The High Divide (4 page)

“And no one cooking for us, either,” Eli said.

Danny reached into the pocket of his big coat and pulled out a tube of sausage and a brick of cheese that smelled so good Eli's jaw began to sting.

“Where'd you get that?”

“Fogarty,” Danny said, grinning.

“His smokehouse?”

Danny nodded. “While you were inside the hotel. What were you doing in there, anyway?”

“Doesn't matter,” Eli said. The mischief he'd pulled with the ring of keys seemed pointless now, foolish, not to mention dangerous and stupid.

“So where's Dad? Did he send for you?”

Eli took the letter from his pocket and gave it a shake. “All that snooping around you were doing and you didn't see this?”

“You must've just put it in there,” Danny said.

“A couple days ago.”

“Let me see.” Danny snatched the letter from Eli's hand. There was a flash of orange, and then Danny's matchlit, grinning face. “Here.” He handed the wooden match to Eli, reached into his big coat for the stub of a candle, and set its wick to the flame.

Danny flattened the letter on the splintery floor, then moved the candle back and forth across the lines. Eli sat and watched, recalling the sick turning of his stomach when he read it himself the first time—also the relief at having something real in hand, the testimony of someone who'd actually seen his father. Danny finished reading and folded it up and slipped it back into the envelope, which he handed to Eli, along with the burning candle. He rolled over onto one side, facing away, and drew his knees up close to his chest.

In Moorhead the lamps still burned yellow inside the ramshackle saloons, and two white steeples rose like pointing fingers through the fading dark. Eli stood in the door of the car as they passed over the Red River of the North, the silty, vegetable smell rising, two paddleboats at rest down there beside the big wooden pier. With the bridge behind them and the train slowing for its Fargo stop, he pulled the heavy door closed, worried about the yard bulls. He needn't have been. The car barely came to rest in front of the depot before it jerked back into motion and accelerated to the pace of a horse's trot. As they rolled through downtown, Eli cracked the door to watch the hulking shape of the Headquarters Hotel slip away behind them.

The air on this side of the Red wasn't the same as back home. It was drier and dustier, not as ripe or settled. He'd always had the feeling, the few times he'd come to Fargo, that anything might happen here, that the men he saw in the noisy streets with their rawboned faces and hard hands would just as soon kill you as tell you the time. Even the women looked tough, as if the prairie wind had blown the softness out of them. As they passed by the stockyards west of the city and the slaughterhouse with its sour, bloody smell, Danny said, “Aren't we going pretty slow?”

“Not for long.”

But the train shuddered then, the engine powering down, and soon they'd come to a full stop. In the silence the boys sat, waiting. After a minute or two, men's voices sang out from the west, and then boots crunched on gravel, the steps coming closer. The men stopped a few cars ahead, banging and knocking on something, steel on steel. Eli tried to peek out through the slit between the door and frame but couldn't see anything—and when the big pistons started going again, building up to the pull, there was something missing. The floor beneath them was still, no pulse or tremble, not even when the long line of couplings ahead started to snap and clang.

Eli got up and pushed the door wide and jumped down to the gravel alongside the tracks. Empty cars were all around them. He counted three ahead of their own, four behind—eight altogether in the abandoned string. Half a mile or so to the east were the lights of Fargo.

Danny jumped down from the car. “Now what?” he asked.

“Walk back to town, I guess. Figure it out.”

“You think they'll catch us and send us home?”

“No, but I'm sending
you
home. There's an eastbound coming through at ten.”

“If you're not going back, I'm not either.”

“It's only fifty cents, and you'll be home in time for lunch. It'd be the best thing, Danny. What if you get sick out here?”

“No,” Danny said.

“You've got to think about Mother, too.”

“If you make me go back, I'll tell her everything. I'll tell her where you're going. I'll tell her about the letter.”

Eli walked back to the car, climbed up and sat down in the doorway, legs dangling. After a minute, Danny clambered up to sit down next to him, and together they watched the morning colors, pink and orange and red, the clouds above Fargo like a range of hills where there were no hills, and the dark line of trees along the river.

