Otto never attended the academy. He went off instead to fight in the war with the 2nd Wisconsin Regiment of the Iron Brigade. Wounded twice, at Antietam and Chancellorsville, he came home a sergeant. Jenny didn’t recognize him when he returned. He was pale from the hospital, his pallor accentuated by his big black mustache and the black slouch hat of the Iron Brigade, and he walked with a limp. But he smiled and slapped her hard on the shoulder, and then she knew him as of old.
That fall he took her on hunting trips. They camped out up north in the big woods and slept under a canvas tent from the war that still smelled of old gunpowder and the red Rebel mud that had stained it. They ate rabbits and squirrels and deer meat fresh killed from the woods and speckled trout from cold black streams that smelled of iron. Those were good days, Jenny recalled now, without the sour stink of the dung heap behind the barn and the clamor of hens waiting to be fed, only the drumming of partridges in the pine woods, the ice like a mirror on the water kettle in the morning . . .
But Otto had contracted the wanderlust from too many years on the march. Like so many veterans, he could not stay at home. So he went West. Mutti had cried and pleaded, but Vati said he couldn’t blame Otto, for hadn’t he himself gone West at the same age? It’s in the blood, her father said, this chasing the setting sun. Mutti had cried even louder.
America is hard, Jenny thought.
It tried to kill my brother, and when it couldn’t kill him, it killed my father and mother instead. I’m sure it’ll try to kill me, too, sooner or later. May all bankers burn in hell. Especially Herr Jochen Sauerweiz of the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank.
2
OTTO ARRIVED THREE days later, in time for the funeral. Jenny walked into town to meet him at the railway station. He was tanned as dark as an Indian, with sunbursts of white wrinkle lines fanning outward from his grave blue eyes, and he did not look as large as she remembered him. He still wore the black slouch hat, dusty from the war—or perhaps merely from the train ride, she realized—but with the same bullet hole through its battered crown, not yet patched ten years after a Rebel minié ball had perforated it somewhere along the Rappahannock. He was thinner, too, and as he walked unsmiling toward her, she noticed flashes of gray in his mustache and at his temples. The limp, though, had vanished, except for a slight hunching of his left shoulder as his weight came down on the opposite foot. An almost imperceptible wince, perhaps habit now after all these years of pain, tensed his facial muscles as a spasm of toothache might have done.
“Na ja, du Hübsche,” he said—Now then, pretty one. And smiled finally, a sad smile but a warm one, revealing a gap where a shell fragment had extracted his lower left molars, both top and bottom, in the cornfield near the Dunker Church at Antietam eleven years earlier. The exit wound had left a knot of scar tissue in the center of his left cheek. It was shaped, she suddenly realized, like a gnarled heart. The small piece of shrapnel must have entered through his open mouth, for there was no sign of an entry wound. He could not remember just how it had happened, there had been so much tumult in the cornfield that day.
“Ah, dear one, how did they die?”
“Selbstmord ,” she said. He winced again, and his eyes slipped out of focus for a moment.
“Ach, Christ, Hanna! How? Why?”
She told him as they walked uphill from the station to the Lutheran church on the ridge above town. The day was cool and bright, and overhead ragged wedges of geese flew south, their high, distant cries sounding festive. She spoke of the bank’s foreclosure, of rope and acid, her tone cold with the ugliness of it. He stopped to look down at the Heldendorf Mercantile Bank, a solid, solemn structure built of gray limestone from the local quarry, with heavy wrought-iron grillwork over its windows. A fortress of financial integrity. Not even Jesse James could rob this bank. It would turn him to stone before he set foot inside the door. Most of the buildings in Heldendorf were built of stone or brick, many of the larger homes as well. It looked foreign to him after the raw-plank architecture of the West, where sudden towns bled sap all summer long and warped the winter through.
“How much was left to pay on the mortgage?”
“Less than a tausend dollars—nine hundred and a bit.”
“I’ll pay it off.” He slapped the new carpetbag he had carried from the train. “When the wire arrived, my partner and I were in Dodge City selling a load of hides. Twenty-four hundred dollars’ worth.” He smiled.
