The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  Lathias did not, as a rule, care much what Leo Krauss thought or said. But with her sitting there, leaning toward him, while the dust motes turned slow spirals in the air between, he wanted to know: What, what did Leo tell you? About the accident? Is that what he said? Feeling that old creeping horror and despair, that rush of guilt like the dark thundering of a hundred hooves. He almost did ask her, but something stopped him: the implication of her words, the intimacy. Not what she knew, but the fact of her knowing, the way it brought her into his life without bringing him into hers.

  He straightened and wiped a hand across his mouth and looked at her, was about to speak, when she said, so quietly, “I’ll tell you.” Her eyes glittering with an emotion Lathias could not identify. “A halfbreed. That’s what he said. A dirty good-for-nothing halfbreed.”

  Something in Lathias relaxed, then. Or not relaxed, but slowed, that pounding against the earth. Slowed, and sickened. It was not what he had thought. Not the accident at all. Halfbreed. Dirty. Good-for-nothing. The same old words he’d heard all his life, from his own mother even. Now from her. On her lips. And he thought, fiercely, Her, too. Her. Everyone. Always. Thinking, What does it matter, anyway? What could it? But he knew in his heart this, too, was a lie.

  Elisabeth leaned forward on the rail. “Is it true?” she said.

  And perhaps without meaning to, perhaps out of habit, he said, as he did with the boy, “Does it matter?”

  Their voices so thick and quiet it was as if they had not spoken at all, only watched each other through the lazy turn of chaff, the moment drawing itself out until it seemed that one or the other of them surely must do something, must speak, though that was not possible, either.

  When they heard the boy climbing heavily across the fence and down into the dirt of the corral outside the barn doors, Lathias turned quickly away and bent and dipped the bucket full and hoisted it up, and then the boy called, “Aren’t you yet done?”

  But Lathias did not reply, only stood with his bucket and watched as Elisabeth jumped down soundlessly from the rail upon which she sat and walked out of the barn doors, disappearing into a flare of light in the yard.

  ——

  The remainder of that long dry summer passed in the mute intimacy of routine, the invariance of their days. The boy did not notice that something subtle had changed between them, or did not seem to notice. And to each other, Lathias and Elisabeth spoke little. She no longer waited for him there in the barn and he told himself that he did not notice her absence. Most afternoons they rode down to the river, the same way always, wordless, single file, as if they were strangers, and sometimes with fishing poles and buckets of bruised worms the boy had plucked from the manure pile. Their catches never amounted to much: a few muddy pickerel and pike, never the ancient, monstrous sturgeon which on rare occasions they glimpsed arching its dark spine from the water and which Lathias knew the boy secretly angled for (and secretly feared), though of course he never said as much. Most often they went to the same spot beneath the Bull’s Forehead, where the banks were lined thickly with willow brush beneath which they could find some small shade, and privacy, too, on those occasions when others came to the river.

  It was no real concern of theirs, those few who came to the river to fish or swim or picnic, as they were almost always farther downstream from the Bull’s Forehead, down where the near bank of the river levelled into a broad sandbar and the willow brush gave way to a few big, parched cottonwoods drooping their dusty branches out over the brown water. Someone had hung a rope swing there, from one of the larger branches, many years ago—three decades almost, according to those who claimed to remember—but as far as anyone knew, no one used it, not since that first day it was strung up and Ollie Werner gave the inaugural jump to cheers and whistles, whooping as he sailed out over the water, blowing an exaggerated kiss to his pregnant young wife, who shook her head and frowned in mock displeasure and said, “Ach, but he’s a child himself,” before he plunged, grinning, beneath the murky surface and never reappeared. The last anyone ever saw of him, a briefly swirling brown eddy that uncoiled itself and flowed on, tranquil and inexorably to the east.

  Since then the rope had hung lifeless, ghostly as a noose, though of course no one would take it down; would not tempt God and Fate.

