Charity

by Paulette Callen

  “No. That’s right.” Lena’s hands began their nervous search once more. “Well, who do you think, Julia?”

  Julia just shook her head and her eyes filled with tears once more.

  “Well, I don’t know either,” said Lena kindly. She felt sorry for Julia. Pa Kaiser had been good to her in his way. She had taken in sewing over the years, but he had helped her out financially from time to time and paid her a little for some bookkeeping while he was still in the well business. Pa had been generous that way.

  Julia was dabbing her eyes. “We’ll all miss him, that’s for sure.”

  “Yes, that’s for sure,” said Lena. She suddenly saw Pa as he had been the day of her wedding. He was smiling. It was so unusual that she mentioned it to Will at the time. “Your dad seems happy,” she said.

  Will grinned and nodded. “Yeah, he thinks I did pretty good marrying you.”

  “Well, he’s right. You did,” Lena retorted smugly.

  Later, as Pa was leaving the reception, he slipped a few bills into her hand and murmured awkwardly, “Get yourself something nice now.”

  It was hard to believe he was gone.

  Lena finished the cup of coffee, kissed Julia on the cheek, and left her to the comfort of her cat. As she walked slowly home, she wondered over Julia and Gertrude. No two sisters could be more different. All the qualities that usually got mixed up in people, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, had been separated; all that was heavy and dark had fallen on Gertrude, and all that was delicate and light had gone into Julia. There was something of the fragile aristocrat about Julia, even though she’d grown plump around the middle over the years, and nothing, Lena thought with distaste, but the thick peasant about Gertrude. The resemblance between them was apparent only in the squareness of their faces and the color of their eyes—a rare cloudy shade of hazel. But with the color, the resemblance ended. The expression in Gertrude’s eyes alternated between the dullness of a fish and a bovine fierceness like that of a placid cow roused to defend her calf. In Julia’s eyes there flickered a girlishness that was at times becoming, even charming, and at other times disconcerting, emanating as it did from a face creased with the myriad fine lines of old age. Lena wondered at those times, where had she been, this old lady, while her body aged, not to have matured at the same rate on the inside. But these were fleeting impressions and Lena did not dwell on them except to attribute Julia’s manner to the fact of her spinsterhood and never having children of her own.

  Lena shuddered. She was not a spinster, but she was thirty-four and still childless. There was no point to a life without children. Now that she was getting older, she felt it more painfully than ever. Anyway, Lena would never be girlish again. She already felt old as the hills.

  Lena entered her own house gratefully. It wasn’t much, this house, but she had taken pains to make it comfortable and pretty, sewing curtains for every window and covers for the old furniture. She kept the wood floors shining the way her mother had taught her: cold water and vinegar. Nothing else. Scrub them with that every week—the wood bleached out pale and glowing. She never had to wax them. She couldn’t afford wax anyway.

  Lena lit her stove, put on the coffee pot, then went down to the cellar for a jar of her sweet rhubarb sauce, which, besides the bread and cookies, was all she had left in the house to eat. There was still plenty of coffee and sugar, thank the Lord, but in a few days she did not know what she was going to do. There was no money. Without Will working there would be no money.

  She took down a bowl, and as she unscrewed the cap on the jar of sauce, the jar slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. Half the contents spilled out. She grabbed a rag, sopped it in the bucket of water in the sink, wrung it out and got down on her hands and knees to wipe up the pink, sweet mess. She was on her hands and knees again, on all the floors she had cleaned and scrubbed since she was old enough to tote a bucket of water—first for her mother and grandmother, then for all the people she’d been hired out to for pennies a week and a place to stay—up to her elbows in water, scalding hot or freezing cold, depending on the job to be done and the whim of the lady of the house. Lena was a young woman and her hands were ugly from work. But this, at least, was her floor.

