The Homesman Page 8

  “I reckon.”

  “I reckon, too. Have you ever in your life earned three hundred dollars for a few weeks’ work?”

  He answered her question with his own. “Why not let me have it now?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Why not carry it along?”

  “Oh, no.”

  He turned away.

  She crossed the street again, then stopped, as deep in thought as she had been in mud. It would in fact be safer to carry the money with her. You couldn’t trust the mail. Besides, he could leave them anytime on the trail, ride on ahead, identify himself, and collect the envelope from Altha Carter, who’d have no way of knowing its purpose or what it contained. She opened her coat and buttoned the envelope inside her shirt. When they reached Iowa, she would make a little ceremony of presenting it to him herself. Decided, she recrossed the street, mounted the seat, and drove out of Loup.

  After a mile or so she stopped, unlocked the rear doors, and let Briggs out. He stretched his limbs and took the reins to spell her.

  “You sent the money to George Briggs.”

  “I did.”

  “That’s who I better be, then.”

  “You mean you’re not?”

  “One name’s as good as another out here.”

  He drove for two hours, northwesterly, while she made a list in her mind. Twice they inquired the way at sod houses. Then they topped a long rise, and Mary Bee had him pull up, and pointed.

  “That must be the Petzke place.” She turned to him. “From now on we’ll have women with us. There are some things I want to say. First, you said you’re not interested, but I don’t care. I want you to know what happened to Mrs. Petzke—Hedda, I think her name is.”

  She told him. The man beside her listened, or pretended to, bringing from a pocket of his cowcoat a plug of Star and gnawing off a good chew.

  “There, now you know,” she said. “I’ll tell you about Mrs. Svendsen and Mrs. Sours as we pick them up.” She frowned. “Oh, yes, the second thing. I am aware that you can’t read. I knew it when you looked at the envelope. If you’d like me to, I’ll teach you how. Somewhere, at some house or school, I’ll get a book or two, and I’m quite capable, I’m trained as a teacher. So whenever you’re ready, I’ll be.”

  She waited. There was a sound high above them. They looked up, and over the white earth the sky was spread like a great, gray tarpaulin and under it, northward, aimed a black arrowhead of geese.

  “Three,” said Mary Bee, counting with her fingers. “By this time tomorrow we’ll have our load. From then on, I will be in charge. I will make the decisions. I am responsible. You are simply to help me however you can. Is that clear?”

  It was like lecturing a mule, the only difference being that the man chewed his cud in response while the mule twitched his ears.

  “Four,” said she sternly. “You may not now, but one day, when we’ve got them safely home, you’ll see what a grand and glorious thing you’ve accomplished. Money aside, it may be the only unselfish thing you ever do.” She fervored up her voice. “And one day, one day, Mr. Briggs, you’ll thank the Lord He gave you the opportunity.”

  He spat loudly over the side. “School’s out,” he declared, and started the wagon.

  N.W. 6, Section 25, Township 10, Range 22W.

  She hugged him tight and would not let him go. He asked her what was the matter.

  “Those wolves,” whimpered Hedda Petzke.

  Otto Petzke tried to joke her out of it. “All you must do, open the door and holler ‘Raus! Raus!’ and they will run away.”

  “No, no,” she whimpered.

  He understood now that she was truly frightened. “Schatzlein, schatzlein,” he murmured in her ear. Otto Petzke was forty, his wife, Hedda, thirty-six, they had been married sixteen years, and still he called her “sweetheart.” He had an idea.