  For a few years afterwards the picnics stopped, from reasons of respect or superstition, no one was certain. But after the war, when the single tragedy of Ollie Werner had been put into grim perspective, people began to return again to the open, sandy spot on the river and Ollie Werner became little more than a folk tale, a rumour, Had it happened even? And by now well accustomed to the necessity of selective forgetting, everyone laughed and joked through the deafening hum of grasshoppers up the draw, and drank their rich, dark chokecherry wine (the air sweet with it, mingled with the musk of sagebrush and yarrow and wolf willow baking in the sun, until no one could tell any longer whether their heads buzzed pleasantly with the wine or with the hot perfumed air), and sat with their sleeves and their pantlegs rolled up and their summer dresses hiked past their knees in the shade of the cottonwoods shushing dryly and throwing beams of sunlight from their leaves like daggers, or floated and splashed about in the wide brown river, tepid as bathwater (the children taunting each other farther and farther out, to where the currents swirled crazily, Be careful Ollie doesn’t get you, he’s down there, you know, until an alert parent roared them onto the bank, where they sat shivering in the relentless sun, elbowing and jostling each other briskly and pretending disdain to hide their relief).

  On picnic days, the boy often stood slightly downriver, staring shamelessly, and Lathias would try to distract, coax him away. Elisabeth, on the other hand, pretended she could neither see nor hear anything, anyone, though sometimes Lathias saw her flinch and glance up when the girls squealed and flapped and shrieked (not in alarm or distress but in giddy encouragement, the sound like the incomprehensible, moon-addled screechings of pheasant hens in autumn). But she was always quick to recover and carry on poking her stick into the mud, steadily, the hot flush of her cheeks beneath her blowing hair the only thing to betray her.

  ——

  Then it was almost September, and the land had grown golden, crunched dryly beneath their boots, and the days were shorter and Lathias became busy with the late harvest, leaving the house before sunup, returning at dusk, or sometimes after, when he would wash hastily by that long sliver of light at the western horizon, rubbing his hands and face and neck under the pump in the yard, half asleep before he had even climbed the ladder to the loft, awake again before he was aware he had slept, dreaming what he saw during waking hours—the endless swaths, the hot golden rush of grain, the suffocating, impermeable bell of sky burned white—until one day simply bled into the next and the moon rose hugely each night, red and swollen with the dust of the fields and the days red also and everything so hot and dry that fires began to flare up at the Sand Hills, where the brush was thickest, but without any recognizable cause, it seemed, as if by their own volition, and the men would ride watch-parties out though they could hardly be spared from the fields. But they took their shifts, all of them except for Leo Krauss, though by now no one had any expectations of him, who lived on their periphery, out there on the edge of the Hills. Some even suspected Leo was the cause of the fires.

  “Well, and what for? What sense is there in that?” some said.

  “God, when has sense ever had anything to do with a Krauss?”

  And others: “Ach, leave him alone already.”

  “That’s right, it couldn’t have been Leo. Striking a match, that’s too much work.”

  But as no one had any proof either for or against him and even those who saw no reason to blame him could not deny that he was capable of anything, they were left to their speculations, and so the blame—or at the very least, the suspicion—fell upon Leo by default and natural inclination. The rest all took their watch shifts, even Lathias, in spite of his long unease with t
he Hills, his grandmother’s stories of the dead who walked there and his own almost-belief that it was the place where the Horseman rode in those long dark hours when the rest of the land slept. But how could he refuse? What could he say, I will not go out there after sunset, those hills are haunted, the place where the dead walk? No, he took his shift, riding out after a day in the field, at dusk, going as close to the Hills as he dared, the hair on the back of his neck rippled up like hackles on a dog and his hands so tense on the reins, his mare yanked her head and laid her ears flat and stepped erratically in the gathering dark. And so he spoke softly to the horse, “Easy now, easy, it’s nothing,” not to calm her, but to calm himself, to hear a human voice, his voice, puny under that huge, bruised sky, starless and scorched; the briefly windless, Godless hills rising before him, all darkened and golden and somehow alive, too, eerie and alive, more than alive, in that way that only the dead can appear to be. His own voice dead, too, so that, after a moment of talking, he realized it was better, even, to be silent.

