The Homesman (21 page)

He stood up sweating, back aching. She weighed a ton. And now he had to think what to put in with her. From on top of the wagon he brought down her bedroll, untied it, and found a green velvet sewing bag he hadn't heeded earlier. He sat down on the grass to open it, and as soon as he did, the four women did likewise. He scowled at them. All they had between the ears was air. He opened the bag.

The first thing, rolled up, was the long strip of white cloth she'd marked out to be a piano keyboard, the one she'd played the other evening to sing to. Next were a comb and brush and a sliver of soap and two handtowels wrapped in what he supposed were undergarments. Also wrapped was ten dollars in greenbacks. She must have brought these to buy for herself in Hebron. He shoved the money down deep into the inside pocket of his suitcoat. Then there was a stack of paper consisting of a folded sheet with names and addresses on it, a packet of letters and another folded sheet, and sticking out of the sheet, the end of a greenback. He unfolded it and found eight dollars in greenbacks. These he added to the ten dollars in his suitcoat. Then he found a small square of cardboard to which was pinned a pink cameo pin carved with the face of a young girl with a crown on her head. Briggs calculated the pin would fetch several dollars anywhere, and so put it in a side pocket with the tin of sardines he'd salvaged from the Giffen dugout. Next was another folded sheet with names and addresses. And finally, there were three envelopes, two unsealed and one sealed, and these he opened. The first contained only a sheet with names and addresses. He replaced it. In the second was a letter to Cuddy signed “Dorothy,” he guessed, her sister, which he couldn't read and didn't care. He put it back in its envelope and set it aside. The writing on the last envelope he had seen before, and remembered: “Mr. George Briggs, c/o Mrs. Altha Carter, Ladies Aid Society, Methodist Church, Hebron, Iowa.” It was sealed. With a finger he slit it open. It held six fifty-dollar notes on the Bank of Loup. Briggs was astounded. He frowned at the notes until it came to him—she hadn't mailed them at all, that day in Loup. She'd kept them, brought them along, and he knew why. She didn't trust him. He was a man of low character. He might desert the party any day, leave her and the women high and dry and ride on by himself, to Hebron, collect the envelope—it was addressed to him—and be on his way flush with cash. And so she told him a white lie, that she had mailed the money at the general store, when instead she'd hidden it in the sewing bag all the long miles and days. Maybe, too, she wanted the satisfaction of paying him off in person, when he had finished the job. He glanced at the grave. Some satisfaction. And he had eighteen dollars in greenbacks to boot. He counted the notes again. He had never set eyes on three hundred dollars in a lump sum. He let himself anticipate a few of the things it would buy him: a bath, a soft bed, stove-cooked victuals, a river of whiskey, a woman, a game of cards, etc.

Briggs folded the banknotes into the envelope and stuffed it down deep with the greenbacks inside his suitcoat. The letters, except the one from her sister back east, and sheets of paper he put back in the bag, then got to his feet. Sure enough, so did the women. Monkey see, monkey do. He picked up her coat and hat and personal items, rolled them up in her bedroll, tied it, and stepping up on a wheel hub pushed it under the tarp on the wagon. He went then to the grave and, kneeling by it, placed her sister's letter inside a fold of the buffalo hide and draped the cloth keyboard, stretching it to full length, from one end of her to the other. He sat back on his haunches.

“Cuddy,” he said, lowering his voice so that the women couldn't hear, “you listen. Don't you haunt me. It won't work. I'm not to blame. You were already a gone goose. Out of your mind, I mean. I know that for a fact, because last evening I missed you and went out and there you were, singing and playing all to yourself. Playing a cloth piano.” He paused. “Anyway, goodbye, and thanks for the money. You were a damn good woman and you helped me a lot.” He was embarrassing himself. “Goodbye.”

He stood, took up the shovel, and began to fill. When the hole was half full, he stepped in and tromped on the earth to tamp it down, then filled to the top and tromped, and when finished, smoothed the excess dirt into a neat mound and stepped back satisfied. Some satisfaction.

