The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Twelve,” Lathias told him.

  “Twelve. There. You see?” But still looking at Lathias, as if he expected an answer from him. “Anyway,” he said again when no one spoke, “it’s good, some adventure.”

  “It’s that Krauss girl,” Helen said, “that’s who he’s with. Isn’t it. Was he with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Lathias said. But he did, of course he did. “I think so.”

  “You see?” Stolanus said. “Out with a friend. It’s only just dark. Let him be. He’ll be home soon enough.”

  Helen stared a moment, then lifted the pot of boiling potatoes and flipped them into the basin to drain, water splashing up her arms and to the floor. She dumped them into a bowl and set it sharply in the centre of the table. Then she went to stand by the window, staring out at the still-darkening plains.

  Christ, that darkness. Some nights, you couldn’t see a thing. And Lathias thought, Who knows what’s out there, who knows what could happen out there? Anything. Everything. Or, worse still, nothing. Not a goddamned thing.

  And so the three of them waited there, listening to the rattling of the lid on the pot of stew that simmered on the stove, the air full of its thick, rich smell. Helen at the window and Stolanus and Lathias at the table, Stolanus breathing heavily, the way he always did, as if it cost him such tremendous effort. And Lathias wondering what to do, sitting there smelling that stew, trying not to let his stomach growl, though he did not feel hungry. Yet his stomach smelled the stew and betrayed him. He did not want Helen to hear, so every time it growled he shifted in his chair so that the legs scraped a little on the floor, until both Helen and Stolanus stared at him.

  But Helen was not stupid. “Go ahead,” she said flatly. “Eat. There’s no point waiting.”

  But there was only the bowl of potatoes steaming away between them. The stew still simmering on the stove, the loaf of bread uncut on the cupboard. And so the two of them just sat there, each wondering if the other would rise and get the meal, whether he should, knowing Helen would not. Finally, Stolanus pushed the bowl of potatoes toward Lathias. Lathias dished some up and then pushed the bowl back to Stolanus and he dished some up and then they sat staring at the potatoes on their plates instead of at the potatoes in the bowl.

  Stolanus did not mean for either of them to eat, as Lathias very well knew. The passing of the bowl was just a gesture, of discomfort and placation. Well meant, but useless.

  “Maybe the barn,” Stolanus said, after a while. “Fell asleep maybe.”

  “I just put the horse up.”

  “Maybe you didn’t see him.”

  Then, as if it had only just occurred to him, Stolanus rose from the table to go check, but Lathias stood first, nearly toppling the table in his hurry to do so.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  And Stolanus blinked at him and then said, “Yah, sure. That’s right. Go wake him. Good.”

  But he did not sit back down, just kept standing there, half bent, his big palms on the edge of the table, watching while Lathias took his coat from the hook by the door.

  Helen still stood at the window and Lathias gave her a quick glance on his way out, but she did not look back at him. He heard Stolanus call as he stepped out the door, “Hurry him up, then. We don’t want cold supper.”

  But he just pulled the door shut in that careful, quiet way, the way people do when there has been a death.

  As soon as he was outside, Lathias regretted it, the way he had closed that door, wished he had let it slam shut, casually, carelessly. It would have been a small reassurance, as if to say, There is no call for decorum, the quiet closing of doors, there has been no tragedy here.

  Halfway across the yard, he turned back to see Helen still standing by the window. He knew she would be there, just as he knew the boy was not in the barn. It seemed as if Helen could see him out there across the darkened yard, well beyond the pale fall of the kerosene lantern through the window, could see him looking back at her. He almost lifted a hand to wave, then caught himself.

  He quickly slid the big barn doors open and the horses nickered softly and he stepped inside to where it seemed less dark, he thought, the way it did when you came in from the prairie at night, as if just the presence of walls and a ceiling somehow eased all that darkness, that vastness, or at least kept it at bay, as if the moon itself had snuck in, seeking shelter. He wondered, briefly, if Stolanus and Helen had spoken since he’d left, wondered if they ever spoke, wondered if Stolanus still sat at the table the way Helen stood at the window, together in their grief and their fear, but separated by it, too. He tried to imagine Stolanus crossing the floor to wrap his big arms around her, however stiffly, tried to imagine them at the window together. But he could not.

