A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  Upon such thinking I am impelled to travel homeward in a roundabout way, that I may pass over the neighboring portion of Beidermann’s land, as if there I might see such evidence as Krupp’s drouth has laid upon it, with no plan to see its owner, who comes in sight suddenly, and I cannot turn my back, so ride to him.

  His Percherons draw a hewed-log stoneboat with fieldstones collected from the dead furrows where he has rolled them out of his plow’s way, these for the foundation of his new barn, he informs me, the roof of which he vows to raise before first snow flies. His dogs come from the hollow from some unholy hunt, and Beidermann warns them away.

  He stands spread of leg atop his pitching load, pipe in teeth like captain of a ship. Coming in sight of his place I see how far he has taken the preparation of his barn, this revealed in the pile of shaven poles and rough sawn boards and the extent of the dug footings. This is admirable and I so say, at which juncture he puts in that he would find useful the help of the twins, saying this abruptly, as if by now they are naturally his to use and I have been unjustly withholding their labor from him. Then I have cause to feel that it would not be unneighborly of me, as it would be to another, to deny him their help, for reason of his incivility in asking it: such brisk demand will raise the back of any man. Yet I swallow his manner, and now the twins will turn their hand to Beidermann’s carpentry.

  Departing, my view is of the well filled with deep and clear water, over which stands a pole frame supporting blades that spin silently in the wind; so there is Krupp’s drouth for Beidermann.

  . . .

  SEPTEM. 19. I observe that every fall seems meaner than the last in some way; in this particular instance by reason of the labor not lessening although the fruit thereof does lessen. Now Krupp, Hansen, Schneider and the Welshman Karn are all threshed out, and no crop fully satisfying but for Beidermann’s, completed the day past, this being his first year’s crop; and I and Schneider and others stand as the first of it comes in, the twins atop two racks, one drawn by Beidermann’s team and the other by my sorrel geldings; more boys following with racks pulled by their fathers’ teams; and all of us watch in silence this parade of plenty that we have seen from our own fields in years past but not this; as if what has failed to come to us has gone to Beidermann in the boundless good fortune the Almighty grants him, and I am caused to wonder what touch it is that serves him abundance and others only sufficiency, but make no complaint, even in my own mind, for what is sufficient is indeed enough.

  In his feeding of the crew, Beidermann puts trust in Ma, who offers its organization, fearing that in his bachelor ignorance he will forego altogether his duty in this regard; and taking Swede Jenssen’s widow as associate, that Beidermann might get himself a close look at her charms, which, in my opinion, do not exist, and a few other wives and daughters, Ma fills the long table under the boxelders with the vittles our host provides. These are not the beef and corn and beans familiar at other tables, but here squirrel, the number of which amazes Ma, saying as she does that he has surely depopulated all nearby standing timber of these little creatures, for the quantity he skinned, with the twins helping, causing me to ask of them whether Beidermann employs the singular method of removing squirrel hides as he uses on his dead heifers. With snap beans and cabbage, he supplies as well a pickle-looking squash, and this being new to the women, defeats them in its cooking, so that it is served up as a runny mush that Schneider’s hired man crudely puts a name to as what he had shoveled from the pen of a sick calf yesterday. All of Ma’s baked bread is soon consumed, that being familiar. There are looks around the table, but no grumbling; and I take it that the others’ thinking is as my own: Beidermann has different ways which do for him, but they may not serve others well.

  The crop in, and before leaving, I become more than a little acquainted with Beidermann’s barn, the twins prevailing upon me, and their older brothers as well, to inspect every foot of it, that they make take pride in their contributions, these being many, from shingling to the straw chinking to hanging doors, so they say. It is a handsome structure of considerable dimension in which Beidermann will winter many head of stock; more, I calculate, than we are able; and with water piped to it, not only to a stock tank built of stones and mortar—this too bearing the mark of the twins’ hand—but to a pump inside, the twins reporting that water runs to his house as well, but that I have not seen, having not been invited inside to see that or any of the furnishings of Beidermann’s life, such observations made only by the twins, who show me now their power to command Beidermann’s savage hounds to back away and behave.

