Prudence

by David Treuer

  Gephardt wasn’t so easygoing with the stranger in the kitchen. He didn’t even look like he’d sit down with the man. The man didn’t look like he wanted Gephardt to sit down, either. Then he reached in his pocket and took out a pistol and pointed it at Gephardt.

  It couldn’t be bigger than a .22. They had one, too, and it was barely strong enough to put down the pigs. Sometimes even holding it against their skulls didn’t do it, and she had to shoot again.

  Gephardt raised his hands like a crook in a movie and sat down.

  Once the men faced each other across the table, the stranger spoke to Gephardt in German. Gephardt nodded slowly, his eyes on the stranger.

  “We are in America now. I speak English now.”

  The stranger said something and he grew angry, and Gephardt said something back to him in the language of his country.

  All the prisoners at the camp had spoken that language. During the summers she’d walked past the camp and seen them inside. One had even escaped, but he had drowned in the river. She’d seen them in the winter, too, when the Pines was closed, walking in long lines out into the tamarack swamps south of the village to cut timber. She saw them laying the corduroy and heard them singing while they worked. She didn’t know what they had done. She didn’t know if they were warriors or just men who got caught up in war. They were hard workers and they were cheerful, too. Nothing like the old men she knew when she was a girl—old men who had fought the Dakota and still carried scalps they’d taken and hidden from the Americans. Those old men had brought out those scalps at the drum dances back when her family still went to the dances. At the ceremonies they recounted how they’d come by the scalps—how they’d shot or stabbed or bludgeoned the enemy and then cut off his scalp. The belt man at the dance, Felix, was the most fearsome of them all. When he danced the belt, he held his war club high. Mary was just a girl and was made to sit off to the side. Her parents told her not to look at Felix, not to say anything to him. She stole looks out from under her scarf and thought she could see blood on his war club. He held it up in the air over his head when they checked the drum. It was still dirty with blood after all those years, though he certainly couldn’t have used that in the war. When she saw him at the Pines, working on the dock or painting the house or cutting the grass, he didn’t seem so fierce. Not as fierce as he did when he danced the belt or spoke for his songs. For each feather, he recounted a kill he had made in the Great War. It took a long time. There were seventeen feathers on the belt.

  Gephardt was nothing like that. He laughed and sang and he worked hard, and she was sure he’d never touched blood, even though he was one of the enemy. He had wanted to stay. He liked the woods, he said. He liked the cold. He liked her. It was possible, but no: Gephardt had not touched blood. Mary knew men who had, like Felix, and he was not like them. Not like them at all.

  The stranger said something to Gephardt and he shook his head. He shook his head and scowled and spoke. The stranger said something else. Gephardt raised his hands and held them up so the stranger could see. The stranger sat back and picked up the gun. He shook his head and then he looked at Mary.

  “He is not who he says he is,” said the stranger. He said it twice before Mary understood what he meant. “He is not who he says he is.”

  “He is my husband,” said Mary as best she could. “He is my husband in the church.”

  “He is a bad man,” said the stranger. “Bad things he has done.”

  “No,” said Gephardt. “No bad man. I make things. I fix things.”

  A bad man. Could it be? Could a bad man have chosen her? Was that all she could hope for? Had the other girls been right?

  The stranger ignored Gephardt. He kept looking at Mary. Finally he turned and spoke to Gephardt in their language again. He went on for a few minutes. While he spoke, Gephardt kept shaking his head, and once he hit the table with his fist.

  “We are in America now. All that is over. We speak English now.”

  “My English is good. Better than yours,” said the stranger. “But we don’t speak it. We speak so you can understand. I speak so you understand.”

  “I am married. Speak for she to understand.”

  The stranger looked at Mary.

  “I, too, was married. I have children. I tell you about your husband. What kind of man he is.”

  Mary narrowed her eyes. What kind of man he is? One who works. That’s who. All he does is work. He spends nothing. He works and they save. The farm that had broken the Norwegians who moved there first makes a life for them. The fields were bad. Rocky and sandy. But they made the fields work for them. Gephardt was good with his hands, and if there was a job, he did it. They had a pig and chickens. Gephardt has made a small mill and cuts lumber. The roof didn’t leak and the walls were packed with rock wool. The cellar dug into the side of the hill was braced and solid and cool and lined with canned pork and beans and berries. And he had, the year before, built a parcher and parched rice. Now it was only the old-timers or the very poorest who dug pits in their yards and danced their rice and ate their meager harvest full of chaff and hulls. The rest brought their rice to Gephardt, and he parched it and threshed it with his machines, and it was fine rice. He never burned it. And it never broke. Long, tan grains of rice—none of them popped. No hulls floated to the top of their pans when he finished it.

