just before coming to Junction, his wife, Lydia, died during childbirth. They had been married for fourteen months.

  His cabin, one room, was smaller than Samuel’s and mine. It made me think Nels built it believing he’d never remarry. A pencil drawing of Lydia was on the back wall near the foot of the bed. Nels had drawn it. There were other drawings, too, tacked on the walls but only the one of Lydia was framed.

  Hurry, the voice in my head said. Get out of here.

  I layered the blankets on the bed, one on top of the other, and pulled each one close to the pillow but left them lumpy in places like a man might do. One look and anyone could see a woman didn’t live here. The sparse kitchen, the lack of a dress on a wall peg, and the coarse blankets rather than quilts said this was the home of a man who lived on his own. It wouldn’t look right if the cabin was too tidy.

  I gave the room one last look, then left to go home.

  The empty toboggan behind me bumped on the uneven trampled snow as I walked over my shuffled tracks. The single set of horse prints worried me. It didn’t make sense.

  I crossed the bridge. Grace’s cabin was up ahead. It must be around seven o’clock, and Michael and the boys were probably seeing to their milk cow and horse. Grace would be cooking breakfast. She might look out the front window. Even though the sunrise was dull, she could see me. She’d find it peculiar. She’d come out to see what I was doing.

  There’d be no getting away if any of them saw me. My nephews, Jacob, Joe, and Hyrum, would come running. Their curious faces would look up at me, their cheeks patched red from the cold and their breaths showing as quick puffs of
white air. “Where’re you going?” they’d ask. “Can we come too? There’s time before school starts.” Jacob, the oldest at seven, would want to pull the toboggan. So would Joe, he was six. Hyrum was three and would beg for a ride.

  Grace and Michael had moved here from Parowan last October, a week after the last man had shown up at the cabin. I didn’t tell them about the men and I didn’t tell them about Floral Ranch. It was better if they didn’t know. Ignorance protected them if deputies questioned them. Neither did I talk about this with any of the neighbors. I had to protect them, too.

  Sooner or later, Michael and the boys were bound to see my shuffled tracks. There was nothing I could do about that. At this moment, I couldn’t risk them seeing me. When the deputies came, they had to be able to say they hadn’t seen the person who had made the tracks.

  I needed to stay out of sight. To my left, the creek had cut a deep channel in the land. I gave the toboggan a push. It plunged over the top of the bank, down the drop-off, and stopped on the rocky creek bed. Slipping, the snow spilling around me, I went down after it. I couldn’t be seen from here.

  I pulled the toboggan over the icy rocks that edged the creek. When the deputies saw the change in the tracks at the top of the bank, I’d tell them I’d slipped and the toboggan got away from me.

  A part of me wanted to warn Michael and Grace that deputies were on the way. It’d scare Grace and the boys to have deputies at their door. Michael wouldn’t understand the purpose of their questions and their demands to search the cabin and barn. It hurt me to think of the boys’ scared faces. I couldn’t warn them, though. Ignorance was the best defense.

  I passed their cabin. When I figured it was safe, I pulled the toboggan up the bank and followed my earlier shuffled footsteps home.

  So many risks, I thought. So many lies I had to tell.

  When the deputies asked about the single set of horse prints at Nels’, there’d be no need to lie. My ignorance was real.

  Nels’ barn. The image of it flashed in my mind just before I got home. I couldn’t see it from here but I looked over my shoulder toward his place. “I want my barn to be airy,” Nels had said when he and Samuel built it. “For the summers. Even if it does take a little extra doing.”

  Like all barns, the front wall had double doors that opened the width of a wagon with room to spare. It was the back wall that was different from most. Nels, a carpenter by trade, put a door there.

  It came to me as clear as if I’d been there. Nels had directed the man to leave from the back of the barn while he left from the front. A steep cliff rose up behind the barn. Nels told the man to take the narrow rocky path along the cliff’s base. The cliff was a buffer from the snowfall and the ground was apt to be bare in places. The prints wouldn’t be so easy to read there. I pictured Nels telling the man about some kind of landmark, a particular rock formation or maybe a bend. “Wait there,” I could almost hear him say. “You’ll reach it before me but I’ll be along. There’s a place where I can cross over in the creek to meet you. That might throw off the trail.”

  It would, I told myself. When the deputies got here—maybe late this afternoon or tomorrow—they’d see the single set. If Nels was back by then, and he should be, they’d question him. He’d come up with some kind of story. He’d gone hunting for winter provisions, he might say. But he hadn’t had any luck. That could fool the deputies. Or maybe they’d follow the single tracks but they would have doubts.

  Doubt was a powerful force. It could slow a person. It could make her question all she once believed was true.

  Off in the distance the school bell rang. It was eight o’clock, later than I thought. Michael, the schoolmaster, always walked with Jacob and Joe to the schoolhouse. They had missed seeing me by a handful of minutes.

  I caught my breath and began to walk. The upper half of the cliffs were lost in the bank of heavy clouds. The air was so still the bare branches of my plum trees looked frozen in place. Heavenly Father, I prayed. Send us more snow and give us wind. Cover the tracks, blow them away. Hold the deputies back. Give us time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DEBORAH – THE IN-BETWEEN

  January 12, 1888

  Home, I fried venison, heated milk, and set out biscuits for my breakfast. The parlor clock’s tick was loud in my ears. Eight-thirty. Nels and the man might be close to Floral Ranch.

