Fervent Charity (16 page)

His reason for getting out of bed was boredom with being horizontal. Jack Frye swung his feet over the side of the cot. Through the holes in his grimy socks, the icy floor shocked him and he recoiled with a curse. For instant warmth he reached for the whiskey bottle on the floor by his bed. Empty. He stared at it. Goddamn! His mind worked slowly. He looked down at himself. He was fully dressed except for his boots. He put down the bottle and picked up a boot and grunted pulling it on. He repeated the process with his other foot. With his feet on the floor, his bleary focus fell on the lump on the cot on the other side of the cold stove. It came back to him. Snuce had kicked them out of the saloon. “You’re not spending the night in here, if that’s what you think,” he had growled as the snow began blowing past his greasy window. “You boys get on home.”

They had reluctantly paid for their drinks and for two bottles to take with them. The alcohol had probably kept them from freezing to death after the stove went out.

The lump stirred. Jack Frye and Gleeve Pruitt had been snowed in here for two days, mostly drinking and sleeping. Jack looked again at his empty bottle. He knew he hadn’t finished it. He was always clear about one thing: the level of whiskey left in his bottle.

It was too cold to sit here and stew. Shivering and cursing, he got up and went to the back of the bunkhouse where he opened the door to the shed. Even colder air, if that were possible, drifted in. He filled the coal pail, hauled it in and tossed the coal into the empty belly of the stove. Then he squashed up a handful of newspaper from the pile on the floor and threw that in. He had to try several times to light it, shivering and cursing in an ever more strident pitch till the coals caught fire. He slammed the stove door shut and went back to his cot to wait under his blanket until the stove kicked out some heat. When it did, the lump stirred again. This time Gleeve’s head emerged. He got up and staggered to the bucket in the corner and urinated.

Jack’s vision was clearer now. The bunkhouse was filled with a cold white light, none of it filtering through the front window. He went to the door and tried to open it. He couldn’t. Some genius had made the bunkhouse door open out instead of in, and the bank of snow that covered the window also blocked the door. He cursed again and stomped out to the shed. There, the door to outside opened in. The snow was up to his shoulder blades, but at least they could get at it. They could dig out. A dozen cans of beans remained on the shelves, but Jack Frye was tired of pissing in a bucket and eating beans out of a can.

“Grab a shovel,” he croaked. His throat felt like sand.

“What for?” Gleeve had returned to his cot and was about to crawl under his blanket.

“We gotta get out of here.”

“What’s the rush?”

“Cuz I’m fuckin’ stir crazy that’s what.” In fact, he needed to get out worse than he needed a smoke, and that was saying something.

“We can’t get the door open. How we gonna shovel if we can’t get out? We just wait, Reuben’ll shovel us out. It’s his bunkhouse.”

“Yeah, and if we wait long enough, he won’t have to cuz it’ll be spring. We can get out through the shed. Put yer boots on.”

They shoveled till they hit a cleared patch that ran to the stable. Reuben Stavig and his boys had been shoveling since daybreak to clear the way to the street. All able-bodied men and boys and a few women were out with shovels; Main Street and some side streets were already clear enough for one horse.

In the clear patch, Jack threw down his shovel. Gleevie grinned and did the same. Still squinting against the dazzle of white snow and winter sun, Gleeve didn’t see Jack’s fist swinging toward him. The impact knocked him into the snow bank.

“Oooww! What was that for?”

“For drinking my whiskey, ya little piss-ant!”

“Well you wadn’t drinkin’ it! You was out cold and I was freezing, man.”

“Wasn’t yours! Now we’re going to Snuce’s and you’re going to buy me another half a bottle.”

“I can’t.” Weaving, Gleeve got to his feet.

“We can get there. They’ve pretty much got the whole place cleared enough to walk. We just have to shovel a few feet east.”

“No. I ain’t got any money left.”

“What?”

“I ain’t...”

Jack heard him the first time and hit him again. Gleeve went sprawling again. “Well, you better hire yourself out and get some money and buy me that whiskey and pay your nickel to Reuben for your cot and his beans we been eatin’ and all that coal we been burning cuz I ain’t paying for more’n my share.”

“You’d ha burnt that coal anyway, whether I was here or not,” Gleevie whined, rubbing his jaw.

“No matter. You was here. You got the benefit. You pay half.”

Gleevie slogged to the general store and asked if they needed help with shoveling. He was told he had to get up earlier, they got their shoveling done already. He was met with the same answer at the post office, the blacksmith’s, the Blue Bird Café, and Mattie Olsen’s hotel. He went back and checked at the Indian Agency. Owen Braaten didn’t need any help either. That left only the saloon. Snuce eyed him, spat into the spittoon at his feet, and said he didn’t need any shoveling, but since Eddie Hansmeier hadn’t shown up, Gleevie could sweep the place out and wash glasses for a couple days till Eddie shoveled his way out and made it in to town.

