by Jason Heit
I shook my head not understanding what he was telling me. Not understanding how truly tired this man was.
“I’m glad to be free of that land. It was a curse to me and now it’s gone. You see?”
“You wanted him to win?”
“Either way,” he said. “I didn’t lose in there. I was counting on I’d be free of it. Elisabetha too.”
“And Frank?”
“I don’t see it having a hold over him. Things are good for him now. His mother’s watching over him.”
“Where are you going to sleep?”
He shook his head. “I’ll probably stumble over to the livery. Zahn don’t care if I’m in there. He says I scare Weninger away.”
“Here,” I said, and I put the coins in his hands. “Your winnings.”
He looked at the handful. “Winnings?” He sighed, then stuffed the coins in his coat pockets and walked away.
Inside the card room the others were still talking. I heard their voices as I climbed the stairs.
“I tell you, he has to be drunk or crazy. Why else would he gamble his land away?” Stolz said.
“I think he knew what he was doing,” Gerein said.
“I should give it back to him,” Jakob said.
“After all those years? Kaspar would be rolling in his grave.”
The men turned quiet as I entered the room and took my place at the table.
“Did you speak to him?” Stolz asked me. “What’d he say?”
“I’m going to give the land note back,” Jakob said, before I could get a word out. He was wound up in a way I’d never seen before, pacing the room and waving around those notes. “I even signed the other note,” he continued. “He can have it too. I don’t want it.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “He doesn’t want any of it.”
“Really?” Jakob said. He stopped pacing, picked up his chair, and held it up six inches off the ground.
“Feel free to take a seat,” Stolz teased.
“He’s happy to be rid of it,” I told them.
“I don’t understand,” Jakob said, still holding the chair. He was all stirred up. I knew how he felt. I’d been that way myself more than once. The whole world unfolding in a way that is so strange and twisted it makes you want to run; at the same time it holds you – pulling you back with its reins, because you’re at the centre of it and it’s waiting till you let go of the bit, settle out and calm down before anything else might happen – otherwise, you’d just be jumping and kicking and going nowhere.
“He truly believes it’s cursed,” I continued.
Stolz laughed. “You were right, Gerein, he did know what he was doing.”
“Strange as that seems,” Gerein said.
“I think you should keep it,” I told Jakob.
“How’s he going to get by?”
“He’s going to drink,” I said. “Probably drink himself dead.”
The men just shook their heads.
“He should stay there through the winter,” Jakob said. “Any of you see him, you tell him I said so.”
“I don’t think he’d listen,” Gerein said.
I nodded in agreement and the room went quiet again. It suddenly felt too small for the four of us and our thoughts. Gerein shuffled the deck. It ruffled like a flurry of grouse taking wing from some grassy cover. “Kaiser game?” he asked.
“The light’s getting low,” Jakob said. “I should be going.” He stuffed the paper in his pocket, collected his coins and his hat and hurried down the stairs.
“How about the rest of you?” Gerein asked.
“One more game,” Stolz said. “It’ll help to set your mind on other things.”
He was right. I didn’t want to leave like Jakob, with my mind racing off the tracks. That’s when mistakes happen. So I sat down with the boys and we played a game of Rummy. The cards were a blur of red and black numbers and faces. I couldn’t make sense of them. More footsteps came up the stairs. It was Zerr. Stolz told him the story and I filled in the other parts when Gerein wasn’t interrupting. Later, Gerein’s brother, Peter, showed. By then, I’d had my fill of cards and talk, so I excused myself from the table. I wanted to find Bernhard. I wanted to offer him something: a meal, a bed for the night, something. I wondered if Jakob had found him and told him to go back to the farm and get some rest. I left the others to the game and went to find Bernhard.
I walked past my horse and grabbed a lantern from the back of my wagon, then walked down to the livery where I figured he might be drinking or sleeping it off. I opened the livery door and raised the lamp in front of me.
“Bernhard?” I called. To my left, a horse grunted and snorted hot heat through its nostrils. “Easy, boy. Easy.”
Further down, I heard a kick and thrashing from inside a stall. The beast was upset. Frightened. I closed the livery door behind me. A bad feeling crept inside me and pulled on my guts. “Easy,” I repeated. The horse whined and kicked at the boards. I heard a dull sound like a sack of grain hitting the floor and the creaking of the rafters as a piece of rope rubbed a groove in the wood. Then a hoof came up over the edge of the stall and I jumped back. Scared the shit out of me.
“Shhh,” I hushed the horse. Trying to hush my beating heart. “Shhh!” I lifted the lantern shoulder height and the horse reeled on its hind legs casting monsterish shadows in the darkness. I heard another dull thud from inside the stall. When the horse dropped to all fours, I saw the rope shifting on the rafter and Bernhard, as big as a door, dead and bug-eyed, came swinging toward me. It was a horrible sight. It made me shrivel and I was sick right there on my boots. I couldn’t say how long I was like that, I just remember shaking like a leaf, trying to spit the bitter taste from my mouth. Once I’d straightened up, I cast the light back into the stall to check my eyes on what I’d seen.
They hadn’t lied. Bernhard was hanging by the end of the rope and it was cutting into his neck from all the kicking and commotion of that awful-frightened horse. I had to get Bernhard down before that rope sawed through his neck. I waited until the horse had backed off some and I slid the stall door open. It didn’t take much for that horse to dart for the open door. I had to jump quickly so as not to be in its path. It ran for the other end of the barn, but stopped and reeled itself up in the darkness before it got close to the outer door. I let it be for the moment and ducked into the stall and slid the door closed behind me.
