A Season of Fire and Ice Read online

  So I am the one to see him off, that he may satisfy himself as to the safety of the Widow and her land; and see his mare wade into the boggy fringe of the flood above the L-shaped stand of cottonwoods and disappear behind them, his dogs romping in mad excitement.

  APR. 22. The twins persist, Harris reporting them gone far south beyond the point of Beidermann’s crossing, and he must hunt an hour to deliver provisions to them and grain for their pinto ponies, the grass being meager there.

  To Beidermann’s place with Otto this morning, and it is as Otto reports, quiet as death in the stillness of abandonment; as he found it when he came with bags of seed owed Beidermann to find him gone—that being the warning to send us searching at the river, where he had surprised me in his fine clothes. An eerie place it is without the presence of the master, and a little chill grows on my heart. The spinning windmill sends forth haunted groans, as might the ghosts of buffalo in Beidermann’s tales to the twins, and we hasten to our chores.

  Throwing corn to Beidermann’s hogs, Otto says, I would not be surprised if the Widow got herself in the family way, but I surely never put the two of them together.

  Pretending innocence, he hopes to tease me into disparaging comment, but I refuse his bait and say only, Now you know. There are no miracles in that aspect of life.

  No miracles, to be sure; but gloomy mystery enough, I think, with abundant cause to ponder the peculiar inequity of purpose that summons the robust Beidermann from his unknown past, endows him with vigor and craft to prove-up his spot of Earth handily and without complaint, lets him set his roots, take a full grip, make his claim certain—and then he is swept away in one instant like a thing of naught, as if for some unknowable reason this stalwart mortal must not receive man’s fair span upon the Earth, but only one pinprick moment as the river rises, as never before, to take him.

  Will the Jenssen woman tenderly lay him out then, when the twins bring in his remains? It is a bitter thought, and I have received too much in my life to harbor bitterness; as I have gone too long unjudged, now to judge others. I do not know the inner man of Beidermann, nor the inner woman of Anna Jenssen; and of this Ma reminded me last night.

  When the silent tobacco-chewing Swede went under from injuries on our threshing rig, at his funeral I watched his wife in a new widow’s tearing passion badger her bawling daughters from pew to graveside, so fiercely demanding propriety from them as to show no grief herself, if it was in her; and I had the coldness to think that poor Swede by God’s will was at last freed from the misery of a whipped and prodded life, delivered from the work he did by moonlight so as to stay afield long after supper until his wife was abed, thus to suffer her only from the time he pulled off his boots to when he fell asleep, and not the whole evening through, which time, when younger, he took pleasure in his fiddle playing, and while that brought little joy to others, it deserved better than the cruel derision of his wife. There was evidence, said Krupp with his sly mouth, that the man often made his bed in the barn, preferring the company of calves to that of his wife.

  For such slim pickings the shrewd Beidermann wades to his death. Not even Ma will allow that the Widow is a catch—Ma with her generous measure of good-will and a pleasing word for the poorest of men or events, who once admitted, Anna ought to put some meat on her bones, which might give a lift to her disposition.

  Well, say I, it is the meat on the bones that gives you your good nature, is it? For Ma is of that species of able cook unreluctant to be first at sampling the product of her own or any woman’s Dutch oven. But Anna Jenssen is far from that, and the unhappy Swede, when he lived, was no more than a rail himself, lacking half his teeth, for all that his toothy wife seemingly possessed enough for them both, and raw-boned as a wintering steer, as if his wife’s cooking, if he ate it, lent no subsidy to his body.

  And yet, in human matters, there is always more. With all the snippy nature of her demeanor, the sniffish looks down her nose for no clear reason, the cackling laugh that tweaks the nerves, yet when the Swede went under and she was in the natural despair attending such circumstances, left alone with two young girls, with the lonely burden of keeping the Swede’s homestead above water with the help of a procession of sorry drunken hired hands, not one of the afflicted lot staying out a season, so that Ma feared for her continuing soundness of mind—yet for all these encumbrances on her stooped shoulders, the Widow does persevere; and whether she does so by virtue of a strength carried unrevealed and secret in herself, or through blindness to the dire nature of her plight, which, clearly seen, would send her skirts aflying back East, as go others, still she endures. So it may be that Beidermann sees not a skinny woman, spare-legged and bent in the shoulder with a frizz of white Swedish hair on her lip like a young boy, but instead a rock of purpose, as stubborn as himself, here to stay. If that is what he sees, then the Swede’s bequeathed homestead is only sugar sprinkled on the fresh bread.

