Charity (7 page)

“Biddie...that was her name when I got her.”

“Yes, she reminds me of Dolly in her eyes, you see. There’s somethin’ going on in there. You’re the new teacher for the section school, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Getting settled?”

Gustie nodded.

“I didn’t know you were in town till yesterday. I’m Lena Kaiser. Say, do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

Gustie was still not used to such overtures of friendliness from strangers, but this woman, unselfconscious and genuinely friendly, was irresistible. She accepted, somewhat shyly. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Olna’s kitchen is right down the street there. Just leave Biddie here where it’s nice and shady. Kenneth won’t mind. Now, I recommend Olna’s pie, but stay away from her cake. It’s dry as toast, but never tell her I said so.”

Gustie led the mare out of the barn, hitched her to the wagon and brought her around to the front of the house. She put down a blanket in the corner of the wagon to cushion a pail of fresh eggs packed in straw. Around the pail she placed a sack of flour, a bag of coffee, and a bag of oats.

Back inside her house she lifted up the trap door to the small cold cellar. Six months of living in this house had passed before Gustie could bear to lower anything into that hole in the earth below her floor. The practical necessity of storing food and keeping it cool forced her to use it. She still had potatoes, turnips, and carrots. She hoisted out the three small bags of vegetables and added them to the supplies in her wagon bed.

She went back in for her old train conductor’s cap. She needed it to shield her eyes as she drove east into the morning sun. Then she got up into the wagon seat and headed Biddie out toward the road.

Gustie traveled east on Dryback Grade—a road built up with tons of mule-hauled dirt through the middle of Dryback Lake, which was really a slough that stretched out for several square miles. Some years, the old folks said, it had lain dry as dust and the old Norwegians used to cut hay out there enough for a winter. This year, between the clumps of fat marsh grass, the still water shone blue with reflected sky. Ducks paddled and bobbed in purposeful circles. One made a
chip chip
sound, like a tiny spoon striking a tin plate. Muskrats quietly parted the waters with round backs, sleek as chestnuts, where last year they had waddled in mud.

A cloud of tiny insects enveloped the mare and wagon. Gustie waved one hand about her head and slapped the reins on Biddie’s rump. The mare lurched forward and pulled them out of the swarming gnats. “Good girl!” said Gustie and reined her back to a comfortable pace.

Once past Dryback Lake, the land on either side of her alternated between marsh, unbroken prairie, and perfect black squares of tilled soil.

Gustie allowed Biddie to go at her own pace, an easy trot, which lulled Gustie into simple enjoyment of the rhythmic motion under a warm sun, breathing cool air.

The twenty-mile journey was always a pleasure for Gustie. She loved this Dakota land, especially now, as it was waking up green and wet after eight months of cold sleep. The sweet wind lifted her hopes and ruffled her desires at the same time as it honed the edges of her sorrow.

After several hours, the ground began to roll, imperceptibly at first, until Gustie was aware of Biddie’s laboring up the first hill. The farther east they traveled, the more the land undulated, becoming rockier, the soil less suited for crops. She passed cows grazing on a hillside. They looked at her with large sleepy eyes and switched at flies with their tails. Filled coulees glistened like oval mirrors among the green and yellow grasses.

In the early evening, Gustie finally turned off the dirt road and endured the jolting of the wagon on its unforgiving wood wheels as it traversed the lumpy ground. Over the next rise, she saw Crow Kills.

From her present vantage point, Crow Kills looked like a small lake, but she was seeing only its western loop. Crow Kills lay like a satin sash draped around the hills. At no point could one see the whole of it; it wound long, deep, cold, clear. And while the lake appeared still in the quietude of evening, Gustie knew it was never really still. There was, on the most breathless of days, small ripples, a slosh against a rock here, the splash of a fish there, a wave rising subtly and merging silently back into its smooth surface. Crow Kills lived and breathed and freely bestowed its soothing spirit upon even those who cursed it, as Gustie had done once. The lake had absorbed her anger, and everything she had flung into it, with grace, with merely a ripple, and was as before visibly unchanged. Crow Kills understood and forgave. Now she found balm in its nearness. Someday she would like to live here. She felt if she could live near this water, the nightmare would leave her.