  And this man, this stranger. Who was he? Who was he to come here and tell her about her husband? Gephardt took care of her. He didn’t mind that when they walked through town he was a block, sometimes two, ahead of her, stomping through his errands at full speed while she lagged behind. He didn’t mind and he didn’t make jokes about her. He never teased her about her leg. He had even cut a block of wood and fashioned it just so and attached it to her shoe so her legs would be the same length. That’s who he was.

  And she worked, too. Their bedding was clean and ironed. Their pots shone. None of her canning popped in the summer. She knew Gephardt. She knew the man was better than anyone. No stranger could tell her what he was, she could see it in his life. He had chosen her when no one else would, and that meant a lot to a person—even to someone lame and marked for work and who would never bear a child.

  “I speak so she understands,” said the stranger. “He is not who he says he is. He is from my town, my city. You understand? We know each other.”

  Her hip hurt. She leaned against the sink and narrowed her eyes, trying to catch the words that flew by. They knew each other. They were from the same country. This much Mary caught, but the rest was lost. She squinted and stared at the stranger. It was the look that took over her face when she was trying to understand what people were saying. They thought she looked that way because she was mean. The kids joked that she was a witch. They were scared of her.

  Gephardt scowled. Shook his head. “I know him not. I know not this man here.” He gestured at the stranger across the table, his water untouched, his sweat drying on his brow.

  The stranger ignored him. He spoke to Mary but he looked at Gephardt while he spoke.

  “He is from my town, see? In the war we hide. I hide. My wife. My children. But this man”—he pointed at Gephardt—“he tells them where to find us. He tells them. Now I have no wife. I have no children.”

  Gephardt half stood. “Nein, nein. nein. No, no! I say nothing. I don’t know you. I never see you.”

  “Your name is Gephardt Miller.”

  “Yes. No. I am not that man.” He sat down. His face was crunched and concerned. “I am not that man.”

  Mary couldn’t pronounce his name. Miller. Her name now, too. But she didn’t need to. She was thirty-five years old. She’d lived with her parents until she was twenty-five and then her aunt after that. All that time—all those long years—she’d lived in shacks covered in tar paper, under roofs covered only in tar paper. She’d endured the damp summers and dry, cold winters as everyone did. She�
�d never felt the thrill of milled lumber under her feet except at the store, church, or post office. It never occurred to her that it was ridiculous to live in a shack with dirt floors, and to sweep them every day. Cleaning dirt. That had been her life until Gephardt, sweeping dirt on dirt. But then Gephardt had come up to her in the store and talked to her, or tried to. She bowed her head. She couldn’t understand anything he said. She looked at her hands. But Gephardt smiled and gestured and smiled some more. He took the rice sack full of groceries from her hands and helped her carry the flour and the pound of nails back to her family’s sugar bush. Her parents offered him tea. He held the tin cup on his lap and smiled. He came back to the sugar bush until they closed it down. He found her through the spring and summer—at fish camp and picking berries. Always her parents offered him tea. Always he accepted. Sometimes he brought them gifts. Yards of cotton twill. A pound of salt. A roll of tar paper. They were married in the fall and moved into Gephardt’s cabin southwest of the village, just off the highway. She was happy. She took great pleasure in sweeping the wood floors of their cabin. She scooted the dirt into a pan and threw the dust and hair and wood chips inside the cookstove, where they crackled away into nothing. No more sweeping the dirt off a dirt floor. And so it didn’t matter that she couldn’t say his last name, her own last name, the l’s a sound she couldn’t get her mouth around. It didn’t matter because she had proved them all wrong. She was the one with insulation in her walls. She was the one with a husband she didn’t have to pull off the road because he fell down drunk. A husband who never set foot in the Wigwam. He worked hard and he took care of her. And what could they say about that?

  “Your husband’s name is Gephardt Miller and he is from my city. Before the war. He was there and he was an engineer. He makes things.”

  It made no sense. The stranger was trying to get her to see something. But there was nothing to see. She saw everything already. Everything she needed to know. Before the war. Well, that was a long time ago. Six years? Ten? Beyond that phrase, Mary had understood nothing the stranger said. Gephardt had told her about the war—how he was in a ship, not a regular one. Not a boat like they had on the big lake. He had been in a ship that went underwater. A submarine. He’d tried to explain it to her but she’d waved away the explanation. White people were always inventing new ways of killing one another. But there were only a few ways, really: burn, drown, cut, shoot, or hit.

  The gun still sat on the table, a dull thing. More like a toy. And could this stranger even use it? It was hard to tell with white people. At the drum dance, when Felix danced his position and spoke, he was clearly a great man, a great warrior. He spoke for each feather on the belt—how he had clubbed three men to death with his rifle, had shot nine, and had stabbed five with his bayonet, all before he turned twenty. When he danced she averted her eyes and looked only at his feet, delicately stamping on the floorboards. With him, it was easy to believe he had done those things, had touched blood, because delicate as his steps were, even dainty, she felt a chill come over her whenever he walked by. But this stranger at their table, in his black suit, with the sweat cooling on his face and the empty soda bottle he must have bought at the Wigwam? It was hard to imagine he could do anything at all to them, not to them and everything they had built together.

