by Gary D. Svee
And still Catherine didn’t know what had upset Edna, not until Edna took the stick and advanced like an avenging angel toward the center of the circle.
And then Catherine knew.
There was a rattlesnake coiled there. Catherine had never seen one, but she knew this was a rattlesnake more certainly than she knew she was her mother’s daughter.
Coils topped by an ugly S held its head back, ready to strike. Yellow eyes halved by black, impenetrable slits were untouched by the crush and flow of life on the creek bottom. This was a creature of death, not life, and it awaited Edna, its tail singing its own death song, anxious to kill one more time before it died.
Catherine shuddered, and Edna waded in. She wielded the rod like the angel Gabriel, the stick whistling through the air to land with a thump. The rattler was writhing, striking blindly at shadows and weeds and the injustice of having been born with scales and rattles and fangs.
And even after it was over; even after one of the boys had stepped out of the knot of watching children and cut the snake’s head off with his pocket knife; even after another boy stepped forward and pulled the rattles, sticking them into his hatband; even after the snake’s head was buried so that none of the children would step barefoot on it and inject themselves with poison; still the snake writhed out its indignation.
Catherine was fascinated. Never had she seen anything so ugly and so compelling at the same time.
“They do that till sundown, then they stop,” Edna said, a shudder running through her. “Probably another one around here, so you kids watch your step.”
The show over, the children scattered, riding a wave of laughter and excitement and release down stream to new adventure.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Catherine said, more to herself than to Edna as they walked back toward the tables.
“Better get used to them. Lots of rattlers around, but you’ll get so you can pick them out pretty easy.”
“No,” Catherine replied. “The snake was awful, but that little boy Joey. He wasn’t playing with the other children or the snake either. It’s like he was playing with … with … death.”
Edna stopped, hands on hips, eyes surveying the tables, creek, women, and children that made up the ever-changing scene beneath the old cotton-wood.
“Could be.” And then as though she were opening an old wound, Edna continued. “Joey’s mom and dad came out here just shining with hope from some central European country. Don’t remember what the country was, but it sounded like they were lisping when they said it. They felt that God was holding them in the palm of His hand: first the passage to America and then the promise of free land in return for nothing but the backbreaking labor they had known all their lives.
“I used to go over and see them whenever I got to feeling sorry for myself. Their home was no better than anyone else’s, but it was always filled with wildflowers and laughter. I couldn’t understand much of what they said. They tried hard to speak English, but their accent was pretty bad. I loved to listen to them anyway. Watching them was like going to church—it made me feel so good.”
“And when she found out she was pregnant with Joey, she ran all the way to our place. All out of breath she was and babbling away in her native tongue and laughing and too excited to sit or stand or talk without trying to do all three at once.”
“I was so happy for her that I cried. I just sat there at the table and cried and cried and cried.”
“I saw her a couple of weeks before Joey was born. She didn’t look good even then, and when Klaus came to get me that night to help out, she looked even worse.”
A tear appeared at the corner of Edna’s eye and trickled down her face like a raindrop on a rock.
“Joeys mother died giving birth to him. Saddest thing I ever saw. In a way, Klaus died that night, too. He isn’t finished with it yet, but he’s doing his best to work himself to death so he can lie beside his Katrina.”
“And Joey is alone. He couldn’t be any more alone if he’d hatched from an egg. His daddy hardly ever talks to him and doesn’t give him much more than what he gives his stock—something to eat and a little room to run.”
“So maybe Joey does play with death. Death is about the only thing you can count on around here. Not enough rain or too much. Not enough sun or too much. But death is here, whenever you want it.”
Edna pulled herself back from her reflection, struggling to make light of what she had said. “Listen to me. You must think I’ve lost my grip. Maybe I have.”
But Catherine didn’t think that. As Edna spoke, she felt herself being inundated by despair, by distance, and by loneliness and hopelessness. She felt more than ever her need to escape this terrible captivity in which she found herself.
Edna spoke again. “Men are coming down. It’s time to eat.”
Max and Jake Thomsen had settled with their heavily laden plates on the soft grass beside the creek. They didn’t speak at first, more concerned with the chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs and radishes than with anything they might have to say.
The barn building had gone well. For all practical purposes, it was done, just some touching up with the red lead paint and hanging doors, windows, and hardware for lifting hay into the loft remained.
All this could be done after supper, or Max could do it himself if the food and beer and impromptu game of horseshoes proved to be more of an attraction than marching back through the heat to the barn.
It wasn’t until their second trip through the line, after their plates had been scraped and slipped into tubs of warm water for washing, that either man felt compelled to speak.
Thomsen was first. “Well, Max, how’s married life treating you?”
“I never even imagined it would be like this,” Max said. “She can’t keep her hands off me.”
Thomsen didn’t share Max’s wan smile. “I noticed,” he said.
“Wonder who else did?”
“Harrison. But I told him wasn’t it great that you two were getting along so well, and now he doesn’t know for sure what he did see.”
“Thanks, Jake.”
“No trouble. Anything serious?”
Max sighed. He wanted to talk. Thomsen knew that with the certainty of long experience. He had played father confessor to more people than most priests, and he could recognize the signs.