  It was then, in the dusk and unease of his own silence, that he heard, felt, the rattling of the Horseman out on the plains at his back, the eerie clacking of bones, and he reined in the agitated mare and sat prickling in the saddle.

  That was when he saw her, or rather, saw what he at first thought, hoped, was a deer, stepping from the leafless branches of a willow, ghostly and profound. The mare lifted her head and stamped. Of course, it was Elisabeth, could only be her. It was somehow no surprise either that she should be out there, after dark, alone in the Hills. It was no surprise at all. And he knew, too, that she had seen him, had, in fact, been watching him, had perhaps even heard him talking stupidly to his horse. Had, perhaps, laughed at him, at the fear in his voice. He saw her slip out from the willow and run through the darkness, toward Leo’s place, and he stopped himself—ashamed that he had even thought it—from calling out to her.

  ELEVEN

  October came and Lathias had more time to spend with them again, with the boy and Elisabeth. On sunny afternoons they would still ride down to the river, the valley stretching out before them, the leaves mostly gone from the scrub and willow and cottonwoods, the gullies and draws deeper, colder, with the lengthened shadows, the quick coming of November; the long grasses beneath their boots blackened with night frosts, the silence broken only by the occasional calls of wild geese flying in eerie formation across the sky stretching impossibly blue above them. At home, the grain was in the bins, the vegetables from the garden stored and waiting in the root cellar, the jars of preserves arranged in precise rows, the animals slaughtered, bled, skinned and ground into richly spiced meats and hung to cure, and everything quietened. Even the fires out at the Sand Hills had stopped. Everyone said, “See, what did I say? It was too much work for him after all,” and, “Yah, that’s right, Leo needs a rest now, too,” and Lathias listened, and nodded and said nothing.

  ——

  All Hallows’ Eve arrived at Schoffs’ the way it always did: without furtive rides after midnight across dark fields to the neighbours’ to release livestock from pens or hoist farm equipment onto the roofs of barns or, if someone was at home, to knock and rattle and howl until finally invited in and given coffee or more often a warm drink of whisky in the light of the kerosene lantern and some bread and sausage and apple kuchen and maybe a hand or two of cards at the kitchen table before riding home considerably warmed to find your own chickens squawking disconsolately from the roof of your house.

  At Schoffs’, there were no pranks played: neither by them, nor to them. Only Stolanus and Helen and Lathias and the boy sitting around the table after supper, when the evening chores were done, and Helen offering to roast apples but no one but the boy wanting any, and nothing to say until Stolanus boomed, as he always did, “Well, and I hope we have no tricksters tonight, eh? Who knows but we’ll find the cow in the outhouse tomorrow.”

  And no one either answering or looking at him, and even Stolanus not believing it himself.

  Lathias excused himself, as he always did, and wished them good night, and the boy sat watching him go.

  ——

  Halfway across the yard, Lathias knew, without seeing, that she was there.

  “What are you doing?” he said into the darkness, hoping he was not wrong, but then again, who would hear if he was?

  “Nothing,” came the answer from beside the barn, and then he could see her, that white dress filled and glowing with moonlight.

  “You should have put a coat on,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I can see you from here.”

  “I wasn’t hiding.”

  He stood in the middle of the yard, neither approaching her nor veering away toward the barn doors. After a while she stepped a bit closer. He could see, then, that she had something wrapped around her shoulders, a blanket or a shawl.

  “Anyway,” she said, “it’s not cold.”

  “Cold enough,” he said, but she made no reply. “What are you doing?” he said again.

  “Playing pranks,” she said. “Isn’t that what everyone does?”

  “Not on him,” he said, meaning the boy. “Don’t do anything to him.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Oh,” he said. “On me, then.”

  “No,” she said, “not on you either.”

  He shifted his feet in the dirt. From the henhouse came the comforting sounds of cooing. A horse sighed from the stable.