  WE THROW DOWN HAY for Beidermann’s restive Percherons and swarming calves. Skittish hens importune us for more corn; the battle-ax blades of the windmill make their mournful moan, which is soaked up by the overlying silence.

  If he has family, no one knows of them, says Otto. Who will take this over?

  We are his neighbors, say I. It lies with us.

  So we add to our own chores those of Beidermann, which one of the boys will go to do early each day until we are certain—until the twins have seen the certainty—that the hunt is unavailing.

  APR. 23. From the twins, still on the river, comes no word; but for all their youthful daring, I know them to be lads of sense and ability, although Ma does fret—they are her babies still—and to put her worrying mind at ease, nothing will do but that I take them the bundle she has put up; and so I do, the day being young enough to travel to them and return by dark, which I have now done, and with heartening outcome.

  When I reach the river the wet grass at the flood’s edge still shows a rim of white frost from the freezing night, as if the Almighty has sketched a border around His watery handiwork. Of the twins or their hobbled ponies there is no sign as I ride south above the boiling water, here black with washed-away soil not soon to be replenished. As heavy a sight as I have laid eyes on, such ruination visited upon good men—how to be understood? Excepting we admit to the Almighty’s Grand Design, wherein is inscribed our destinies, our fates, and Beidermann’s doom.

  Over the boggy ground, my gelding pulls toward firmer footing upslope, away from the splashing waters. The cold air holds the smell of fresh damp earth, underlaid by the rotting stench of varmints trapped and drowned: their cadavers toss swiftly past; jackrabbits, squirrel, a fox, the mangled furry mass of a prairie wolf, not so wily as to outwit the flood.

  Somewhere here too, the remains of the incautious Beidermann, which the twins will come upon: not the first dead man they have seen, nor the last—for they bid to see me go, and Ma, and surely some of their older brothers. But Beidermann, long in the water, banged and buffeted by his passage through brush and snags and rocks, will be one they see more than once in their blackest dreams.

  At that same L-shaped stand of cottonwoods where a week ago Beidermann prodded his mare into the soupy edges of the flood, here I draw up. A high hill of stripped roots and branches, flattened brush, half a privy, have anchored on a snag in the river here, an unwanted dam that will need grubbing out, perhaps timber to be salvaged, when the flood has had its say. If the water has pulled back since Beidermann challenged it, it is by inches only.

  My gelding takes me up a little slope which offers a vantage to oversee the wreckage, and here, by chance of a narrow sight-line unobstructed by vine-tangled islands of bending willows, suddenly I have a view of unflooded land opposite, which is the dry western bank of the flood—a surprising prospect it is, perhaps a half-mile distant and fuzzed over by hanging mist, which sometimes clears for a moment as the wind veers.

  In one such moment I glimpse a sight which causes my heart to quicken, for there is mov
ement on that dry shore, on the slope far opposite, and I quit the saddle to get a steady view, and stare unblinking until my eyes are aching. It could be no more than a stranded animal, one of Krupp’s bulls, or specters the imagination conjures.

  But several figures stir there. It could be Krupp himself, it could be Gaustad from far upriver, seeking lost stock, or the incautious Widow Jenssen out in her buggy, doing the same. . . . Now the mist unfolds sufficiently to reveal three figures moving back and forth upon the shore. So fixedly do I stare that they blur into the mist, and I must close my eyes to rest them; it is as if the image is etched on the balls of my eyes, and too clear to misperceive. Indeed it is three figures I see, three mounted men and not ghosts; three men, one larger and two smaller, the smaller ones on horses of lesser proportion and lighter shade than the one—perhaps pintos. Moving along the shore they gain an elevation that limns them against the milky western sky, as in a lantern show. If the dogs are there I cannot see them, but there is reason enough to believe it is the twins and Beidermann.

