The High Divide (7 page)

She knocked on the door and a boy appeared, twelve or thirteen years old, with a cleft in his chin that she couldn't help smiling at, and familiar hands, long and thick-knuckled. Despite herself, she imagined taking those hands and pressing them to her face. She stepped back, nearly stumbling.

“Can I help you, Ma'am?”

“I'm wondering, are your parents at home? Or your grandparents, I mean.”

He turned and called back into the house, “Grandma, there's a woman here to see you,” then turned back again. “She don't move so quick these days.”

“Or your grandpa, I could talk with him too,” Gretta said. “That would be fine.”

“Grampa ain't well,” the boy said, matter of fact. “Got seized up good, which is the reason I am here. My folks left me to stay on and help take care of him.” He aimed a thumb over his shoulder as he spoke, the act of doing so seeming to produce the woman herself, Florence, who was bent over double and leaning on a cane. Her face was thinner and grayer, though still wide through the jaw, and her eyes were as pale as her brother's. She came up close behind her grandson, took him by the shoulders, and looked up at Gretta.

“Hello, Florence,” Gretta said. Standing on the wooden step, she studied her sister-in-law's eyes, watching for recognition. They blinked but remained neutral.

“How is my brother?” Florence asked.

All at once the valise suspended from Gretta's fist felt impossibly heavy, and she leaned to the side to let it fall on the step. Her first glimpse of the house had caused her to think Ulysses was close by, but that feeling passed now like a sparrow from a room.

“Didn't you get my letter?” Gretta asked.

Florence nodded. “We've had troubles here. I figured you would write again if he didn't show up. Louie?”—she pushed her grandson forward and pointed him toward Gretta's valise—“bring that grip inside for her.” Then she backstepped into the house, waving Gretta forward. The sitting room was unchanged: dark wainscoting halfway up the walls, a painting of ships on a stormy sea, the pine stairway rising to the dark second floor. Florence pointed her to a cane rocker with a leather seat, and Louie set her valise on the floor next to her. Florence took a high-backed chair upholstered in rose velour. Louie pulled up a stool.

“Recognized you right off,” Florence said. “You look mostly the same.”

Gretta was not able to respond in kind, but tried to smile. “I'm sorry about Charles,” she said. “What happened?”

Florence swatted the air, as if Gretta's condolences meant nothing.

“Gramma don't like talking about it,” Louie said.

“He had a spell in early July. Can't move anything on his left side. Can't even get out of bed for his private business.”

“I'm sorry.”

A voice floated down from upstairs. “Louie? Louie?”

Florence said, “I never did understand my brother. 'Course I was out of the house by the time he was born, and then after the wars when he lived here with Charlie and me, he stayed to himself. Preferred his own company, such as it was. Never seemed interested in talking or spending time. We weren't like family, somehow.” She cleared her throat and leveled her face at Gretta. She narrowed her pale eyes. “We haven't seen him,” she said. “He has not been here, I assure you. Wish I could tell you that he had.”

From upstairs the voice came again, more urgent this time. “Louie, Florence. I'm going to need somebody now.”

“Go ahead, please,” Gretta said. “I'm fine here.”

Florence rolled her eyes, then nodded at her grandson and pushed herself up from her chair. As she moved toward the stairway, leaning on her cane, Louie cut a line around her and mounted the stairs two at a time.

Gretta crossed to the kitchen, where the pine floor was still painted red and the big Glenwood stove dominated the north wall. She pushed open the door to the back room where Ulysses had slept. The narrow bed was gone, and in its place stood an open cabinet crammed full of canned goods, sacks of flour and sugar, spice jars. The desk he'd used was still here, in the same corner, but instead of the neat row of sharpened pencils Gretta remembered, and the half-drawn building plans, its top was covered with haphazard piles of yellowing newspapers. The floor, too, was a shambles, unnavigable, littered with broken chairs, cardboard boxes, empty bottles, stacks of magazines, the whole mess reinforcing Gretta's sense that Florence was telling the truth, that Ulysses had not been here—and that Florence wasn't going to be of any help in finding him, either.

