The Homesman (13 page)

But she was a woman. “They are not freight. They are human beings.”

“They're crazy.”

“They are precious to the Lord.”

“Well, they are to me, too, Cuddy. Three hundred dollars' worth.”

They saw, now and then, a sod dwelling or a school or the smoking stovepipe of a dugout, and Briggs avoided them as carefully as he did the bloated carcasses of cattle frozen to death in the winter.

After three days they had established a routine. Like the horses, the mules were picketed at night, or lariated as some called it, and woke the party mornings by braying like bugles. Briggs unpicketed them, along with the mare and his roan, and let them roll and run and play bronc and try to bite and kick each other. He couldn't feed them grain, but even damp and dead the bluestem grass had some nutriment in it. One at a time Mary Bee took three of the women away from the camp, behind bushes if there were bushes, to relieve themselves, during which Briggs got her fire going again. Having lost the use of her legs, Arabella Sours had to be carried, and he did this. Mary Bee heated water and washed the women's hands and faces and combed their hair, then cooked breakfast. Mrs. Sours and Mrs. Petzke had to be hand-fed. After the meal Mary Bee washed dishes, packed the grub box, rolled blankets, and loaded bedrolls while Briggs harnessed and hitched the span and tied the trailers. Together they placed their passengers in the wagon and moved on. Mrs. Svendsen's arms were still unbound. Rough riding seemed to have knocked the rage out of her.

They took turns at the reins. Briggs spoke seldom. Among other pastimes, Mary Bee counted lone trees. Stands of timber were usually found along creeks or in river bottoms, cottonwoods and sycamores, ash and elm, but occasionally a lone tree seemed to have planted itself on the plain and grown to full majesty. How it was there was a riddle without an answer, unless by bird dropping. She loved these solitary trees. They were dauntless. They comforted and inspired her. The second day she counted four of them, the third day two. They made two or three stops daily. During one the animals were watered and the keg filled at a creek or spring. During another, when opportunity presented, Briggs would take the ax and cut a supply of firewood and toss it up on the tarp. A midday stop was scheduled to permit the women, Mary Bee in charge, to relieve themselves, Briggs again carrying young Mrs. Sours and her doll. They took turns at hunting, too, she one afternoon, he the next. She saddled Dorothy, took her rifle, and rode out as free as the breeze, hoping for big game, antelope or a buffalo stray, but settling, as he did, for prairie chickens or jackrabbits, which weighed up to seven pounds.

They camped in late afternoon, Briggs choosing the site. Mary Bee got a fire going, unloaded the grub box and Dutch oven, dressed and prepared the game. He untied, unhitched, unharnessed, and picketed the four animals. She had never seen anyone as fussy about picketing. First he looked for good grass, then walked round and round on it and stomped the earth until he was satisfied it was solid enough and would hold. Then he drove the four pins in so deep with an ax that nothing less than a hippopotamus could have dislodged them, and it was all he could manage to pull them in the morning. Once supper was eaten and the dishes done and the women taken to bushes or out behind the stock, beds were unrolled for them under the wagon box in case of rain. Every several days, when there was a stream nearby, Mary Bee put the women into clean underthings, washed their dirty, and spread them out to dry. If they weren't dry by sun-up, she spread them on the tarp atop the wagon and weighted them with stones. From the start Briggs insisted each woman be tied to a wheel spoke by a wrist for the night. That got her dander up. These were people, she declared, not animals, no need whatever to picket them. And what, he inquired, if one or more of them set out in darkness for hearth and home? Fiddlesticks, they wouldn't. How did she know they wouldn't? Was she ready, in the morning, to ride to hell and gone to find them? If she could? And if she couldn't, what then? So they were tied. Mary Bee bedded down near them. Briggs slept by the fire, and slept cold, he complained. She had dealt him two damn skinny blankets. Sometimes in the night the whicker of a mule or horse waked her, and when she looked over at him he lay on his side, her rifle near, staring into the embers of the fire, thinking. Thinking? Was he capable of cerebration?

Each hour of the hours each day on the wagon was long enough to go round the world at the equator.

If only she had a fife to toot.

If only she had Mr. Emerson to read.

If only she had a hatpin to jab into the stick-in-the-mud beside her on the seat.

“Why are you a claim-jumper?” she jabbed one morning.