Gleevie was humiliated by such work, a smart man like himself, but he had no choice. He had to pay for his cot and replace Jack’s whiskey, because if he didn’t, if the cold didn’t kill him, Jack Frye would.

With hat in hand, he asked Snuce to advance him twenty-five cents and half a bottle of whiskey. Snuce’s arteries did not pulse with sentimental feeling for his fellow man, but he knew a man had to live, and he knew that with the snow piled up to the rooftops, Gleevie couldn’t go anywhere. So he gave him fifty cents and told him to get a bath. “You got a change of clothes?” he asked.

Gleevie thought a minute and remembered he had some clothes, probably cleaner than what he had on, in a paper bag under his cot. He nodded.

“Well, change ’em then and get those washed. Come back in forty-five minutes and start work.”

Gleevie went to Mattie Olsen’s and paid her to wash his clothes and let him use her bath shed. He came back, cold to his bones because her shed was only heated by a tiny tin stove, the place was drafty and the water lukewarm.

Fortunately for Gleevie, two days later Eddie Hansmeier’s mother came in to town to tell Snuce that Eddie had fallen out of their hayloft. Fortunately for Eddie, he’d missed the tines of the plough and only broke his shoulder, but he would be laid up for the rest of the winter. Now Gleevie could earn enough money sweeping and washing up at the Spittoon to pay for his cot and one meal a day at the cafe. It was time spent fermenting his hatred of the squaw who got him thrown out of Charity, where he could have worked on a threshing crew and made good money and been gone before the snow flew.

Slow nights at the Spittoon, Gleeve and Jack played cards. They never played for money. Gleeve never stole any more whiskey, and they got along.

Chapter 13: April 1901

D
olly was big, strong, and
stubborn, and drove Lena’s gentle-spoken pa to fits of cursing in Norwegian when, mid-field row, she would stop. Why—no one could ever tell. She was well cared for, never overworked or worked when it was too hot—Baathor Halverson was a deeply kind man—so her stops were described by his amiably mocking friends as pauses for personal meditation. When Baathor’s closest neighbor hollered at him across the pasture...
Hey, Bottle... Why don’t you sell her—get another horse?
Baathor, as angry at the nickname that stuck to him in this new country as at fate for sticking him with such a maddening and willful beast, would mutter, “Because nobody else would put up with it!” meaning, of course, that someone else might beat her, or simply have her slaughtered. So, “Nothing moves Dolly” was Baathor’s continuing lament.

Lena had no memory of the event; nevertheless, it had attained mythical status in her imagination. She could see herself as a toddler following Pa to the corral, stopping in the middle of it as he went on to the far end to pump water for the stock. The prairie languished in a cloud of August dust. The sloughs and creek beds were dry, the coulees just dips in the scorched land. The only source of water was the well. When the trough was filled, Baathor whistled and the thirsty cattle, knowing that sound heralded abundant cool water, overcame the inertia of the heat and of their own great ruminating bodies to stampede back to the corral for their nightly drink.

Lena could see her pa that evening—how he whistled and
then
he turned and saw his child happily playing in the dirt in the middle of the corral, the cattle already almost surging through the gate, their russet backs heaving together like a muddy river flooding its banks to engulf and destroy everything in its inexorable rush forward. He felt their hooves jar the earth, and he thought,
How can they run so fast?
He could feel their breathing, their beating hearts...and he was paralyzed. Dolly had been grazing in the same pasture. She had looked up when she heard the whistle and with equine wisdom took it all in, and then this willful draft horse, broad in back and heavy of leg, transformed herself in blood and bone and ran like a Thoroughbred. She slipped through the corral gate one horse tail ahead of the cattle and planted herself like the cedars of Lebanon around Lena, who watched with curious glee as the pounding red river of cattle parted and flowed around them.

“Oh, ja,” Baathor would say, his Norwegian brogue thickening, to anyone who stopped by to wonder why he no longer cursed at his horse. Then he would tell the story of Dolly who saved his little girl. And at the end of his story, his voice breaking, he’d say, “Oh ja, they bumped her good then, but, you know—nothing moves Dolly.”

Lena had her life because of a horse, and that’s why she stopped the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific on its tracks this cold April morning.

A chilly wind swirled down the rails between the granary and the depot. Lena pulled the pink crocheted cap securely over her daughter’s ears and smoothed her own hair down.
We look like a bunch of mud hens crossing Dryback Grade,
Lena thought as she glanced over her shoulder at her sisters and their children, all following behind her. Ella and Ragna, their combined seven children in tow, had arrived earlier on the east-bound passenger train and left their bags at the depot while they ate breakfast at Olna’s Kitchen. Now, as they were returning to reclaim their things, the east-bound freight rolled in. Lena waited for her sisters on the platform outside. Before the conductor had swung the mail bag down to Willie Mohs, Lena sniffed the air—Willie said later—“like a prairie dog.”

