The Horseman's Graves Read online

  The

  HORSEMAN’S

  GRAVES

  Jacqueline Baker

  For my mother,

  and in memory of my grandfather,

  and all the gentle hearts before them.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  KNOCHENFELD

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  THE HILLS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  THE RIVER

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  PILGRIMAGE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  Acclaim for The Horseman’s Graves

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  KNOCHENFELD

  ONE

  They had always been haunted, those hills. The place where the dead walk. But by the time Leo Krauss arrived with his parents and gape-eyed siblings in 1909 (travelling from the stinking though venerable port of Odessa by polluted steamer to Montreal and then west by train and west by cart and west on mules and, finally, when the mules lay wasted in the dust, west on foot across a land searing under the heat of a prairie sun), the ghosts that had once walked the hills had vanished, or were, at least, imperceptible to those already burdened by the past of another country. Now, it was life the newcomers travelled toward, not death. A big clean dome of pure sky. Infinite, unfettered space. A new start. Death was behind them; here, a life could be resurrected.

  Leo’s father, Old Krauss—Gustav was his Christian name, though it had been some time since anyone had used it—whether by lack of prudence or enterprise or by sheer perversity took up his homestead in the worst possible corner of that parched, sifting region known as Palliser’s Triangle, a supposedly hostile and uninhabitable extension of the American Desert. Though there was better land available, Old Krauss settled himself and his family on a hundred and sixty pitiable acres tucked right up against the Sand Hills, toward the richer land bordering the river, but not of it. He might have taken comfort in the mere fact of its proximity, that good, dark gumbo land, as though it might somehow—by erosion or osmosis—creep over into his own; but the truth was Old Krauss neither needed nor gave comfort.

  “Mean as crossed rattlers, those Krausses,” that’s what people said about them.

  “Mean in the old country, mean over here.”

  “That’s how meanness is.”

  “Can’t shake that kind of thing out of the blood,” was what they said.

  And it did appear to be bred into Krausses, the same as their straight black hair and those pinched dark eyes set into colourless faces, “like two pissholes in the snow,” people said. Flat-out mean: to others, and to their own.

  Old Krauss would come into town sometimes, to the café or the grocery or the post office, and laugh to the other men, as if sharing a joke: “Yah, you should have seen,” he would say. “She made it halfway down the road this time, she must be getting faster.”

  It was his wife he was talking about, old Ida, his senior by at least five years. At first, no one knew what he meant. Then Pius Schoff happened to stop by the Krauss place one day just as Old Krauss was on his way into town.

  “By God,” Pius said later, “I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

  But Old Krauss had done nothing out of the ordinary, only what he always did: hitched up his wagon in the barn where Ida could not see, and then cracked the reins and shot from the doors and straight down the road, Ida out of the house and running after him hollering until they—mule, cart, man and wife—were just a receding cloud of dust in the distance and Pius still standing in the yard staring after them. It was Old Krauss’s joke on his wife. Often, when she needed her few things from town, she would drag the big wooden table over so that she could stand by the window next to the door—with her washing or her canning or her cooking—one eye fixed on the barn. But Old Krauss must have been blessed with a kind of perverse second-sight that allowed him to predict the precise moment his wife would turn away, and off he’d shoot across the prairies, sometimes with young Leo and perhaps one or two of the other children on the seat beside him, staring back at their mother with those dark, implacable eyes and a look on their faces that suggested neither shame nor even comprehension.

  Nor would Old Krauss run Ida’s errands in town for her—“What business of mine?” he would say—and so if she heard the wagon she would be forced to drop what she was doing and chase after him. If she caught up, he’d slow down a little, not stop, but slow down, perhaps just so that he might have a good laugh at her trying to jump in. If she didn’t catch up to the wagon, as was most often the case, or did but was unable to hoist herself into it, she would be left to return home and do without whatever it was she needed or else to walk the six miles to town, no matter the weather or the season, and hope, at least, for a ride home.

  Often, in the middle of winter, Old Krauss would pull his wagon up in front of the grocery and holler to someone, anyone, on the street, “No time for a coat, eh?” and jab his thumb to where Ida sat next to him, nearly dead from the cold and clutching over her ears and neck the black woollen headscarf she wore around the house, her hands bare and raw, eyes streaming wet from the wind, and for comfort only the black beaded rosary she always kept wrapped around her fist. How she didn’t die from exposure, no one knew.