  In the buggy traveling home Ma says: A nice woman would do him good.

  Then he will have to send for her, I say, although I know it is the Widow Jenssen she means, but for the stony Beidermann to court this snippy, shrill-voiced woman with her houseful of girls as noisy as her flocks of geese brings up a picture my mind cannot take in.

  He showed courtesy to her at dinner, Ma says.

  1883

  JAN. 1. On the first day of the New Year, with the sun on the drifts bright enough to blind, comes Beidermann on snowshoes, his first time to our place, and at Ma’s urging sits to coffee and Christmas cake with us all, but doing so uneasily, as would a man unused to woman’s company in a warm kitchen. Nor are we easy with him, in that he comes as a surprise, although the twins do show such satisfaction in his company that he hauls up a stiff cordiality and offers me, and Otto as well, his plug to cut for our pipes, and we are soon all smoking together, at which juncture Beidermann reveals his purpose.

  These little boys of yours are damned fine workers, says he, which causes the twins’ ears to redden.

  That is the way I have raised them up, say I, but without appreciation for his profane speech.

  This is the New Year, says Beidermann to nods all around, and today we enter a new season. I am a man who sets straight his obligations of each year past before he embarks upon yet another, and it is my practice at this time to settle square with one and all.

  Here he withdraws from the straw in his sack two small objects, and beckoning the twins forward, presents them each with one.

  Ma and the boys and I draw close to see what gifts these are, to find they are blown goose eggs, every spot of each covered by a fine and delicate rendering in tiny painted strokes of a pastoral scene of a storyland country, not unlike the etchings in my books from London, although not in black ink but in the brightest of colors. A tiny shepherd and his tiny flock on the banks of a blue river encircle one egg, and the other bears the depiction of a farmer and his little girl at their cottage door overlooking a green meadow beneath the arch of a brilliant rainbow; on both the strokes appear done by a single hair of the brush, and with the touch of a fairy.

  As they come to my hand for examination I hold them high for Ma to see, but her excitement is provoked not by admiration for Beidermann’s artistry, but for another reason, in that she whispers to me, somewhat loud, Those are eggs from Anna Jenssen’s geese!

  So that is the end of Beidermann’s first year, and now we go on.

  Beidermann at the Flood

  1884

  APR. 18. All are asleep now. The room smells of swamp mud from our boots and britches, and from my dank hair. I am too much worn and the hour too advanced to recite the dismal business that has occupied my boys and me these two days past, other than that I will put a name to our fear, which amongst ourselves we show reluctance to do. But now it must be counted certain, yes, that Beidermann is lost, for there is no portion of the flooded wilderness as lends itself to penetration where we have not already gone; and if we cannot go in, then unlucky Beidermann cannot come out. He is lost, we must say so.

  APR. 19. We must give up this looking, we must say to one another that Beidermann is in the hands of the Almighty, delivered there in the cruel way such as occurs in the blackest of dreams. There is no more we can do; I say so to Otto and Cornelius, and they, being the oldest, are of similar mind. Yet the twins are
dauntless in their youthful hope—Beidermann will be found beyond the next muddy island of tangled brush and cottonwood snags. When the others of us ride home in weary silence, these confident two camp in the cold night mist above the flood, waiting for the dawn to renew their search; and from this I would not detain them, for such spirit, in their tender years, is deflected only at risk of injuring it forever, and that I have never done with any of my boys.

  APR. 20. Otto and Cornelius stay home to their duties this day, attention to the stock being overdue; and while I thought to remain with them, instead, the milking over, I ride out with Harris who goes to Beidermann’s place to feed the penned animals there, or they will starve; while I turn off in the cold wind toward the river. And so while I say I have no hope, I have some hope still; and in consequence tread the morass south of the fork, calling Beidermann’s name; and hearing sometimes in the distance, above the loud slap and hiss of the water and hidden by islands of sodden willow or tangles of weed-caught brush, one of my boys calling the same. No reply comes; only the cry of the redwing blackbirds trying for perches on a patch of cat-tails soon flattened as the swift channel sends down a tumbling shape, perhaps one of Krupp’s black bulls.