I had a hell of a time getting him down. I ended up cutting the rope just behind the noose. It was as high as I could reach. I don’t care to think much more about how he landed and the sight of his neck and face or the other things that happen to the dead. I kept the stall door closed and got that poor horse settled in another stall before I ran back out into the night to get some help. I fetched the livery owner, Mr. Zahn, from next door and we took care of the body and he gave me a place to stay for the night.
I rode out to Nels’s the next morning. He was in the middle of his chores when I got there. He seemed to have an idea that something had happened, said he could see it on my face, so I told him the story as I knew it. It wasn’t much of a surprise to Nels. “The man had no luck,” he said. That was the best approximation of it, I supposed; so I left Nels to the job of telling Elisabetha and Frank, and I carried on to Christian’s farm to tell him the story before he found out some other way. He came out of the house when the dogs started barking, and I recounted the events of the card game and how I’d come upon Bernhard in that the terrible way, making sure he understood it was Bernhard’s doing and no fault of Jakob Feist.
“Where is he now?” asked Christian.
“In the tack room at the livery,” I said. “We couldn’t think of nowhere else to put him.”
Christian nodded. “The priest won’t want him in the cemetery, I suppose.”
“Probably not,” I answered.
> “Well, I better make a box.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, staring at the ground.
“Probably need more wood.”
“Yeah.”
It was noon when I made it back to the farm. Margaret ran out of the house looking tired and all shades of worried and angry. “Where have you been?” she shouted to me before I was even off the wagon.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it all over again, but I owed her something. “Bernhard’s dead.”
She covered her eyes and a string of tears ran down her cheeks. I stopped the wagon and handed the lines to my boy, John, and went to Margaret and held her in my arms.
“I had an awful feeling,” she said. “I thought something might’ve happened to you,” she sobbed into my ear. “I was worried all night long.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m here.” I held her tight for a while longer; neither one of us wanted to let go.
A few days later, I was in town and ran into Jakob Feist. We talked some. He wasn’t looking too good.
“It’s all too much at once,” he said. “The way some people look at me like I might be Death himself or something.” He had a worried expression. “You think he meant to do this?” he asked. “To get to me? So people would think him a martyr and make me and my family look like we did something evil.”
“I doubt he thought beyond himself,” I said.
“You think?” He rubbed the creases in his forehead. “I know he out-thought me, maybe even the whole bunch of us.”
“You have to be pretty lost to go down that path of thinking.”
Jakob nodded as he chewed on that thought. “I’d have given him back the land.”
“I know.”
“There ain’t nobody who’ll take it now.”
The wind was blowing cold. I needed to be going. “You’ll make some good of it,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, and he turned up his collar.
I gave him a pat on the shoulder, and we went our separate ways.
-
Until today, I thought the whole thing with that land had been settled. But Frank told me Jakob Feist seeded Bernhard’s quarter to grass, and Frank had been helping Jakob mend the old barbwire fences. In return, Jakob was going to let Frank pasture his cattle on the quarter.
“Jakob Feist’s basically a good man,” I told him. “He’ll always do the right thing in the end.”
Frank nodded. “I think he feels bad about how he got that quarter – he’s offered to sell it to me. Cheap.”
Those words made my neck hairs stand on end. “You sure you wanna do that? Bernhard figured there was a curse on that land.”
Frank half-smiled and looked at me with those ghostly eyes. “I don’t put much stock in curses, Uncle. Far as I can tell, there’s been one over me since before I was born.”
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
The Card Game
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my parents, Dan and Georgeline Heit, for supporting and encouraging my work on this book. To Emmanuel and Veronica Bertsch for sharing your memories and answering my questions about those early settler days. And to Joseph S. Height whose research and writing grounds these stories.
With respect to craft, I need to thank my friend and mentor, Dave Margoshes, who pushed me to listen to and learn from my characters. Dave is a tough old dude, and he’s one of the most generous I know. Thank you for believing in me. It’s made the journey less wearisome.
Also thanks to Alissa York for her comments on earlier drafts of many of these stories; Leona Theis for very carefully reading my manuscript and providing me with helpful feedback; and, James McNulty for digging deep into “The Horse Accident” with me. Big thanks to my editor, J. Jill Robinson, for being tough, thoughtful and tireless in her work. You’ve helped me to enrich these stories.
Many thanks to Mary K Renwick, Karl Tischler, Sean Renwick, Dianne Peacock, Inge Gowans, and Chris Volk.
Finally, I would like to thank the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their financial support.
An excerpt from “Fireworks Over Kaidenberg” appeared in Prairie Messenger, Vol. 94, No. 6, June 22, 2016.
About the Author
Jason Heit was raised on his family’s farm in west central Saskatchewan. Growing up in a rural community that struggled to thrive inspired him to study rural issues and work in the area of community economic development in Canada, Latin America, and Mongolia.
He holds a Master’s of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on co-operative organizations from the University of Saskatchewan, and continues to work in economic development as a policy analyst with the federal government.
Heit’s writing often reflects his interest in rural communities and people, their issues and stories. His short stories have appeared in Event and Coffin Bell. Kaidenberg’s Best Sons is his first book.