  Lathias looked up to the one window in the loft, then down at the open barn door.

  “You think I was up there,” she said, “up in the barn.”

  Lathias said nothing.

  “What would I even want up there?”

  Her voice had a strange quality, tremulous, as if she were shivering. Lathias rubbed his own hands together in the cool air and waited.

  “I don’t care nothing about your things. Whatever you have up there. Which is nothing, probably.”

  Still, he waited.

  “I wasn’t out playing any prank on you,” she said, softer.

  “Who, then?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Don’t, then.”

  “Pranks,” he said, “like those fires?” He had not thought he would say anything about that, had not planned to. He could almost feel her stiffen in the darkness.

  “That wasn’t me,” she said coldly.

  “Who was it, then?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “I saw you, too. Does that mean you started the fires?”

  “You know what I was doing out there.”

  “Maybe I was doing the same.”

  “And Leo? Where was he?”

  As soon as he said it, he was sorry. He did not know why he’d said it, did not even know what he’d meant by it. But he knew immediately it was the wrong thing to say.

  She was silent for so long, he thought she would not respond. Finally he saw her dress stir in the darkness, as if she had been leaning against something, or sitting, and now she had risen.

  “You don’t know nothing about that.”

  And she turned and walked away, disappearing gradually into the night, that white dress growing fainter and fainter across the prairie, as if it absorbed the darkness, and he did not call after her.

  When he reached the loft, he lit the kerosene lantern there and sat, looking around to see what she had done, scanning the room, his few belongings, lifting the covers on his bed even, looking under the pillow, lifting the covers again. But there was nothing.

  ——

  The following day, the first of November, All Saints’, she did not turn up at the Schoff place. Lathias and the boy rode to the river alone and, by mid-afternoon of that day, as if by some divine ordination, some law of the dead, the weather turned suddenly cold and the sky greyed over in one long, bleak sheet and the wind rose out of the north a
nd blasted dull aches into the backs of their skulls as they stood on the riverbank, their hands jammed into pockets or covering their ears, and checked the slow progress of the ice across the water.

  ——

  She came back, of course, the following week, and acted as if All Hallows’ Eve had never happened. They both did. And so their trips to the river continued, much the same as they always had, except that now they went with a purpose: the checking of the ice. A huge herd of antelope had started coming down, too, just upriver from them. Sometimes the boy would bring carrots and try to tempt them closer, but they just stood on the bank and eyed him stiffly, ready to bolt should he take a step forward. And so he stood waiting, barely allowing himself to breathe, believing that if he held still long enough, they would come to him.

  “Don’t bother,” Elisabeth said. “They won’t come.”

  “Why won’t they?” the boy asked.

  But she did not answer.

  One afternoon, when the river had almost sheeted straight across, Elisabeth moved to step onto the ice and Lathias grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back, letting her go just as quickly.

  “It’s not ready yet,” he said, turning away, sticking his hand back into his pocket.

  “How do you know,” she said, “if you don’t step on it?”

  “It hasn’t been cold long enough yet.”

  “How do you know when it’s been cold long enough?”

  Lathias shrugged. “You just know.”

  Then, as if on cue, one of the antelope from the herd upriver put one hoof out, stepped back, then stepped out again, tentatively.

  “Why’s she going out there?” the boy said. “Chase her back.”

  “They want to cross,” Lathias said.

  “But she’ll go through,” he said. “It’s not thick enough.”

  “No,” Lathias said. “She’ll go back.”

  He was right. The doe stood there a moment and then retreated, back up onto the bank, and the whole herd moved off again, upriver.

  Elisabeth watched from beneath her blowing hair. She still wore her black kerchief from the summer and over this she had pulled an ugly grey knitted hat that looked as if it had been stitched together from old socks, but her hands were bare and red. She lifted them to her mouth and blew on them and then, as if it were the most natural thing to do next, she stepped out onto the ice and her foot went through and she was plunged into water up to her knee.