  Once a week at least Old Krauss could be heard bragging to the other men, usually in Wing’s where they met for coffee and Old Krauss there at every opportunity, sitting all day if he could manage, bragging about how he’d made Ida run, as if it were something extraordinarily funny, as if they all shared in the joke, never noticing how the men bent their heads over their cups or simply got up and left, and only Wing with his coffeepot and his dishtowel who would even acknowledge him, smiling and nodding but quite possibly thinking the same thing everyone else was: that Old Krauss was a prize SOB if ever there was one. Old Krauss would sit there all day drinking Wing’s coffee and never paying a red cent—that is how the men put it, not a red cent—and Wing too polite or too afraid himself to say anything. Because that was one thing about Old Krauss: if someone ever crossed him, if he ever thought someone had crossed him, they had better watch their backs, or at least that’s what he claimed, managing to sound convincing enough for them to believe him. Most of the time he was harmless enough, too stupid and too lazy for any of
his plans to work: elaborate, impossible plans. He would spend all his time chewing over his grudge, imagining the satisfaction of besting whoever had wronged him, though never actually putting a plan into action. But harmless most of the time is hardly better than harmless none of the time, since no one could predict when Old Krauss was harmless and when he was not.

  ——

  That first spring after Krausses arrived, the old man went out—no one knew where—and got a dog, an enormous, woolly coated, whitish thing with a tongue that perpetually lolled from its huge mouth and that quickly developed a taste for the neighbours’ chickens. It would roam the countryside at night wreaking havoc on the henhouses, sometimes not even eating what it killed, just killing for the sake of killing.

  At first coyotes were blamed. But one night Mrs. Arlen Gebler, awake with a bout of stomach upset, spotted what looked to be a large sheep hightailing it out of her yard with one of her best layers clamped firmly in its jaws. Mrs. Arlen Gebler, no fool, knew what she had seen. Word spread. It wasn’t long before half the countryside was laying a bead on the poor beast, just waiting with their shotguns; to protect their chickens, they all said—“Yah, and what about the children? Today it’s just chickens, but tomorrow?”—but really just because it was Old Krauss’s dog, and so guilty of much by association. Some even tried to bait the animal, just to have the pleasure of shooting him. Not that Old Krauss would have cared one way or another about the dog. He treated it no better and no worse than anything else in his possession. It was always running around half-starved and sore from beatings. It was no great wonder the animal had taken to killing chickens, it was so hungry. The problem was, it had acquired a taste for blood.

  It was Pius Schoff who finally got him, and Pius as good a man as ever there was. But Pius had a thing about Old Krauss.

  “May God forgive me,” he would say, shaking his head, “but I hope that sonofabitch rots in hell,” shocking all who heard him. They’d never known Pius to say a word against anyone.

  But Schoffs were Krausses’ nearest neighbours, and Old Krauss always borrowing one thing and another and never returning anything, or returning things considerably more worn than when he’d borrowed them. Sometimes he did not even ask for what he took, just walked over and took what he needed whether anyone was home or not. And Old Krauss’s gaunt and phlegmatic cattle, when he had any, always over in Pius’s pasture, and the Krauss children into Mrs. Schoff’s garden (“And it’s not that they take the food,” she said, “God knows they need it and they’re welcome, but they stomp all over everything and break the stalks and leave nothing”), and tormenting the Schoff kids, worse still since that afternoon when the eldest Schoff boy—Stolanus—coming upon Leo and one of his younger brothers beating a stray calf cruelly with willow switches, turned the switches upon the beaters until they wept, an act for which Stolanus was to hang his head later in shame before his father, and for which the older Krausses exacted revenge upon the Schoff children at every opportunity, though they had beaten Leo and the younger brother as well for their tears. And then, too, being neighbours, Pius saw and heard more of what went on there between Old Krauss and Ida, and the children, also, and so maybe he had more reason to feel as he did about Old Krauss.

  So, though he hated to do it, Pius shot that dog one morning while the eldest boy, Stolanus, stood watching, and when the big dog dropped in the dust with an air of astonishing finality, Pius lowered the shotgun and, after a moment, said to his son, “Well. That’s one of his at least out of its misery.”

  But afterwards, when father and son stood together over the big dog’s body, wondering what to do—whether to cart it over to Old Krauss or just to bury it—Pius felt kind of sorry he’d done it at all.

  “Poor beast,” he said, and, handing the shotgun to his son, he crouched and tried to hoist the dog up into his arms, but he could not, and he struggled there in the dust, the dog’s huge head rolling heavily. When the son moved to help him, Pius waved the boy away.

  “I shot him,” he said, grimly. “I’ll do it.”

  And so Stolanus stood and watched as his father hefted the huge animal up and across his chest, and when he saw his father was heading out toward the shelterbelt, he went to the barn and exchanged the shotgun for a spade.

  Pius was sitting winded on a cottonwood stump with the dog at his feet when Stolanus entered the trees. Without speaking, the boy bent and stabbed at the cracked earth.

  “I shot him,” Pius said, rising and reaching for the spade.

  Stolanus did not look up. “I watched you,” he said, and kept digging.

  When the last stone had been laid to keep the coyotes away, they replaced the spade in the barn and stopped at the pump to wash the blood and dirt from their hands and then they walked over to Krausses’ together.

  Halfway there the boy said, “Do we have to?”

