The Homesman (4 page)

They nodded, gravely, awed perhaps by the number of their assignments.

“Good,” she said. “And remember—love your dear mother.” She let go of them and stood. “Now, you get busy as bees. Give me your foreheads.”

They raised their faces. She kissed each one on the forehead, then left them. Passing through the front room, she couldn't bear to look again at Theoline. Outside, Vester had hung the meat and stabled her horse and was returning. Mary Bee noticed she had clenched her fists. It was anger again, flaring higher in the void. It must have found kindling. She must damp it down before it reached her heart.

“I've untied her.”

Vester scowled. It had irked him to stable her horse. He had not thanked her for the antelope. “Who said to? No tellin' what she'll do.”

“I assure you she's harmless. Besides, you may not have her much longer.”

“How's that?”

“That's one reason why I'm here. I have a message for you from Reverend Dowd.” She opened her fists into hands and began to explain the necessity for a homesman, but Vester soon interrupted her. He knew all that, Dowd had told him. Very well, she said, the drawing would be held at the church next Tuesday, in the afternoon, and he should be there, the other three husbands would be. Vester asked what drawing. Why, to decide which one of the four would take the four wives back east, across the Missouri, to Hebron, Iowa, whence they'd be escorted home. Whoever lost the drawing would take them back, the other three husbands would supply wagon, team, and supplies. That was the way it was done last year, when three women had lost their minds over the winter, and Reverend Dowd proposed to try it again this. Vester stared at her, then stated flatly he wouldn't do no such a thing. Christamighty, he knew Petzke and Svendsen—the one was a damn Dutchman and the other a Norskie—Sours he'd never heard of—and he wasn't hauling their women anywhere. She could tell Dowd to find another fool. Mary Bee said he must be there for the drawing. He was as responsible for his wife's welfare as the others were for theirs. Vester said he wouldn't, and nobody could make him, this was a free country. “Then what will you do with Theoline?” asked Mary Bee.

That stumped him.

She started for the stable. It was a tiny triumph, but the anger burned in her unabated. In the stable she glanced at a swelling on the flank of the ox next to her mare, which had to be warbles, which needed coal oil. When she led the mare out Vester had followed, whining. He swore he wanted to do what was best for Line, but what if he went to the drawing and lost? Heading east with a load of women, being gone for weeks, who'd see to his stock and his girls? Mary Bee said she would. Well, what if he wasn't picked? He was so hard up he couldn't chip in a sack of meal or a red cent for the trip. Why, he'd just been into Loup last thaw and taken out a chattel mortgage, and he had to get a crop in this spring or lose everything. If he had any more bad luck, he whined, come summer he'd quit and pack up his girls and goods and head back for Kentucky, where a feller had a chance. Couldn't she get it through her head how he was whipsawed? If he was picked in the drawing he wouldn't go, and if he wasn't, to his shame he couldn't ante up a thing—either way he come out behind. Just what in holy hell was he s'pose t'do?

She heard young voices singing in the house, singing “Away in the Manger.” What she'd have liked to say was oh, Vester, all we have brought out here to this wilderness is our lives and a little seed of civilization. We have planted that seed. Unless we tend it, it will die, and if it dies, we are no better than brutes. Taking these poor women home is civilized.

Instead, she said, “Go.”

“I won't.”

“Tuesday,” she said.

Now he was angry. He hadn't budged her.

“I won't.”

“Then I'll go in your place,” she said. “I'll draw for you. If I win, I'll provide what you can't afford. If I lose, you'll start east with your wife and the other three. You have to.”

“Damn if I will!”

“They'll make you.”

“I've got a long rifle!”

Mary Bee mounted up, reins in one fist. “In the meantime, love her.”

“Love 'er! After what she's done t'me? I give 'er no cause t'go crazy!”

“You gave her another baby.”

“The Lord's will!”

Now her anger blazed, and Mary Bee Cuddy felt the heat of it in her heart. “It wasn't the Lord bedded her!” she cried. Her look after that was like a cut of the reins. “Vester,” she said, “you are a damned poor specimen of a man.” And she nudged Dorothy with a knee and rode off.

Vester Belknap cupped both hands around his mouth and hollered. “I am, hey? Leastwise I don't dress up like a woman!”