  I am surprised, and not surprised. How have the twins made this perilous crossing? It is a marvel; but the darker mystery lies with Beidermann, who survives. Yet I think not such a mystery, for this is Beidermann. Have the twins found him, or has he found the twins? It is enough that they are all safe—and yet they are not safe, for they must cross back; and whatever way the three have been spirited across the flood, whether borne—shall I fancy?—on the wings of Beidermann’s goatish passion, that way must be rediscovered for their return. If it is a lesson needed to be learned, then Beidermann has taught it.

  I see my stout neighbor venture into the flood to his mare’s withers, the twins’ ponies skittishly following. A thin rain commences, obscuring their dodging progression, hummock to hummock, across the water; but I feel easy they will soon be on the bank where I stand.

  So I now await them at home, where Ma fries ham and potatoes for the twins’ supper, and asks if she might lay a plate in expectation of Beidermann; but I tell her, No, for he is sure to go his own way. . . .

  INTER-LEAF

  ON HIS WAY with his team to borrow old man Praeger’s hayrake, the bachelor Beidermann got to thinking, as he often did these days, about the Widow. He rode first along the slim and sometimes disappearing trickle of the Sheyenne, then turned up the slow rise north, his dogs far ahead, barking now and then at an antelope or a rabbit, or an imaginary one. He would be all forenoon getting there, and he was soon in serious consideration of the Widow, having quickly dismissed the image of her as last seen a week earlier, chasing her geese out of the squash, it being a toss-up which was the noisiest, the geese or the Widow Jenssen.

  He figured her for north of forty, beating him by a good half-dozen years. She looked it, too: thin, stooped, hard-skinned. Her girls were eight and ten, meaning she’d married late, probably delighted to find herself married at all at that age. Swede Jenssen, he knew from remarks old Praeger kept making—as if this was something he’d never forget—had passed away from injuries caused by Praeger’s binder rolling over him. Now three years dead, Swede had been a man of singular quality, if the windy old Praeger could be believed, although no youngster. Some old geezer, maybe, whom Anna had finagled to the altar. A good worker, though; you could tell from the shape his place was still in; even the old sod stable was still standing. He had left a nice piece of land. . . . And that was a thorny matter too, for any interest Beidermann took in the Widow might look to some like interest in the two sections she had managed to work by herself now for seven years, with the help of whatever drunken hand hung on for a month or two before she had to fire him. . . . Well, people could think what they wanted, but there was nobody who’d say anything to his face.

  For that matter, Beidermann wondered if anyone had even pegged him as courting the Widow. It wasn’t clear to him that he was. Probably he was, since he called on her for no purpose, and it was a long haul to her place, no closer than to Praeger’s. But he hadn’t given her any real presents . . . those deer steaks, and he had done most of her butchering last fall. . . . In the spring she had given him a half-dozen goose eggs to put under one of his setting hens, but they’d turned out to be infertile, so he’d blown out the dried contents, painted the shells for ornaments, and returned them, to her astonishment.

  So perhaps he was courting . . . but it was nothing like the business with that girl years before up in Buford. Of course, he was only twenty-one then; she was fourteen. She wouldn’t come down to Bismarck with him—so his courting couldn’t have been that successful—even though her pa all but hit her in the head to make her go. She wouldn’t do it, though. . . . She was something: long black hair like an Indian’s, but shiny clean; soft, bright cheeks. . . . Whatever might have happened to her? A grown woman now, probably with a daughter or two herself. He hoped she had gotten as far away from that bastard old man of hers as he had from his.

  HE WAS ASTRIDE the mare’s broad back, a moth-eaten buffalo robe doubled over to give some cushion against her iron backbone and the harness hip-strap. The team held to a shambling trot, harness jangling. In these lower parts there was dampness enough to keep the ground a little spongy, the grass slightly green, and the air breathable. His cattle were somewhere along here, to the south, he figured; he had seen neither them nor old Praeger’s, but there was plenty of sign in the dried mud.

  Now, coming out of the bottom, the mare and her gelding partner slowed to a walk as they faced into the drouth’s heat. . . .

  “Drouth? Drouth?” old man Praeger had scoffed. This was just one more dry spell. “You haven’t seen drouth,” he told Beidermann.