“I had a dream about him,” Danny said. “Night before last. His beard was grown out, it was long and gray, and he looked skinny.”

“Was he all right?” Eli asked.

“There was a lot of smoke and a lot of people. And they were running around, screaming. And I heard a band playing. There were tinkling horns and a drum. It was cold outside, and snow on the ground.”

“What happened?”

“That's all,” Danny said. “That's it.” He took off his big, floppy hat and set it on the floor beside him. He said, “Do you think that woman is the reason he left? That's what Herman Stroud told me. That he left Mother for another woman.”

“No,” Eli said.

“Do you think he still loves Mom?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” Eli said.

“We're going out there to Bismarck, though, aren't we? To her place—that Laura Powers? Even though he's not there?”

“What else can we do? At least she's seen him. She has to know
something
.”

“Maybe she sent the letter right after he left, maybe he's already home,” Danny said, his large eyes gleaming. “Have you thought of that?”

“Nope,” Eli said, “but I like the idea. I really like it.”

“But you don't believe it.”

“No, do you?”

Danny shook his head. “Where is he then?” he asked, his thin face knotted up by the question. He looked like an old man suddenly. “Where
is
he?”

Plainwater

F
or all the worry he'd caused in the home he walked away from, all the justifiable tears and anger, his movements across the countryside by rail and by foot had attracted little in the way of attention from those who may have seen him. A tall man, eyes drawn to the ground, carrying no bag or rifle, and sleeping in barns, ditches, and a house or two. By appearance, a man stripped of luck, cuffs frayed and cheeks unshaved, stopping finally in this river town where for several weeks he'd hired himself out to a merchant who was building a warehouse down along the shore. Nights, he'd been sleeping in a small, unpainted church. He rose now from the maple pew he'd been using for a bed, rolled his blanket, gathered his few possibles, and walked up the aisle. He passed by the altar and knocked at the door of the room where the parson prayed in the morning, early, before the sun.

The old man was sitting next to a bookcase, oil lamp burning on the table beside him.

“I wanted to thank you for letting me sleep here. It's been comfortable.”

“You're no burden to me,” the parson said. “Are you moving on, then?”

“I am.”

“You never said where you're from.”

“It's been my opinion that people don't harbor what you'd call any real concern for those not kin to them.”

“Where are you from?” the parson asked. “If you don't mind.”

“Nowhere that you would know about.”

The parson smiled, a hundred wrinkles claiming his face. “Is the idea to be gone from there? Or to go someplace?”

“I like to think I'm going someplace.”

“It would seem, then, you're looking for something.”

“Or somebody, yes.”

The parson turned down the flame of his lamp as the sky outside the window lightened. He cleared his throat. “As pastors go, I likely haven't been a good one. The words people need to hear have been hard for me to come by.” He gestured toward the sanctuary. “It's my fear that those who sit out there on Sunday mornings often leave unsatisfied—unless they've fallen asleep, in which case they go off rested at least. But I will say this. I have a clear notion that my prayers reach heaven, and in that respect I am fortunate. More to the point, of late I have found myself praying for you.”

Ulysses laughed. “I'll take all the prayers you've got, though I ask that you spare me your sacraments.”

A rooster crowed in the distance. “I can hardly give you Communion against your will, can I?” the parson said.

“Nor baptize me all over again, thank God for that. Another dunking might just be enough to do me in.”

The parson rubbed a palm over his bald skull. “I have to say that's an odd complaint. Afterwards, one normally feels purged. Lighter on the feet.”

“It had the opposite effect on me, no offense intended. Sent me searching for a remedy, is what it did.”

The old man drummed his fingers on the side table. He frowned. “Remedy? Forgiveness is free, of course. You know that, surely. God is no merchant selling his wares.”

“I understand. Tell me, though—are the sins we commit against God alone?”

The parson shook his head. “No, but it's to God that we answer for our mortal souls.”

“With respect, sir,” Ulysses said, “I believe we have more to answer for than just our mortal souls.”