Gustie turned Biddie and the wagon bumped and clattered past the southwestern tip of the lake, past the irregular groves of cottonwoods, one of the few naturally occurring trees on a land where wheat grass was regent.

A gust of wind brought her scents of fresh water, moss, and rushes mingled with a subtle fishiness. She was close enough now to hear the whispering of the trees and to see their seeds nestled in beds of cotton floating on the breeze. She did not have to rein Biddie to the right, away from the lake and up a slight incline, because the mare knew where to go and when to stop. Gustie climbed down from the wagon and let the reins brush the ground. She was in no hurry. The light always lasted longer over the lake than anywhere else. She walked to a mound of earth at the top of an incline marked only by a tender cottonwood that Gustie had transplanted there two years ago. She had been afraid that the first winter would kill it, but the sapling had survived.

Gustie sank to the ground. Since the prairie grasses had overgrown it, the mound was hardly visible any longer as something separate from the hill.

She sat with her legs tucked under her, closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the soil. The plants had formed a tight network of roots and fibers; getting through to black dirt was not as easy as it used to be. Gustie needed the dirt itself on her hands, and she dug through till she had it. She resisted the urge to spread it across her face as she used to do. She just sat quietly, her eyes remaining closed, and felt the release of tension that had been mounting inside her for weeks, culminating in the nightmare.

Gustie sensed her presence and looked up over her shoulder. Dorcas stood there, arms crossed over her breasts, watching her patiently. The fringes of her shawl flapped in the wind. Wisps of iron gray hair flurried about a round, deeply lined face. She looked as she always did, except when she smiled which was seldom, very stern.

“Come and eat.” Dorcas nodded her head slightly, turned and walked down the other side of the incline.

Gustie hiked after her marveling that with all of the old woman’s girth and age, she could still walk faster and with more ease over this lumpy prairie ground than Gustie could, and Dorcas never got winded.
Maybe it’s her moccasins,
thought Gustie.

Gustie stopped.
My goodness.
I forgot Biddie.
“Dorcas, wait, we can ride.” She lifted her skirts, turned back at a run, and almost twisted her ankle.

The mare greeted her with a snuffle of affront at being a second thought. Gustie snatched up the reins and hauled herself on to the wagon seat. Dorcas was nowhere in sight. A gentle shake of the reins and the horse moved leisurely up and over the rise and down the other side in an arc that took them back toward the lake, but farther east, along the southern shore.

In front of Dorcas’s cabin a tripod stood over glowing sticks. The smell of beans drifted up from the black kettle hanging from its center, and coffee steamed from a pot that sat directly upon hot rocks.

Gustie pulled Biddie up behind the cabin. Dorcas’s workbench—a board laid across two tree stumps—evidenced her recent fish cleaning. Scales stuck to the wood and scattered over the ground caught the light in prismatic specks. A few yards away black birds fought over fish heads and entrails. Gustie unhitched the mare and led her down to the lake. While the horse drank her fill, Gustie washed her hands and splashed the cold water on her face and neck.

Even though Dorcas had told her more than once to just come in, she could never get used to walking into someone’s home without knocking. Gustie rapped softly on the door of the cabin before carrying in her bags of flour and vegetables. When she opened the door, she was greeted by the sharp scent of herbs and roots. The spotted calf skin still hung on the wall to her left over one bed, and the red cowhide, its edges crackling with age, still covered the opposite wall. Gustie felt like she had come home.

She made a second trip out to her wagon for the eggs and coffee. As Dorcas took them from her, she tipped her head slightly, and peered at Gustie through squinty eyes. “Not so bad this time. Hmm?” There was nothing wrong with Dorcas’s vision, Gustie knew. Squinting helped her come to conclusions.

“No, just last night. No school, so I came right away.”

Dorcas took two plates and spoons outside. “Good. That’s good. Always good to come early and stay long.”

Gustie followed her with two cups. “Not too long. I’ll wear out my welcome.”

Dorcas spooned beans onto each plate. “When you are not welcome, I’ll drown you in the lake. Feed the fish.” She pointed with her chin toward Crow Kills.