  He climbed to the loft quietly, without a lantern, calling softly, feeling his way around in the darkness—he did not want to startle the boy—then, taking a lantern from the hook on the wall and lighting it. But there was nothing. And he was struck, again, by the aloneness of his life. Of his and the boy’s. No, they were not friends, it was true. They were just together in their aloneness, the way Helen and Stolanus were together in theirs. Together in their unluckiness.

  He climbed back down the ladder and looked below, too, in the horses’ stalls, and in the cribs and feed bins. Nothing.

  And now he felt a slow cold creeping like water in his belly. And he heard, or thought he heard, the distant pounding of hooves across the prairie.

  He took a halter from a nail on the wall and slipped it over the mare’s head, and she eyed him curiously and huffed that they should be going out again so soon and at such an hour.

  Before stepping from the barn, he blew out his lantern so that Helen, please God, would not see him ride away.

  THREE

  Mary Krauss stood at the kitchen window, peering out across the darkening prairies, seeing only the reflection of her own moonish face, her breath steaming the thin, cold glass. From the same window that afternoon she had watched her daughter walk across the fields toward Schoffs’, watched the familiar quirk in the girl’s gait that she’d had, it seemed, since she first walked.

  A curse, her own mother had said back then, watching Elisabeth toddle unsteadily across the floor. She will carry a heavy load. And had insisted they do the test. So she’d sat at the table with the baby in her lap while her mother and Anna placed a pencil, a small hammer and a spoon within the child’s reach. They’d waited while Elisabeth studied the items, waited to see which she would reach for—would she be smart, would she be strong, would she make a good wife? Elisabeth turned and looked up at her with that pale, quiet, baleful gaze, then swept all the objects from the table with one small hand. And her mother had nodded gravely, predictably. She will carry a heavy load. Who knows what she will end up?

  And sometimes when the child looked at her it was as if she was cursed with a sort of heaviness after all, a weariness; old before her time. And as she got older, indeed, the way Elisabeth walked did look as though she were carrying something, milk pails or water buckets or potatoes from the garden, an odd and almost imperceptible bracing of her shoulders, arms out a little from her body as if for balance, hardly noticeable, not noticeable to anyone who had not watched her closely, who was not, perhaps, expecting to see something there. And she thought of her mother, maybe dead now. And she thought of Anna and the others, and she wondered why Anna had not written. So her mother must be all right, then. Otherwise, someone would have sent word. And Father? He would live forever, surely (though, of course, she was wrong, could not have known that he would be dead the following summer, an artery severed in the field, and that he would die slowly, staring up into a sky burned white with heat, and that he would not be found until the next morning, by Anna, sent out by their mother, who lay dying herself in the back bedroom, of what ailment, no one knew, since Anton refused to summon the doctor, and that Anna would stand a few moments looking down at him and then return to the house to tell her mother he could
not be found, and that the mother would not learn the truth until he was discovered some days later by a neighbour, but by then the coyotes had already been at him; and that the mother would die, too, soon after, and Anna would be left alone there, going a bit touched, some said in later years, until she was an old woman, and then she was dead, too).

  Sometimes, in Mary’s lowest moments, she allowed herself to think this: from the frying pan into the fire. Like her mother. The worst view of things always. But what could she do? Nothing. Keep Elisabeth out of Leo’s way during his bad times, just as she had done with her father at all times. And in spite of it all, in spite of Leo, his wild swings between penitent and sinner, in spite of it, he had come to her rescue. Hadn’t he? He had saved her, from that old suffocating life of doom and silence and domination. He had saved them both, her and Elisabeth. Elisabeth didn’t yet understand. But she would. Someday. When she was older. Then, her daughter would thank her.

  Mary took the last of the flour from the bin in the pantry, and the tin of lard, the eggs she had gathered that morning, not enough but she would make do, then looked out the window again. Dark, the moon rising there to the east, lightless too, it seemed.

