The Horseman's Graves

by Jacqueline Baker

  “She was so … strange. It was dark. I wanted to go home.”

  The boy started to cry then. Lathias turned his hat in his hands, slowly. Ran his finger along the brim.

  “What did she say I lied about?” In spite of himself, hating himself for it.

  “Everything,” he choked.

  “Like what?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”

  He waited until the boy settled down a bit, and he said, “So you were not angry with her, then?”

  The boy looked up in surprise. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  Lathias looked out the window, turned the hat slowly in his hands.

  “It was dark,” the boy said. “And she was being so funny. That way she gets, as if she is angry with you even though you haven’t done anything.”

  “So you started walking home. And she was on the ice. Why was she on the ice?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. She was angry. She said if I left her there—”

  “What?”

  “She said—”

  And he started to cry again.

  “What did she say?”

  It came out then, all in a choked rush, so that it was difficult for Lathias to decipher what the boy was saying.

  “She said she would probably die. That’s what she said, that she would die, and I told her that was stupid and she said she would freeze to death and then it would be—”

  “What?”

  He stopped crying, suddenly, as if amazed at the words on his own tongue, the terrible weight of them. As if hearing them himself for the first time.

  “It would be my fault.”

  Lathias bit at his lip, that old resentment rising again, though what could it matter, now? What matter resentment or mistrust or outrage? Elisabeth dead in the river. He turned his hat slowly, looking down at it. “Then what?” he said.

  And the boy spoke, still in that slow amazement, as if it were the dream he was relating now, or as if time had slowed down, stilled, and run backwards. It made Lathias wonder if he was not confusing the two, the reality and the dream, or if he even remembered that night now at all as it had really been, and could anyone anyway? Was it even possible?

  “I started up the draw,” the boy said.

  “And?”

  “And she hollered at me. She was standing on the ice.”

  “Yes?”

  “So I told her to come on, then, I would wait for her. But she just stood there. It was dark. I could hardly even see her. I was scared, a little, but I wasn’t angry. I just wanted to go home. I called her. She just stood there. So I started walking. She was acting so funny, I just wanted to go home. So I started walking and I thought she would come, then, that she would follow me.”

  And then the boy stopped and stared down at the blankets and Lathias said, softly, “And then?”

  The boy looked at him, his eyes large and feverish.

  “I stopped,” he said. “I turned around. I didn’t want to go home without her. I was scared. It was dark. So I turned around.”

  “And?”

  “She was gone.”

  Lathias swallowed, shook his head.

  “What do you mean? Did you hear the ice crack or did she call out or what?”

  “She was just gone. And I thought—”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought … I thought the Horseman, and so I ran.”

  Lathias leaned back in his chair, looked out the window again, at Stolanus tinkering the hours away at the barn. Gone, he thought. Just gone.

  After a minute, he said, “Is that what you told McCready?”

  The boy shook his head, wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “McCready never asked me that.”

  And Lathias said, “What do you mean? What did he ask you?”

  “McCready wanted to know did I push her in the river.”

  “That’s it? That’s all he asked?”

  The boy flushed up, spoke so softly Lathias had to lean forward to hear him. “He asked if she was my girlfriend. He asked was I in love with her. He asked did we—”

  “All right,” Lathias said. “Never mind.” He took a deep breath, looked out the window again. He sat like that a long time. The window frosted up from his breath, but he did not lift a hand to rub it clean.

  Finally, the boy said, softly, “Do you want to know what I answered?”

  Lathias shook his head. “That is a question you don’t need to answer for nobody.”

  “She,” he said, “she …”

  Lathias looked up sharply. “Don’t,” he said.

  “Before she went out on the ice, she said—”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “I want to tell you.”

  Lathias stood up. “I don’t want to know.” And he took his hat and his gloves and left.

  THIRTEEN

  All that week following the Funeral Mass the boy stayed up in his room, sorting through his boxes of junk in a troubled, abstracted way. Lathias worked around the farm with furious determination, mending fence mostly and doing other odd jobs that came with the milder weather, and, when there was nothing left to do, in the lengthening evenings, he mucked out already immaculate stalls and swept the barn again, while Stolanus smoked and watched him from the doorway, saying, “What, are you expecting company?” as always unaware of the biting implication of his words. And when the slatboard floors could not reasonably bear more sweeping, he picked up a curry comb and tucked himself into one of the stalls, and Stolanus would step his cigarette out against the ground and drop the butt into his shirt pocket and say, “Supper soon,” and wait for Lathias to reply. But Lathias would say nothing, only watch Stolanus cross the yard, and then, when he had washed at the pump and gone inside, Lathias would do the same, turning up at the table to eat hastily and disappear again, out to the barn, leaving Helen and Stolanus to their own company.

  The boy up there in his room seemed not to care, either about Lathias’s absence or about the distance between them. At least that is what Lathias told himself. Thinking, He can see it too now, what I am. She told him. She must have, about the accident. Told him it was me. And now this. Now her. And if I had been there, it would not have happened. It happened because of me. Again. And he would stop brushing at the mare and lean his forehead up against her hot flank. Thinking, Because of me. Thinking, I know what it is. I know what I should do. But not able to do that, either.