“What in Sam Hill?”

Ella was the first to emerge from the depot with her carpet bag. Lena handed Gracia to her with the command to “Wait here a minute” and sniffed her way down to the fourth boxcar. The conductor was getting up steam to pull out when Lena came running back, slapping the sides of the cars and yelling, “No you don’t! No you don’t!”

Ella and Ragna, tired from their previous day of visiting cousins and shopping in Argus, rolled their eyes, not in the least surprised that Lena could stop a train. They were resigned to wait while their younger sister carried through to the end whatever disturbance of the peace she had in mind.

“What’s the matter?” Ella asked wearily. Her plump cheeks sagged, deepening the crease that drew down the corners of her mouth.

Lena snapped, “Don’t you smell it?”

“I smell something,” replied Ragna, making her nasty face. “What is it?”

Lena’s sisters grew up on the same dirt farm she did, and yet, sometimes they acted so town-bred that she couldn’t decide if they were putting on airs, or, if during their childhood, they just hadn’t paid attention. Either way, they irritated her. “Horses!” she said. “In a bad way.”

She pointed to the conductor and swung her finger to the car in question. “Open that car—down there where that stink is coming from.”

“I can’t—”

“Open it! I want to see in there.”

Willie shook his head with amazement as the conductor lowered all three hundred pounds of himself to the ground. The station manager had seen it before—tiny Lena Kaiser bullying big men into doing what she wanted. He trailed behind them, curious himself to see inside the boxcar.

When the conductor rolled back the doors, Lena uttered a guttural cry, Willie’s face fell, and the conductor broke out in a sweat. On the slimy floor of the boxcar lay horses, starved, sick, covered with open sores and jagged wounds, some already dead, some barely hanging on to life, their eyes rolled back.

She turned to the conductor, accusation stark on her face.

The fat man squirmed. “I came on a few miles ago. I wasn’t driving when they were loaded. I didn’t know—”

“This train isn’t going anywhere,” she said flatly. “Willie, who’s the nearest with a gun?”

“The sheriff, for sure, and Gudierian keeps his Winchester in back of the tack shop.”

At Harlan Gudierian’s name, Lena shuddered. “Go get Dennis, then. Tell him to bring his pistol.”

“Jack, you heard the lady,” Willie said to his son who had returned from his run to the post office with the mail bag. The thirteen-year-old turned around and sprinted up Main Street again.

Lena walked back to where her sisters stood, surrounded by children beginning to shiver in the cold. Ella still held Lena’s daughter. “You go on to the house,” Lena said. “The beds are all made up for you upstairs if anybody wants a nap. I’m going to stay here and make sure this is seen to. Take Gracia with you. I don’t want her around here.”

Ragna’s perpetual frown deepened and she hoisted her own youngest child higher on her hip. “Why don’t you let the men see to it?”

“I’ll stick around to make sure they do,” Lena said.

Ragna knew it was futile to argue. She turned and headed south to Lena’s house. Ella, Gracia held tightly to her bosom with one hand, reached down and took the hand of her own three-year old. The rest of the children trudged behind them weighted down with their travel bags.

She watched them go with some regret. They had stopped in Charity on their way home to Wheat Lake. It was the only time they had ever made a special effort to visit with their younger sister. She hardly knew her nieces and nephews, and now this. Well, she couldn’t help it. She would follow them home as soon as she saw to it that Dennis did the right thing.

She heard panting behind her. “Mrs. Kaiser.” Jack was breathless from his run. “Don’t know where the sheriff is. Deputy Mulkey said he’d send him down as soon as he finds him. So I went and told Mr. Gudierian and he’s coming.” The boy saw Lena’s face darken. “I thought—”

“No, Jack, you did the right thing. You’re a fast runner.”

Harlan Gudierian was already shuffling toward them, rifle in hand.

“I think we should wait for the sheriff, then,” Willie advised.

The conductor jammed his cap down on his head. “Now, I can’t sit here all day. Your sheriff could be anywhere. I gotta shut things up and get going.”

He turned away from them to walk back to the open car.

“You can’t go on with those horses lying there like that!” Lena said, trotting behind him.

He ignored her and just raised a hand in a dismissive gesture. He dropped it when he felt a hard poke in his buttocks. He swung around. Lena was behind him, raising Harlan Gudierian’s rifle to her shoulder, her sights squarely on the conductor’s abdomen. She saw the man’s face register surprise and then a good natured, albeit condescending, amusement, an expression she had seen before on the faces of those who did not know her well.

“I don’t have to be a good shot. You’re a big fella.” She cocked the rifle, startling the men around her—especially the conductor—and lowered her sights to his groin. “I’ll bet you’d miss
that.”

