by Lloyd Zimpel
It is quiet now on the porch with the tale growing so grim; but calmly as before, Ma tears her rags, her voice thoughtful as she calls up these facts told to her, recollections of a distant time; blood and misery and horror of the past, remembered by the kin of victims, themselves remembered only for the pained and ugly awful moments of their lives. I have no sarcasm for this, and outside the dark door, Otto and August and whoever else has come up, wait with no more sound than the creak of their chairs.
Ma goes on, in the voice she would use to instruct the twins how to snap beans, and she braces back to slice her hand, rags dangling from it, across her lower belly. When Ethel saw this, she grew pale. Now, of course, she had tended terrible wounds in battle, wounds that ordinary mortals did not survive, which can be healed only by the mercy of God Himself. This man had a wound like that; out of it hung guts this long—Ma measures off a distance with a torn piece of an ancient curtain. All bleeding and smelling, the little girls crying . . . And Ethel lays her hand upon his feverish brow. . . .
Ma, say I, the story is growing too bloody by far.
She rips away, heedless of my voice, the summer porch in full silence now. No bugs hum in the corn, and in the scum beneath the cattle trough the toads hold their tongues; and we all wait for what this woman will say next: whatever mixture yet she will pull out of her scrambled dreams and memories and told-to tales of her kin’s dark history.
There is more . . . Ethel lay her hand on the man’s hot brow and smiled at him, that smile of hers. He was in an awful state. Yes, he was insensible, and could not see her smiling face, but yet he felt the coolness of her hand—
Ma, Ma, wait, Ma, say I. You are going pretty far here. . . .
—but he can see in his mind’s eye, for God has given him this last gift of the dying moment, to see himself; he sees his soul oozing away through the terrible cut in his belly. The poor man—
Not for a moment has she ceased tearing her rags, with a heap of untorn cloth still at her side: every worn-out garment, every old sack or curtain, every swatch of canvas weathered enough to be pliable, every outused square of cloth passing through her hands ends here as raw material for rug or quilt: until doomsday she will be at her gathering and tearing—
She has not stopped her story: Ethel sees that this is a test of her, nothing less. All those days while the storm blows—a terrible storm, killing settlers and their wives caught out in it, and cattle from one side of the country to the other, all piled up and froze to death. And Ethel sits by the wounded man with her hand on his feverish brow all night, and the next day, too. And those brave little girls keep a fire going with nothing but cobs and hay, and the cabin gets so cold their own breath fills it up like a snowy mist, and in the morning, the fire gone down, they are so stiff with cold they can scarcely move. Now, the wounded man . . . he is warm under the buffalo robes and he is come back from death’s door. He turns his face to Ethel, and he says: Who are you? And she says: My name is Ethel. And he says: No, your name is not Ethel, for you are an angel, and you have saved me. Now, reach your hand into the left pocket of my britches and take out what you find there. Do it! So she did as he commanded, to find that she held in her hand a five-dollar gold piece. The man on the cot says to her That is your payment for the miraculous healing you have performed upon me. And she says: No, I refuse it. I ask no payment. The gift I possess is payment for itself.
Here Ma breathes a long sigh of regret, and her voice changes back from Ethel’s to her own. You see? It was too late. She had taken the money from his pocket and held it as her own in her hand. Too late. Her gift was corrupt the moment that money touched her hand. Do you see that, how it happened?
Ma is not looking at me, for she studies her rags; but I nod, saying nothing. I can say: No, I do not see, and let her explain. I can say: Yes, I do see. It makes no difference: there is nothing to see.
No sound from the porch; but in a minute a rumbling voice, which is clearly Harris’—so he is the one who has come during Ma’s telling—and if he is speaking to his brothers his voice is not more than a long grumble which I cannot decipher.
But Ma is not finished: From that moment on, Ethel had no gift. It had flown out of her body, and she was an everyday person no more special than me. She could not heal a swatted fly. She had corrupted her gift and God took it from her, just like that.
