by Lloyd Zimpel
Where are them evil dogs of yours? I ask, not wanting to be surprised by their teeth in my leg.
By God, says Beidermann, but you are a tough customer to please. You do not like my team and you do not like my dogs. Is there anything else about me that you do not like?—But if he wants an answer he does not wait for it.—Well, I left them running a deer this morning at my place and if they caught up to it you will not see them around here.
He turns away to tie his handsome team to a sapling, and retrieves his ax from the sledge, and hefts it from hand to hand as its flared blade glints: he has shown it to me before—a tool from the Old Country, he claims, in a manner as to say it has magical quality.
Now I am going to trim up another few logs for your sledge, he says, and if you boys would not mind loading these here on that sledge of mine, why I would be much obliged. I am calling it quits here today. That timber up the line toward Jenssen’s is too damned scrubby.
He plows off through the snow into the line of trees along the riverbank while the twins and I begin to hoist the snow-crusted logs onto the sledge. From behind the walls of brush torn awry by the passage of the horses and dragged logs, we hear the whack of Beidermann’s ax.
THROUGHOUT THE FORENOON the clouds lower and the weather grows gray. We sit on the trimmed logs to take our dinner of the wurst and cheese and hardboiled eggs Ma has packed. Beidermann eats his meat and bread with lard without talking, and finishing, wipes his mouth with the back of his mitten and pronounces: It will snow some.
The twins receive this with the gravity they give all Beidermann’s opinions, even ones as unremarkable as this, and stop kicking snow at one another to cast sober eyes to the sky and to Beidermann and to me—as if I might challenge Beidermann’s certainty, as I am often more than willing to do, if only to deflect somewhat the twins’ excessive admiration of him: and while I have not been much successful at this before, I lose more ground now; for Beidermann flatters them by requesting they take his team—his mighty Percherons!—to skid out the logs that remain. To be offered the reins of Pegasus would thrill the lads no more; as with dwarf hands on the leviathans’ bridles into the woods they plunge, and with manly cries come thundering forth, a snubbed log pitching behind in a rain of scraped bark and ice, as the two leap nimbly through the whipping hazelnut branches and dead blackberry vines.
Beidermann’s snow comes; with little wind the large flakes, fat with wetness, descend through the still sky in such abundant quantity as to obscure us from each other and muffle the sound of Beidermann’s steady ax.
His sledge is near loaded; and I go to bring my team forward, to take on the last load, as the snow falls near as thick as fog, to mute the sound that now comes to my ears: a queer, grunting bellow, like the belly-deep groan of a man wrenching himself from a nightmare. (I have heard it since, in my mind, often.) I cannot see Beidermann; and the twins, at a distance into the brush, draw up at the ugly sound and look back to me, knowing I am not its source, but for assurance that no threat lies in it.
I cannot offer it; for I am no less alarmed than they, and it is with dread that I push through the brush to where the sound of Beidermann’s ax has ceased.
He lies an arm’s length from its bloodied blade; upon his side, on one elbow, like a man reclining at a Sunday picnic. But he lies on no pretty blanket upon shaded grass; but instead in a bed of trampled, dirty snow and torn branches, and he twists his face around through a screen of falling snow and in a quiet rage says, Now I have done it, for damned sure.
It is his leg, or foot, I think, for that is where a glancing blade would go with lightning certainty; as it did with my brother Emil in the Wisconsin woods, myself a terrified lad no older than the twins now; with Emil leaning on me, dragging his half-foot, the fat part of that leg tied off tightly with the thong from the useless boot, to leave the snow spotted with blood for three miles until we met the old man coming with a team for the fence rails we were cutting.
But with Beidermann it is not his foot, for he will maintain singularity even in so dire an event. He holds his left hand, from which half of one finger is long since gone from some happening he has never remarked upon, like a shield over his red lower belly near his loins; and I see now the soaked mackinaw beneath that hand where the flakes of snow melt on touching. He has slipped, then, with his swing, the wet snow at his feet giving no purchase, or the incomplete hand giving an incomplete hold, and fallen on the razor edge of his Old Country ax blade as it glanced off the gnarled joint where branch meets trunk. . . . Fallen on his ax! For the doughty Beidermann, so humble a misadventure!