  Entering the house, he came out with his shotgun and a shell. He had his rifle in the wagon in case he could shoot a buffalo. Hedda had never fired a weapon, she shrank from it, but he showed her how to break the gun and load it and, after much coaxing, to put it to her shoulder and aim. Then, standing behind her, placing her finger on the trigger, so that she would know the sound and kick, he tricked her and pulled it. At the explosion and recoil she cried out and collapsed at his feet, and he thought she’d fainted. But she had not, and when he lifted her she threw her arms around him. They stood together several minutes, their boys, Rolf and Jergen, fifteen and fourteen, watching them impatiently from the wagon, the ox team breathing steam. It was early-morning light. Father and sons were going to the Couteau, eight miles south, to cut wood in the river bottom, for they were out of wood and almost out of hay for the stove and this was only February and only their second thaw. Otto Petzke looked aside at their sod house. The snow had drifted on the north side as high as the roof. What had become of the small, sturdy, spark-eyed woman who had come west with him three years ago? It was this long verdammt winter, or maybe Gerda’s dying. She was thin now, she spoke only when spoken to, lifting a finger tired her, she was a stranger in their midst. And he recalled: when the wolves, hunting in packs, howled outside nights, she turned to him in bed and hugged him as she did now, desperately.

  He forced her from him, holding her arms.

  “We go,” he said. “Here is what you do. In the house I have put out two boxes of shells. If they come near, open the door and shoot the gun, anywhere. They will run away schnell, quick, I promise it. We be back tomorrow, I promise it.” He put the shotgun into her hand.

  “Nein,” she said, and let it fall.

  He strode from her to the wagon.

  But she did not see them go. She ran, leaving the weapon in the snow, into the house.

  To keep busy that day she sewed, patching the seats and knees of Otto’s and the boys’ spare overalls with flour sacking. It was also to keep her mind off the coming night.

  She was very lonely. She missed the virile voices of her husband and her boys. She wished they had a ticking clock.

  They had come west from a farm south of Springfield, in Illinois. Otto longed for free land and a fresh start. His farm was mortgaged. He hungered for adventure, too, but this he could not put into words except to talk now and then about buffalo. So he sold out and bought a wagon and oxen. Hedda made him wait until the baby was born, a girl, Eva, and then they set out across Iowa, husband, wife, two boys, a girl, Gerda, and the baby, Eva, nursing. Crossing the Missouri by ferry at Kanesville, they joined several other wagons to follow the Platte River, the most traveled trail. Here they lost Eva, the baby, to fever and fits, and buried her beneath a tree beside the river. They left the train then, and turned northwest, and after a month more Otto found his land. He filed two claims, each of a hundred sixty acres, half a section, one a homestead and the other under the “timbering” provision, and paid the fee of fifty cents an acre. The soil was sandy there, and he concluded to try potatoes along with corn and wheat. By the end of the second summer he favored potatoes over corn and wheat by forty acres. The Petzkes prospered. And to top it off, Otto found adventure. He shot and killed the only buffalo seen in those parts in years, a stray bull. He skinned it out, butchered it, kept the hump and a hindquarter, took three quarters to the three nearest neighbors, and came home drunk for the first and only time in his married life.

  In the afternoon it started snowing.

  She was very lonely. It was not so bad in winter, with her family about, but the rest of the year, when she was alone, she talked to herself. Now she had not seen another woman for four months, even her nearest neighbor, Mrs. Iverson, four miles away. She had not gone into Loup with Otto since August. Mrs. Iverson told her about a farmwife up north in the Territory who went into the fields summers and lay down among the sheep, to have company.

  She forgot to go to the stable to feed the stock until it was near dark. Then s
he ran both ways, and to the outhouse, and running back stumbled over the shotgun. She snatched it up, hurried it into the house, dried it off, and stood it against a chair by the boxes of shells Otto had put out.

  It was snowing hard and getting cold. The thaw was over. They might not be home tomorrow.

  At dark she lit the old hussy. This was a bowl of sand with a stick upright in the center and a wick wound around it and filled with skunk oil. Otto had shot a fat polecat that gave two quarts of oil. By this light she cooked herself a supper of schnitz und knep, dried apples and dumplings, and drank a cup of rye coffee with bran essence to make it taste like real coffee.

  There were precious few hay cats left. She stoked the stove with some, saving most for morning, and got into bed fully dressed except for her boots.

  They were gray wolves. Some weighed as much as fifty pounds. As the winter wore on they began to hunt in starving packs of five or six to be sure of their prey. They attacked anything alive. Mr. Iverson had told Otto what they did to cattle during blizzards. Covered with ice and snow, the cattle were jumped on and knocked down and couldn’t rise, and the wolves would rip into their bellies and eat until they had eaten a hole big enough for one or two to crawl into and shelter themselves from the storm. Hedda Petzke knew in her soul they were more than wolves. They were messengers of God.