  Gephardt shook his head again. “I am not that man. I am not him. I know him. He is dead. Er ist tot.”

  “You have his name.”

  “I take his name. Yes, I take it. I am not him. I am from Lübeck. I am a welder then. Jetzt. I join metal. The man you seek. He is dead. He drown in the river.”

  The stranger looked at Gephardt steadily. Mary could see he wasn’t sure what to believe.

  “Look!” said Gephardt and he held up his hands—pocked with scars from working with iron and steel, strong, gripping hands. He wasn’t handsome. His legs were bowed, and though his back was broad, one shoulder dipped lower than the other and the muscles of his neck were bunched. In the village they called him “the crab.” He couldn’t understand them anyway. It didn’t matter. They needed him, which was why they said such mean things. “No engineer. He is dead. That one drowned. I take only his name.”

  What could he mean? Whatever the stranger wanted, Gephardt couldn’t give it to him. That was clear to Mary. It should be clear to the stranger. He was looking for a man, but Gephardt wasn’t him, so he should just leave. He should leave and leave them alone.

  “You try to trick me.”

  “I am no Göttingener. I am not from there. Gephardt Miller. Yes, he is from there. I am not that man. I am Herman Jünger. I am from Lübeck. That man, he tries to escape. They have a big search but no one finds him. He disappears from them and then they find his body on shore. Half in the water, rotting away. That is Gephardt Miller. I take only his name.”

  “You are a Nazi!”

  “Kein Nazi. Nein, nein. Kein Nazi. Politics I don’t care. War I don’t care. Fighting I don’t care. I wanted work. I find work, welding work, on the U-boat. I find work there welding. The Nazis never want me and I never want them.”

  Mary understood that word. Nazi. She’d heard it all during the war years—Nazi, German, Kraut—the men who left and the few who came back used these words. They must all mean the same thing. They must just mean the enemy. And who cared about that, anyway? When the fighting was over, it was over. When the blood price had been paid, it was all over. Her grandfather spoke of fighting the Nadisoog. They would stop fighting and be brothers. Gii-paabiindigaadiwag owiigiwaamiwaang gaa-ishkwaa-miigaadiwaad.

  “It doesn’t matter. You helped them. You helped them kill my family.”

  “I help no one kill.”

  “You lie.” The man hit the table and the gun jumped. The water sloshed in the jar.

  “I don’t kill anyone for purpose.” Gephardt looked meaningfully at Mary. And then down at the table.

  “You lie. Now is the time for truth,” said the man.

  “I kill one man,” said Gephardt mournfully. “I kill him before the war, you see. I kill him in Lübeck. It was accident.”

  That couldn’t be true. Could it be? Mary crossed her arms. Her husband was not the man he’d said he was. And he had blood on his hands that no one had washed off. It was still there on his hands. Gephardt turned to Mary.

  “I kill a man in a fight. I hit him too hard. Here”—he pushed both hands into the right side of his rib cage—“I hit him here,” he explained to Mary and then to the stranger. “It was an accident.”

  “Liar!”

  “It is true. I tell the truth. I tell the truth to you.”

  “Damn liar!”

  “This is why I take his name. I take his name when they want to send us back to Germany. They put me back in prison. I don’t go back to prison. I love America. I love freedom. My wife”—he gestured at Mary—“she does what I say. I make this house. I have life.”

  “You lie. You helped them. I don’t care you were in prison. I don’t care you join the U-boat from prison. I don’t care! You helped them. So you are not Gephardt.” The stranger sat lower in his chair. “So you are not him. You still must pay.”

  The stranger closed his eyes and reached out and took the pistol in his right hand and fired. Gephardt flinched and grabbed his left forearm. He looked in surprise at the small hole that opened up in the muscle.

  “You’ve hit me. I am shot!” he said in surprise.

  “I shoot again,” said the stranger.

  He aimed at Gephardt’s face and shot once more. Gephardt’s head snapped back.

  But then once, twice, Mary hit the stranger in the head with the blunt side of the kindling ax. His chair tipped and he fell on the floor. She tried to hit him again, but he fell against the wall and his chair blocked the way.

  Gephardt bent low over the table, his face in his hands. Blood dripped between his fingers and pooled on the oilcloth.

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nbsp; Mary set down the ax and lifted Gephardt’s head in her hands. Satisfied, she lowered herself back down to the table and then took his left arm in her hands and looked at it this way and that before setting that down, too. He moaned through clenched teeth but didn’t say anything. Mary righted the stranger’s chair. Gephardt stayed quiet while Mary dragged the stranger’s body away from the table into the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “Dead?” asked Gephardt through his hands. His voice sounded strange. Thick.

  “Not dead,” she said. A pump knot had risen on the back of the stranger’s head. He jerked a little, but that was all.