The stubby whiskers of his chin catch the falling flakes, and his eyes watch mine; not fearfully, I think, but to gauge by my look the full measure of his misfortune: but no, he means to catch panic or unsureness in me, as if I might flinch away like a girl, unmanned by the sight of the stain which spreads from his coat to the mounded snow, where it turns from red to pink.
At my shoulder as I kneel to see, the team restless behind them, the twins freeze in an awful silence, stunned at Beidermann’s fall; this giant figure to them, a certain kind of man unlike others they know, with his grand tales of buffalo, and digging gold in the Western hills, and his lessons to them in bringing a wild horse to hand, or in finding water in desert sand. More easily can they imagine their father fallen, or one of their grown brothers.
With his stub finger, Beidermann struggles to undo the buttons of his thick coat, and when I reach to help, he continues as if I am not there, and pulls back the skirt of his mackinaw and his wool outer pants, where the pants beneath reveal a bloody slash in the fabric just below the waist and a little to the right side. He unbuttons the suspender there to push the pants down, and the blood comes freely over his hand as he raises himself on his elbow, the better to see.
I have done it, he says, God damn it all.
I bend close, and it is a wicked sight: not a clean cut but more a gouged tear, as a consequence of a twist of the flared blade as he plunged his weight onto it. Nested in that tear a shiny purple bulge pulses; from the outer edges of its eruption blood wells in easy surges. On this glistening mound the falling flakes melt, and the odor is that of a butchered steer, or hog, or chicken—all alike in the end, none so different among living creatures as to claim singularity—and I am filled with wonder that this odorous patch of Beidermann’s insides hopes to push itself free as if it has awaited this moment for as long as Beidermann has been a man. It is disquieting to my own heart, and to the twins, bending to see, it can be no less; for all that they have seen guts before, but always those of creatures whose mortality is certain.
This has a serious look to it, I say; and it is as if my saying so makes Beidermann need to prove me wrong: holding coat and trousers free of the wound, he rises briskly to one knee—for all the world as if he will take to his feet and stride off as if he suffers nothing worth more attention than that already given it. Above the soughing snow, I hear the twins sigh in awe: now he proves their estimate of him.
But he is still human. His motion excites the blood at the edges of the blockage, and before he can stand and empty himself through the hole the ax has made, I lay my hand on his shoulder to bear him down. He looks sharply at me, irked, but that look passes: his face is gray and sagging, but more, I think, with wrath than suffering.
Get me something to tie this up, he orders.
I will do you better than that, I say; and tell the twins to roll the top logs off Beidermann’s sledge, so that five or six lay even, on which a man can rest; and as they do so, I take some flour sacking I have for a handkerchief and offer it to Beidermann to cover his wound. He rises, as the twins watch in disbelief, and takes a step toward the sledge; but now his pain seizes him and cants him onto me like a man with one leg. He holds the rag against his side, and the seepage from it stains portions of my own clothing as I lean him against the snowy logs that make a bed on the sledge. The twins come close to help, but there is no way to do so.
&n
bsp; Hitch up his team, I tell them, and tie our team to that back post.
They jump to do that; as with lessening help from Beidermann himself, who is swearing, I drag him fully onto the logs, and myself take a crossways seat behind him, that he can recline his head against me.
Go to my place, he says.
No. Jenssen’s place is closer, I tell him. The Widow can fix you up until we can get the doctor.
At the front end of the logs sit the twins, with their feet dangling at the horses’ hooves: one holds the reins like glass, the other holding down our saws and axes, Beidermann’s bloody ax amongst them. The first clucks in a dry voice to the team, steering it free of the trees and down the sloping bank, across the ice, then to heave up the sharp western bank, as the track leads onto the prairie over the tops of sage and tall weeds poking through the drifts, the horses’ snowy haunches rolling from the ponderous trot they take up when the shallowness of the snow allows. I grip Beidermann’s shoulders to prevent jarring of his head: his face grows near as white as the snow falling upon it.