  Under the light of this lamp, as the others sleep, I can sustain hope no longer, nor will it revive with the dawn, as it sometimes does. So too it is with Harris, confessing as we ride tiredly home in the dark, that futility seizes him. For all that he is the youngest next the twins, he has an old man’s cynical misdoubts and few of their youthful expectations of eternal good and foresight of immortality. Perhaps the twins persist through simple affection for Beidermann, for all that he is not so likeable in the eyes of many. But he favors the two in his telling of fancy stories of water running uphill, and Indians riding the ghosts of buffalo through fierce blizzards; and commands their fascination at his rough-hewn ways of trapping wild duck live, and skinning ground squirrel with one yank of his hooked finger. For all that their loyalty is to the man’s peculiarities rather than to his strength, I still cannot disaffirm it, for that loyalty is learned at my own knee and that of their mother. But now their expectations must meet a grievous end, for our stubborn neighbor surely is gone under in the unforgiving waters: even the able Beidermann, so certain in his own sufficiency, cannot make his challenges with impunity forever.

  APR. 21. This day, as the twins continue at the river, the others of us bend to our chores—for animals and land have no patience—although we do so with burdened hearts, our thoughts with Beidermann and his fate. Harris, going off to tend the lost man’s stock, says, What call did he have to be out there, in it? And though I do not voice it to the youngster, I have the answer to his question.

  It is five days past that I saw Beidermann; I see him astride his mare, his wolfish hounds attending, as I go to examine the mud fence on the southern bottoms, erected there to prohibit the range stock from the eroding cliff above the river, all this swept away now and lying under the unruly waters.

  I say unruly, but they are more than that. Indeed, a horrendous turmoil of water, far, far more of it than I have seen in any of my years on these plains; and flushed upon us with such surprise that no neighbor had opportunity to forewarn another, none to foresee the trifling Sheyenne engorge itself to such stunning proportion, spread a mile from its negligible banks, laying waste the bottom lands to the near horizon, only by the grace of God limiting its devastation to a strip of my holdings, but overrunning more of Beidermann’s, Krupp’s, Jenssen’s—I cannot tell how much more.

  I see him coming in the distance, the sturdy Beidermann, as I ride parallel to my vanished fences and mount a rise that looks down through the mist upon the forbidding sight—furious brown water battering hummocks of nettles and briars and head-high reeds and matted willows; cottonwoods with half their height drowned; the whole composing a labyrinth of wild islands scattered in an agitated sea; impassable and deadly for all the tangles of roots and half-afloat snags, chunks of white ice bucketing through, and the sluiced-up bones of buffalo. I see, in a deceptive backwater, a drifting log languishing beneath the surface, suddenly snapped up by an offshoot of the cruel current to swirl half above the surface and slap down splashing, as if hurled by an unseen hand; then to drift again on a quiet eddy amongst swamped hazelnut bushes and blackberry vines.

  Two more of my heifers are here; one with only her rump rearing from the mud, and the bloated other a few rods into the river’s center, pressed against a hillock of brush by the water’s fierceness and battered by logs and ice and tossing limbs; both these animals having escaped over my mud barriers collapsed by the winter snows which, since the New Year, fell in a relentlessness out-matched only by the spring rains which followed, with this result. How many head of my cattle have gone under in it, I do not know.

  My gelding snorts at the approach of Beidermann’s mare. Up he trots without greeting, points a thick thumb toward the heifer’s rump. Yah, he says, I lost eight–ten head in that.