  “This’ll do me,” Beidermann said.

  The thin line of cottonwoods that marked the outer rim of the river’s flood plain offered a little shade; it dappled the horses as they trod under the trees. The two hounds had pulled in, too, at the heat, and instead of coursing ahead, noses high and yellow eyes seeking anything worth a chase, they trailed in the team’s dust, tongues hanging.

  LOOKED AT A CERTAIN WAY, Beidermann supposed, the Widow could be considered a catch, her years and Methodist ways notwithstanding. More than once, old Praeger’s wife had let on that Anna was the prize heifer in these parts; until once Beidermann worked in a slick question, saying, that if that is so, how is it that none of this herd of overgrown boys running around your place have snapped her up; Otto, for one, being practically her age? That set the old lady to rolling her sharp eyes and furiously slicing up her raisin pie and pouring coffee like hell wouldn’t have it. And all the while she was probably wondering the same thing: how to get a few of those big eaters—two were still little, the twins—away from her table and bellied up to some other woman’s. . . .

  FOR SURE, THIS WAS a day no cooler than it had to be, the sun as hellish today as every day for the last month. Praeger’s “dry spell” and then some. Sweat soaked his shirt collar, buttoned tight against the sun, and both horses frothed where the cheek pieces rubbed. He was heading onto old Praeger’s land now; soon the path turned from a bordering green to overall dun, then to gray dust. The sky, relentlessly without clouds, was a thin blue, where the sun had not blurred it white. It struck Beidermann that he was leaving a fertile valley to travel onto a barren plain. . . . Not true, he knew, but in his mind was some biblical equivalent of such difference, and he sought to recall it:

  In green pastures lived the blessed, and in blighted wilderness dwelt the corrupt.

  Something like that. His mother had read it to him as they sat on the log outside their dugout—it would have been early morning or early evening, times when his father was sure not to be on hand.

  She had two Bibles, his mother did, English and German, and read from either handily. When she died, he had just started reading back to her from both, so clever had been her teaching. He remembered her first lessons from Proverbs:

  Where no oxen are, the crib is clean,

  But much increase is by the strength of the ox.

 
It means, she told him, you must do the unpleasant work of cleaning the stable if you want your cattle to keep their health and work hard to bring in a crop.

  It was a memory that had come back to him often, when he was working a bull train and staring through the dust at a dozen dumb oxens’ asses.

  THE BLOTCHED SHADE offered by the sparse and wind-tossed cottonwoods ended. The horses pulled onto the prairie toward old Praeger’s. Before he left the last of the shade, Beidermann pulled up and swung off the mare to relieve his bowels. As he squatted, the brown grass rose well above his head. Blackflies thronged to his loins, and cottonwood fluff floated down and then, whipped by the wind, sailed swiftly away. Shivering their hides against the flies, the big horses chewed whatever buffalo grass they could work past their bits. On a spot where the grass was blown flat, the two hounds took their rest, their long legs stretched in front of them, eyes nearly closed, panting so loudly that Beidermann could hear them above the wind. From where he squatted, he cast about for a handful of leaves that weren’t too dry and brittle.

  Back on the mare again, with the hide redoubled under his sweaty rear, he set the team onto the faint track north. Only his own previous journeys marked this trail. No one else had reason to travel this way to old Praeger’s. Krupp came from the north; the Swede, when he was alive—or now the Widow—though she hated to take her horses any distance—from the west; and old Reinhardt came in, cursing his mules every foot of the way, from the east. That trail from Reinhardt’s was an old wagon road from Saint Paul, but Beidermann remembered when the freighters had abandoned that route for a smoother one, with more water on the way, through Fargo. He remembered well, because one of the first bull trains on that road cost him his best dog, father of the bitch plodding in the dust behind him right now. The feisty bugger had decided to chew out the hamstring of the nigh ox on a Slide Bros. freighter, and the wagon boss hammered him to death with a slab of strap iron. It was something! The boss was a slop-bucket Dutchman whose screeching English Beidermann could barely understand, although it was clear he expected payment for his stricken bull, the beast still in its yoke, dragging down its terrified mate, trying to pull its useless leg under itself, and all the while bellowing and tossing, strings of its saliva hitting everything in sight.