We will make it by dark, I tell him.
Ahhhh, he sighs. By God, I have done a few foolish things in my life, but this one takes the cake.
I have seen worse things happen to good men, I say, thinking of my own brother and the blood poisoning that took his life; and decent Swede Jenssen, toward whose place we hasten, gone under in two days from injuries on our binder; and I tell Beidermann, You will be as good as new when we get you into a bed and fetch Doc Entwhistle to take a look at you.
He grunts, or groans. Yes, he says, and to get him out here in this weather I will have to sign over my place to him.
Well, I say, he is not a bad man, when he is sober.
He says nothing for half a mile, then whispers hoarsely: Your boys handle that team nicely.
That they do, I say.
They have the team moving swiftly over high ground, avoiding the undulate drifts where they can, and where they cannot with slapping reins send the horses breasting through to clearer ground. For all the snow, there is less wind than we have a right to expect, as if the Almighty has sufficiently afflicted our wood-gathering enterprise, and withholds a full-grown storm. Beidermann’s calamity is the limit of His test of us for this time; for it is not simply a foolish mistake, as Beidermann would have it, but surely a test; a trial given Beidermann as a consequence of prideful behavior and the arrogance bespoken not only in his words, but in his manner of doing, and attempting overmuch—this man who bites off plenty every time, no matter that he shows ability to chew with the best: for there are circumstances the Lord cannot overlook, and He is absolutely bound to answer Earthly arrogance with its Divine twin—His own mighty power; so that of His might there may never be left a doubt in the minds of bystanders who, observing unpunished bullheadedness, will be tempted to overreach likewise.
This, I know too well, as the signs to me have been many and various; from so small an admonition as the failure of a spring to flow, to the dire blow of not many winters past, when He took our only daughter: the child gone so young she lacked a name, although Ma and I have given her a secret one; and thereby decimated our clan; for this little child, if only for a tick of time, made us ten in number: the only daughter, gone as a tiny infant, claimed because I had pushed beyond the limit of the Lord’s tolerance in my ambition—no, more than ambition—lust, it was, for greater possession, for laying hands on more, and accumulating land under my name and my boys’ names, as far as a man could ride in a week’s time. I wanted no boundaries: for it is boundless, a man’s hope, and cannot easily be checked, and yet it always is, for the Lord will in time balk. And so she was taken from us, in the common way—losing breath in the night, her little body cold at Ma’s side in the morning. . . .
Far above in dreamless sleep
Safe in Christ’s tender fold,
My baby doth serenely rest,
From winter’s chill and cold. . . .
The snow hastens dusk, and it grows colder; but now a shadow looms. We have come upon the hill of snow that is Jenssen’s sod barn, the house a stone’s throw beyond.
ABOUT ANNA JENSSEN I have never shied from admitting my doubts, for all that she has done a job in running Swede’s place after he went under, and bringing up their two young girls: still she is such a scrawny rail of a female, full of silly giggles and shrill complaint, being just the style of woman suited to keep those flocks of noisy geese. But now, having delivered the wounded Beidermann to her door, and watched her way with him, I wonder if my opinion is not too limited; for she reveals a competence and easy manner concealed before by scattered behavior; and whether this derives from a knowledge of the nursing trade discovered as a girl on the Missouri border, or if it is summoned from her out of a particular female concern for the vulnerable Beidermann, I cannot say. For certain there are enough rumors and gossip about the two of them; one report running so wild as to have her carrying his child: this unfounded, for as Ma said, time would tell; and it did not: although Ma herself vows there is a fancy between them, which, with the touch of the busybody in her, she would like to help advance. But if something goes between the two I have not observed it, nor do I ask to; for all that I am willing to believe that a woman in the Widow’s severe circumstances would readily fancy a bachelor as agreeably fixed as Beidermann.