Frowning, the parson leaned back and stared off into the corner. He lifted a hand as the other took his leave.

Goodwill

I
n town she asked first at the depot, trying hard to look unconcerned, as if she meant only to round up her sons for some chore they'd ducked out of. She put on a smile and cocked her head and set her hands on her hips.

“They ain't been around here,” Wheatfield said. “And if they was, I would of put them right to work.”

“Send them straight home if they show up,” Gretta told him, then turned away to avoid his eyes. It was a temptation to give in, to go back to the house and cry until she couldn't cry any longer, and then go to sleep, only to wake in a few hours to find her boys returned, home from some adventure—like their expedition upriver last summer in a neighbor's leaky rowboat. Instead she walked to the mercantile, where she hovered in one of the side aisles, telling herself that Eli may in fact have gone off to Fargo with Mr. Goldman this morning. And who was to say Danny hadn't chased after him and ended up going along? That wasn't such a stretch, was it? As she feigned interest in a display of serving bowls, leaning close to inspect them, she felt herself being watched. Sure enough, when she glanced up at the counter Mrs. Goldman was there, watching her, lips pursed. A tiny woman with stingy, birdlike features.

“You tell your son that Anton left without him, that he waited fifteen minutes past leaving time. It's a long drive, you know, and he got a late start.”

Gretta nodded. “I'll tell him.”

“Was there something else?”

“No, no. I was only looking at this bowl.”

“That's from England, of course. Real bronze, hand-hammered. And the price you see is firm.”

“Thank you,” Gretta said.

She stopped next at the barber shop, then at the pharmacy, and finally on a whim at Two Blood's gun store, where he opened the door and stepped aside to let her in. She knew how much her sons liked this place—the guns, of course, and the tobacco smell, and the old, dusty buffalo head presiding from the wall above the counter. He offered her a chair next to his worktable, but she said no, she had to be getting home.

“I only stopped to ask if you'd seen the boys,” she told him.

His face was so furrowed she couldn't imagine he'd ever been young. He said, “I don't sleep so good anymore. I was sitting here this morning, early. Smoking. Saw your boys walking past on the street.” He pointed out the window.

Gretta's hands went cold. Her throat tightened. “What time?”

“Eli came first, and then the small one a minute later. This was before the first light. They carried blanket rolls, both of them.”

“They didn't say anything?”

“They didn't see me. I had no lamp burning.”

“You must have wondered what they were doing.”

Two Blood smiled. “Boys have their reasons.”

“Do you think they were heading for the depot?” Gretta asked.

“That might be so.”

“You could have stopped them, talked to them, asked them where they were going,” she said, knowing he would have done no such a thing.

The old man shrugged, a fluid roll of his shoulders.

At home Gretta thought to look in the chifforobe, and when she found her husband's rifle missing, also his winter coat and hat, she realized there was no choice but to go looking—and that meant a trip to St. Paul, where Ulysses still had a sister living, and a brother-in-law. Or did as recently as a two years ago, when they'd last heard from them at Christmastime. In July Gretta had written to Florence, asking if she'd seen Ulysses, but so far had heard nothing back.

Panic twisted in Gretta's stomach, and she sat down at the dining-room table to calm herself, making fists to keep her fingers from shaking. Her lungs had risen into her throat, and though she needed air, she couldn't seem to take any more in.