  She began to cry. This floor was the reason she put up with Will Kaiser—this floor and the lace curtains in the bedroom, the cotton curtains in her kitchen. The wood cabinet that held her dishes and baking things and still supported the neat row of loaves was her cabinet, made simply, beautifully and without a nail, by Will’s own hands when he was still more in love with her than with whiskey. This little house, the garden outside, the clotheslines that stretched across the yard—these things were hers, and without Will she would lose them and have to go back to working for other people, living in other people’s houses, caring for other people’s children, having nothing of her own. She couldn’t go back to washing other people’s dirty clothes, cooking their moist cakes and puddings that needed hours of steaming and molding just so, while she, nor anyone she cared a snap about, ever got to eat them.

  No, Will was not perfect. But life was infinitely better with him than without him. And no one could take the first ten years of her marriage from her. Unlike some drinking men, he never raised a hand to her. And him sitting in jail was no justice—not for him, who’d done no killing, whose only crime perhaps was in being too drunk to prevent one—and not for her. For, without Will, she could keep nothing she loved and had nothing to look forward to. Without him, there would never be a child. She began sobbing into the rhubarb-soaked rag.

  She was sobbing loudly, with abandon, when a shadow fell across the kitchen. She looked up. Framed in the doorway was a tall, slender woman wearing a threadbare black skirt and equally worn white blouse. The high color in her face graced wide-set gray eyes that shone very dark behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Lena choked and sobbed harder into the rag she held in her fist. “Oh, Gustie!”

  The ladies of the Ruth and Esther Circle met every other Sunday, the members taking turns offering their homes as meeting place. Lena enjoyed the Circle—especially when she could play hostess—except for one Sunday afternoon when the Bible reading was done, the planning completed for next Sunday’s luncheon after the baptismal service for Marvin and Kate Gullickson’s first baby, and the conversation over coffee and sugar cookies turned to gossip about Augusta Roemer. A few clicked their tongues and shook their heads and said it was such a shame. Gustie really needed a man to take care of her. And why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t she pay any attention to Nemil Glasrud? Sure, Nemil wasn’t going to win any beauty prizes, but then neither was Augusta, and he was a good worker and had had his eye, however shyly, upon her ever since she came to Charity—now what was it—two or three years ago? And never once had she even given him the time of day. A woman in Gustie’s predicament and not getting any younger after all, they clucked reasonably, could not afford to treat a man like an old shirt.

  Lena, who on principle might have agreed, having expressed similar sentiments herself about other women, bristled when such sentiments were tossed about over Gustie. With a glare at her sister-in-law Nyla that said unmistakably You better not say anything or I will tell a few things I know about you, too, she said, “And what does Gustie need a man for? So she can have twice as many clothes to wash, and clothes that are twice as dirty to boot? So she has three times the cooking, and somebody she has to pick up after all the time? And wait up for? She’s happy the way she is, and maybe all of you aren’t so blissful in your married nests as you’d have us believe either, and are just jealous of her freedom. It’s none of anybody’s business whether she has a man or not. The idea!” Lena was hell-bent. “And, as for Nemil Glasrud, he’s as homely as a fence and smells like his barn, and I didn’t see any of you...” she cast her fury upon the younger, newly married women in the room, “taking up with him, and you were all given the eye by him at on
e time or another.”

  Lena’s back was up, but not everyone took the warning to quietly finish their coffee and go home. Harriet Kranhold, always needing the final word, tilted her head so that her double chins trebled as they flopped over her collar. Stirring another spoon of sugar into her already syrupy brew, she grunted, “Hmph. She goes off...somebody said she goes to Argus for books, supplies, whatnot, but she’s gone two, three days, sometimes longer. Where can she afford to stay in Argus? And on a Sunday? There’s no books or supplies to be bought on a Sunday. She just trots off as she pleases to nobody knows where. It doesn’t look right. Not at all, I don’t think.” After a significant pause, she looked up and continued in a more confidential tone but still audible to all present, “And Axel told me that Harold Schenecker said he saw her a couple of times in her wagon going east. East, mind you. Argus is west.” She paused for effect. “She’d have a long trip going to Argus that way.” A light giggle rippled around the room. Harriet nodded and smiled, stirred and stirred.

