In Open Spaces (7 page)

Dad nodded. “God, son, you should see all the honyockers moving in. There must be twenty new homesteads between here and Belle, and those are just the ones I could see from the road.” He shook his head.

Mom dipped another sack into the tub of water. I was glad that Dad brought up this topic, as it was something my parents were in complete agreement about—empathy toward these newcomers. By this
time, the prime land, along the river and bigger streams, had all been claimed. Everyone knew that these latecomers were working against odds they hadn’t anticipated, lured by ads from the railroads claiming five times more production from 320 acres than anyone could expect.

I noticed a tiny white dress draped over one of the kitchen chairs. “What’s that?”

Mom glanced up. “That’s for Jenny’s baby.”

I nodded. Jenny Glasser, Gary’s son Steve’s wife, had lost her baby a few days before. “When’s the funeral?”

Mom stopped what she was doing, her eyes shifting from side to side.

I studied her. “Mom?”

“Wait!” She held up one hand. “Quiet! I heard screaming.”

Muriel suddenly burst into the house. “Mom, Katie is running up the road. And she’s screaming.”

We ran outside, where we saw a shadow flying toward the house. I raced ahead to Katie, who collapsed into my arms. Her hair was matted against her head from the sweat. Even her dress felt moist. Mom and Dad arrived just behind me.

“What is it, honey?” Mom brushed the hair back from Katie’s sweaty forehead. “Is Jack okay? Where’s Jack?”

“Where’s Jack?” Dad asked, his tone more impatient than Mom’s.

But Katie was breathing so hard that she couldn’t speak. I carried her to the house and set her down in a chair. Mom knelt in front of her. “Katie, what happened? Where’s Jack?” Now her own tone was more urgent, more desperate.

“Give her a chance to breathe,” I said. “Give her some room.”

“What happened?” Dad insisted, ignoring me, moving closer to Katie.

“It’s George,” Katie finally said, coughing. “Jack found him.” She burst into tears, and the coughing intensified. We all stood, stunned, silent, for several minutes. Dad muttered softly, his head rocking from side to side, eyes to the floor. Mom’s eyelids clenched together.

My throat closed. I couldn’t have made a sound if I needed to. I found myself trying to imagine what George would look like after six months frozen underwater, but I stopped short of a picture, horrified that I would be thinking such a thing. Bob and Muriel started crying, and tears pushed toward my own eyes, but I blinked them back. I squeezed my eyes closed, wondering what Jack was doing. Was he fishing George from the river? If so, he’d no doubt need some help.

“Let’s go, Dad.” My voice was deep and thick in my throat, barely recognizable. I started for the back door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Dad nodded.

We found Jack two hundred yards downstream from the crossing, sitting on the bank with his head on his knees, in his hands. One bloated leg, nearly bursting the seams of its overalls, jutted at an angle from the water, bobbing gently with the current. The boot was gone, the foot blue. Upstream, about ten yards, Jack and Katie’s fishing poles were planted in the bank. One of them jerked with the weight of a fish.

Dad prepared a lasso and inched down the steep bank.

“Dad, shouldn’t we just go in and get him?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, swinging the lasso above his head, then tossing it out over the rushing water. He missed the first time, but on his second toss, the loop flopped over the foot. I scooted down the bank behind Dad, sitting, and hooked my hands into his back pockets. He pulled. I pulled. Jack remained folded up on the bank, still hiding his face.

The body broke free. We strained, dragging my brother’s mutated form onto the bank. Our racing breath was nearly as loud as the rush of water.

George’s face was bloated beyond human proportion. His arms puffed from beneath his sleeves, bleached from months in ice. His skin looked like a cow’s bag—pale, almost transparent. Dad and I hauled the body further up the bank, struggling with the weight. Dad collapsed
once we reached level ground. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the slate-gray sky.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t avert my eyes from my brother’s distorted expression. His eyes and mouth were wide open, his cheeks swollen until they nearly hid his ears. One hand was clenched into a fist, the other lay innocently open, its fingers sausage thick. In a way, his appearance was a relief, because it didn’t look like him. This wasn’t my brother. The river had swallowed up George and regurgitated this strange form in his place.