Each person was different, of course. Some would bluster into Millard’s as though they hadn’t a care in the world, then drink themselves into a stupor and weep their guts out on the polished mahogany bar. Others would whisper bits and pieces of their secrets into his ear each time he brought them a drink and nod knowingly when they caught his eye as though to affirm the veracity of the stories they told.
Thomsen could pick those who wanted to talk out of a bar full of people. He ignored the whiners, those who use alcohol as an excuse to pour their litany of woes into the ears of anyone who would listen, but he tried to provide a sympathetic ear to the ones who occasionally needed someone to talk to outside their tight circle of family and friends.
Max wanted to talk, but he didn’t know how. Thomsen began pulling the story out of Max a little bit at a time, as gently as a mother pulls a sliver from a child’s finger. And Max began to talk, the words coming slowly at first like the first drops of water over an earthen dam, and then in a torrent as the dam was torn away.
Max told Thomsen almost everything that had happened since that day of the wedding 100 years ago in Prairie Rose, but he told nothing of what had happened before, nothing of the lies that he had told, the promises he had made.
Max had always thought of himself as an honest man. He wasn’t ready to admit to himself—certainly not to Thomsen—that given enough reason, he was a facile liar, and he couldn’t tell Thomsen why having a wife was so important to him. Even if he had been able to put that need to words, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.
So Max talked about what he had done and what Catherine had done, abou
t the pistol and the table fork and the privy and the ranch site and about his plans. Max remembered the arguments nearly word for word. He had gone over them line after line in his mind, and the words gushed out.
Thomsen sat silently, listening to Max and nodding occasionally. Listening was Thomsen’s gift. He gave freely of his ear, but was chary with his advice. Today, he made an exception.
“Maybe you ought to let her go.”
Max looked at Thomsen as though he had been betrayed. “She’s my wife, Jake.”
“You don’t own her, Max.”
“She said before a priest she was mine. I can handle her. It will just take a while for her to get used to that. She’ll ease up. People are just like horses. You treat them decent and let them know who’s got the reins, and they come around—most of them anyway.”
The words were spoken as though Max desperately wanted to believe them. They sat quietly then, Thomsen wishing he hadn’t poked into the affair, Max preoccupied with something.
Max sat with his face in his hands, eyes shut. When he spoke, his voice was low, drained. “Truth be known, she scares the hell out of me. She reminds me of a filly I bought when I was on the Bar X. Maybe the prettiest animal I ever saw, but she was crazy—not locoed—just crazy. Some don’t think animals can be crazy. But they can be just as crazy as people. I couldn’t even put a blanket or a hackamore on her. Throw a rope on her and snub it down, and she’d fight it until her eyes bugged out and she choked.”
“I tried working her every day, but she got worse instead of better. I’d go in there shaking a bucket of oats, and she’d start shaking and her eyes would roll. If I’d get close to her, she’d kick or bite. Gawd, how she could bite!”
“Look at this.” Max pulled his shirt out of his pants. There on his side was an ugly half-moon scar as big as an orange.
“Took hide and all. If the snubbing rope hadn’t held, she’d have killed me. She sure as hell wanted to. Finally let her out to pasture. Thought she would calm down, but she didn’t seem to. She’d watch me whenever I was around that pasture, watch me like I was a coyote.”
“Didn’t ease up at all, so I decided I might as well put her back in the corral for one more try before I sold her to some cowboy dumb as me. I loaded up a bucket of oats and headed for the pasture, shaking it so she’d hear and maybe come. She heard me all right.”
Max picked up a stick and threw it hard at the creek, watching the current play with it, pulling it this way and that before it disappeared downstream.
“She was watching when I came around the corner of the barn, dancing around, kicking at something only there wasn’t anything there. When she couldn’t get to me, she bit herself. Never saw a horse do that before or since.”
“I kept coming and finally she spooked. Went into the fence and got all tangled up. But that didn’t stop her. She just kept bucking. By the time I got to her, blood was spraying from her the way water sprays when a dog shakes himself after a swim.”
“She did herself proud, all right, and bucked even worse when I got close to her. Sounded like a single tree snapping when her leg broke.”
“Nothing I could do for her, so I went back to the house and got a rifle. When I got back she was just standing there, on three legs, blood running from big, deep cuts.”
“I walked up to her, and she didn’t even move. She looked right into my eyes when I put that front sight on her forehead.”
“Jake, I swear to God she was grinning at me when I pulled the trigger. I swear to God.” Max shuddered. “That woman scares the hell out of me, Jake. She scares the living hell out of me.”
9
Catherine was lying alone in the dark. Outside it was midmoming, inside black as a moonless night. She had been lying there since daybreak, since awakening to the clatter of hooves and the creak of harness as Max led the giant Percherons from the corral.
She listened to the sound of Max’s voice carrying across the darkness as he told the animals what great, beautiful beasts they were, and then she climbed from bed, the canvas floor covering hard and cold on her feet. She dressed, lit the kerosene lantern, and had a fire in the stove by the time Max called to her from outside.
Breakfast was quiet and peaceful, if impersonal, until Max made the mistake of thanking Catherine for not creating a scene in front of his friends.