She takes to sorting the torn rags now, dark colors in a pile on the left of her rocking chair, light on the right, each pile growing like a protective pillar. You may have heard my mother tell it, she says. She liked to teach a lesson from it, like she did with Bible stories. She knew Ethel and Esther, although she never knew our twins. But the lesson is there, still.
The lesson, say I. What lesson is that, then?
Why, that the twins cannot take payment for using their gift. It is God-given and cannot be bartered.
I hear Harris’ simmering rumble, and he bellows: For Christ’s sake, Ma! What are you talking about? Those boys didn’t do anything. Beidermann did, with his damn wishbone. And God didn’t lift a finger either. Maybe the Devil did.
Yes, says Ma, the Devil will surely put his nose in wherever he can, as I have explained.
It is clear to me, and it seems so to the boys, that we need explore this matter no further. All are quiet. Harris broods—even from the porch his doing so can be sensed; the other boys silently adrift in their own confusion; and myself at the edge of the bluff, like a preyed-upon animal pushed by its enemies, where it must jump into the unknown space below, empty space hidden in a fog.
At long last Ma rises from her chair to stand between her pillars of rags; and there is not a single thing, no twitch of a muscle, no roll of an eye, no curl of lip, to show that she differs from the woman she was this forenoon, this afternoon, this evening, or every forenoon, afternoon, or evening for however many years we wish to count back. . . . We have had a quarter-hour’s story, imagined from her kinswoman’s past; and that, having been spun out, leads her again to her kitchen, where, pushing aside her rags, she goes to rummage in the cupboard, to bring out a pie made yesterday from dried apples, and slicing it, she calls: Otto, August, Harris—without seeing if any of them is there to hear—If that cream is cooled off, you bring it in and have some with this pie.
Laying out this treat, she turns away for bed.
The boys hear, but no one moves to fetch the cooled cream; and in full appeal the pie rests upon the crinkled oilcloth, needing covering soon, as even in the lamplight the flies persist with a buzz that grows louder and louder.
JUNE 9. He has found his damned water, rather Radke the digger has—and who should receive the first handshake: he who guesses it is somewhere near, or he who draws it forth to see? The twins carry home their report so far after suppertime that Ma’s scolding is vigorous enough to require that I add nothing, as they address their Johnny cake and beans. By the third mouthful they regain their enthusiasm, to proclaim the consummation of the Beidermann adventure. What they burn to report, none of their brothers but Harris stays to hear, all hastening to light a pipe at the corral or finally curry an unkempt horse. Harris holds his end of the table alone; at the other, the twins’ forks send up a tinnish clatter to accompany their voices; and while Harris mixes and remixes his card deck, each card so much rubbed that the heraldic figures thereon are indistinguishable to all but their owner, who uses his privity to defraud his brothers in games in which the stakes are shares of Harris’ chores; although no more, his deceit having been found out.
Come and see, then, beg the twins between mouthfuls.
I have seen water run before, say I.
But not water their hero Beidermann has wrested from the stubborn earth. This is water, Harris might say, which is the water of Beidermann’s invention. . . . But the lads exhort and cajole, having been taught a little of the arts of persuasion and debate from books their own Ma read to them; and I assent. Tomorrow we will see what Beidermann hath wrought. As Otto says: You have the privilege, sir,
of seeing the likes of Pharaoh’s pyramids, and perhaps the Sphinx thrown in . . . and take a light team to bring back that hayrake which Beidermann borrowed and promised to return but never did.
JUNE 10. Yes, amidst the scattered rock and dirt left by Radke, there runs a little water upon a dry field where none ran before, where hay will grow now. At the twins’ insistence I take a draught: it is water, warm, with iron in it. Beidermann has brought forth water; who would deny it? The twins race around the plank-buttressed shaft, a dance of water nymphs, Beidermann standing near and if he had a vest, his thumbs would be in the armholes and his chest thrust forth like a new father.
Congratulations to Mister Beidermann. I said it to him this noon; I write it here at midnight, a timely hour to mull over God-given gifts . . . or Devil’s curses. . . . The toads are silent, the cicadas asleep, the animals at peace. From our bed Ma breathes loudly; for the years pass and it becomes less simple to draw each night’s breath. So it is. . . . Beyond the dark I hear the poet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo.