Dad and Jack were useless, I realized. Neither of them moved. Although his expression was as stoic and straight as always, tears ran down Dad’s weathered cheeks, something I’d never seen. I tried to keep the air moving through my lungs, recognizing that if anything was going to get done, I had to hold my emotions in check.

I cleared my throat. “Come on, Dad.” My voice broke. “We’ve got to get back to the house. Mom’s going to be worried.”

Dad had pulled his hands together against his chest, where they were clenched, as if ready to defend against an attack. His pinched, red-rimmed eyes met mine, and he nodded.

“Right. Okay, son.” He lifted himself to a sitting position. I helped him stand. “All right. Let’s get him on one of these horses.” He sniffed. “Jack, give us a hand here.”

Jack had still not moved. But at Dad’s command, after lifting his head and staring blankly for a moment, as if clearing his mind, he stood, his arms dropping to his sides. I got ahold of George’s arms, and Dad grabbed his legs. We hefted him up off the ground, and Jack stepped in, lifting the bulk of George’s torso. George’s skin was cold and soft, slightly sticky, like bread dough, and with his wet clothes and bloat, he was damn heavy. The feel of his skin made me feel cold myself, on the inside.

Getting George draped over Ahab’s back was difficult, as his torso did not bend. But we balanced him on his stomach, then stretched a
rope from his hands to his feet under Ahab’s belly. I noticed that the flesh on George’s leg had torn where Dad roped it. There was almost no blood, and the tissue inside the cut was as white as the surface. We did all this wordlessly, avoiding each other’s eyes.

I finished tying the knot. Dad and Jack had already mounted their horses. I climbed up behind Dad, and held Ahab’s reins, leading him behind us. Ten minutes later, we approached the house. Mom stood on the stoop, both hands clamped to her mouth. Muriel clutched Mom’s skirt, and Bob stood behind her. Mom dropped her hands and moaned, disappearing inside the house when she saw the body, leaving the two little ones racing after her, clutching for her skirt.

Despite the long day, and my tired muscles, I had trouble sleeping. Although George’s bed had been empty for more than a half year, I kept waking up and looking over at it. And each time I managed to drift off, my dreams were invaded by wolves, tearing into George’s body, which we had laid out in the barn. Dad was certain that the stench wouldn’t get too bad before morning, but I was worried that it was already strong enough to draw the attention of some predators.

The wolves in my dreams were screaming, like humans rather than animals. The screams half woke me several times, until they sounded so real that I was fully awake. But in the time it took me to pass from being vaguely aware to waking up, I realized that I really did hear screams. I jumped out of bed, pulled on my overalls, and raced toward the barn. But halfway across the yard, I heard the screams behind me, in the house. Confused, I turned back, and went inside.

I smelled kerosene, and saw a muted light leaking beneath the closed door of the girls’ room. I opened the door carefully. Dad stood at the foot of Katie’s bed. Mom sat on the bed, bent at the waist so that her face nearly touched Katie’s. She held a wet cloth to my sister’s forehead and spoke gently. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s going to pass. Just
relax.” Her voice sounded soothing on the surface, but I could hear the fear in it. Mom’s hair drifted out away from her head in a tangle of copper and white flags. I saw the strain on her face. It scared me, as this fear was rare for Mom.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Dad answered.

“Should I go for the doctor?”

“Jack already left to see if Doc Sorenson is in Capitol.”

“Where’s Muriel?”

“She’s in our bed,” Dad answered.

