The Barter (19 page)

An accident severe enough to delay the business of the farm was a source of frustration and embarrassment for a good farmer's family. Yet the day came on the Hirschfelders' place when the exhaustion and grind of the season, along with the heavy burdens that John carried mostly on his own, resulted in their inevitable catastrophe.

One warm early November day after dinnertime, while Matthew was napping in his crib in the shady cool of the front parlor, Dusana and Rebecca were in the kitchen finishing what they thought might be the final batch of pickled green beans—the fall crop had turned out even better than the spring beans, sweet and tender and straight, and Rebecca was feeling a little sorry to be packing the last of them in jars. She had been smelling smoke for some time without consciously deciding that it was a different kind of smoke than the one her modern, grouchy kitchen stove tended to put off when they used twists of hay for tinder as they sometimes did—they always had more hay than the animals would eat, since most of the livestock disdained the barn unless the winter took a turn toward unusual cold, preferring to stay out to pasture.

She looked up at Dusana drawing water from the reservoir on the stove and realized that the girl's eyes were slightly red, and that the sting in her own mouth wasn't of vinegar but of smoke, and the light filtering through the kitchen had a golden-gray cast. Feeling
Rebecca's eyes on her, Dusana glanced toward the table, and something in Rebecca's expression made her hands slow, still, stop.

Pushing up from the table, Rebecca said to Dusana in a low voice, “Go to the baby. Go. Go now.” Dusana started and dropped the metal cup she held, still staring at Rebecca, whose face seemed, even to herself, strange and frozen, as if she'd looked at Medusa.

“What—” Dusana whispered. Then they heard the first screams from the yard.

“Go now!” Rebecca ordered, rising and finding herself on the other side of the kitchen doorway before she even felt herself move, as if she'd transported herself five feet just by leaning in her chair. She scanned the green-gold perimeter lines of the fields for the men and saw John and the Heinrich brothers running for the barn. And curling around the side of the barn like a gloved, suggestive finger, a pale-gray plume of smoke, white and hot.

Fire. The barn. Rebecca raced across the kitchen garden and past the pump toward the outbuildings. No way of knowing how much of the barn would be destroyed, how many of their tools, how much of their seed, their milking implements. She thanked God from her heart that most of the animals were out in the pasture, although she knew there was a clique of old, fat sheep that sometimes liked to make a nest for themselves in the shady area just inside the barn door. The screams continued, but she knew now they were not human. And no sheep could make a sound like that, piercingly high, loud enough to set her eardrums buzzing. She ran.

Barn fires weren't exactly unusual in that hot, dry country, of course. No one kept any quantity of hay in a wooden barn in summer. Some of the more prosperous farmers erected stone barns as soon as they could afford the materials and the time. One Comal County
family had been forced to watch a fire in their barn spread across their fields and yard and eventually set their house ablaze. They had moved to San Antonio, where the wife had family that could take some of their children in. They'd had nothing to put in the wagon, nothing to take away from the stage where their lives, the work of their hands, had come to ruin. Everything they owned had been eaten alive.

Rebecca rounded the corner of the barn, coming onto the wagon path that led from the barnyard back to the farmhouse drive and from there out to the farm-to-market road. There in the wagon path she skidded to a halt and promptly dropped to her hands and knees, so flooded with gratitude or horror or some hellish combination of the two that her legs momentarily failed her.

Pledge, the dray mare, an animal whose leaden, dappled coat usually put Rebecca in mind of a winter field in bleakest January, typically spent her days harnessed to the spring wagon the men used to drive into town and to move light tools and equipment from the sheds to the barn or the fields. Pledge had spent a long, sweaty youth tied to a series of cultivators, gang plows, and threshers, and had earned a little ease in her middle age; her left forehoof was also prone to splits and infection, although she was otherwise a strong old girl, not in the least dainty, if a bit on the haughty side for a workhorse. Rebecca didn't know their farm horses as well as she knew the cows—the horses were usually out in the fields with the men. But Pledge she knew by name because by now she was more or less a fixture around the barnyard and because she would, if she felt like it, respond to her name if it were called from not too far beyond the ridge that separated the barnyard from the acreage. From where Rebecca worked in the house or the garden, she had often
heard this horse's name called with humor, with mock longing, with affection.

