by Linda Byler
“So you had to put him down?”
“Of course.” He hadn’t meant for his words to come out quite so sharply.
“I guess now you think it was my fault.”
“Of course not. It was a blizzard. There was nothing you could have done differently.”
Hannah was silent for a while, standing at the window and watching the storm approach. Then suddenly, without turning she said, “You probably wish the palomino was still alive and I was dead.”
“Stop it, Hannah.” This was spoken sternly.
“Would it have mattered to you if I’d have died?” she asked, almost coyly, but not quite.
“Yes, Hannah, a great deal.”
“You would have headed back East so fast it wouldn’t be funny. You’d marry again. Have a nice life. One without all this sacrifice.”
Jerry stuck the awl back into the stirrup, got to his feet, and went to the window. He grasped Hannah’s elbows from behind, and turned her to face him.
“What are you saying? What is wrong with you?”
“Well, you would have. You know you’d go back East if you didn’t have to stay here on the homestead to keep up your end of the deal.”
He could not deny it. Yes, he would. But he didn’t say it.
Hannah twisted from his touch and flounced to the kitchen, banging pans on the countertop.
She baked a cake while he continued his work fixing the stirrup. Jerry couldn’t tell what was going on in her head, but a comfortable silence settled throughout the house like the pleasant aroma coming from the cook stove—a companionable calm that brought a hum of contentment to Jerry’s lips.
She had never before confided any of her feelings to him. And here, in one afternoon, she’d said all that—her mother, her fear, and the palomino. Suddenly, without thinking, he asked, “Why did you never name the palomino?”
“I did.”
“You never called him by any name.”
She lowered her face and blushed furiously. “That would mean I accepted your gift, and I never did. If I accepted the horse, I’d have to accept you.”
“I see.” Then, “You have accepted me.”
Clearly rattled, Hannah lifted a flaming face, her eyes dark, miserable pools of embarrassment.
“Well,” she said.
“Can’t you do better than that?” When he looked at Hannah’s face, his eyes traveled to her eyes, which now held a mysterious, warm light that threw his world off its steady axis.
“Someday.” She let her eyes hold his, with only a hint of sparkle in their translucent depths, followed by the merest hint of a soft smile.
It was only a hint of acceptance, but it was as much as he’d ever hoped to receive. He sank to the low stool where he had been working, his breathing ragged and uneven. Whoa. Steady there.
He left the house, carrying the repaired saddle, then simply sat on a pile of hay with any empty expression in his eyes. If he lived to be a hundred years old, he’d never figure her out.
Someday, she had said.
He wavered between sobs of frustration and wild shrieks of glee. Did that soft light in her eyes mean her fierce resolve was crumbling? Was there the slightest crack in her rigid armor of bitterness and self-will? Too soon to tell. Perhaps that was most of his fascination with Hannah. She was so complex, so hard to comprehend. You never knew which way her mood would take her. He wondered, though, if that night on the prairie had not dispersed some of the worst of her rebellion.
He shook his head to clear it, jumped up, and began to clean stalls as if he had only one afternoon to do it.
The mules’ gigantic ears pricked forward. Mollie yawned, stretched her mouth wide, bared her immense yellow teeth and then closed them with a clack. Then she bent her head and went back to nosing around for a forgotten wisp of hay.
True to Hannah’s words, each storm that drove in from the northwest seemed to be a test of endurance. She found herself pensive, brittle, pacing the kitchen when Jerry was not around, wishing he’d go outside and leave her alone when he was in the house. He always tried to ease her unhappiness with cheerful words which, she decided, was like running your fingernails down the blackboard at school.
She didn’t sew, wouldn’t read, and hated to write letters. She refused to get on horseback if there was an inch of snow on the ground. She argued endlessly about Black Angus versus longhorns, and was simply a burden both to herself and to Jerry.
She wanted to go to town. She wanted to visit the Texas folks but, no, she would not go. For one thing, she didn’t trust Bobby, the quarter horse. He was sorrel and chunky and cranky. She’d never seen a sorrel horse she liked. Even Nip and Tuck failed to pull her out of her slump.
Jerry told her the first thing they’d do in the spring would be make a trip to Pennsylvania to see her mother. Hannah averted her eyes and closed them off with lids like little feather-lined window curtains and didn’t say anything.
Jerry’s hair grew down to his shoulders, so Hannah told him one evening that if he didn’t cut his hair, she would.
“Go right ahead,” he answered, unconcerned. He didn’t think she would do it.
Armed with a towel, a scissors, and a brush and comb, Hannah approached Jerry. “Sit up straight,” she commanded.
He obeyed.
Instantly, the comb was dragged through his long dark hair, tearing at the snags until his nose burned and tears sprang to his eyes.
“Let me do that.” He reached for the brush and comb, but she pulled them away. He sat down and bent his head, resigned.
“Take it easy.”
Hannah said nothing, just proceeded to rake the comb through his long, tangled hair until he thought half the hair on his head had been pulled out by the roots. He gritted his teeth, bearing the pain.
She leveled her face with his, sighting along his floppy bangs, estimating, and then slowly drawing the blades of the scissors precisely where she wanted them.