  Of course, she knew Elisabeth was following that hired man around, that halfbreed, as Leo called him. Maybe even thought she was in love with him, though that seemed unlikely, with Elisabeth. But one never knew. And if there was a baby, then what? What would the halfbreed do then? Marry her? No. Perhaps, if he thought he was in love, and even then, it was still not likely. Love. She had not been in love herself, had never said, I love you, had not heard it said back. Sometimes, it seemed to count for so little between a man and a woman, this love, she was surprised at all the fuss.

  She looked out the window again. Nothing. She could not stand there all night, looking back at her own face, featureless in the dim glass. There was something eerie in it. Seeing herself there, but not herself, either. The ghost of herself, the night shining through her. It was as if she were already dead. It gave her a bad feeling, a strange sense of something gone very wrong. She turned back to the stove. Surely Elisabeth would be home soon. What did worrying help? Too much worrying was like too much love: it wore you out.

  She cracked the eggs and beat them in the tin basin with a little salt, the yolks still pale with winter, sifted in flour, a bit of water dipped from the bucket in the corner, and began to knead, the dough for the schnittnudeln pleasantly warm between her fingers. When it was smooth, she sprinkled flour across the wiped counter, lumped the dough in the centre and began to roll it out, evenly, rubbing flour as she needed on the wooden rolling pin to keep the dough from sticking, working by the small glow of the stove. She could light a lamp, but then she would not be able to see so easily out the darkened window should she choose to look, and then again there was not much kerosene. So she worked on, steadily, in the almost dark of a dead woman’s kitchen.

  Cecilia. Whose wedding dress was worn now by her own daughter. Sometimes, it was as if she knew exactly what Elisabeth meant, understood, though she had never felt a hand on her own face while she slept as Elisabeth had claimed. Nevertheless, there was something. As if she could feel her there, the dead woman, when she was working, as if someone watched over her shoulder. The feeling was so strong that once she had said aloud, over some cucumbers she was pickling, “Am I doing this right?”

  At first, she had felt ashamed at her error, was glad no one had been there to hear her, for she must have sounded crazed, speaking to the dead, cold air. Then, when she became used to that presence always at her shoulder, she befriended it. Began to think of it as a her. Cecilia. And she would speak to her sometimes when she was alone there. And she did not feel foolish about it, but, rather, comforted. As if there were now someone who understood, someone who sympathized. There was nothing crazy about it. People often spoke to the dead. In a way, it was like praying, though she would never admit to this, not to anyone, especially Leo, bordering as it did so near to sacrilege.

  It was not the same for Elisabeth, of course, who complained that first week after they’d arrived of feeling a hand brush her face in the night. At first, Mary had worried, had suspected Leo, and so she had sat up all night, watching him sleep, only to hear the girl make the same complaint in the morning. There was nothing violent in it, or threatening, she said, just a hand against her face in the night, then gone. But it had disturbed Elisabeth, and so she made a bed for herself in the barn, and there she remained, in spite of entreaties (from her) and threats (from Leo) that she return to the house. How she managed out there in the winter, Mary could not imagine. But the child had always had a mind of her own and so she had told herself, If she gets cold enough, she will come inside again. But she never had.

  Mary, on the other hand, was glad for Cecilia’s company in that little shack with its constant smell of sulphur. When she’d first arrived, she’d scrubbed everything down, emptied out cupboards and drawers, searching out the source of that stench. She’d found nothing. Just dirt, mouse droppings, cobwebs. The desiccated bodies of houseflies so ancient they crumbled to dust at a touch. And after she’d scrubbed everything with scalding vinegar-water, then opened all the windows so air swept through the cramped rooms, she was dismayed to find the house still stinking. She’d become almost used to it now. It did not bother her so much. Tonight she hardly noticed it at all.

  Mary filled the big cast-iron pot with water and set it on the stove and stood over it, the watched pot, wondering again at everyone’s prolonged absence. It did not bode well. Where could they all be? Elisabeth. Leo. Tonight, even Cecilia had not come.