“It's a living.”

“How much of a living? How much would you have got for jumping Andy Giffen's claim?”

“Two hundred.”

“That isn't much.”

“For laying up three, four months it is.”

“What would have happened when Andy came home?”

“He couldn't drive me off. He'd have to go to the lawyer in Wamego, man I work for. Buy his own place back, maybe a thousand dollars, or get tied up so long in court he'd starve.”

“Despicable.”

“Dumb.”

“Dumb?”

“He forgot to file.”

Another morning she tried the mules. “Will these mules make it to the Missouri?”

“I don't expect.”

“Why not?”

She'd hit his nail on the head. “They'll lose too much flesh,” he said. “Those sodbusters who put this outfit together for you should've had some sacks of corn on top. There's not enough good in this dead grass. Out here stock should have a quart or two of shelled corn every day. Some say oats, but oats'll get musty. Not shelled corn. Best feed there is, man or beast.”

Anything to keep him talking to hear another voice. Anything to occupy the mind. “The one twitching his ears, he knows he's the subject of discussion. He's the Thinker, the other's the Worker. But they should have names. What shall we call them?”

“I don't use names.”

“Oh. What d'you call your horse?”

“ ‘Horse.' ”

“ ‘Horse,' ” she said.

“ ‘Horse,' ” he repeated.

“That's all,” she said.

“That's all,” he repeated. “I don't care to get too choice of anyone or anything.”

“I see.” She considered that. “Well, my mare's name is ‘Dorothy,' after my sister.”

She waited. That gave him a lead, and if he had a smithereen of social instinct he'd take it, he'd inquire politely about her sister, or her family, or her origins. She waited in vain. He was an utter dolt. And so, eventually, she took her own lead, plodding through her past as though she were following a plow up and down a field while his eyelids drooped and his head sank. Dorothy was her older sister, two years older. They had no brothers. Dorothy was happily married to a doctor, had a little boy, six, and was expecting another child, she'd just written as much. She lived in Bath, on Lake Keuka, in upper York State, where both girls had been born and raised. Their father was a tanner, and she could still remember the smell of the acid when he came home evenings from the tannery. Her mother died when she, Mary Bee, was twelve. She attended the Troy Female Seminary, taught primary school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for eight years, and then applied to Catharine Beecher's National Popular Education Board in Boston to be tested and inspired and transported out west, her way paid. To serve God and her church, to light a candle of learning in the darkness of the far frontier—these were her intentions. That she hoped also to have some adventures and to catch a strong, handsome, educated, industrious, virile paragon of a husband went without saying to anyone, certainly to Briggs. She was accepted and soon, with her friend Miss Clara Marsh, transported to the Territory by rail, steamer, and stage. In the winter of that dreadful year at the school south of Wamego, word came that her father had passed away, and in the spring came her inheritance. Within weeks she had bought a claim from a new widow and started putting in a crop. The driver's chin reached his chest.

“Am I keeping you awake, Mr. Briggs?” she asked.

His head jerked erect.

“Why, no, Cuddy,” said he, touching the brim of his hat. “You are putting me to sleep.”

One day he turned the wagon down into a stand of timber to water the animals and fill the keg. As soon as they stopped by the considerable stream, Mary Bee jumped down, walked stiff-legged to the nearest tree, a black walnut, and flung her arms around it, holding it in her embrace for several minutes. Perhaps what she missed most, she told Briggs defiantly, cheek to trunk, was trees, the trees she had known and loved in York State—maple and beech, poplar and birch, spruce and cedar, in all their multitudes. She let the women out and put them back. Then, as they moved away through the timber, Briggs held up the mules. Ahead of them, atop four poles cut from young trees, was a scaffold of saplings lashed together and to the poles by rawhide thongs. There were three such platforms. On each lay a shape the size of a human wrapped in a buffalo hide. Corpses, said Briggs. Winnebago. This was how they did it. They sat for a moment in stillness. A crow cawed, distantly. Briggs eased the wagon alongside the nearest scaffold and climbed back on top, over the gear on hands and knees. He leaned, got a grip on the buffalo hide encasing the corpse, and yanked on it until it pulled free and dumped the body off the scaffold. Before it thudded on the ground Mary Bee had exclaimed in horror and averted her eyes. Briggs shook the hide, whacked it on the platform to get the dust out of it, spread it on the wagon top to air, and resumed his seat and driving. That day, whenever Mary Bee chanced to see the hide, she felt sick at her stomach. That night, at bedtime, Briggs laid his two blankets over the hide and rolled up in all three. In the morning he announced he had slept warm for the first time.

