by Jason Heit
“I know,” he said.
He drank his coffee and tried to think of a polite way to leave. He almost wished he hadn’t come. There was too much sadness here. Desperation. He missed the forest. The river. There was some peace there in the green world.
“Everything I hold onto leaves me,” said the woman.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Sutherland,” Peter said as he got up from his chair. “I have to go.” He avoided looking at the woman, as he picked up his luggage and made for the door, fearing, if he did, something about her might hold him there. Then, not being able to hold back any longer, he stopped and turned to the woman. “I am sorry for you and Henry.” He swallowed and stepped out the door.
Outside, he took a deep breath. What was it that people wanted? He shook his head. How could he answer that when he didn’t even know what it was he himself wanted?
Peter turned on Union Street and walked toward Main. The day was warm. There were people about on the street. Automobiles puffing out smoke. And, to the south, there was the rail yard and the clang of steel on steel. He made his way to the rail station. His path was straightforward now: he was going east. Riding the steel rails through the Rockies and over the prairie back to Kaidenberg. Back to Katherine.
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
A Death in the Family
Telling Stories
1919
Folks weren’t so kind toward me or mine following the attack on Bernhard. The rumour mill had passed its judgment and settled on me, Kaspar Feist, and Charles Harrison as its main suspects. And, again, it felt as though Bernhard was heaping his revenge upon me. This time without the slightest bit of effort. Not that I envied him. From what I was hearing he was in a bad way. But when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff once a story has had its way around Kaidenberg, I’ll take my chances on finding a needle in a haystack. Zahn, the shopkeeper, told my wife, Margaret, that Bernhard had gone deaf, dumb, and blind. I’d heard from Andreas Stolz that Bernhard was right as rain, but had developed a mean streak to rival the devil – something about him ripping off chickens’ heads and plotting his revenge on me and on Harrison. While Stolz’s story seemed more in tune with the Bernhard I’d known, I doubted very much that he would ever be the man he was before. I’d done all I could that day to stop his bleeding and to revive him. It was the reviving that worried me the most. When I returned him to his wagon box, I would’ve wagered his chances of waking near even – either he would or he wouldn’t. The fact he did tells me either God ain’t finished with him or he ain’t finished telling God what’s what.
Truth be told, I’d say there’s something about taking care of a man you’ve spent a good part of your life hating, fixing up his wounds and such. It changes your heart and your heart changes your mind. It’s a funny thing how that works. So, I guess after all that hate, it finally ended up that I genuinely pitied Bernhard and wished well for him.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t given some thought as to whether a righting might be coming my way, especially early on when Bernhard showed little sign of ever running a plough again, much less tying his boot laces. I figured if someone would be making amends it’d be Bernhard’s brother, Christian, and maybe his brother-in-law, Nels. Seeing that they didn’t, I reckon some common sense prevailed. They probably figured that had I wanted to seek my revenge on Bernhard I would’ve found a better place in the past ten years than the church picnic to do it. But that didn’t mean we all just magically got along. There was plenty of talk behind our backs and nasty looks, especially in that first year. Going to church became a hurtful thing. I’d never seen so many scowling faces eyeballing me as I did when Margaret and I would walk to our pew on Sunday morning. Eventually, things got better, but only because so much else changed – Father Selz leaving for Alberta, the flu epidemic, automobiles and everything moving fast – maybe it got easier to let go. There were little things that helped too, like the boys working things out, Frank Jr., Lambert, and my nephew, Ignaz. I helped a little with that. It made a big difference for young Frank, and I was happy to help him. We had talked a bit. I suppose I was the only one he could talk to at that time.
It was a few weeks after the picnic that I noticed Frank – young Frank, I mean – lurking around the farm. He was about eight, I believe. The first time, I was going off to feed the milk cows when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, about 100 yards away, on the side of the road, ducking behind the wheat crop. I took a double look and saw him peek his head out again and just as quickly he was gone. I didn’t give him much mind. I figured if he wanted to talk he’d come find me. I spotted him again a few days later. He was in our pasture hiding among the cattle. He was a sneaky little guy, keeping an eye on me as he moved from one cow to the other. I watched him from my blacksmith shop, off and on for nearly half an hour before I finally got to my work. After that I suppose he must’ve figured our little dance was done, because when I walked into the blacksmith shop the next day he was there waiting for me, looking over my forge and hand tools from a distance.
I wasn’t too sure what to say to the boy. Those who know me know I’m not the most welcoming of others in my work space – just ask my son, Jakob – but I had no intention of telling this young fella to go. The last time we’d spoken I was setting off to help mend his stepfather’s head after he’d dropped that rock on him. The boy had been about ready to run away and never come back, and seeing him like this got me wondering if those thoughts weren’t back in his head. He wore a sad-puppy look on his face and for some reason seeing him there reminded me some of my own little boy, Anton, who might’ve been just a few years older than Frank was then when he died. Anyhow, I just gave the boy a nod of my cap and sat down at my grindstone. I had it rigged like a bicycle with two foot levers to get it spinning.