•   •   •

This day it turned cold again and spit small, sparse flakes as though it disremembered how to snow.

This time Charley Linens and John Cox and Martin Polhemus picked up Henry Caudill on the way. Henry was a good man with a gun. When he joined them he had a package wrapped tight in white paper. They asked what that was. He said sulphur. They asked what it was for. Henry said for just in case. The four rode south and west toward the Kettle River until they came to Andy Giffen's stovepipe and a curl of smoke rising from it, then down into the ravine, keeping well upside of the stovepipe. Here they tied horses to a runt tree, and slipping rifles, sneaked down the ravine into a thick tangle of gooseberry bushes that faced Andy's dugout from maybe sixty yards off. When they figured they had enough cover of the bushes, they readied rifles and let Charley Linens take the lead. He shouted.

“Moore!”

The door and window of the dugout were closed.

“Briggs!”

He was talking to himself.

“Hey, you, jumper!”

That did it. As they watched, the door opened a crack and the window a crack.

“This here's the same bunch was here the other day!” Charley shouted. “Andy Giffen's friends! Andy's due any day now, and we want you off this claim! We got four guns to your one, so you be smart about it. Come on out with your hands up and we'll see you on your way, much obliged, no harm done! Come on now!”

They waited a minute, two.

“Shit,” said Martin Polhemus.

He raised up on his knees, poked rifle barrel through the bushes, set stock to shoulder, and fired at the dugout door. Then the rest did the same, some firing at the door, some at the window. It sounded like a battle. The ugly horse in the stable took fright or fury at the gunfire and started snorting and screaming like a woman in labor. But they had bitten off more than they could chew. Briggs or whatsisname was as rapid with a rifle as he was with a handgun. He jumped from door to window and back again and that barrel would snake out an inch or two and he'd fire and snake back and they never thought a man could be so accurate aiming and firing so fast. His bullets clipped branches close to their faces. They went by like a hot breath. John Cox got a twig in the eye and said “Ow!” and stopped firing. So did the others.

They sat back on their buttocks in the snow. They were scared. They knew what they had to do, but how the hell to do it was the question.

“Goddam him,” said Martin Polhemus. He was breathing hard and sweating.

“Boys, listen,” said Henry Caudill, who was a soft-spoken man. “We've got us a mossback here. We can't shoot him out. He's got sod and wood between us. So why not smoke him out? That's why I brung that pound of sulphur.”

He told them to let loose again. While they did, he'd run up the ravine, get his sulphur, climb on out, and drop it down Andy's stovepipe. They looked doubtful. Henry said give it a try. He said back where he came from, mountains down in Missouri, that's how they got a bear out of a hole, smoked him out. Then when he came out bellering and half-blind, they'd kill him easy as falling off a log.

“Why not?” said John Cox, rubbing his twig eye. “I'm cold and hungry and it's a long ways to supper.”

“I don't want any of us shot,” said Charley Linens.

“Him neither,” said a grim Martin Polhemus. “I want that sonvabitch strung from a tree.”

So they gave it a try. Three of them blasted away at the dugout again while Henry Caudill peeled off up the ravine. Then they hunkered down in the gooseberry bushes and waited and watched the dugout and could see nary sign of movement. The afternoon began to die on them. It grew dark sooner in the ravine than up on the flatland. Then, suddenly, the dugout door swung wide open and the window, too, and thick yellow smoke billowed out from both and they expected to see Briggs come out coughing and half-blind. But he did not. The dugout disappeared completely in a yellow cloud. Martin Polhemus hitched up and fired off a couple rounds into the cloud, and to their disbelief, a couple more banged right back out of the cloud and sliced the bushes close by.

That made Martin Polhemus so mad he rose up and took a chance. “You et enough smoke yet, Briggs?” he hollered. “You had enough?”

The jumper hollered right back. “You damn dumb sodbusters! Go on home!”

Martin sank down and swore a blue streak.

Henry Caudill slipped back from on top and they bunched up and looked at him, squatting.

“You still want him out of here?” he asked.

They did.

“All right,” said Henry. “We can't shoot him out or smoke him out. You come by my place next week and pick me up. I'll have Thor Svendsen with me. Strong as an ox. But he's maybe got some gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder?” they all said.