Gustie lifted up her skirt to wrap around the hot handle of the coffee pot and filled their cups. As Lena and Will would have said, it was the kind of coffee you could stand your spoon in. Gustie loved it.

They ate outside on the small porch that fronted the cabin. Dorcas settled on two wood boxes that were stacked against the outside wall, and Gustie sat down on the step and leaned against one of the poles that supported the small overhanging roof. She looked at the crates supporting the old woman and wished she could buy Dorcas a rocking chair. The beans, flavored with onion and bacon fat, had cooked down all day to a thick sauce. They ate slowly.

“Fishing good?” Gustie asked.

Dorcas nodded. “Yup. Pretty good.”

“That’s good.”

A bird called from the willow that bent over Crow Kills. Gustie swatted at a mosquito. She had gotten used to Dorcas’s long silences while she lay in bed, unable to speak, not being required to speak. The quiet that surrounded the old woman was a filled and comforting one which Gustie craved, even though she lived alone, in silence much of the time.

They finished their supper and Gustie washed the dishes and the pot in the lake. Dorcas disappeared into the cottonwoods to the east.

Crow Kills was now blue-gray, flecked with silver sparkles—tiny waves, rivulets on the surface ever reaching for the shore. As the pale sky deepened in hue, the green of the farther shore darkened, dissolving the trees and bushes into silhouette. A deer stepped down to the waters’ edge to drink, then vanished like a ghost. A few birds warbled their evening songs—a warm-up for the night insects that would take up the concert with frogs when the darkness was complete.

Gustie needed these times when her mind emptied and she enlarged and entered into her surroundings. She felt herself blowing across the lake, felt the ripples in herself, reaching to herself the shore, and another part of herself, the birds singing, and again herself answering in the ratching sound of the crickets. She was the grass. She was the cottonwoods and the sound they made rustling softly in herself the breeze. This was losing the painful part of herself, her memories, her fears, her frustrations and limitations, and finding the best, that which existed in everything. This feeling lasted only a moment. Try as she might, she couldn’t recapture it or make it last. It came; it went; a visitation over which she had no control.

A lone water bird floated on the lake in the thickening dusk. Gustie rose, stepped down off the porch and walked up the path out of the trees to where she stood in the open. On three sides there was nothing but rolling land, and behind her, Crow Kills with its cottonwood sentinels. Gustie looked up at the night sky. The stars! She could almost hear them, singing a siren song, a multitude of beautiful melodies, far as infinity, close as her heart, seducing her. She knew she could never again live without the open sky, just like this, any time she needed it. Even when she could not get to Crow Kills, even in the dead of winter, she could walk a few steps out away from her own little house and get this sky, fill herself with it, feel herself soar up into it. She drank it like nectar, like black sparkling wine.

The scattered clouds hung low and heavy. The nearest cloud was dark at its belly where it appeared to touch the earth and lightened to piles of frothy white at its top.

The birds twittered in contentment, but perhaps it was her own contentment Gustie heard. No doubt birds had squabbles and problems of their own. A small golden brown animal appeared from around a cluster of purple blossoms and disappeared again.

The air was a delicious caress of warm and cool—the breath of the prairie poised between spring and summer. The sun drew out her scent and the wind tossed it back into her nostrils: her hair, fresh and rushy smelling from her morning bath in the lake, her skin smelling of the strong soap she always used.

Gustie noticed how much cleaner she felt out here in the middle-west than how she used to feel back east, and how much cleaner still she felt here at the lake where most of the living was done outside. Air was cleansing, like water.

The breeze fluttered around her bare legs, under her arms, through and beneath the loose fabric of her ankle-length shift. The rest of her clothing was drying on the branches of the willow. She longed to take even the shift off and run naked across the prairie.

The rough grass under her bare feet made her feel real and grounded. Her hair was loose and blew around in the breeze. Gustie held her glasses folded up in her hand so nothing would obstruct the wind from her face. For a moment she forgot everything but her sense of freedom. She stood, her head thrown back, face to the sun, and let the wind blow through her.