  I encounter him in the flesh so seldom, though suffering frequently the twins’ reports of his doings, that I am surprised to see him now; and surely I am unprepared for the look of him, for he is dressed in good clothes which, upon the rough Beidermann, never given to close attention in his dress, would look queer even in congenial circumstances; here in the gray damp above the demolishing water he sits astride his mare in smart britches and a gray wool shirt and similar vest and a thick black coat of frock length, as a railroad agent would wear, its tail fluttered by the wind. That Beidermann should own such finery, let alone display it upon himself in this cheerless scenery, is another measure of his singularity.

  But his manner says nothing of this, as he recounts the ravage upon his land, which is greater than that upon mine. Glaring narrow-eyed at the sweep of water, he points to a huge log tossing past. Good timber going to waste, he says.

  Now his guess is that the worst has passed, for he claims to discern a drop-off in the water. Yes, he is sure of it, he says, as if to convince himself. He can cross.

  This last I hear with astonishment. Cross the flood? What would persuade him to such folly, to attempt to cross this sinister tide? But if I suspected the answer to this question beforehand, now I am certain of it, and I hold my tongue; for I know it is true, then, the rumor passed along, perhaps aggravated, by the meddling Krupp, with his skill at gossip and complaint, about Beidermann’s doings; here confirmed by the smart clothes, the lunacy of a proposed crossing when the western bank for which he must aim is not even visible in the mist. Into this he would throw himself, his mare, his ugly dogs—well rid of them, I would say—all for the sake of the spindly Anna Jenssen! It is beyond imagining, as Krupp himself admits, with a wink adding, And those two sections Swede left her has nothing to do with it either, eh?

  At my side Beidermann muses to himself more than addresses me. Yes, he will cross; it can be done a mile upstream at the stand of cottonwoods whose L-shape marks an angle in the riverbed now made straight by the flood; at that grove, he vows, it is somewhat shallow, and his mare will need swim little distance, it being mostly bog, soft and dangerous, true, but passable to a cautious man who knows its perils and moves swiftly.

  At such delusion in this staunch man I can only marvel. So inflamed by the long-jawed widow has he become that a half-mile of deadly flood is as nothing. There is silliness in his plan too, for even if he prosecutes a crossing undrowned, what will be the condition of his sporting clothes, having done so? The Widow Jenssen will welcome him as a pillar of stinking mud. But he is besotted; appetite shines in his eyes, and nothing I can say will stay him—he is not a man to schedule his behavior on the alarm of others. The Jenssen woman has wrought a transformation in the Beidermann bone and sinew, who, once a sober hard working man, has become a suitor as reckless as a dog with turpentine on his ass.

  And more than suitor, I fear, if we can believe the scandalous footnote to Krupp’s rumor claiming that the impassioned Beidermann has too vigorously set forth his case wit
h the Widow, and in consequence she has with startling haste plumped up, like one of her own noisy geese penned to fatten for Christmas. This slyly attested to by Otto, he being the last to see her since that Holiday, a glint in his eye as he awaits disapproval from me, who has delivered so many moral preachments to my boys; but I do not give it outwardly, for all that I am sorely disappointed to find the stable Beidermann thus hauled in, whether by the Widow’s scarce charms or her legacy of two sections of good land—whichever it may be, I am not one to further gossip, even amongst my own close kin.

  And yet we have had a hand in this sorry development, or at least Ma’s innocent finger shows, by reason of her matchmaking between these two, they having met at Beidermann’s first threshing, at which Ma and the Widow Jenssen set his table for the hands, he being a bachelor of such undomestic bent that they feared he would ignore the feeding of the crew. There, then, the cackling Jenssen woman set her cap, and with such dire success that, had Beidermann been a small degree more likeable, less set and certain of his differing ways, and with less enviable achievement on his homestead, then he might have gained my friendly ear and sympathetic advice as well. But he is a man who rubs everybody against the grain, in that he himself is highly capable and displays scorn toward anyone who is not.

  At the flood’s edge Beidermann reins his mare past me, his dogs furtively skirting my legs as they watch for a nip—and it is cause to wonder how these vicious beasts disport themselves with the Widow’s flocks of geese while the lusty Beidermann conducts his visits. It is beyond easy imagining, as is everything about this Beidermann folly.