“Why not? That's the sure way. We'll blow him out like a stump.”

“I'll bring the rope,” added Martin Polhemus.

“Rope?”

“He ain't blown dead, I want him down by the river. At the end of a rope. Dancin' a jig.”

•   •   •

If the reference was to religion, it was called “Kettle Church”; if to education, “Kettle School.” It served both purposes. A building bee enlisting every man and boy in the neighborhood had erected it in a single day on a rise not far from the river. Logs for walls were hauled from the river bottom, chinked with blocks, and pointed up with clay. The roof was made of sod and branches. Mary Bee Cuddy's hundred dollars bought the niceties: a door, two window frames and glass, a stove, a carpentered pulpit for the preacher, a dozen slates and sheepskin erasers, and a grab bag of books. Every second Sabbath, winter permitting, and this one had not, Reverend Dowd held services of a sort he called, with a twinkle in the eye, “non-denominational Methodist.” But the wider function of the building was instructional. School was divided into three terms of eight weeks, fall, winter, and spring, although this year the winter term had been canceled for reasons of weather and love. The children could not come for cold and snow. Teacher could not come because she had married at Christmas. She was Miss Clara Marsh, late of Vermont and early to the plains. Rather than the result of love, however, marriage for her was probably the lesser of two evils. This was a subscription school. Her fee was a dollar a child per term, plus her keep, and with seventeen scholars signed up, she should have had, by the end of the fall term, seventeen dollars. She did not. She had ten dollars in hand and seven in hope. Worse, she had spent the term boarding and rooming with the parents of her pupils, moving from sod house to dugout, sleeping three to a bed with wiggly youngsters, subsisting on a diet composed in the main of cornmeal mush, corn samp, corn cake, corn dodgers, and corn bread, which had undermined her constitution. Marriage, therefore, even to a balding widower who needed a workhorse wife, might have seemed to Clara Marsh a sensible alternative to poverty and broken health. She was asked. She said yes. There was no winter term at Kettle School.

Mary Bee was the first to arrive.

She stood for a spell, deciding not to start a fire in the stove even though there was ample wood in the box. What had to be done would take only a little while. A long, broad board was slotted on pegs inserted in the logs on two sides of the room. On this crude desk, books and slates and erasers were neatly stacked. The benches, for classes and congregations, were hewn logs with pegs driven in for legs. Near the stove was a wooden water bucket and a rusty dipper. She seated herself on a bench in front of the movable pulpit.

Garn Sours entered.

He stared at her in surprise, managed to nod, then sat on a bench near the door, his back to her, bent over, studying the dirt floor, a picture of misery. He was twenty-one or -two at most. Her heart sank. That he could lead four women unsound of mind, his own wife included, several hundred miles over trackless prairie, feed them and care for them and bring them safely to haven, was inconceivable.

Again she surveyed the room. It occurred to her to envy Miss Clara Marsh. Both of them had come west full of faith, beans, and foreboding, but Marsh had been the luckier. Her school had every amenity compared to the one south of Wamego over which she, Cuddy, had presided for a year. No desk, no slates, few books, a stubborn stove, and a pinch-penny board that failed, every term end, to pay her the full dollar a day it had promised. That school had come equipped, in addition, with two oafish louts of sixteen who tyrannized the younger children and would have made pedagogy impossible had she not one day, at one stroke, shown them what stuff she was made of. A band of Pawnees camped in the vicinity. She carried a rifle to school every day. While the autumn was still warm, a rattler four feet long found its way into the room. Calmly, scared half to death, she took charge. Herding the hysterical children away from the snake, she seized her weapon, tossed a book near the reptile to make it coil and rear to strike, aimed, and with a single bullet shot off its head. At once she earned the louts' respect and saved the term. Yet playing heroine did not endear the profession to her. She, too, like Marsh, ate more corn than was fit for cattle. She, too, like Marsh, lay sleepless in ticky beds with grubby, bad-dream bedfellows. But unlike Marsh, no balding knight-at-arms appeared to save the maiden in distress. Instead, in the spring, money had come in the mail—two whole whopping thousand dollars of it—and she was free. The last day of school she wrote a note to the school board and told it, politely, to go suck an egg.