“Pass me that axe.” I pointed to my work bench about halfway between the two of us. He looked at the axe and then fetched it for me. I took the axe from him. “I’m going to put a new edge on this. If you watch how I do it, then you can work on the next one.”
He nodded, and I got to pedaling and honing that axe blade on the spinning grindstone. The boy watched with a keen focus. His dark eyes narrowed and his jaw relaxed enough that I could make out a little space between his thick lips. He didn’t make a sound. After I finished, I got up and found an old hatchet and told the boy to take a seat. The seat plate was made of cast iron and I had set an old piece of sheepskin on there to provide a little comfort, but the boy, being a runt of a man, couldn’t push both pedals at once; still, we made it work. And he showed plenty of patience as we put a nice fine edge on that old hatchet.
“Now put a new handle on it,” I said, “and it’ll be just like new.”
I could feel there was a smile inside him somewhere, maybe it was in his eyes since his mouth didn’t quite show it, but it was a start.
“You’re a ways from home, huh?” I continued. My farm was three miles from Bernhard’s, a little less by the way the crow flies, but this time of year, with the crops standing tall, there were no shortcuts.
He stood there shy and quiet and staring at his feet.
“You hungry? Let’s go see what’s in the garden,” I said. He seemed to like the idea, so I walked him over to the garden patch and let him pick at the peas while I dug up a few fresh carrots about the size of my fingers. As I dusted off the carrots, I watched Frank shell the four or five pea pods he’d picked into the pa
lm of his hand; he lowered his face down to his palm and ate them up like a hog eating from the trough. Watching him munch up those peas put a smile on my face.
“It was nice of you to pay me a visit.” I handed him a carrot. “Any particular reason you come by?”
He looked down at his feet again. I remember thinking this boy must be a fearful, scared type, but when I look back at it now I think he had more courage than most his age. It’s something, to reach out to another person; it’s not light work. It’s easier to bury things, or so I’d say from my own experience. It might’ve been a half-minute or so before the boy chirped up and answered me. “I wanted to hear your story,” he mumbled.
“What story would that be?”
“You told me you had a story,” he said, with a shy kind of desperation.
“I did?”
“Is it about my father? My real father?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know much about your father,” I said, before I fully gathered what it was the boy wanted to hear. “He seemed to be as good a man as any,” I continued, trying to make amends. “He kept a good farm and worked hard. I remember he liked talking about your mother, he was proud of her, proud to be married to her. I suppose that’s something I know.”
The boy nodded. There wasn’t too much shine in his eyes. I felt a whole lot of sadness for the little fella. I hadn’t realized he had his mind set on hearing a story about his father. I don’t know what made me do it, but as soon as I started speaking again the words came straight out my mouth without my head’s knowing.
“Well, there was that one time your father…he helped me out of a bad situation.”
“How did he do that?” asked the boy.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” I gave him another carrot. He took a bite and chewed on it, just as I was chewing on how best to tell this one.
“It happened in the fall just before the year you were born, but he knew you were coming. He was on his way back home from town, probably went to check in on the priest. Your father was good for doing that kind of thing.
“Anyway, like I said, I was in a bad situation. I’d gone out to do… some hunting. I used to hunt back then, not so much these days. I wanted to get a deer, so we’d have some deer meat to mix with pork and make some good sausage for over the winter.
“So, I was out there on the land and I’d been out there most of the day. I was getting cold and I was making my way home. As I did, well, I saw the biggest deer I ever did see, and I think it made me a bit careless because I forgot which horse I was riding that day. She was a jumpy one, especially at the sound of a gun. Had I been smart I’d have gotten down off my horse, led her away and maybe tied her to something nearby. But, like I said, I was excited and pulled my rifle out of my saddle holster and took aim. It was a long shot, but I wanted that deer. So, I took my shot. And BANG! My horse reared up on its hind legs as scared as can be and I went falling back, nearly went head over heels, and I landed hard on the ground. Knocked the wind right out of me. And my horse took off.
“Now, somehow my horse ran nearly straight toward your father, and, true I wasn’t there to see it, but I know that horse was mighty upset and there was no stopping it, for him or no one. But, your father, he must’ve seen it coming off in the distance and he must’ve seen a chance to do some good. So, what he’d done was, he unhitched one of his horses from the wagon, and I’m guessing he picked the fastest of the two –”
“That’d be Dusty,” said the boy, who I could see was now wearing a big smile, full of excitement.
“I think you’re right. I think he said his horse’s name was Dusty.” I smiled back at the boy. “Well, he rode his horse, Dusty, bareback right up to my own and when he got there he did a fancy thing and went straight from riding Dusty onto the back of my horse and he rode her till she got used to his feel and he got her calmed down –”
“What was your horse’s name?”