I approached the scene, half not wanting to, preferring the thought of sinking back in my bed and covering my head with a pillow. Katie arched her back and screamed, her mouth stretching into a frightening rectangle. It looked as if the skin might tear around her teeth. I felt my own teeth clench together. One of Katie’s knees rose and fell time and again, thumping softly against the mattress. Her eyes, when they were open, darted around the room, without focus. It looked as if she could die at any moment, and I couldn’t imagine that life could be so cruel as to take another of us on the very day we’d found our brother’s body.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“A couple hours,” Dad said. “We heard her moaning, and we came in to see what was wrong. She started screaming about a half hour ago.” Dad looked completely beaten down.

Katie screamed again, her head bent so far back that it looked as if it could break off. She panted frantically, her chest as busy as boiling water.

“Easy, baby,” Mom said softly. “Where does it hurt?”

But Katie couldn’t hear her, and I realized that her condition was worse than I thought. She repeated a staccato “oh, oh, oh” between breaths.

Katie screamed at regular intervals, her voice weakening each time. Dad brought a pot of steaming water from the kitchen. Mom dipped a
cloth into the pot, wrung it, and laid it across Katie’s forehead. Mom tried to feed Katie a spoonful of hot tea with whiskey and honey, but she wasn’t conscious enough to drink. She knocked the spoon from Mom’s hand with a jerk of her chin. The sheets had turned gray with sweat.

The fits eventually drained Katie so that she fell into an exhausted sleep between each spasm. Her eyes would close peacefully, sending a shiver of fear through me each time. But after a minute or two the pain would wrench her from slumber, back to the struggle, and the pain in her face made me wince right along with her.

At four in the morning, she uttered her first words of the night. “Pull ’em in, pull ’em in,” she pleaded.

Mom panicked, trying to figure out what to pull in, what she could do to ease her daughter’s misery. She tugged at the blankets, then looked at Dad, puzzled and scared. Then she turned back to Katie and pulled her lips inside her mouth. Her brow pinched. Dad and I studied the floor.

“The fish?” Dad said. “She probably means the fish.”

“Or George,” I offered.

One of the last times that Katie and I played homesteader in our little prairie house, Katie approached me with her arms wrapped around the blanket-swathed figure of her favorite doll.

“Blake, honey,” she announced in a strong, steady voice, a voice very much like my mother’s. “We need to get ahold of the preacher.”

“Oh?” I answered. “What for?”

“The baby’s dead,” Katie said matter-of-factly. “We need to bury the baby.”

Katie was six years old at the time.

“I’ll put the baby in the barn,” she told me. “And I’ll send a note to the preacher. And then I’ll get some supper ready. Can you start on a coffin, honey?”

I guess we all knew, or suspected, how the night was going to end, although we tried to hope otherwise. We looked to the door whenever any small sound echoed through the night’s silence. But soon after she spoke, the final gripping vise squeezed the life from Katie. She died eyes, mouth, and hands open to the ceiling, her last sound so weak that it was little more than a groan, followed by a sigh.

Jack and Doc Sorenson arrived an hour later to find us in a silent vigil around the body. Mom wept, while Dad and I simply sat in exhausted amazement at what had taken place that day. I hurt so bad inside that I couldn’t hold my head up. It seemed that I’d been awake forever, and that a year’s worth of life had been packed into the past twenty-four hours.

Jack barely responded when he learned that Katie was dead. He turned and left the room, going directly to bed. Doc Sorenson examined Katie and determined that what we thought was the flu was actually spinal meningitis. He said that he couldn’t have done anything even if he’d gotten there sooner, which was a very small consolation at the time. But a relief nonetheless. He checked Bob, and determined that he just had a cold, and not meningitis. Dad thanked Doc for his trouble, offering him a bed for the remainder of the night. But it was only a few hours before his first appointment, so he had to hurry back.

Because of the state of George’s body, the funeral had to be hastily arranged for two days later. There wasn’t time to make Katie a funeral dress, and none of George’s clothes fit his bloated torso. So we wrapped him in one of his blankets, and we laid Katie out in her favorite frock—a calico with lace. Pastor Ludke from the Little Missouri Lutheran Church performed the service the afternoon after he had buried the Glasser baby.