She frowned. “Are you coming back? I’ll not work the place by myself.”
“No, but you could hire help. I’m sure there must be some strong young backs looking for work. Maybe two or three?”
“And how would I pay for their Arbeit, in buttermilk and manure? Vati couldn’t even meet the loan payments, with the price milk is bringing these days—even buttermilk. There’s no money anywhere.”
“Dock zwar,” Otto said. “Too true—except on the Buffalo Range. But might you not marry, Hanna? Have no lads come a-courting?”
“Keine,” she said firmly. “Not a one, thank God! And by the way, my name is no longer Hanna. I call myself Jenny now—proper American.”
“Tschenny?” He laughed. “No wonder the local boys aren’t coming round. To them you’re a Tenny.’ And don’t stare daggers at me that way. Why are women always so serious about their names? Why have all the girls I’ve ever known felt bound and determined to change them?”
He looked at her and laughed again, winked and composed his face in mock seriousness.
“Well then, with no marital prospects in sight, you could sell the herd and rent out the pastureland. Or keep the herd—fine stock it is—and make an arrangement with some good farmer in the neighborhood to go shares with you on the milk, in return for his labor. Wieland always had his eyes on our herd, as I recall.”
“Ja sicher,” she said. “True indeed. Frau Wieland has invited me to move in with them, and in return allow Herr Wieland to work our herd. But I won’t live with the Wielands. I won’t be a replacement for her dead Hannelore.”
“Then perhaps we might sell the place,” Otto said, “even at a loss, if necessary—I want no money from this farm, it would all be yours—and you could move to town.” He glanced at her quickly, striding along beside him, and saw the hard set of her jaw.
Suddenly he knew what she wanted.
She wanted to go West with him.
She must be thinking that it would be like those hunting trips they’d made together when he got back from the war. Another lighthearted outdoor adventure. Or perhaps she wanted to be with him wherever he went—after all, she was his little sister, she loved him as dearly as he loved her, and now, with Mutti and Vati gone . . . She was only sixteen, after all. But the West? The only women there were whores and outlaws.
“It’s not like up north, Jenny,” Otto explained quietly. “It’s different out on the prairies. An alien world—there are no trees, only grass. Little or no water, and what you do find is bitter or full of buffalo dung. Rattlesnakes everywhere. Wolves as big as yearling calves. We sleep on the ground most of the time, and the ground is hard. And the wind blows always, always, day and night. Sometimes it’s so cold that mules freeze stiff, standing up. Sometimes so hot and dry that your eyelids crack just from blinking, so hot and dry that your nose bleeds. Often you can’t bathe for weeks on end, out in those badlands where the buffalo are today. You can’t even wash your face or brush your teeth. And nothing to eat but buffalo hump and hardtack, day after day after day.”
“I know.”
Christ, she was stubborn! She didn’t know. She’d only read newspapers, or maybe some silly dime novel about valiant, handsome, devil-may-care buffalo runners. If only she could smell one.
THE FUNERAL SERVICE was short but solemn, Pastor Koellner’s words heartfelt. He had stretched the rules concerning suicide, making it sound as though Vati had died in a farm accident and Mutti, in her grief, had returned to the house distraught, grabbed a bottle she thought contained Himbeerschnaps, and take
n a fatal draught before realizing it was carbolic acid. No, the Dousmanns were not the first suicides the pastor had buried. America was a hard place.
Otto hadn’t been in the wooden church since before the war. He had gone then only to please his mother, as had Jenny. He recognized many faces in the congregation, but had difficulty at first putting names to them. Herr Albrecht, the stone mason, with his ruddy, wind-scoured face and hands hard as horn. Beside him Mrs. Obst, the schoolteacher—old now and, though dressed in her churchgoing finest, still smelling of chalk dust and India ink. Ursula Frischert, the love of his youth. Beside her stood two sturdy children, redheads both, a boy and a girl, and her husband, Otto’s marching Kamerad from the 2nd Wisconsin, Lud Nortmann, balding, he saw, with the stooped shoulders and spidery, ink-stained fingers of a bookkeeper. And when Ursula—whose waist Otto had once been able to span with both hands—turned sideways to whisper something in Lud’s ear, Otto noticed that she was with child once more. With sudden clarity Otto recalled a morning in the autumn of 1861 when Lud Nortmann, younger, slimmer, untried in battle, had been splattered with the brains of a comrade—was it Sergeant Houghton?—on a dusty road in southern Maryland and, while a volley of musket shots sought the Rebel skirmisher in the trees beside the road, had collapsed against Otto, weeping hysterically. They hadn’t killed the Johnny, either.
Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott . . .
LATER SHE STOOD beside him, dry-eyed, the grief leached out of her. All that remained now was the graveyard. She’d weather that. Then Otto would go down to the bank and speak with Herr Sauerweiz. He would gladly accept Otto’s money in payment of the mortgage. Why, he must have dozens of farms on his hands by now, what use would another be to him? Otto would make some kind of arrangement regarding the farm with Herr Wieland. He was an honest man, Herr Wieland, and he knew as well that if he cheated the Dousmanns, Otto would simply return and thrash their money out of him. There were advantages to a soldierly reputation. When those matters were out of the way, along with her packing, Otto and Jenny could depart for Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Topeka, and the Great West. Otto had said that the buffalo herds should be moving by now. There were “shaggies” to slaughter, money to be made, a whole new direction to her life. She had known her brother could not refuse her, no matter how grimly he described the West. For the first time in days she felt hopeful again.
TWO DAYS LATER they were on a train. Jenny sat in the swaying car, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, jaw set, eyes hard, so firm in her childish convictions, Otto thought—so clean and sure in her crisply starched shirtwaist, her neatly pleated wool skirt, her pert little cap with a stuffed bobolink perched on top. The true West would be a rude awakening.
They had left Chicago that morning and now the train was rolling through rich Illinois farmland. Cow corn stood tall in the fields, hardening off for the silos, pumpkins bright between the rows. Big red slate-roofed barns and trimly painted white houses rested content beneath the shade trees, elms and oaks and chestnuts, and tall, sweet grass surrounded the farmhouses, with herds of fat Holsteins and Guernseys grazing knee-deep in it, staring mindlessly at the passing train. Look at this, Jenny! he wanted to say. This is your America. Brooks and creeks and rivers full to overflowing with clean, cold, fast Midwestern water. Towns clicking past the train windows, the glint of plate-glass windows, righteous women walking the streets, shopping baskets on their arms, their children trailing obediently behind. Schoolhouses built of brick. Prosperous farmers coming to town with hayseed in their beards, their wagons drawn by matched pairs of glossy draft horses. Tall-steepled churches. Paved streets and sidewalks. How could she want to leave all this for the stink of the Buffalo Range?
“It’s not adventure, Jennchen,” he told her once again. “It’s not even hunting, not the way we did it in Wisconsin when you were a girl. That was sport. This is business. It’s ugly.”
He thought of the skinned, raw carcasses of buff so thick along the Arkansas River and the Pawnee Fork, where they’d shot them when they came to water, that a man could hop from carcass to carcass for a mile without touching the ground. Rattlesnakes coiled in buffalo skulls. Buffalo putrid on the Smoky Hill River, or the Solomon, or the Platte when the skinners were finished with them, shining on the sandy slopes like the windows of a great city reflecting the sunset. Poisoned wolves bloating in the sun, skinned out and reeking to high heaven. The stink of arsenic and strychnine and rotten meat.
“The whole damn prairie stinks,” he said. “Here, you can still smell it on me, smell it—and I’ve been away for more than a week.”
He thrust his hand under her nose. She turned away, silent, obstinate.
“And the redskins, there’s the Hostiles to worry about, too. Constantly. Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Satanta’s Kiowas sometimes, up from Texas, young bucks out for ponies and scalps and some fun. Or Comanches—even worse. They’ll take a man’s pizzle for a trophy.”
“Oh, please!” She turned to stab a look at him, grimmer still. Then she laughed. “And anyway, I have no pizzle to worry about. Nein, Otto, you can’t frighten me with Red Indian tales.”
“Das ist nicht komisch, Jenny. Not funny at all.”