  Lena often wondered where Gustie went to but had not felt it her business to ask.

  Mathilda Langager, whose head bobbed about on her scrawny neck as if she were a goose trying to avoid the hatchet, opened her mouth. Lena snapped, “What do you care where she goes? She’s always in that cold, cramped school house come a Monday morning of a school day, isn’t she? And if it weren’t for her, that boy of yours, Mathilda,” Lena pointed her finger at Mathilda, “wouldn’t even be able to scrawl his name, let alone read a book or add two bags of feed in a wagon to two lying on the ground and know he had a pile of four.”

  This was true, of course, and everybody knew it. Arthur Langager was sixteen years old before he could write his name. Gustie had worked with the boy, and he could now even read a few lines from the Bible and do simple sums. Mathilda reddened, and her mouth puckered into an unattractive pout.

  Lena’s back was more than up—she had been ready to throw the whole pesky lot of them out of her house. So they finished their coffee, hastily nibbled the last crumb of the last cookie, and, sucking sugar crystals off their fingers, went their separate ways at three o’clock with variously expressed, though mostly all smug excuses that they had to “be getting home to the family to start supper.” Gustie was not present; the only one who was stung was Lena, for there were those who knew very well that after twelve years of marriage, her childlessness was as big a wound as Will’s drinking. But Lena kept her back straight and her chin out and willed a gleam to her eye that defied anyone to ever say a direct word to her face about any of it. No one ever did.

  And now that Will was in jail, maybe for keeps this time, people did not know quite what to do. In the past, Lena had refused comfort or criticism, and now that she might need some of the former, even the most well-meaning in Charity were hesitant to offer it.

  Gustie, without thinking, confronted by the white paper crumpled in her door, read Lena’s message, jumped back into her wagon, turned Biddie around, and headed for the south of town to Lena’s house.

  She found Lena on the floor surrounded by a pink sticky mess and choking with sobs. Gustie lifted her gently by the shoulders, seated her at the table, and cleaned the floor. When the coffee was poured, she sat across the table from Lena, who was still snuffling, making little moaning sounds, and blowing her nose. Gustie had not failed to notice as she was cleaning things up that the cupboards were all but bare.

  “What’s happened?” Gustie coaxed when Lena had exhausted her sniffling.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Your note just said ‘come see me.’ I find you on the floor making a big fuss over some rhubarb sauce.”

  Lena laughed and choked into her dish towel. “Oh, Gustie, you always make me laugh.” She wiped her eyes, blew her nose again, and said, “It’s Will.”

  It usually is, Gustie thought dourly. But even Gustie was surprised when Lena poured out a story far more serious than his usual drunken episodes.

  “Dennis says he’s got to hold Will for the circuit judge. I told him, I says, ‘You know Will could never do anything as bad as this,’ and he says it makes no difference. Will is the only suspect, and he’s got to hold him.” Lena blew her nose fiercely into the dishtowel. As her anger got the better of her grief and fear, she pummeled the air with the wadded up towel. “And then I went to see Ma Kaiser. She’s just sitting there in that house rocking and staring off. She’s worthless. And thinks Will done it. And Julia...”

  “Yes, what does Julia think?”

  “Julia doesn’t think Will did it, I don’t believe, but she’s pretty tore up over Pa, so she wasn’t saying too much. Pa did a lot for her you know, one way and another. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been sitting here so all alone, and I didn’t know what to do. Where were you?” Lena began to cry again.

  Gustie reached across the table and took Lena’s hand. “I’m sorry, Lena. I’m here now.”

  “Oh, fiddlesticks. You can be anywhere you want. I’m not like some other people around here who have to know everybody’s business. I just...no one else around here is any good.”

  Lena was looking out the window in some embarrassment and didn’t notice Gustie’s smile.

  “Well, we’ll think of something.” There was a short silence between them as Gustie took up the vigil out of the window, and Lena searched for inspiration in her coffee cup.