  And so that is how things went, those days. Lathias worked like a man crazed. Stolanus wasted time around the yard. Helen slept or stood staring out the kitchen window, out across the crusted fields, an untouched cup of coffee in her hand and the house a shambles around her, dirty, the scraps of the last meal still littering the stove and the table.

  No one saw Leo, or heard anything about him at all, and that was just as well as far as everyone was concerned. And it seemed that everything had settled into that long, numb, dull period of baffled grief that follows a death.

  ——

  Ash Wednesday brought new troubles. Stolanus and Lathias were out in the barn when the sound of a wagon approaching startled them both.

  “Schoff,” they heard someone holler from the yard, “bring your kid out here. Schoff!”

  Stolanus and Lathias exchanged glances.

  “Good God,” Stolanus said. “Leo.”

  Stolanus and Lathias walked out of the barn together. Leo was standing in the wagon, looking around, and Mary was sitting beside him, her face tucked into her big black shawl.

  “Leo,” Stolanus said, carefully, “what can I do for you?”

  Leo turned and stared at them, trying for that old look of superiority and disdain, but clearly more than three sheets to the wind, swaying and unsteady on his legs.

  “You bring that boy of yours out here,” he said. “I want to talk to him.”

  “He is sleeping,” Stolanus said. “What is it?”

  “What do you think?”
he said, and he jerked his thumb at Mary who sat staring at her lap.

  The sight of Mary brought that sick feeling back to Lathias again, doubly hard, brought the reality of it all back, and he stood there hoping she would not uncover her face and look at him. It would have been more than he could stand. He ducked his head and kicked at the crust of dirt beneath his boots.

  “She wants to know what happened,” Leo said.

  Stolanus said, “He already told what happened.”

  “Not to me, he didn’t. Not to her, neither.” Leo swayed a little, muttered something. Then, “Tell him,” he said to Mary. “Go on.”

  Stolanus took a few steps forward, said to Mary gently, “I—forgive me—I should have said sooner, I didn’t know how, I’m sorry.” He glanced at Lathias. “I am sorry,” he said. “About your girl. My boy is, too. But there is nothing to tell that hasn’t already been said.”

  But Mary did not move, made no acknowledgment that she had even heard.

  “Are you bringing him down here or not?” Leo said.

  “He already told what happened,” Stolanus repeated.

  And Leo sucked his teeth and nodded and said, “We’ll just have to see about that.”

  Lathias was about to say something too, wanted to say something, not to Leo, but to Mary; he had wanted to say he had known them both, that the boy was not capable of hurting the girl, that he had loved her, yes, he would even have told that, would have betrayed that about him. But just as he was about to speak, he noticed that Mary had moved, had lifted her face from her shawl and was looking up toward the house, and so Lathias looked up too, and saw that the boy was there, standing at the window, looking out, his face so pale there behind the glass.

  But the strange thing, the thing that caught Lathias, was that the boy looked somehow different. Lathias could not at first decide what it was, and then it struck him: Why, he looks normal. It’s the scar. The scar is gone.

  He stood marvelling at the boy, whole and unscathed and as he had once been. And it seemed, in that second, that the miraculous was possible, that a miracle had occurred before his eyes; or at the very least, that all that had come before had been a dream; that the boy was whole and unharmed, that there had never been an accident, that he had never caused one, that Elisabeth was not dead in the river, and that he had not caused that, either. Lathias’s heart leaped up into his throat, he almost cried out from relief and joy and amazement.

  Then the boy shifted in the window and Lathias realized it had been only a trick of the light reflecting on the glass or the way the glass itself warped at the place where the boy’s face had been. There had been no miracle. The scar was still there. Elisabeth was still drowned in the river. And her mother still sat there in the yard, looking up at the boy, he down at her.

  It was a moment before he realized Leo had spoken to him.

  “What, are you deaf?” Leo was saying.

  Lathias glanced at Stolanus, waiting also, then back to Leo.

  “Can’t you hear?” Leo said. He jerked his thumb toward Mary. “She wants to know what you were up to.”

  Lathias looked at Mary, but she had only dropped her gaze back to her lap.

  “What, he can’t speak neither? She wants to know what you were up to with her girl.”

  Stolanus spoke then. “Just young people, Leo, out having fun together.”

  “That’s not what I saw,” Leo said. “I saw it different.”

  Lathias stared back at him, his skin gone cold, though he did not know what Leo could be talking about.

  “It was you,” Leo said, and nodded. “Don’t think I don’t know. All along. It was you.”

  And then the crack of the reins and Leo and the wagon and Mary lurched away across the snowy yard, and Lathias watched them go and Mary did not look back. He watched them go and go, and when he tired of watching them, he looked back up to the window and watched as the boy stepped away, and then he was gone, too. And like everything else during the past few days, Lathias wondered what had been real and what imagined.

  That is the way of it, he thought, that is how my life has always been. Not watching things come, but watching them go.