He rose to his feet and shrugged his jacket straight on his shoulders, hitched up his trousers, and grabbed his hat. He felt himself reddening, with anger or perhaps with shame.
Pizzle!
He’d been too long in the Army.
“I’m going for a smoke,” he said.
3
HE WALKED TO the rear of the train and stood on the platform in the cold rushing air. He lit a cheroot and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. The bite of the smoke felt good.
Well, it was done; he had tried his best. There was no dissuading her. He’d better learn to live with it. After all, she was a good, strong, tough-minded girl. He doubted he could have handled the death of their parents as well as she had. Not the way they died. She wasn’t struck helpless in the face of blood or death, so far at least. Anyone could handle its ugliness, he’d learned that in the war, but those who were queasy took longer to learn. The fearful, after they had mastered their fear, often became unnecessarily cruel, or took too many heedless risks.
He’d been a good soldier, and he was proud of that. But it had ruined him for real life. He couldn’t abide a farm when he returned to it. Nor a town, for that matter. He couldn’t abide the rootedness of it. He had to move, to march, to shoot.
The Great West suited him, with its alkaline water and searing winds, buffalo grass and sandstone buttes, its promise of challenge over every horizon. Even its cheapjack towns and pox-ridden women, the wasted drunks pissing their lives away in some rat-squeaking, flea-bitten road ranch. The brash young drovers up from Texas, pistoled down in honky-tonks and brothels from Abilene to Ellsworth. Dodge would no doubt be their next slaughterhouse. Saddest of all, the failed homesteaders who’d come West with dreams and returned East, penniless and broken, as if fleeing a nightmare. “No place for a white man,” they said.
Strangely enough, though, he had prospered in the Great West. At first when he left the farm he’d been content repairing farm machinery in western Minnesota, but the work got too steady, so he sold shoes door-to-door for a while in Iowa, then cut firewood in bulk near Omaha, drifted north one winter to run a trapline on the Niobrara River, and finally landed a job with the Union Pacific, bossing a gang of Irish, Norwegian, and German gandy dancers laying steel for branch lines along tributaries of the Platte. The U.P. was organized on military lines and its officers liked his soldierly bearing. But when the railroad advised him, as a salaried employee, that he must vote for Grant in ‘68, he quit. He would have voted for General Grant, his old commander, in any event. But not on the railroad’s orders.
With the $373.68 he’d managed to save on the U.P., Otto bought a five-year-old chestnut mare named Vixen; an elderly mule named Zeke, whom he knew to be steady in the traces; a light spring wagon with outsized iron-rimmed wheels
; a stew kettle, frying pan, coffeepot, and tin cup; five pounds of coffee beans, twenty of flour, another ten of dried fruit (apples, apricots, prunes), thirty of soldier beans, a slab of fatback, two fifty-pound kegs of rock salt, a small bottle of arsenic with which to rid the hides he took of vermin; a pewter spoon, a butcher’s knife and sharpening steel, four woolen blankets that still bore a faded U.S. Army stencil and the stench of Southern dirt upon them: an ax, pick, and shovel, bar lead, a bullet mold, a swage, a primer punch, a wad cutter, and a cast-iron pot in which to melt the bar lead for bullets; a large round carton containing a thousand Berdan primers, four dozen reasonably new 1¾-inch brass cartridge cases in .50 caliber, a twenty-five-pound keg of Du Pont Fg-grade black powder, and a Model 1866 .50-caliber Sharps military rifle, modified to accommodate center-fire cartridges, whose full stock had been cut back to 10 inches, then capped at the end in German silver. The barrel had been shortened as well, to 29 inches from its original 30¼, thus improving the rifle’s balance as well as its appearance. A tang sight was mounted on the wrist of the oiled walnut stock, just behind the sidehammer. Its vernier elevations were graded out to 1,300 yards, but that was sheer vainglory. With 72 grains of Fg loaded behind the 457-grain grooved ball, it shot accurately at ranges only slightly in excess of 400 yards, and the big, slow bullet tended to drift quite atrociously in a crosswind even at that piddling range. Yes, he thought, I love rifles, perhaps too well.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 2