Should I be surprised?
Gretta thought.

The only other place she'd thought to go was the Minneapolis headquarters of the Grand Army of the Republic, in the Loan and Trust building. Ulysses used to receive their letters in fine, official-looking envelopes, and it was Gretta's notion that she might discover in their offices lists of the men with whom he'd served, along with their addresses. Then again, she might return home empty-handed, with nothing more than she already knew. What frightened her most, however, was that her search might lead in some roundabout way to a place she wished she hadn't found.

Florence and Louie returned from upstairs, and Gretta, trying to exhibit a concern she didn't feel, asked if Charles was all right.

“If all right means your face hasn't got any color in it and your fingers can't hold a fork, then yes, he's fine and dandy. We've been trying to feed him cow liver, for the iron, but he's not fond of it. Seems to bleed straight through him.” Florence offered a humorless laugh. “Not that Charlie's any concern of yours, Gretta. Now about my little brother—you gave me the impression he left without saying anything.”

“Well, there was a note—to the effect that he had found work. But he didn't say where.”

“Work that he needed, as I recall. Your letter said as much. He was always a hard worker, Ulysses. Hired himself out from the time he was big enough to handle a shovel or lift a hammer. And if there was nothing for him in Sloan's Crossing, then I suppose he had to go someplace else.”

“Of course. But wouldn't you think he'd have said where?”

“Yes.” Florence rolled her eyes again. Another unexplainable phenomenon, like her husband's illness.

“Tell me,” Gretta said. “Were there ever any women that you remember? Before
me?
”

“No. No. I used to tell him he needed one, though, I remember that.”

“He has a buckskin tobacco pouch, about this big”—Gretta indicated its size with her hands—“with a lovely beaded pattern, yellow and blue, a mountain beneath a sun. I've always wondered who made it.”

“I wouldn't know, because I never snooped in his things. But I will say I'm surprised he walked off like he did. He was always so dependable.” Florence looked up at Gretta, and for a moment her eyes looked darker and softer. “And I know he loves you,” she said. “Of course my brother is a loner—at least before you came along, he was. Hardly came out of his room at night, especially after he got back the second time. He used to take his plate of supper back there and eat all by himself.”

“What do you mean, the second time?” Gretta asked.

“After his second enlistment.”

“I don't understand.”

“You don't understand what?”

The feeling in Gretta's stomach was the same as what came when you were walking at night and stepped forward onto ground an inch or two lower than expected—that brief sensation of falling then catching yourself. “He enlisted twice?” she said.

Florence looked off in a corner, frowning. She blinked and turned to Louie, who had been sitting quietly on his stool. “You know that chest of drawers in the north bedroom? Run up and yank the bottom one, right side, and bring it down here. The right side, Louie. Go on.” As the boy headed for the stairs, Florence turned back to Gretta. “He was discharged in sixty-five, after the Rebs surrendered, and came back here that summer. He didn't stay in the service between campaigns.”

Gretta waited, not sure what question to ask.

“He stayed around for about a year, I suppose it was. Worked for a builder by the name of Sirkel, putting up houses all over this part of the city. I thought he was doing pretty good. But then the next summer he reenlisted. Sixty-six, it would've been. No, maybe he was here two years. Might have been sixty-seven he went back in. He went down to Kansas, anyway, and joined up with the Cavalry.”

“Kansas?”

“That's what I said. Kansas.”

Gretta was light-headed suddenly, her fingers tingling. She had never heard Ulysses mention reenlisting. Not once. She had never heard him mention Kansas or, for that matter, the Cavalry. He had never spoken of a Mr. Sirkel, or of building houses after coming home from the war. As far as Gretta knew, he came back to St. Paul in sixty-five, started driving horsecars, and stayed at it until she came along.

“It was the second time he came home—this would have been in sixty-nine—that he started driving the horses, working the route. Not so long before you met him.”

Louie was back from upstairs now with the drawer, which was wide and shallow, glass-knobbed, and when Florence nodded at him, he dropped it unceremoniously on Gretta's lap. There was little in it—some of Ulysses's old drawings and building plans scattered across the top of whatever else there might be.