Her confidence increased as the curtains of hair fell away from the scissors and she formed the traditional bowl cut of the Amish, leaving his hair longer over his ears than the bangs on his forehead.
Jerry thought he’d been shot when her scissors crunched into his ear, snapping a deep cut along the top where his skin was thickest. Making some sort of involuntary grimace and a whoosh of disgust, he leapt to his feet, a hand going to his ear that was already spurting blood.
Hannah moved back, a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with fright, too embarrassed to utter a word of justification for her actions. He went to the bathroom and held a cold washcloth to his throbbing ear, trying to staunch the spurting blood.
When he returned, the scissors, comb, and brush lay on the table, the towel in a heap on the floor, with no sign of Hannah. Her bedroom door was closed, and remained that way until the following morning.
At breakfast, she burned the toast. Not just burned it, but completely blackened it until it was as black as soot, smoking and shrunk to about half its size. She burned her fingers as she retrieved it from the oven and had to hold them beneath the gush of cold water from the faucet at the sink.
“I’ll make more toast,” Jerry offered.
Hannah didn’t look up from her cold water therapy. She didn’t let him know she’d heard him. She looked at his hair from the back and it looked all right. He must have finished cutting it by himself. There was a large, angry cut in his ear, about three-quarters of the way up. She decided he’d get over it, but wouldn’t talk to him all day, so he gave up trying and kept to himself.
When Jerry came in from the barn late that evening, Hannah was sitting in the oak rocking chair, perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap. As he hung up his coat, she turned to look at him. “I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t have anything to do,” she said.
Her words were spoken in short, hard jerks, as if she didn’t have enough breath to complete the sentence. Her face was thin, her eyes huge, a frightened look on her features, as if she had seen a ghost lurking
in the house while he was at the barn.
“Well, Hannah. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re pretty much snowed in. We have no telephone, no mail, no neighbors. You’ve lived here longer than I have, so surely you knew what the winters were like, didn’t you?”
“I did, but it was different when my family was here. And the Jenkinses would come.”
“We can ride over there.”
“No.” Her answer was decidedly emphatic and forceful. She would no longer venture out on horseback in the snow, saying it was foolish. If you were caught on the prairie once, you’d have no one to blame but yourself if it happened again. She had no desire to check on the cattle or watch for the herds of flowing antelope. Nothing.
“Hannah, you’ve changed.”
“I don’t want to die. It was close enough, that time.”
“I mean, your sense of adventure is gone.”
“It has nothing to do with adventure. It’s foolish, is all. I’ll ride again when spring comes, and not one day before that.”
That night, after Jerry had gone to bed, she sat alone on her rocking chair and thought of Abigail Jenkins’s diaries, those recordings of times like these, when the long, tedious days of winter drove her to questioning her own sanity, her fear of being pushed over the edge by the power of isolation. To be alone, day after day, in an endless expanse of white, while knowing one storm would eventually be followed by another, the time crawling by like snails.
Suddenly, without warning, Hannah began to cry. Her nose burned, her mouth wobbled, and quiet heaves of her chest ended in silent hiccoughs of distress. She let the tears and the overwhelming need to be sad rock her in its grip. She didn’t try to hold back or prevent it.
She wanted her mother. She was so homesick for the sight of her kindly face, the soft etchings that would eventually turn into wrinkles. She wanted to eat her mother’s food and listen to her words, knowing that she was there for her, no matter what. She wanted to put her fist into Manny’s arm, to see him grab the spot where she’d clubbed him good and proper, grimace and sway, bent double, and then come after her, yelling his revenge.
Sweet Mary, so innocent and loving. A child. And Eli. She groaned within herself and let the tears come, welling from her eyes in soft trickles down her cheeks.
They were her family. She’d spent every day, every week, every month and year of her life with them. How could she be expected to live without them?
Jerry had said she was changing. What did he know?
She just knew that, suddenly, in the dead of this North Dakota winter, the homestead was no longer quite as important. It had lost some of its shining luster like a tarnished silver teapot. The Klassermans were gone, with the sleek black cattle she had envied, planning to fashion the homestead after their example. Now here she was, her land containing these raw-boned, hairy old longhorns that she could as soon shoot as look at.
The homestead was not the real homestead without her family. There! She’d admitted to herself what she’d tried to stuff away without her head knowing what her heart had tried to reveal.
Perhaps if she loved Jerry the way other women loved their husbands, she would feel as if he was her family.
She didn’t know. All she did for Jerry was cut his ear, burn his toast, and kill, yes, kill his best palomino. That poor horse! So faithful, left on the prairie for the eagles, ravens, and wolves. She felt as if it should have been her left out there. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t absolutely sure of what she wanted, what she knew, or if she had ever known anything.
If only that incident had never happened. Lying out there on the prairie without knowing if she’d live or die had taken away all her confidence. It was like she’d been bucked off a horse and wasn’t quite able to summon the courage to get back on.
Well, she’d have to do better. She couldn’t sit in this house and weep around like a starving barn cat, that was one thing sure. Sniveling, whining, complaining. That simply was not her.