  He did not really expect an answer, and he did not get one. Just a slight lifting of the shoulders, a resigned curl at the corners of the mouth. And so they walked on in silence, their boots thumping softly in the dust.

  ——

  No one was home. Pius knocked a third time and then said to Stolanus, “I guess Ida was quick today,” though neither of them laughed.

  Pius opened the door a crack. “Yah, hello?” he called. “Anyone home?”

  But there was only the creak of the door on its hinge. Pius sighed, feeling relieved in spite of his good intentions, and reached into his shirt pocket for a bit of paper and the stub end of a pencil. Quickly, he wrote Old Krauss a note—I shot your dog—and was about to add an apology and a signature when Stolanus, leaning against the open screen door, looking inside the darkened kitchen with not a little curiosity, said, “Papa.”

  Stolanus pointed at a spot on the floor just inside the door. There lay what appeared to be the new harness Pius had brought back just a few days previous from Maple Creek, to where they made a six-day journey south by wagon twice a year for supplies. Pius stepped inside and picked it up. It was cut and frayed where someone had been after it with a knife, for God knows what reason, but sure enough, it was theirs. Pius dropped the harness in disgust. He took up the pencil again and added to the note, Keep off my goddamned property you sonofabitch or by God you’ll get the same. Then signed his name, left the harness and walked home, his boy at his heels.

  That evening, Pius was sitting with his family at the supper table over a particularly sweet ham, wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t have left that note after all, wondering if it was too late to ride over after supper and get rid of it, thinking it was a very stupid thing he had written and wondering what on earth had possessed him, when the door swung open and in walked Old Krauss, just the way he always would walk in on people, not even bothering to knock. Pius started up from the table, feeling guilty and ashamed and just a little bit scared all at once, but before he could speak, Old Krauss held out the piece of paper Pius had written on and said, “Yah, someone left me a note, but I can’t read. What does it say?”

  ——

  Pius may or may not have read the note to him, he may or may not have warned Old Krauss off his property, but one way or another Old Krauss found out Pius had shot his dog. He began to brag around town, how he, Gustav Krauss, was going to show that so-and-so that he, Gustav Krauss, was not to be meddled with. Of course, it never amounted to anything. It never did with Old Krauss. Or almost never. There was some rumour, some story about how in the old country Old Krauss’s father had somehow crossed an uncle of Pius’s, though neither Old Krauss nor Pius would speak of it, and speculation tended to favour an unexpected pregnancy in one of Pius’s older cousins, which resulted in bloodshed, though no one could provide any details, and the story seemed to balloon with each telling until in the end it seemed that Old Krauss’s father had been guilty of more than common promiscuity, that his offences had included rape, murder; that somehow young Pius had been involved in the retaliation; that they had carried their grudge with them from the old country to
the new. In some tellings, the trouble between Krausses and Schoffs in the old country predated even Pius and Gustav. The old folks told how Pius’s father’s second-cousin-once-removed’s neck had been slit over a little matter of a stray hog, Gustav’s father the one generally suspected, though nothing was ever proven. No one knew for certain, but the speculation was enough: Old Krauss, stupid though he was, was born of dangerous men, and who was to say he could not be just as dangerous, worse even—dangerous in the rash and unpredictable way that only the truly stupid can be.

  And there did seem to be more than the usual dislike between Pius Schoff and Old Krauss, seemed always to have been, almost as soon as Old Krauss had turned up and, perversely, set down roots on the land adjacent to Schoff’s. It was as if the bad blood had crossed the ocean along with the grief and hopes and hand-carved rosaries, and Old Krauss meant to keep it there.

  It all made Pius more than a little nervous, as if he had, with the trouble about the harness, reopened an old and darkly festering wound. He began to sleep with the .22 tucked snugly beneath his side of the bed he shared with his wife, a habit which, she confessed, made her uneasy.

  “You don’t think Old Krauss would really do anything,” Mrs. Schoff would always say, “would he?”

  “Ach,” Pius would reply, and shake his head, “better to be safe than sorry.”

  One night, Mrs. Schoff turned to her husband. “If you had to,” she said, “would you shoot him even?”

  Pius thought a while.

  “I’d rather not,” he finally said.

  ——

  That June, when Pius’s prized cattle dog had a litter of pups, he packed up the best two in a crate to take over to Old Krauss, a peace offering, and Mrs. Schoff said to her husband, “Well, you might as well save those dogs the trouble and take our chickens, too.”

  But Pius just shrugged as if to say, If he is our cross to bear, bear it we must, and be glad it is no worse. He never again approached Old Krauss about anything, though things continued to go missing from his yard, more often than before, as if to goad, and the Krauss kids continued to lay beatings at every opportunity upon the Schoff kids. Pius nevertheless advised his children to avoid Krausses, which they did, and to walk away from a fight, which they did not. And when Pius went to town, the other men said to him slyly, “I see you’re grazing Krauss’s stock again.”