“Think!” she said aloud, then pushed away from the table, went into the kitchen, and drew a tall glass of cold water from the pump and forced herself to drink it all down. She took a breath and blew it out. At the China hutch she took out the silver candlestick-holders her mother had received as a wedding gift, and she set them on the table. They were fashioned in a plain, heavy style, and whenever Gretta polished them—at Christmas and Easter—their weight in her hands summoned to mind her mother's silvery blonde hair, always pulled back in a tight bun on holidays, and her father's eyes, which even at family gatherings seemed to search out windows and doors, a route of escape. There were other things, too, that she could sell—her lace handkerchiefs, the blue pitcher painted in the royal Danish pattern, her grandfather's brass letter opener. The local undertaker, Burlingame, had a pawn exchange at the alley entrance to his store, and though Gretta had never sold him anything, she'd heard that he was more generous now that a new funeral man had set up shop in the town five miles east. She gathered her things on the table and wrapped each up in dishtowels, then put on her best coat and regarded herself in the mirror that hung in the front room. With the panic rising in her belly it was hard to stand up straight, but that's what she did—pushed her shoulders back and stepped up close to examine her face. She brought her lips together in a line and pushed the bottom one out in a way that suggested confidence. She studied her brow, which was neither too thin nor too thick, and then her nose, which she had often been told was well formed. She collected a fallen lock from her forehead, tucked it behind an ear, and took a step back for a full view. Her black wool coat was smooth, with no obvious creases or wrinkles, and tailored well to her shape. Her hands looked chapped, though, and so she went to her room for the balm that Ulysses used on his fingers in the winter.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed when a knock at the door brought her to her feet. She dried her hands on the bedspread, moved quickly across the house, and opened the door a crack, blocking it with the toe of her shoe. Mead Fogarty stood on the front stoop with his derby hat in his chubby hands.

“I hear that your sons are missing,” he said. “I might be in a position to help you.”

Gretta pulled back. The man wanted his money, that was all—unless he'd come to observe her pain, and to gloat.

“Let me inside, please.”

With no other choice, Gretta withdrew her toe from the door. Fogarty pushed forward, snagging the shoulder of his jacket on a nail jutting from the doorframe.

“Damn it!” he said.

“What do you know about my boys?” Gretta asked him.

He gave his chin a careless toss. “They've gone in search of their father, I imagine.”

“Have you seen them?”

“I haven't.”

“You said you knew something.”

“No, I said I might be able to help you. Listen.” He lifted both hands, palms out. “We have to sit down and talk.”

She led him to the kitchen, where they sat across from each other at the table. Fogarty planted his elbows and grasped his hands together in an oddly formal gesture. He tipped back his head and looked at her along the uneven line of his nose. “I've lost my ring of keys,” he announced. “The ones to all the rooms in my building. And I'm afraid it's your fault.”

God help me,
Gretta thought. Fogarty's red face was composed and serious, his plump lips neither smiling nor pursed. He coughed and swallowed, then reached into the pocket of his jacket for a tin flask, which he held aloft and squinted at.

“It's been a trying day,” he said, and took a drink, eyes rolling back in his head. “I don't often indulge myself—my wife would have vouched for me on that. But there are times a man requires help in what he needs to do.” He offered the flask to Gretta, who made a face.

“You were saying about your keys,” she said, aware of the clock ticking on the secretary and the growing number of miles separating her from her sons.

“Mrs. Pope, you so upset me the other night that I haven't been thinking straight since. Owing me rent as you do, and then taking my generous offer so lightly. Last night, in fact, I was so distracted that I must have lost my keys while I was up at Lowman's Bend, fishing.”

Gretta could not respond. The man's mind and motivations were unknowable, absurd.

“I'm on my way to find them now, and I insist that you come along with me.”

She almost laughed, out of confusion. “I don't have time,” she said. “Can't you see that? I have to figure out what to do.”

Fogarty narrowed his eyes. His gaze fell on Gretta's lips and then her neck, which Gretta moved to cover with her hand. “If you help me find my keys,” he said, “I will give you money for the trip you're planning.”

“What trip?”

He took another swallow from his flask and offered it to her again. This time she accepted, wincing as the whiskey burned its way down her throat. Fogarty smiled, head cocked like a bird dog.

Be careful,
Gretta thought,
there's no one looking out for you.

“When I heard your boys were gone, I knew right off I had to help out, it's the honorable thing to do. On the other hand, one good deed deserves another, doesn't it?” He smiled again, only for a moment. “I may be a homely man,” he said, “but I'm no fool. And I won't be mocked like some rube. You've been telling me you know where your husband is, that he's coming home soon. That is not the case, is it?”