Willie, a few feet away, witnessed the conductor change his opinion about this small auburn-haired woman and took a step in. “Maybe we should wait for the sheriff, though, Mrs.—”

“It could be a month of Sundays before Dennis shows up. Those horses aren’t going to lay there and suffer! Not while I can do something about it. Harlan, give me some more bullets.” He didn’t respond. “Well, you brought a box with you didn’t you? What in blazes use is a gun if you don’t have bullets?” Harlan fished in his overalls for the box and laid it in her outstretched palm. She dumped its contents into the pocket of her dress, gave him back the empty box and turned her back on them all. “Help me up there, Jack,” she said over her shoulder as she walked briskly toward the open car.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Jack caught up with her, leaving his father worried and Harlan limp, his mind working slowly trying to figure out why Lena had grabbed his gun away from him.

She laid the Winchester down on the edge of the boxcar floor, took off her coat and gave it to Jack, then he gave her a leg up. Shafts of cold sun through the slats of the car and the open door behind her gave her plenty of light to do what she had to do. She could still hardly believe what she saw. In the ten-by-thirty-foot boxcar lay about fifteen horses.

She picked up the gun and stared at it. She had never pointed a gun at a human being before. She would live with that later. Her breathing was shallow, only partly because of the stench of manure, sickness, and rotting wounds inside the car.

Closest to her a dying mare lay quietly, patiently. The outline of the horse on her side resembled the curves of a woman’s back. Lena felt a pain in her heart. Maggots squirmed in the sores on the mare’s flank. Lena tucked the rifle into her shoulder and sighted down the barrel to the mare’s head. Her throat hurt like she had swallowed a pen knife sideways. Her hands trembled. She stepped closer and fired at point blank range. She absorbed the kick of the rifle; the sound of the shot pierced her eardrums with pain, and the mare almost imperceptibly relaxed into the floor.

She stepped over the mare’s neck to the next living horse, a brown gelding, all bones and ragged hide. She worked the lever action and the shell casing flew out.
There’s a place in heaven for horses... Pa said that the day we buried Dolly.
She raised the gun to her shoulder and fired.

Lena wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. She was sweating profusely, though it wasn’t warm in the car, and she was crying, but she didn’t care. She cried out loud because she couldn’t hear herself for the ringing in her ears. Flies crawled over the face of a spotted pony. She cocked, fired. She wiped her eyes again with the back of her other sleeve and moved on to the next horse. Dead already. She stepped around two more dead horses till she found another still breathing.
Cock. Fire.
Another mare, already dead. A burro crumpled in the corner, a mere pile of bones, barely alive. Lena pulled the lever and fired. Tears poured down her face. Her nose ran. The hem of her dress was slick with blood and slime. She killed one more horse, reloaded, and went on till she was finished. She stood at the end and looked down the length of the boxcar. This had to be all. No. At the east end, opposite to where she stood, a horse, terrified by the gunfire, was arching its neck, straining upward but falling back on its side. Lena made her way over and around bodies and through muck toward the struggling animal until she stood over him...a young stallion she could see now—a two-year-old maybe.

“Mrs. Kaiser.” A voice in her ear. Sounding far away beyond the ringing of her tortured eardrums. Again, “Mrs. Kaiser—Lena. I’ll do it. Go on now.”

She looked up. “You here to arrest me, Dennis?”

“No, Ma’am. I’ll finish it up.”

“It’s done.” She raised her hand over the dead. “There’s nothing to finish.”

“What about—”

“Not this one.” She yelled out the doors of the boxcar, “Willie!” Her throat still hurt. “I need your wagon.”

Willie signaled Jack to bring the team and wagon around.

Out of alarm or curiosity, people who had heard shots instead of the departing train whistle had collected at the depot—Don Grode who’d been at the granary and feed store across the tracks; Carl Torgerson, his son Kermit and two customers from the ice cream parlor; Hank Ackerman, the pig farmer who’d been ambling down Main Street on his way to Leroy’s Tavern for beer.

Dennis considered the struggling horse. “I dunno, Missus. He might get up with some help. But even if he does, somebody’s gonna have to stay with him. He’s in damn poor shape. How you gonna—”

“We need some help in here. Willie!” Lena yelled again. Carl, Kermit, and Jack climbed into the boxcar. They were followed by Don Grode and a couple men she didn’t know. She pointed to the horse. “Get him into the wagon. I’m taking him home.”

Lena jumped down to the ground by herself. “Willie, send a telegram for me.” She lifted the bloodied skirt of her dress and took a handful of clean petticoat beneath it, bent over and wiped her face with it. Hank Ackerman stared at her. “What are you looking at, Hank?” she asked evenly. “You’ve been in a slaughterhouse before.” He nodded gravely and went to help transfer the animal from the boxcar to the wagon. To the station manager, she continued, “Will’ll settle up with you later. I don’t have any money left on me.”