She had all her valuables in the velvet sewing bag now: a sheet with the name and address of Theoline Belknap's sister in Kentucky; the packet of letters and the name and address of Karl Koenig, Hedda Petzke's brother near Springfield, Illinois; the paper with the names of Arabella Sours's numerous family in Ohio, and her pink cameo pinned to a piece of cardboard; the envelope with the names and addresses of Gro Svendsen's two cousins in Minnesota; the cloth melodeon keyboard; the last letter from Dorothy; and the envelope the banker had given her containing six fifty-dollar notes on the Bank of Loup and addressed to Mr. George Briggs, c/o Mrs. Altha Carter, Ladies Aid Society, Methodist Church, Hebron, Iowa; plus her own ten dollars in greenbacks. By day the bag was rolled up in her blankets. By night she slept with it. In her bones she knew she had been right to bring the three hundred dollars rather than mailing it, but the same bones told her indubitably that if Briggs laid hands on it, he would abandon them forthwith. If he was the other things she believed him to be, he could certainly be a thief. A man of low character. An ignoramus. A stick-in-the-mud. A dolt. A brute—only a brute could have split Vester Belknap's scalp. She had ransacked her vocabulary for the one noun that would perfectly peg him. Most of the men who came to the plains were good men, hardy and brave, God-fearing and ambitious, family men. Oh, there were exceptions, lowest on the scale, the outlaws and ne'er-do-wells. The in-between batch consisted of culls, inferior in every aspect, taking what they could, contributing nil. Eureka. She had her noun. The claim-jumper was a cull.

The next morning the mules, harnessed and hitched, would not go. Mary Bee had the reins. She clucked till her tongue tired. Briggs sat impassive beside her. She stood up, grasped the reins, and gave each beast a smart switch on the croup. Neither budged. The Thinker twitched his ears. The Worker was adamant. She gave them a second switch. They would not go. She consigned them to Perdition. She switched again. They stood stubborn as—as mules.

“Damn!” she cried, and sat down.

Briggs got down and unhitched them, and taking the span by both bridles, trailing the reins, led them out of the shafts and around the wagon in a wide circle, backed them into the shafts, hitched them up again as though for the first time that morning, handed Mary Bee the reins, and took his seat.

She clucked.

Away they went.

She looked at Briggs, who was looking at her, and he did something so startling she could have fallen from the seat.

He gave her a wink.

•   •   •

As the long miles hissed and grumbled under the wheels of the frame wagon, she studied her four charges with great interest, making daily entries in a kind of mental notebook.

There was no change in the condition of Mrs. Petzke, who had been terrorized into insanity. Her paralysis persisted. She could walk only with an arm about her waist, moving and supporting her, and could take nourishment only if fed by hand. She seemed never to sleep. Mary Bee would peer in at her as she lay under the wagon at night, tethered by a wrist to a wheel spoke, and her eyes were always open, the pupils always dilated. Sometimes she whimpered. It was as though the poor woman was still besieged by wolves, and would be as long as she lived.

Mrs. Sours seemed to have lost permanently the use of her legs. Briggs carried her to meals and to relieve herself. Awake or asleep, she clutched the rag doll. She was scrawny, her cheeks pale, her flaxen hair had no luster, and incredibly, for a girl of nineteen, she showed no animation. Mary Bee fed her, too, by morsel, with her fingers. She opened her mouth for food like an infant, but ate without appetite. Her paralysis seemed to be as much of the will as of the body, and to Mary Bee she was the most pitiful of the four.

The dangerous one, Mrs. Svendsen, turned out to be anything but homicidal. Now that she had been removed from the presence of her husband, the hate that had glittered in her eyes was gone and she seemed entirely harmless. When spoken to, as Mary Bee did, she made no response except to say, from time to time, and in a placid manner, “God will strike you down.” She was frequently sleepless at night, turning and tossing under the wagon with sighs and groans, due perhaps to an inner agitation which did not manifest itself by day.