She dried her tears, blew her nose, and went to the window to look out at the stars, feeling the same sense of despair she had felt when she began to weep. She sat back in the rocking chair and began all over again.
Which is where Jerry found her. Unable to sleep and knowing that Hannah had not gone to bed, he got up, dressed in clean clothes, and walked softly on stocking feet to her side.
“Hannah.” The gentleness of his voice only brought another barrage of tears. He handed her a clean handkerchief. She honked long and loud, swiped viciously at her streaming eyes, and told him to go back to bed.
She sent an elbow into his side. “Go away.”
“Just tell me what’s wrong, Hannah. I’ll do anything, anything to make you stop crying. I’ve never known you to be like this.”
“Go away. Just go!”
“No.”
Almost she got away from him. She rose halfway, turned, but his hands caught her waist and brought her to him, close enough that she could smell the soap from his washing, the baking soda clean of his teeth.
“Tell me, Hannah.” His words were spoken against her hair, so soft and dark and silky, they seemed to be liquid.
Almost she stayed in his arms, breathing in the smell of him, putting her arms around him, and sinking against his solid strength.
Then her pride reared its face, the alpha force of her existence, and she extracted herself, but not without a sense of loss, unacknowledged even to herself.
“I’m all right. Go back to bed. It’s just been a long winter.”
A lesser man than Jerry might have lost his patience and tried desperately to reclaim the moment, thinking selfishly of his own desire. But he let her go, stepped back, and recognized what had occurred. For the space of a few heartbeats, she had been his.
He knew time and patience were on his side.
Hannah’s spirits were a constant worry now. She roamed the house, her eyes vacant with an unnamed hopelessness, a look that drove fear into him. He tried to draw her out by suggesting different things, but what could be accomplished on the prairie in the winter was limited.
He had heard of pioneer women who were unable to hold onto their sanity, some of them losing their reason and never getting it back, turning into mentally ill patients that had to be “put away,” that awful phrase that meant they were incarcerated in an institution, a mental hospital.
This was a whole new challenge, and a fearful one. Jerry knew she was trying to beat the dark moments, but she seemed unable to rise above the clouds of darkness that came down on her head like a heavy fog.
Then she refused to eat. For one whole day, she drank only bitter black tea and sat staring straight ahead, her dark eyes boring holes into the wall of the house, her arms hanging by her sides, the rocker squeaking as she rocked. Her eyes remained dry. She didn’t cook and she didn’t wash dishes. The floor remained unswept and the laundry piled up in the washhouse.
Jerry knew it was time to do something, anything. He had no clear path, but he had to make an effort. To ride through the snow would take a huge effort. The closest telephone was at the Klasserman ranch, now the Timothy Weber home.
He didn’t relish going there. The couple left him with an unsettled sense of questioning, a strange atmosphere he couldn’t define.
He had to get help for Hannah. He knelt at her side, without touching her. “Hannah.” Dull eyes shifted to his, then fell away.
“Listen, I’m going away. I’m riding to the Klasserman place to use the telephone, to get help for you. You need to see a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“Yes, you do. You’re going from bad to worse. You’re not feeling well at all. This is so unlike you, to sit like this. You’re not eating.”
“I will when I’m hungry.”
“You keep the fire going, Hannah. Please. I have to go.”
“Don’t leave me here alone.”
“Then you’ll have to come with me.”
She shook her head. “I
t’s too cold. Too far. A storm could come up.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here. We have no choice.”
Hannah stared into space and resumed her rocking. Her eyes clouded over with a startling veil of despondency.
Jerry rode hard, without sparing King. He struggled to keep the fear at bay, kept assuring himself that Hannah would be all right, that it was only the midwinter blues.
It was hard going, but they had ridden through plenty of drifts, been on the open range in snow up to King’s underside. As they neared the turnoff, Jerry sniffed, drew his eyebrows down in bewilderment. There was a definite smell, an odor hovering in the air, a smell like … burnt something. It smelled like wood smoke. The Webers must be burning their stoves very hot. He rode on, noticing the dense sheen in the atmosphere.
As he drew closer, up over the rise of land and around the curve where the clump of cottonwoods huddled together like ancient refugees, the smell became overpowering, a thick, cloying smell of burnt wood and …
He gasped! What had been the Klassermans’ house was a pile of charred timbers and twisted metal roofing, the snow around the dwelling melted away by the inferno that it must have been. All that remained were the black, twisted pieces of metal roofing, with smoke reaching to the endless sky, a pall of gray whisked away by the everlasting prairie winds.
The expensive automobiles stood blackened and charred in the front, a testimony of mystery, the truth of Timothy and Lila’s inability to escape.
King snorted with distaste. Jerry reined him in and dismounted with numb extremities, his mind unable to comprehend what his eyes were seeing before him.
CHAPTER 9
JERRY STOOD BEFORE THE REMAINS OF THE HOUSE, HIS HEAD BOWED, his hat in his hands, as he prayed for guidance and for the souls of the departed. He sensed his own mortality, the limits of his ability to change the horror of what had occurred, felt the power of an all-seeing, all-encompassing God who allowed calamities of this magnitude.