The wagon Pledge was harnessed to was in flames. With the heat and the lick of the fire at her back the horse was in a panic, charging and bucking through the barnyard, tearing her head side to side, panting, eyes rolling. Her hindquarters had been badly singed, and her tail was smoldering. Smoke and the smell of blood and the horse's fear roiled through the air. The animal had somehow ripped a gash open across her breast—a pitchfork and broken backhoe lay strewn across the hard dirt, along with the smashed pieces of the barn animals' wooden barrel trough, surrounded by an irregular pattern of darkened dust, where the water inside the barrel had disappeared into the earth.

Rebecca forced herself to her feet as the men appeared atop the ridge and Pledge ran for the fence, trailing a racketing terror of flames and anguish. John and the Heinrichs didn't pause until they reached the barnyard, but they were forced to back away as Pledge reared up and threw herself against the gate that led to the empty cow pen. Impossible to think of catching her reins, impossible to think of getting close enough to unhitch the harness.

“John!” Rebecca shouted. She felt tears streaming down her face and sensed by the hitch of her breath that she was either sobbing or choking on the smoke, although she felt curiously clear and pure, as if the terror of the horse made all other emotions impossible to feel for oneself. She advanced toward her husband, who caught her shoulders in his strong grip.

“Rebecca. I have to get her past the fence. If she runs into the fields she'll trail fire into the—” He released her and shouted to Paul Heinrich, the younger of the two brothers, “Get the horse blankets
from the barn! All of them!” To Rebecca he said grimly, “We need the blankets wet—we can try throwing them over the wagon to smother the fire, or over Pledge's head to calm her long enough to set her free.”

“God help her—and the trough is destroyed, the only water's at the pump!” Rebecca grabbed John's hand and wrung it in her own. “If we can contain her in the cow pen, may she yet knock the wagon loose?”

“If she can, if she's strong enough.” John paused. “Can you help me?”

“How? How?”

“We don't have time to get the water from the pump—we have to take the blankets there and soak them, then get them back across the yard—help Paul, direct him.”

“Where will you be?”

“I have to try to drive her past the fence. And I have to try to unhitch her somehow.”

“Oh God, be careful, John. Please. Please.”

His face was terrible in that moment. She saw it all, all across his eyes and his mouth as if the truth were literally written there: An understanding of how he wanted to feel toward her had intruded on his determination to feel nothing for her, and it had only gouged the gulf between them deeper. “I will.”

The younger Heinrich emerged from the smoke-filled barn, staggering under a heavy armload of horse blankets, and Rebecca raced up the slope toward the house to prime the pump. She was working the pump handle so hard her arm felt as if it would fly off when Paul caught up to her and dumped the load of blankets upon the dirt at her feet. She heard the chickens in their yard nearby beginning to raise a clamor about the smoke-filled air and the commotion, and she
glanced quickly back at the inscrutable windows of her house, and then back to the pump, where mercifully the water had begun to flow. Paul, she saw with some surprise, was weeping, standing still and wringing his hands. With the stout toe of her laced leather boot Rebecca kicked one of the horse blankets beneath the stream of water from the pump. She glared at the wretched farm boy.

“My God, what is the matter with you?” she said. “We must be quick and sharp and smart now, not falling to pieces! We could still save the mare!”

Paul was scarcely older than Dusana. He was a strong, broad, handsome boy, with some habits that Rebecca knew John frowned on: cigarettes, some drinking, some familiarity with the shopgirls in town. “I should have shot her in the head when we came back from town, better than lead her to this state,” he wept.

John and Martin and Paul had been down to the depot and the grain elevator that morning, Rebecca recalled. They'd taken Pledge and her wagon and returned just before dinner.

“What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“I had a smoke in the barnyard, ma'am, before I went out to the fields after dinner.”

“You mean you think your cigarette started this?” Rebecca wiped her eyes with her sleeve impatiently.