  Gustie asked, “When is the judge due?”

  Lena shrugged. “Two weeks, I guess. Maybe more.”

  “We have a little time. Let’s rest, and we can think clearly in the morning. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Oh, Gustie, I’m so glad you’re back.” Lena took in her friend through watery eyes. “You’re a brick, Gus.”

  Gustie, often mystified by Lena’s expressions, assumed brick was good.

  “Let’s get some food into you. I’ll bet you’ve had nothing but coffee all day.” She referred to the uncut loaves. Gustie poured another cup of coffee for each of them, dished up what little was left of the rhubarb sauce, and sliced two healthy portions of bread. Nobody baked like Lena. Since there was no butter or sour cream, they dipped their bread in the coffee. Lena sprinkled hers with sugar.

  “Now,” said Gustie, “you’ll come back with me. We’ll pick up a few things at O’Grady’s and this evening have ourselves a good supper. I’m hungry myself. Bring your sweater. It’s going to get cold.” Lena did not move. “Let’s get out of here. You can’t sit here by yourself another day.”

  “I want to finish my coffee first,” Lena whined.

  “All right.” Gustie rinsed her cup and bowl and set them to dry on the sideboard. “Has anybody notified Ella and Ragna?”

  Lena told her of her decision not to.

  “How about Tori?”

  “No. He usually comes in Saturday nights and stays over. I don’t really expect him before that.” Lena still had not moved from the table. She suddenly brightened. “But you never know. He might come. I should be here if he does.”

  “Do you want to go to O’Grady’s with me?” Gustie was getting exasperated.

  Lena still did not move from her chair. She took a sip from a coffee cup that Gustie knew was empty. “I don’t feel like it, really. I just don’t feel like going to O’Grady’s just now.”

  Gustie rested the tip of her finger on her lower lip and considered. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to miss Tori if he came by. I need some things. I’ve been gone a long time.” Gustie took herself briskly to the door. “How about...if I just go and get what I need and come back for you. If Tori isn’t here by then, we’ll leave him a note.”

  “Well, that sounds all right.”

  The man stepping down from the 4:30 train out of St. Paul was obviously not a homesteader. Nor was he a traveling salesman, teacher, or preacher. His gray suit was too finely tailored, his matching ha
t and gloves too expensive, his skin too pale, his hands too soft. He was thin, of medium height with sparse sandy hair, and the mien of one accustomed to taking and giving orders, and, having chafed under the taking, now gloats in the giving. The stranger checked into the Koenig Hotel and after inspecting his room, and locking his luggage securely therein, asked for directions to the sheriff’s office.

  Dennis Sully was alone, fingering a tin cup of tepid coffee and pondering the fact that he had nothing further to offer the circuit judge in the way of evidence for or against Will Kaiser in the murder of Frederick Kaiser, Sr.

  Dennis never expected to do much as sheriff. He had no inflated ideas about his position as a lawman. He simply wanted a quiet steady life. In Charity, he got it. Mostly, he broke up occasional brawls between the heavy drinking Germans and Poles, and between Indians and whites—again, only the drinkers of either community ever fought—and picked up Will Kaiser three or four times a year and locked him up for a few hours or hauled him home depending on his condition. Dennis suspected that the city council had hired him more to keep up appearances as the county seat than because they had any real need for a sheriff.

  Dennis was not pleased, therefore, to be investigating a murder. Not that he was squeamish. As a young cowboy in Missouri and Nebraska, he had seen a few gunfights. He had fired his own pistol a time or two, though he had never killed anybody and never meant to. Dennis was a crack shot if he had to be. In his younger days he could, on a galloping horse, bring down a deer with one bullet. He never left a duck or goose flapping and gasping for bloody breath. If he couldn’t kill with the first shot, he didn’t fire. And he had seen some heated skirmishes with Indians in their last efforts to save their place on the land. Now, the cattle were fenced in and the cowboys mostly out to pasture, the game was thin, the Indians had lost, and Dennis’ pistol lay in his desk drawer.