Beidermann’s Place
1886
OCT. 9. Cool and windy. Currying the black mare I see she is putting on her winter hair, as are all the cattle now. The boys bring in another wagonload of wood, this being the last left for cutting on the South Fork, so they report, but I will go out tomorrow to confirm this for myself.
Winter is coming, I tell Ma.
Yes, she says: as it always does.
OCT. 19. Mild and cloudy. The stock tank is iced over, and Otto takes an ax to it. A speckling of snow overlays all; and the banking of manure against the underpinnings of the house bears a skin of frost from inner moistness. The pump is freed with a boiling kettle, and Ma will soon be melting snow for her soft water.
. . .
OCT. 29. Cold and clear. Our bachelor neighbor Beidermann works the slim strands of cottonwood on the river five miles north; this as passable timber for his building, and the scrubby cedar in the draws thereabouts as firewood. For this endeavor he secures yet again the loan of my twins, who come in after dark to report that, far from doing the boys’ work of trimming or leading the skidding team, they take on the man’s job of handling Beidermann’s crosscut saw; and while it is not an undertaking at which I would readily test them, still I know that they are capable, for they are already gaining some size, with promise to attain the muscular proportion of all my boys, this being a legacy of myself and their mother, who is a large-boned woman of some heft in her own right. They eat a man’s supper and report that in the weeks ahead, when Beidermann returns to finish his cutting, they will go to help, if I permit, which I do; although wondering that the proud Beidermann, so full of self-sufficiency always, bothers himself to ask help for this task when he seldom does for greater ones. But Ma says the company of the twins pleases him, they being admirers of his easeful command of animals, and of his skills as hunter and trapper, and his forthright ways; and so, it now seems, of his woodsman-ship as well. It would please me if they showed a similar heartiness toward the lessons in their books, or the chores on their own place.
NOV. 1. Cold and sunny. A good snow the two days past, now stopping; and a full wheel of sun today, which casts a brilliance on the drifted prairie that pains the eye, yet gives an aspect of splendor, against which stand like spills of ink the loud crows and blackbirds brought to picking in our cattleyard by the cover laid over prairie range. Otto and I ride through the northern quarter toward Krupp’s place, and find respectable forage there and beyond, the wind having scoured the bluffs of snow to allow the cattle access. Otto remarks on their fat and sturdy appearance, which promises they will survive if we do not suffer too severe a winter; for even the fattest of steers will go under if the Northers come too swift and many.
NOV. 17. Cold and cloudy. This day the twins again put their hand to Beidermann’s cutting, and come in each with a jack-rabbit’s hind foot, severed from an animal the mighty Beidermann felled with a throw of his ax: so the lads report defiantly, awaiting the scoffs of their brothers who grow weary of tales describing our doughty neighbor’s varied talents. August suggests the twins would do well to contribute to our own cutting; but we have hands enough for that undertaking, with upwards of ten cords set by; so that even Ma, who is seldom ready to admit that sufficient firewood exists on Earth to forestall winter’s chill, allows that the supply shows promise. But promise only, for there is never certainty in providing against the snowy onslaught with which the Almighty tests the strength of His subjects on this land; as He does through drouth and flood, fire and pestilence, hunger and plague, thus to weed out the weak, the improvident, and the un-blessed; plucking from His land the proud and faithless—so many of those gone now, Gaustad, Baum, the Dutchman, and others who thrived only five years ago, and now the prairie moves to reclaim their old places. For all that our own root cellar is stocked with potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips and cabbages, the sheds filled with good hay, the granary and corncrib laden, the smokehouse hung with hams—for all that this gives the appearance of provision, yet it is only appearance. The Almighty eye bores deep: what It sees where we see plenty, no man knows.
DEC. 1. Clear and windy. The venerable poet warns:
The piercing cold commands us shut the door,
And rouse the cheerful hearth; for at the heels
Of dark November comes with arrowy scourge
The tyrannous December.