“Not exactly,” Gretta said.

“So you've been lying to me.”

“I am trying to be optimistic.”

“An admirable trait.” Fogarty pressed his hands together palm to palm beneath his chin. “But if your husband has taken a permanent leave, which I believe he has, it's to your benefit—and mine—to reach that conclusion sooner, not later.”

“I don't understand,” she said.

“Because,” Mead Fogarty said, “I mean to take his place.”

Gretta stood up so fast the room went black, and she reached out to steady herself against the table. She wanted to run to her bedroom and shut and lock the door.

“I don't expect this comes as a welcome surprise, anxious as you are right now. But I am a decent man, offering help you happen to need. I urge you to give it serious thought.” He got up from the table and gestured toward the door. “In the meantime, I need to find my keys. My rig is out front.”

“I can't go with you—it wouldn't look right,” she said.

Fogarty laughed. “It doesn't look right either when a woman's husband leaves her and stays away for months on end. Now take my arm, hold your head up, and come along. It's only a mile north, and we'll be there in no time. If folks happen to see you, fine. I'm good people.”

She refused his arm, but the tremor in the man's bottom lip gave her courage, and she consented to follow him out of the house and into the street where he helped her onto the buckboard of his spring wagon, which was covered in a fresh coat of white paint. He tipped his flask for another swallow, then took up the driving lines. Gretta kept her eyes trained ahead as they drove north toward the edge of town, looking to the side just once, when a man's voice called her name—“Gretta?”—a voice she knew and could not ignore: Otis Bending, an old carpenter who often helped Ulysses with his larger projects, the houses and barns. She lifted a hand and offered a flat smile she hoped he could see through, a smile that said,
It isn't what you think.
Otis only scowled, his enormous hands hanging like spades beside him. Gretta felt cold suddenly. The sun had gone behind a bank of clouds, the dead scent of autumn in the air, dust and woodsmoke and dead grass. She imagined her sons walking along some strange road or hunched in a woods, sharing a loaf of her bread—or the pair of them in a train car, wrapped in their blankets and lying close together for warmth. Tears welled in her eyes, but she squeezed them back and dried her face with her sleeve. She couldn't help thinking of the nights she'd climbed into the loft and touched their hair as they slept—Danny's silken curls and Eli's full, heavy ones, cool in her fingers.

Fogarty yanked on the driving lines and the young gelding veered left, plunging off the road onto a dirt trail. Gretta had to grasp the seat with both hands to keep from pitching off the wagon. “Whoa, easy there,” Fogarty said, flicking the lines and driving on, the wagon jouncing and squeaking in the ruts. They wound through a stand of cottonwoods, the blue stripe of the river glistening as they headed toward a place Gretta knew from years ago when she and Ulysses still fished together. Once he'd caught a catfish the size of a piglet and staked it over a wood fire, and she still remembered the tangy flavor of its gray meat.

“Where is he?” Fogarty asked.

“I don't know.”

“If you want my help, I need to know where you're going.”

“He might be in St. Paul, where he grew up,” Gretta said, unable to look at the man. She despised him for the power he had to question her like this. “I don't know where else he'd go.”

“But he hasn't contacted you?”

“No.”

Fogarty removed his flask again and drank, though it wasn't easy, his hand bobbing at every jerk of the wagon. There was the dull ping of teeth striking tin, but he managed to fasten on with his lips and take a long pull. Thirty feet from the water he hauled back on the lines and yanked the hand brake. The gelding snorted and shook itself. Fogarty turned and raised a finger to Gretta's face. He licked his bright lips. “I was faithful to my wife while she lived,” he said, “and I've been faithful to her memory since she died. I try to be a good man.” His cheeks were blotchy and his breath sour.

Gretta couldn't speak.

“No doubt you've been holding out on me, keeping a tight grip on that rent money. But I'll add to that.” He tapped an index finger against the chestpocket of his tight-fitting vest. “I have five dollars here. For you. I have to know, however, that my generosity will be met with a mutual feeling.”