“He was never one to talk about his time out there,” Florence said, “and I never saw any of his service papers. But I think there might be a few letters from a fellow he served with.” She nodded at the drawer. “Been a long time since the last one came. A dozen years probably.”

“Why didn't you send them on?”

“I sent the first one, soon's I got it. Ulysses wrote me back and said if any more showed up, I should toss them out, he didn't want them. I didn't have the heart, though. Figured he might change his mind one day. Anyway, there's only a few, three altogether I believe, and I didn't open any but the first.”

Gretta's impulse was to get up and carry the drawer out of the house and go off to a place where she could sort through its contents alone. She clenched her stomach as she lifted out her husband's old drawings one by one, half a dozen of them, and set them on the floor next to her, pencil sketches of houses, barns, granaries, along with hand-drawn floor plans and lists of building materials. Beneath these were a couple of stories cut from newspapers—nothing that caught Gretta's eye—then finally a small packet of letters, tied in string. She slipped the top one out, a faded white envelope from the U.S. Army. She held it up to read the address, then read it again for good measure before looking sharply at Florence.

“This one isn't his,” Gretta said.

Florence scowled and blinked. She pointed a finger at the letters still lying in the drawer.

Gretta set aside the one she was holding and picked up the next, sent by a Jim Powers from Fort Riley, Kansas. A brown envelope. This one, same as the first, was addressed not to
Ulysses
Pope,
but to
Ulysses
Popovich,
416 Dale Street East, St. Paul, Minnesota. She put it down and reached for the next two, both unopened, both bearing the same address and return address. Gretta had become so accustomed to masking what she felt that her face remained composed, even though her neck and back were suddenly flushed and slick. The beat of her heart was so heavy that she put a hand on her breast to calm it.

“Popovich,” she said.

Florence turned to give Gretta a sideways look, frowning at her. “You didn't know?”

“How would I know if he didn't tell me?”

“Pope, Popovich—I suppose it doesn't matter.”

Although she hadn't taken a breath, Gretta's lungs were full to bursting. She coughed hard, expelling what she could, then managed to suck in a thimbleful of air, enough to say, “It doesn't matter that I don't know my husband's name?”

“Well he changed it before he met you, obviously.”

She concentrated on her breathing. Closed her eyes and saw Ulysses on the day of their wedding, standing tall and straight at the altar where they exchanged their vows. Looked into his pale eyes and tried to find in them a place to rest, some bit of green earth or brown soil, anything at all to lean against or fall down upon.

“Are you all right?” Florence bent forward and touched Gretta's wrist with surprising sympathy. “Louie, go fetch a glass of water.”

Gretta gathered her wits and picked up the first envelope from the floor, the one from the U.S. Army. Inside were the discharge papers, dated February 18, 1869—six months before she met him—of Ulysses Popovich.
My husband,
she thought. She picked up the next one, the already opened envelope from Jim Powers, from Fort Riley, Kansas, slipped out the single sheet, and read. In a scrawling hand, the man complained of the heat and the terrible food, bemoaned a lost but well-deserved promotion, and boasted of his upcoming marriage to a woman from nearby Junction City, a widow with three young children. Gretta returned it to its envelope and then the other letters to the drawer, along with the drawings and the newspaper cuttings. She accepted the glass of water from Louie and took a long drink. Then looked at Florence.

“Why?” she asked her sister-in-law.

Florence shook her head. “I'm not sure I know. Or I should say, I'm not sure I understand. He did it when he got back in sixty-nine, the second time. He said our name made him sound like our family just stepped off the boat, instead of going all the way back to the last century, which we do. We had people here before the War of the Revolution, for pity's sake. But he said the men in the service made jokes. Popovich, Papa bitch, popinjay, I don't know. Said he wanted his children, if he ever had any, to have an American name. Now, Charlie and I didn't think much of the idea, I'll tell you that. Pope? Sounded awful high and mighty to our ears. Not to mention we aren't Catholic. But of course Dad was the one who would have cared, and by then he and mother were long gone.”