  She dozed, then went rigid at the howls outside, not close but not far.

  She slid out of bed and by the light of the old hussy took up the shotgun, loaded it, and creeping to the door, opened it a crack, put the gun to her shoulder, poked the barrel through the crack, and fired. The explosion deafened her, and the recoil bumped her backward. She closed the door. When her ears could hear, the howling had stopped.

  After that she couldn’t sleep but lay still, the shotgun beside her on the bed and loaded.

  Later, she heard scratching at the wooden door. How could she open it to fire outside without letting them leap through the crack onto her? It was hung on leather hinges. If they jumped at it, two or three of them, the way they did at cattle, might they not tear it off the hinges?

  She had insisted that they bring their bed with headboard and footboard of solid oak, hers and Otto’s, from Illinois. It was their wedding bed. The scratching continued. Partitioned off by a hung blanket, the boys slept behind their parents on a bed of strung rope and poles braced by the sod walls.

  She sprang out of bed, gun in hands, and moving around the bed, putting the headboard between herself and the door like a wall, laid the weapon over the headboard and, stooping, aimed it at the door.

  Wolves were born hunters. They knew someone, something alive was inside the house.

  Suddenly there was a great crash of glass, of the window glass beside the door, and she turned the gun barrel toward the shower of glass and pulled the trigger.

  Inside the house the roar of the weapon was even louder. When her hearing returned, she listened. She couldn’t see the animal. Had she killed it? Wounded it? Or missed it altogether? But the silence was more fearful to her than sound, and after a minute she sank to the floor behind the bed, tore the hung blanket down about her, and began to sob. Later, as light entered by the shattered window, she still sat there, bundled, shaking cold.

  In full morning she roused herself. The wolf that had leaped through the window lay dead at the foot of the bed. It was thin, its ribs could be counted, and its head was bloody. She opened the door and, taking it by its tail, dragged it outside. She went to the stable to feed the stock, and to the outhouse, through heavy snow drifting down under a sky the color of dishwater. They couldn’t be home today, not hauling a wagonload of wood. She would be alone another night.

  Somehow she passed the day. There was no use lighting the stove, not with the open window. She ate nothing. Her right shoulder was sore from the kick of the shotgun. From the trunk she took a packet of letters from her two sisters-in-law in Illinois, received and treasured over the past two years, and read them aloud one by one to hear the sound of a voice. The Petzkes had not had mail since November. There was an old German saying, “Reden ist Silber, schweigen ist Gold,” “Speech is silver, silence is gold.” It was not true.

  In the afternoon she made ready. Using some sticks behind the stove, she pegged up a blanket over the window, then stacked two chairs, one atop the other, in front of it. She fed the stock again. It had stopped snowing. As the day darkened, she moved a third chair behind the headboard of the bed, lit the old hussy, placed the boxes of shells on the boys’ bed behind her, easy to reach, then wrapped herself in another blanket and seated herself on the chair, loaded gun across her lap.

  Hedda Petzke waited.

  She had not done enough to save Eva, her baby, sleeping now in a lonely grave beside the Platte. She had not done enough to save Gerda, her four-year-old, laid low last summer by a rattlesnake bite. She had gone on the run at Gerda’s scream by the stable, killed the snake, which was a yard long, with a hoe, carried the child into the house, and run into the fields screaming for Otto. They gave her whiskey, then Otto saddled up and galloped to the Iversons, caught a chicken, galloped back, and together they tore the hen apart and bound the heart over the bite, by the ankle, to pull out the venom. The nearest doctor lived eighteen miles away. All night they gave her whiskey and kept the heart over the bite, but in the morning Gerda died. They buried her near the house. Hedda had lost both her girls. She had failed them. He knew that, too. It was why He had sent the wolves as messengers. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Romans 12:19.

  The howling started, close by this night.