It was time to make ready. Briggs brought his horse and tied it to the wagon. From the grub box he got a cup and spoon and cupped a small sack of cornmeal from the larger—he could make gruel in the cup—and from the compartment under the wagon seat he got her rifle and ample cartridges. The rifle he stuck in his saddle scabbard, and the other truck in his saddlebag. He tied his bedroll and cowcoat on behind. He moved in a deliberate manner, the women watching.

The last thing was what to do with the sewing bag with its letters and relatives' names. Where to stow it where someone would be sure to find it. He settled on the underseat box and put it there and dropped the lid.

He led his horse around in front of the four women and mounted up and gave each of them a long, disgusted look. God but he was sick and tired of tied tongues and faces like walls and eyes like broken windows. “All right,” he said, “we are parting company. I'm going on by myself. I have worn my ass to the bone for you on that wagon, and a good woman has died for you, and that's enough. You can just get to Ioway under your own steam. The woman you have to see there is named Mrs. Altha Carter. Altha Carter. You set out from here straight east till you come to the river, then go south to the ferry at Kanesville, cross, and go south to Hebron.” He raised a finger. “Now what's the name of that woman?”

He waited. They looked at him as though he'd been reading from the damn Bible—“And Ner begat Kish, and Kish begat Saul,” so on and so forth.

“What's the name of the town?”

They were women made of straw. Fussing over them accomplished nothing. What they needed was a few whacks on the backside.

“Shit,” he said. “All right, you are on your own. You've got cornmeal and four wheels and a riding horse and a crackerjack span of mules and you ought to get there. If you don't, it'll be no loss to the U.S. of America.” With his free hand he touched the brim of his slouch hat. “So this is goodbye, ladies. Goodbye and good luck.”

He twitched the reins and the roan walked him away forever from the tree and fresh grave and wagon and the giddyup girls. He had felt all morning like a trigger being squeezed, and now the hammer had gone home. He hadn't ridden ten rods when he heard someone calling after him: “Goodbye! Goodbye!” Waving one arm, he supposed, and holding her doll with the other. The hell with her. The hell with the whole millstone, crack-brain bunch. This was a free country. George Briggs was finally by God a free man.

•   •   •

The first thing he did was reassure himself.

He made comfortable the sheath of his knife and the barrel of the repeater under his belt.

Then he laid a hand on his saddlebag and the rifle butt and his bedroll and cowcoat behind.

He made certain of the cameo pin in a side pocket and the riches of greenbacks and banknotes deep in the inside pocket.

Peaceful of mind he rode on. He had an inclination to glance back over his shoulder to see if there was any sign of life around the wagon, but that would be borrowing trouble.

April.

Sunshine a-plenty. The sky was lake blue, the clouds feathers, and the songs of birds on high pierced the blue like pins.

The prairie reminded him of a big boardinghouse platter. On it a feed of spring was served, green and brown, new buffalo grass supplanting old. And any day now there'd be more wildflowers, blue and yellow and orange and white, than the eye could eat.

He almost looked back but caught himself.

He was a man who never looked back. That was what he told Cuddy after he told her about the woman he lived with, who wanted to marry: “I rode away from her and never looked back.”

If they had any brains and gumption they'd get along fine. They were farmers' wives. They could handle a horse and mules and a wagon and cook and do for themselves, and with their dumb luck they'd stumble onto somebody who'd take pity and peek under the wagon seat and see they got where they were supposed to go.

The need to look back was powerful.

He hoped Hebron was more than one of those small, Sunday-go-to-meeting towns. Even so, with the Kanesville crossings nearby, there must be some places where a man could raise some hell.

He pretended to be a dragoon on parade. He squared his shoulders and stiffened his neck.

Even if they didn't make it, if they milled around and starved or killed each other, it would be a blessing. They were no earthly good to anyone. They would just be a burden to their kinfolk.

Briggs looked back.

“Godamighty,” he groaned.

Here they came, following him. They were strewn out in single file like sheep coming to a fold, Sours first, then Petzke, then Svendsen, then Belknap. They trudged along as though, if he were in the lead, they'd follow him through fire and flood, up mountain and down, to the grave or to everlasting life, as though, if he would be their guide, they'd walk around the whole, monstrous world.