Their clothes scabbed with snow, the twins reach home after nightfall, leaving Beidermann on his homeward journey at the point four miles west where it brings him nearest our place. They have the two geldings, trustworthy animals, got as colts from the sullen Dutchman, whose place south of Skiles went under from grasshoppers first, and then drouth and the madness of his wife; who told me when I claimed the colts to take what tools and lumber I desired, since there was no one else to pay money for them; and so I gave him another eight dollars, which he needed; although there was little for me to salvage other than a bit of lumber from his small cabin and a few boards from the roof of his sod barn, some torn harness, a cultivator useful for its parts, and a good logging bob-sled. The despairing Dutchman left only a grove of apple trees—a grove of sticks no higher than my elbow—which may have lived for half of one season. His intention was to return to Wisconsin and start afresh, God willing.
Tomorrow, the twins go out again with Beidermann, and they ask my permission to take a harness team so as to double Beidermann’s haul, in that he wishes to complete his cutting before the snow deepens; and while I am the first of any to help a neighbor, it is not my habit to lend out my horses unless under my own eye or that of Otto or Henry; for I have seen good men, irreproachable in most aspects, perhaps out of ignorance and not willfully, misuse animals badly when it costs them nothing; so I promise I will come along with my team, which pleases them, that I will see them in their men’s work at Beidermann’s side.
DEC. 4 & 5 & 6. Snow, cold and stormy. This is the first night in three that the twins and I will sleep in our own beds, and the reason for it is a grim one—more than grim, indeed calamitous, for our neighbor Beidermann, whose grave misadventure calls for our prayers on his behalf, for all that the stolid Beidermann would never ask for them. How he fares we will not know until morning when, should the weather permit, we will go to see if the doctor has come through, and if Beidermann is with us still.
WE ARE ONLY NOW back from tending Beidermann’s hungry stock, and it is late. All are sleeping now but for Ma, who sees me take down this book and says, Well, you are going to burn the midnight oil now, I suppose. It will wait until you have got some sleep. Do you think you will forget it? And with a poke at the fire, she goes to bed.
No, there is no likelihood of forgetting; but I have in me some of the same disbelieving wonder which the twins show over this disaster, and the particulars of it beg sorting through; for in it lies a lesson, surely, and the Lord would have us learn that lesson. Perhaps He even offered an augury that we in our hum
an blindness failed to see; a premonition lost to us in that pale dawn of three days past when we set out to aid Beidermann as promised; our sledge running swiftly over the firm snow to the river site where he is cutting, as the twins cluck the team along at a goodly pace, within my cautions to mind the animals’ capacities and not overuse them. There is no foreboding in this.
As we come up to the river, Beidermann is snaking trimmed logs through the snow-choked brush cluttering the outer bank, his splendid Percherons snorting white clouds, their teeth grinding on their bits, heads tossing to the clang of buckles and groan of leather, and their great hooves send the snow showering up with each step. Behind them, Beidermann holds the reins shoulder high, stepping quickly aside the skidding log, the legs of his trousers stiff with frozen snow; and the collar of his mackinaw, folded up about his stubbled chin, bears the white coating of his frozen breath. He unhooks the chain from the log, leaving it beside a scattering of others of similar size in the threshed-up snow.
Well, so I have a full crew today, he says, as if I am remiss in not coming on earlier days.
Yes, I say, I have my doubts those nags of yours can get this job done, so I have brought a team that knows how to pull.
He spits tobacco aside, and bares his teeth in a slender grin. Yes, he says, I have been thinking of scrapping them and getting a yoke of those cattle Krupp favors.
At this the twins laugh, at the absurdity of such a trade; for they have often heard Krupp’s tales of the oxen kept by his father in Illinois; beasts that could outpull any team, as Krupp had it: Old Dick hauled that stoneboat easier than any three horses, or Old Dan pulled that cow out of the mud like he was on a Sunday stroll; although for all his nostalgia over oxen, Krupp himself turns out to be a mule man; he brags on his mules no less than his father’s oxen, and when he had them at our threshing, it seemed to me he was beginning to look like them; which Ma said was an ugly thought, but did not disagree.