  ——

  All that night he lay wide-eyed in his bunk, the certainty of his leaving settling over him like a dead weight. And he thought, If I had gone when I should have, all those years ago, this would not have happened. If I had never come at all …

  But he had been over that so often it no longer held any real interest, or even any depth either, the way a word—the name of a loved one—can lose all meaning, all association, with enough repetition, can detach from the thing itself, not a name, but only a word, arbitrary, meaningless. The name of his own mother, like the colour of her hair, a thing he would never know, since it had been used by no one. Sometimes, he would run through all the names he could think of, trying them one after the other against what he could remember of her. Settling upon none. No, there were some things that could not be named.

  Which always made him think of Helen and how when the boy lay dying, all those years ago—or so they all had thought—lay dying in his bedroom upstairs and Lathias lay in his own bunk in the loft, lay there in a hot agony of guilt and grief, just a boy himself and unable to face any of them, Helen had come to him. She didn’t have to, she owed him nothing, he would have understood if she had wanted him gone that very night, but she had not, she had come to him in the loft and he had turned his face away, ashamed of his tears, and she had put her hand on his forehead and it had been so warm and gentle. When she began to speak, it was so quiet, Lathias had to hold his breath to hear. “It’s funny,” she had said, “the things you remember.” And then she had sat a while longer, and Lathias had wondered if she expected something from him then, an apology, but he could not, he would not have been able to speak to save his own life in that moment. And so he just lay there, his head turned away from her. Finally she said, “I was thinking tonight about the old folks, how they used to believe the dead could see. My mother believed it. When my grandmother died, I was eight, nine maybe. They laid her out at home, like they always did. She was in the big bedroom off the kitchen. Most people used the parlour for that, but we did not have one. I knew she was in there, and I knew she was dead. I remember my mother coming to me the morning of the funeral and saying, ‘Go on in to Grandmother now. She’ll want to see you before she’s buried.’ That’s what she said. ‘She’ll want to see you.’”

  She paused and Lathias wondered if she had finished, but he did not want to turn to look at her and so he just lay there, her hand on his head still now with remembering.

  “When I went in,” she said, “Grandmother was stretched out on the bed, as if she was sleeping, only she was on top of the covers and wearing her good church dress and her long grey braids were wound up on the sides of her head in a funny way I don’t ever remember her wearing them. I had feared her eyes would be open. I was relieved when they weren’t. I stood there in the doorway feeling relieved, but then I got scared all over again because I was afraid she would open her eyes, to see me, you know, one last time, like my mother said. I stood there praying that she wouldn’t. And so I shut my eyes. I stood there with my eyes shut so that I wouldn’t see if she opened hers. Then, when I figured I’d stayed in there long enough to suit my mother, and for my grandmother to have a good long look, I backed out and into the kitchen where everyone was standing around drinking coffee and I did not open my eyes until I’d pulled the bedroom door shut.

  “My mother said to me, ‘Did you say goodbye to Grandmother?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And she said, ‘Did you stand where she could have a good look at you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And my mother started to cry then, and tell me I was a good girl, that I’d made Grandmother real happy, and I just stood there nodding with a terrible feeling in my heart.”

  It seemed as though Helen would sigh, it seemed the moment for it. But she did not. She just sat there unmoving, and she said, “I’ve neve
r been able to name that feeling, to say just what it was. I knew only that it was terrible.” Then, she did sigh. “It’s funny,” she said. “The things you remember.”

  And they sat that way for what seemed like a long time, just sitting together, Helen’s hand still on Lathias’s head, and his face turned to the wall. And Lathias thought, But you should be with him, why are you not sitting with him?—even as he knew the answer. And there was no blame there between them, and he was young enough to believe there never would be.

  Finally, he turned to look up at her. She was staring at the rosary over his bed, and he wondered if she was praying or if she was just staring off vacantly, just thinking, and that it might not have been a rosary at all that she looked at, but even just a nail in the wall, a length of rope, a cobweb, wondered if it wouldn’t have made any difference. And he knew then it was true, there was nothing of religion or faith or hope even in her expression, and, before he could stop himself, he raised a hand and touched her hair, and they sat that way and then she took his hand, he thought she would move it away from her, but she did not, she just held it and pressed it to her hair, her cheek, and then lowered it, down to rest against the small swell of her belly, and she held it there. She would not have needed to, he would never have moved it away. He had watched her often, wondering what it would be like to put his hand to her belly, to feel the life there. He had thought there would be movement, that he would be able to feel the child, but there was nothing, just her dress against his skin and the rise and fall of her belly as she breathed in and out and in and out.

  She had turned to look down at him then and she had wanted him to feel it, too, a movement there, he could tell by the way she sat so still, the way she looked at him so deeply, and then he did feel something, a quick ripple under the skin, and he pulled his hand away and she took it and put it back and they sat that way and then she leaned over and she kissed him, and he realized that he’d known all along she would. She kissed him on his lips, gently, and he realized he had never been kissed before, not by anyone. And then he was weeping again and so was she, her tears in his mouth. She raised her head, and stood and walked away again, disappeared down the ladder and out into the night.