He stopped. He sat his horse, waiting. He was unable to look back again.

The girl reached him first, put an arm around his leg, and held him tight as she might have a dying child. The wolf woman stretched arms over both his legs, strapping him to the saddle. The barren woman and the woman who had murdered her infant came up on the other side and laid hands on him, one his thigh, one his hip. And there on the prairie, under the lake sky, the five were joined in a kind of communion. The horse did not move, just as he had not moved under the taut rope that long night of life or death by the river. There was no sound but the songs of birds on high. The man looked down at the women, at the tangled hair and dirty faces, into the empty eyes. He was not free after all. He had replaced Cuddy. Likely they did not understand her ending, but whatever she had meant to them, he meant to them in her stead. Briggs had been a solitary man, and staying shy of others, riding away from love or friend or any sort of tether, had never found what lay inside him unfulfilled. Now it seemed to him that, as blood tunnels silently within the veins, something like a common prayer passed upward from their bodies into his, a plea to which his undiscovered self said yes.

He moved his animal away from the women and turned around and headed for the wagon at a walk. After a few rods he looked back.

The four were following.

•   •   •

Half an hour later he had everything in its rightful place and the women back in the box and the wagon rolling, again trailing the horses, and George Briggs up on the seat, driving and cussing George Briggs. If he'd been somebody else, he'd have beaten the tar out of George Briggs. Just because a woman who'd called him a “man of low character” had strung herself up to a tree. Just because four cuckoo clocks had hung on to him like a husband or brother or side-of-the-road savior. The man who never looked back had now, just once, and made maybe the biggest mistake of his life. If he'd had tobacco, he could have chewed. If he'd had whiskey, he could have got drunk. But all he had was a hollow gut and a sunk sensation and a set of reins in his hands, so he struck a bargain with himself: three more days, counting this one. He'd haul these half-wit hens three more days, and if he hadn't got them on the ferry by then, so long, sisters. Starting now he'd slant south and east, and after three days could leave them with a clear conscience. The farther south, down toward the Platte, the more travelers. Some outfit heading west would be sure to run into them and find the papers and Mrs. Carter's name in the sewing bag and put two and two together.

That afternoon he spotted two wagon trains in the distance, and sod houses, he noted, were giving way to log cabins. Game was clean gone. He took stock. The mules were skin and bones. They pulled heads-down. What they needed was some corn and a couple days off to laze around and fatten up, but he could give them neither grain nor time. Stay upright long enough to pull the wagon to the river and they could fall dead for all he gave a damn. His horse was in good shape, as was hers, the gelding, Shaver. The frame wagon had aches and pains and the iron tire on the left rear wheel had loosened again and rang as it rolled. He looked for a creek but could find none, so made a dry camp that evening and cut wood and wedged the tire, hoping it would last two more days. Maybe it would, but the cornmeal wouldn't.

He had to do everything now. He fried up the remaining cornmeal into dodgers and apportioned them carefully. After supper's, the rest would make two cold meals tomorrow, not a crumb more. They'd be bound sooner or later to come onto a road ranch or a shebang and he could buy food. He had money. You bet he had money.

He made a discovery in the morning. He could take the women out to the bushes two by two rather than singly, and they wouldn't fuss or fight. Not only that, they'd beeline right back to the wagon on their own hook. Wherever he went they went, following him like pups even when he went to take a leak unless he thought to lock them in the box first.

That day, the second, the weather wouldn't settle down. It would rain cats and dogs, then stop, then drip awhile, then stop while it made up its mind what to do next. Briggs kept a sharp eye out through the gloom. He much preferred a shebang to a road ranch. There might be a crowd at a ranch, with several trains stopped at once, blacksmithing and repairing wagons and trading footsore animals for fresh and drinking whiskey while the womenfolk bought bread and cheese and molasses and hominy and dried apples for pies and sundries from a general line of merchandise. There might be teamsters, too, and worse, some Army. It had been five years since he had flown the coop at Fort Kearney. Enlisted men did not fret him, they were common ruck and would come and go; but where there was Army there might be officers, career men, some of whom were confounded smart and had memories like steel traps. No, he wanted a shebang.