  Breakfast eaten, I left the table and looked out the kitchen window’s thick wavy glass. A fox stood sideways between two plum trees. Its gray coat was flecked with snow and its bushy tail brushed the snow-covered ground. Its head was turned toward the cabin. It was looking at me.

  It was after the chickens in the coop. Before I could do anything to chase it off, it raised its head as if sniffing the air, then looked over its shoulder toward the Wastelands.

  My skin prickled. The fox looked again at me. I stepped back from the window. The fox turned and wound its way through the orchard until it blended into the snow.

  A warning. Foxes were night creatures. I’d never seen one during this time of day before. Just like I’d never had a hunted man come to my door in January.

  Don’t lodge the man in your memory, I told myself. He was gone. I’d never see him again.

  I washed the breakfast dishes and when that was finished, I carried a pail of heated water to the coop. Drinking it would help warm the chickens in this cold. I studied the snow as I walked, expecting to see the fox’s tracks near the coop. There weren’t any. The fox hadn’t come to do harm but to warn. Deputies were on their way.

  I looked toward the trail that came from the Wastelands. Nothing. Inside the coop, the rooster and the six hens, their black and white feathers fluffed against the cold, cackled when I came inside the fenced-off yard. Big Tom stood up and beat his wings. “I know,” I said. “You’re put out with me for running late.” The water in their nearly-empty pan had a thin coat of ice on the top. I changed the water and before I’d finished, the hens were out of their nests and circling the pan. “Be fair-minded,” I said to Pretty Girl who bossed the hens. “Don’t take what’s not yours.”

  I scattered corn on top of the snow in the yard. Sure that I heard a horse nicker, I whirled around. Nothing.

  The chickens clucked and pecked at the corn poking holes in the snow. If the fox had been around, they weren’t riled up. I needed to do the same. I had to go about my business like this were any other day.

  A sudden screech made my pulse rush. Just a bird, I told myself. A hawk. Or its prey. I cleaned out the coop’s soiled straw and was certain I heard men’s voices.

  It was the nearby poplar tree, its upper branches scraping in the light wind. My nerves rattled, I put fresh straw down inside the coop. “Keep warm,” I told the hens and Big Tom when I left. I got Buttercup from the barn and brought her out to the barnyard. She nosed the snow and at the water trough, I kept looking over my shoulder as I worked the pump, believing heavy footsteps crunched the snow behind me.

  Not yet. Too soon. It’d be dusk or maybe tomorrow before the deputies got here.

  Back in the cabin, I got one of Samuel’s rocks that he kept on top of the bedroom dresser. It was black with whitish-yellow lines that flowed through it. I ran my forefinger along the edges. They were jagged as if they’d broken off from a bigger rock. “It’s a wonderment to me,” Samuel had told me when he brought it home several years ago. “Don’t know what it is. I found it and others like it up on the plateau. It’s not limestone like most.” He licked his forefinger and wiped the rock so that it shined. “Makes me think it’s not from here. Maybe it rose up from the belly of the earth.”

  I laughed, then saw how Samuel was studying the rock, turning it one way and then another. “Could such a thing happen?”

  “Maybe not. But until I know different, I like to lean toward the side of maybe so.”

  Samuel saying such things was what drew me to him. I was nearly nineteen and he was a few months short of twenty-four when I met him. Like now, he was a wh
eelwright who traveled to small towns in the back country of Utah and the northern parts of Arizona. He came to Parowan every year to mend wagon wheels and made new ones when the old couldn’t be fixed. During the first years he came to Parowan, I’d never had an occasion to speak to him although I’d seen him at church services.

  That changed in early April of 1870. I’ll never forget the month or the year. The day was cold, and there was a wet snow on the ground. My father had hired Samuel to replace two wagon wheels but Samuel had been able to fix them. Pleased about the savings, my father brought Samuel home for dinner. It was a Tuesday, the one day of the week my father visited us and stayed the night with my mother.

  Samuel was a short man just a few inches taller than me. Most women wouldn’t call him handsome. His nose was too broad. But his grin came easily and his dark brown hair, in need of a trim, curled around his ears. A cowlick swirled and poked up at the back of his head. He was clean shaven, and that set him apart from my father whose gray beard came down to his collar.

  There were twelve of us at the long kitchen table. My father was at one end and my mother was at the other. I won’t forget that either, how we were all together, Samuel a part of it. My seven brothers and Grace stair-stepped from ages twenty years to sixteen months. For the most part, we were fair-headed with hazel eyes. Samuel sat in the middle of one of the side benches with my brothers beside and across from him. Grace and I were across from Samuel and at the end by my mother. I had Zeb on my lap. He was sixteen months old and didn’t like to sit still. He whined and arched his back wanting to be let down but it was dinner and he was expected at the table. I fed him a piece of biscuit to chew while my father said the blessing for the meal. When we raised our heads, my mother gave the younger boys and Grace stern looks as she always did when my father visited. They were to speak only when spoken to.

  “Tell us about your travels,” my father said to Samuel as we passed platters of sliced ham and boiled potatoes around the table. “How are things in St. George?”