  She unwrapped the blanket, crept to the door, opened it a crack, and fired. The howling stopped. She sat down again behind the headboard.

  But they stayed near, circling the house probably. Could they scent her through the blanket?

  Suddenly the blanket over the window billowed. She jumped to her feet and aimed.

  The blanket dropped, the stacked chairs were smashed over, and a gray shape, leaping, was tangled in the chairs. She fired. The shape writhed and then lay still over the chairs, near the foot of the bed.

  Reloading the weapon she began to cry softly. After a time she could truly hear them, whining about in front of the house. She remained standing, crying. What would they do now? They were too wary to try the window again. Gun pointed at the window she stood, stiff with cold, until her eyes blurred with tears. She could not have that. She willed herself to stop crying, which she did, but to vent her fright began to whine like the wolves.

  Suddenly she heard something above. They were on the roof. Searching for a way to get past the gun, to reach her, they had climbed the drifted snow on the north side of the house to claw a hole in the roof and jump down upon her.

  The clawing continued. Bits of wood and dirt dropped on the bed. Whining, she raised the gun and aimed it at the roof.

  Her arms ached. A clump of wood and earth and legs fell suddenly, awkwardly, out of the roof.

  “Grüss Gott!” she screamed, and fired.

  The charge of shot flung the animal sideways onto the table, tipping over the table and dowsing the light.

  In the darkness she whined with fright and fumbled for a shell and broke the gun and reloaded and couldn’t see where to aim but sensed another messenger of God descending and fired where ­instinct told her and the messenger, wounded, yelped and thrashed upon the bed. It snarled and snapped in agony, crawling up the bed to tear her limb from limb and to avenge her dearest dead. She could see its awful eyes, closer, closer. She could breathe its foul breath, closer.

  Her men came home in the morning. They saw the broken window, the dead wolf outside the door, and inside they found the carcasses of three more, one caught in chairs, one on the table, one on the bed. They found the shotgun and shell casings behind the headboard. But there was no sign of wife and mother. A frantic Otto ran shouting to the stable, Rolf a
nd Jergen to the outhouse. Then they returned on the run and for some reason Otto threw himself down and peered under the bed. “Lieber Gott!” he gasped. It took two of them to pull Hedda Petzke from under the bed. Her arms, legs, body, were rigid. It was like a paralysis. They had to help her rise and sit upon a chair. She couldn’t speak, but made strange whimpering sounds. The pupils of her eyes were dilated. She did not know her husband or her sons. “Schatzlein, sweetheart,” mourned Otto Petzke over and over, her hands in his, tears in his eyes.

  • • •

  They must have been on the lookout, for they emerged from the sod house long before the wagon reached it and stood like soldiers in rank, three of them, father and two stout boys in their teens. They were ready, too. Otto Petzke held some envelopes, one boy a bundle, the other a bedroll. Neither boy, probably, had ever before seen a frame wagon, but they didn’t stare, standing erect and Germanic as their father, and Mary Bee’s heart went out to the three. She knew what the wagon would mean to the four families, visited in turn. Its coming would be dreaded and welcomed alike. Its going would have the finality of death.

  She stepped down from the seat and greeted Otto, then indicated Briggs, who, she said, would assist her on the way. Petzke introduced his sons, Rolf and Jergen, and said the three of them had been waiting since Reverend Dowd came by yesterday and said Miss Cuddy would soon be there. He gave her a packet of envelopes tied with a string. On the front of the first was the name “Karl Koenig,” Hedda’s older brother, who lived not far from Springfield, Illinois. Inside, he said, was a letter from himself to Karl that explained everything. The others were letters from Hedda’s sisters-in-law. Karl, he was certain, would take his sister in and do what he could for her, otherwise her younger brother, Albert, would. He lived and farmed near Karl. Hedda had been close to her sisters-in-law, writing back and forth. But if neither family was able, there must be an asylum near Springfield, that being the state capital. Petzke gave her also a folded sheet inside of which was eight dollars in greenbacks, all the cash he had. It should go to Karl or Albert, he said, whichever brother accepted his Hedda.