“You thank me?” she said, bitterness spewing from a festering, self-inflicted wound. “Don’t thank me—thank my sinful pride that made me whimper at the thought of admitting to those good people what a fool I am.
“Don’t thank me, Mr. Bass, for being party to your deception. I am nothing more than a puppet hanging on the strings of my ugly pride.”
Max took one look at Catherine’s face and fled the table, leaving his food half-eaten, and Catherine, sitting in the gentle light of the kerosene lantern, her fists kneading, driving her fingernails painfully into the palms of her hands.
She fought the tears, her face still and hard, but they came anyway, trickling like a spring born of a jolt deep in the earth. Still she made no noise, sitting in silence but for the drip of tears on her plate.
When the tears stopped, Catherine rose and cleared the table, scraping dishes to wash in the water heating on the stove. It was then that she heard Max outside. She paid little attention at first, her mind recognizing, cataloging, and then ignoring the sound of saw and hammer.
But when she had finished the dishes and washed the trail of tears from her face, Catherine stepped outside to greet a pale day.
Max had carried two sawhorses and a couple arm loads of lumber from the bam and was working on the creek bottom below the dugout. He stopped for a moment as Catherine emerged, and then went back to sawing one-by-four-inch boards into three-and-a-half-foot lengths, one end of each cut at a forty-five-degree angle.
At first Catherine didn’t understand what he was doing, but when he began nailing the boards to some rough-cut lumber, she realized he was building a picket fence. Her face bleached white, and she marched on shaking legs down the steps from the dugout.
“You are building a corral, Mr. Bass, so you can soft-break me like a horse?”
Max was taken aback by Catherine’s rage. “No, ma’am, I’m just putting up this fence. Thought it would brighten the place a little, make it seem more like home.”
But Catherine didn’t listen. She marched to the stump they had used to kill the chickens and pulled the double-bitted axe free, its blade still rust colored with blood.
Max had gone back to work, turning only as Catherine loomed behind him, the axe held in both hands high over her head.
“Son of a bitch!” Max screeched as he threw himself backward.
“Son of a bitch!” Catherine screamed as she swung the axe.
The blade bit deeply, and then crunched through. She swung again, and another one-by-four split.
Max was scrambling crablike backward on his haunches. Never had he felt more vulnerable.
“Now for you,” she said, turning to him. Max came as close to squealing as he ever had.
“This is not a home. It is a hole in the ground. I am not married to you. That matter will be cleared up as soon as the priest comes back to Prairie Rose. Remember those two points, Mr. Bass.”
“Now you git. I’ll take care of these sticks. I need some kindling, anyway. Git!”
Max got.
Afterward Catherine, standing alone in the morning light, blood-stained axe in hand, felt the rage flow out of her and with it, her strength. She felt too tired to move, but she dropped the axe and forced herself up the stairs and into the dugout. She had been sitting there since in the impenetrable dark, feeling empty and helpless.
The barn raising had confirmed her worst fears. She had begged Jake Thomsen for help, and he had ignored her, avoiding her whenever chance brought them near each other.
Then Catherine had approached Edna, cautiously because she knew that Edna was Max’s ally in plotting to bring her to Montana.
&n
bsp; Would Edna mind giving her a ride to town one day?
Why didn’t she wait until Max went to town? It is best not to surprise husbands so soon after marriage.
Catherine knew she was alone then in a land where distance was measured in days and four-year-old boys pick death for a playing companion.
Her nose wrinkled at the scent of raw dirt. The smell permeated her life now. Even when she left the dugout it hung on her like dust from a tomb, and that was appropriate. With the blanket drawn over the door and the lantern hanging cold and dark by the door, the dugout was as much tomb as anything, and Catherine sat in it as though she were dead. That thought comforted her. She desperately wanted to extinguish her mind as she had the lamp, to stop the mad race of thought. For a while, she succeeded, but in the end, her mind would not be muzzled. Still, she sat in silence, her body molding itself into the rough chair.
Catherine didn’t hear the first drops of dirt that rained down on the step outside, her ears straining so to hear silence that she could hear nothing else. But then came a rush of clods and dust, and the blanket swayed aside, allowing a sliver of light into the room for a moment and then closing, plunging the dugout again into profound darkness.
Had it not been for her reawakened consciousness, she might not have heard the ever so faint scratching on the canvas floor.
A mouse scrambling along the top of the entrance outside had triggered a miniature landslide and had been swept down with the falling dirt, Catherine thought. Terrified by the fall, the light, and the noise, it ducked into the dugout.
Catherine was not unaccustomed to mice. She had been raised in an environment that suited mice as well as man. Still she didn’t like pantries patterned with droppings and half-chewed loaves of bread, so she stamped her foot to frighten the little creature away.
But the sound of her foot was not greeted by a squeak and a scramble for the door. Instead, Catherine heard a tch, tch, tch, buzzzzz. Rattlesnake! She knew it was a rattlesnake as certainly as she knew that fires cast shadows, and she was terrified.
Somewhere between the table and the door was a rattlesnake, invisible and menacing. More scratching: The snake was moving, but where?