In the moment the Widow opens the door, wearing Swede’s sheepskin coat, her long narrow nose tipped red with a cold, she knows what we have brought. She sees the slumping Beidermann on the logs white with snow, and I fear she will screech; but she does not, and at once appears to gather in the true degree of the affair; and her long mare’s face, too often alight with a misfitted twinkle when men are at hand, is sober and keen, as if calamity clears her head like the camphor I smell in the room behind her, where her two girls, with running noses, stand fearfully.
Was it the horses? she says: for it was Swede’s team that pulled our binder over him.
No, I say, it was the ax.
Without pause for more talk, she hooks one of Beidermann’s arms around her shoulders while I take the other: he protests, half pushing me away, and whispering and muttering, but what he says I cannot hear; perhaps it is for the Widow, a private message, as she steers him to the girls’ bed; and with quiet urgency and no feminine shyness sets to stripping the bloody clothes away, leaving a strip of the inner pants to cover his loins; and over one shoulder directs the youngest girl to fetch clean rags and the pot from the stove; while I tell the twins to put up Beidermann’s and our team; and over her other shoulder the Widow instructs the older girl in how to move the stock in the barn to accommodate all.
Beidermann lays like a bull in this room, breathing deeply but unspeaking beneath the Widow’s hands, his presence filling more than the bed. It is not a small house for this region, two rooms joined by a doorless arch, all from pine Swede’s brother freighted in from Minnesota; the walls all papered; all but the far corners visible to me as I sit at the table with a lamp under which Swede and I played more than one game of cards.
The Widow offers womanly sounds of comfort as she sets to bathe Beidermann’s wound in a solution of mercury, and overlays it with a pad of cotton soaked with carbolic acid and olive oil; all done with an easy, practiced hand.
It needs sewing up, she says.
That will have to wait for the doctor, then, I say.
Beidermann tries to raise his head to look. If I have seen him without a hat before, I do not remember it: his hair falls away from his head evenly on all sides, thick and black as an Indian’s.
No, it will not wait, says the Widow.
From her sewing box she brings forth her large needle and cotton thread, quickly bathes both in chemicals from her jars, and with one hand taking its widest reach with fingers and thumb, brings together the torn edges of the wound and begins her stitchery. Beidermann stonily eyes the ceiling beams, his mouth so clamped that the stubbled cheeks pucker. The Widow takes a slow pull on the thread, ste
adier of hand than I would expect. The twins and the two girls come in, and stop shaking snow off themselves to watch without a sound.
I have seen that done once before, I say into the lamp-lit silence: and I tell them of when as a youth I watched a ferryman, a black Norwegian, sew up a knife slice on his own knee with a fishing line as he vowed the while that horse hair would be better. While I do not say so, his workmanship was no more crude than the Widow’s, although it takes a hard man indeed to ask that such make-shift surgery look as clean and pretty as a cross-stitched sampler. Looking over the Widow’s shoulder in the dim light I tell her it is a masterful piece of work, and to Beidermann I pass a jest, that he is darned up more neatly than the toe of my sock; but he does not respond nor look at me.
You will have to bring the doctor soon, the Widow says to me, and in a lower voice: I have my doubts about blood poisoning already.
She casts a troubled look at Beidermann, who pants irregularly like a downed ox, his face reddening, perhaps as signal to the onset of fever.
We will fetch him from Skiles in the morning, I say. One of the boys will go—Henry or Otto.
We will go, Pa, clamor the twins as one; but I raise my hand against it; for all that they are lads of fortitude, it is a half day’s ride, and I choose not to experiment whether two children can persuade the crotchety Entwhistle, in his cups more often than not, to attempt the ride back through wicked weather: whereas Otto, should the physician offer an excuse, is by himself capable of extorting a supply of morphine or other helpful medicine, or even rising to the temper with which he was born and fetching the old croaker along by the seat of his pants.
Beidermann is talking, as if in sleep: I was fixing to butcher that hog . . . he mutters.
What? I ask. Well, we will do that, all right, when you are on your feet again, eh, boys?