  FOUR

  There was a bit of a smoky moon, not much, not enough to cast any light, so when Lathias was well clear of the yard he stopped and lit the lantern again, thinking, If I cannot see him, at least he will see me. They could be lost out there, trying to find their way home. But he did not believe that either.

  When he reached the Horseman’s graves he crossed himself as he had used to, back when he had first come there, nearly the same age as the boy, though that seemed impossible, that he had ever been the age the boy was now, and he tried not to think of that, of his own youth, gone now, and of the Horseman lying down there, dead and decaying also, and that rattling sound on the wind (he tried not to listen for it) that meant he was saddling his fleshless horses to tear up through the earth, to what awful resurrection or apotheosis or vengeance he could not, would not, suppose.

  The smoke of the distant dead fire at Hausers’ swirled the light across the fields, murky and hypnotic, and so Lathias looked out into the night instead. For a moment, he considered blowing the lantern out, thinking how he must look lit up on that endless, unrelenting prairie, knowing that he could not see whatever was out there, but whatever was out there could see him. But he thought of the boy instead, of the boy lost in all that darkness, and held the lantern higher and called out for him, though his voice seemed to carry no farther than the lantern’s faltering light, and he rode on, the mare snorting into the night and stumbling, the smell of smoke and the river in her nostrils, and in his own, and the fear there, too, and the distant dry rattling of bones, and he rode and rode and rode and then the boy was right there, God help him, was he seeing things? Right there in front of him, his face white from the light, and of it, too, as if brought into being because of and for it. As if he had not existed outside of it, could not have. The boy stood there in the light from the lantern, groping, as if still moving, his hands battering against the light, fighting it almost, and Lathias swung down, gripped him by the shoulder.

  “All right,” he shouted, “all right.” Shaking him. “Are you?”

  But the boy could not answer, could see the light before him but could not speak, all those bones rattling on the wind, the Horseman behind him almost, his demon horses, but there was all that light—was it morning?—it was so bright and someone shaking him, hollering at him, the Horseman gripping his shoulder, and all those hooves pounding the f
rozen dirt all around him, and he struck and struck, fighting to free himself, and then he felt it, that sudden tingling in his arms and legs, sucking the light, running through him, something hot and dark, it was coming, blasting furiously through him, like a train, like the fast pounding of hooves, like the wrath of God, and he swung his hands against it, all that hot blackness. “No,” he cried, “no.”

  And Lathias saw it, too, the way the boy’s eyes rolled up in his head. He held him tightly, pressing the boy’s arms against his sides, holding him there, shaking.

  “Easy,” he said, “easy. Hang on.” But he could not stop it.

  FIVE

  They came steadily, down into the valley. By wagon, car and on horse. Someone had lit a bonfire and it threw a weird and whirling light upon the undulating hills, the eerie embers of ice and the mad, slow flow of the river glittering darkly before and because of it. Ranged along the bank, lanterns and torches moved with a slow and meticulous grace, as if carried by other than mortal hands. It was cold, and a light snow had begun to fall, the flakes so fine and spare, some thought at first that they were not snow but only the wish of snow, the belief that snow, even then, with a girl drowned in the river, could be.

  Later, some would remember stopping, at that moment when the snow began to fall, and looking around, marvelling at the strangeness, the peculiar beauty. Of course, it all still seemed so impossible, a mistake. Had they not just seen her the other day, in town with her mother? Remember, standing outside Stednick’s, looking at the window display while her mother sold eggs to Stednick or bartered or begged more credit, more fool she, and the girl just stood there peeling chunks of paint from the windowsill until Stednick had come out and shouted at her, really the man did not know how to speak without shouting, and the girl just stood there staring at him, looking as if she could not care about him or his paint or his windowsill one way or another, and could not care either that Stednick stood there shouting at her while people passed on the street, she was not even ashamed, remember, just the other day? But, no, that was weeks ago, at least. Was it? My God, how time flies. Even so, only weeks. And now she was drowned. Gone. She was, and now she wasn’t. They shook their heads. Impossible, they said, impossible.