“There were some straw and some husks in the wagon, ma'am—I were supposed to sweep it out and I didn't, and I had my cigarette and tossed it aside as I went out, because they were calling for me and they couldn't wait, and I forgot all about Pledge. I forgot.” Paul's eyes streamed. The air in the yard was gray, as if a layer of fog had settled over them. Rebecca thought with dismay of the stink that would pervade the house, the hours of washing of drapes and
cushions and bedclothes that faced her. And of Pledge, poor Pledge, who must have stood in the barnyard, attached to a smoldering wooden firetrap, for some time before the pain started, before realizing the danger she was in.

“Take this down—
Warten Sie,
can you manage more? Then take these,” she snapped, pointing at the sodden heap at her feet and working the pump handle with a rage that clarified her thoughts and hardened her heart. The cries of the poor horse provoked a harsh sob from Rebecca's own throat as she watched the Heinrich boy dragging the soaked horse blankets through the dust down the slope. She finished dousing the last of them and followed behind Paul as quickly as she could manage, with the corners of two blankets clenched in each fist, pulling with all her might against the weight of the water and the flannel and the dirt that quickly caked on the underside of her burden.

When she returned around the corner of the barn onto the wagon path, she saw immediately that John and Martin had managed to chase Pledge into the cow pen, but the horse's suffering, which had seemed only minutes earlier as if it could hardly have been worse, was amplified unbearably within the fenced-in space. Pledge galloped from one end of the enclosure to the other, screaming and thrashing, bleeding from fresh wounds on her neck and her right foreleg, now rearing up and smashing one powerful hoof on a fence post, now dashing her own head against the gate in her frenzy. The wagon was charred and smoldering, the wheels turning and lurching like medieval torture devices, and chunks large and small of still-fiery wood littered the dirt. John knelt inside the cow pen, breathing hard, recovering from his last attempt to corner the horse, his expression resolute and pained. Martin and Paul were straining to heap the wet
horse blankets over the top rail of the cow pen fence. As Rebecca approached, Martin climbed swiftly over the fence and joined John inside, but both men had to scatter as the horse made another mad charge in their direction.

Paul turned and, seeing the mistress of the house dragging two horse blankets that weighed almost as much as she did, moved to help her, shouting, “John and Martin are going to corner her! John said for you to go get the gun!” This last was yelled into her face as he reached her side. Rebecca stared.

“Surely not—not yet? Can't we save her?”

Paul shot her a grim look.

But I can't leave him here,
she almost said, but the boy had turned already, taking the horse flannels from her as he did so and, with a holler of effort, throwing them atop the other blankets piled along the cow pen fence, which bowed noticeably under the weight. John had already seized one and Martin followed suit.

Now the horse's strength had begun to flag, or perhaps she understood that within her fiery prison help was finally at hand, and Pledge staggered. She took a labored step toward the center of the cow pen, and Rebecca watched as one of the horse's knees buckled and gave. The proud animal sank, whinnying weakly like a foal, and the blackened and blazing oven behind her reared up, tipping forward on its front axle. There came a tremendous crack as the axle split.

“Now!” John bellowed, and the men charged forward, looking almost like a ragged trio of bullfighters, hauling the soaked horse blankets between them. John threw his blanket over Pledge's head and neck and held her fast, although she fought to regain her feet when Paul slapped a wet flannel over her burned hindquarters. Meanwhile Martin worked to smother the fire in the wagon,
staggering back and forth between the fence and the center of the cow pen.

Instead of running for the house, Rebecca climbed the fence. Pledge suddenly threw her head back and screamed again, although there was less terror than pain in the sound. John clung to the horse's neck and pulled her to him with all his strength, shouting to her, “Pledge! Calm, girl! Be still! Still, girl!”

Still her mighty body surged forward, toward Rebecca, almost as if the animal sensed her there and wanted to warn her, to expel her, or indeed perhaps to urge her to come closer. Caught by a corner of the wagon as it lurched behind the horse's weight, Martin fell to his hands and knees and knocked Paul down as he went. How John managed to keep from being kicked was a miracle and mystery to his wife.