“Oh that, that was Juniper. She’s still out there.” I pointed to the pasture. “We’ll go see her later and get her hitched up to the wagon, and I’ll take you on back toward your place. How does that sound?”
“I don’t have to go,” the boy said.
“Sure, not now,” I said. “Later on. We ain’t finished the story. Anyway, where was I… Oh yeah, well, your father he did all that without knowing who he was doing it for and I thought that was awful nice. And he rode Juniper all the way back to his wagon with his good horse, Dusty, following right behind them. Now I think that’d be where most people would stop, you know, they’d probably see the brand on the horse and take the horse over the next day. But your father, he knew something was wrong and that someone might be hurt, so he hitched his horse back up and tied my Juniper to the end of the wagon and rode out in the direction she’d come from.
“Thing is, I was hurt bad and hadn’t even got to my feet. I was just lying in pain and moaning and praying to God that someone might find me. It was darn near dusk by then and I was worried I’d be spending the night under some cold stars, but when I heard the teetering sound of that wagon coming over the prairie I got so happy I might’ve danced if I could’ve, but I couldn’t, so I shouted for help. And, well, it was your father who came to my rescue and I was so happy to see him, let me tell you. He got me standing and when I saw he’d found Juniper too, I swore to him I’d do what I could to help him someday. I even offered to give him some money for what he’d done, but he just said, ‘Kaspar, you keep your money, and just you keep an eye out for me and my family, ’cause my wife and I got a little baby coming, and I’ll do the same for yours, because that’s all that matters.’ And I said I would… I reckon that’s the story I meant to tell you when I said I had a story to share with you.”
I looked down at that boy and damn it if he wasn’t crying, and I just got so that it made me cry too – thinking about that boy never knowing his real dad and wishing I’d seen my Little Anton once more. And thinking about him in that little box when we buried him back in North Dakota, some five hundred miles away. Well, I got choked up. And he just wrapped his arms around my waist and we had ourselves a cry. Then I walked him on over to where Juniper was and he noticed my bad limp and asked if I’d gotten that when I fell off the back of Juniper. Well, I didn’t see the harm in it, so I told him that’s when it happened. I think he liked that. It made me smile when we got her hitched to the wagon and he offered to help me up. “Oh, just like your father did,” I said. That brought another big smile to his face. We talked a little more on the ride back. He wanted to know what happened to the deer. “I must’ve clean missed it,” I told him. And he figured maybe his father went back the next day and got it, because he’d heard his grandpa tell him his father was a good hunter. And it seemed fine to me, so I told Frank, “I think I heard he did get that big deer.”
Then, as we got closer to his home, well, we both turned a little quiet and I could tell he wasn’t so happy to be leaving just then, so I told him he could sneak by every now and again, but not to do it too often or his mother would get worried. I told him his father would want him to be helping her as much as he could and that seemed to settle him some and he put on as brave and proud a face as I’d ever seen any boy wear.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t ride him all the way back to his yard. I didn’t think Bernhard would take too kindly to me coming by without no invitation. So I dropped Frank off about a half-mile from the yard and headed on toward my son Jakob’s farm. I guess that was another thing about that boy, his visiting brought me and Jakob back together some. I know I surprised Jakob when I showed up like that, without his mother or saying so much as a word beforehand.
Things had never been easy between me and Jakob. I was hard on him even before Bernhard took that land from underneath my nose. It was just the way we rubbed up against each other and those early days in the Dakotas were hard on all of us. So I didn’t take it so bad when the first words out of his m
outh were, “What’s wrong, Father?”
“I wanted to see you,” I said, climbing down from the wagon.
“That’s it?”
“I’d been thinking about you. Your mother tells me you and the Reichert girl hit it off at the picnic.”
After I mentioned the picnic, I could see the thoughts change behind his eyes. “There’s a lot of people saying you’re the one who hurt Bernhard.”
“And you think I did?”
He shook his head. “Wouldn’t upset me if you did. If folks didn’t know what kind of man he was before the picnic, they had some picture of it by the end. I just don’t understand why you’d wait so long to do it.”
“You think I did it?”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” Jakob countered.
I laughed. What was I to tell Jakob? That it was an eight-year-old boy who’d done it. That poor kid already had enough misfortune, being born half orphan, and the idea of passing the buck to him – I don’t think I’d ever have slept another peaceful night had I let that slip.
“It was your mother,” I told him. “She finally had enough of all my talk.”
Well that put a smile on his face, and he told me he visited the Reichert family and had coffee with them and had been invited back for a Sunday meal. It was happy news. A blessed day. And it all started with young Frank walking into my yard. The boy reminded me so much of Anton; I wished I could’ve shared that with Jakob, but I wasn’t so sure he’d see it the way I did. He still had plenty of anger to direct at Bernhard and that extended to just about anything Bernhard cared for. Of course, that was my doing, setting Jakob up on that farm right next door to him. That’s another one I’ve added to the list of the things I ain’t so proud of in my days. Anyhow, those are other stories, and this is about Frank.