A Season of Fire and Ice Read online

  Beidermann, when it came his turn to yell, demanded payment for his dead dog, a sum he claimed the equal of any damned ox, and so there was a fight, Beidermann sustaining a broken little finger that healed crooked. The Dutchman backed off when Apple-wine ran out of his stable and poked a rifle in his face. . . . He missed that dog, name of Lord, for a long time.

  Now the expanse of plain ahead revealed nothing but more of itself, mile after mile of grass waving flat and dodging up in the wind. No tree, house or animal anywhere. To Beidermann, aboard the big mare, it was a comfortable sight, out of something his mother might have read him from the Bible. In so many places where he had been it had looked like this. It was how the world was meant to look. He knew exactly what was up ahead: it would be just like this. Yes, the world was finite, but Beidermann had seen some of the places that were said to be the end of it—said so by ignorant people who looked at the horizon and said: There the world ends. Beidermann was not one of them.

  IT WAS ALMOST NOON before he saw the hazy outline of old Praeger’s new barn. He had some dry meat and a biscuit wrapped in his pocket, and he ate without stopping, so that when old lady Praeger pushed dinner on him, as she was sure to do, he could pat his belly and claim he’d already filled it. Well, sure, he’d sit down to a piece of pie. That old woman could sell pie to the devil. And he wouldn’t turn down a cup of coffee. Now he found himself looking forward to both.

  Here the dust the team kicked up was as gray as the hounds who followed in it. Here was drouth, no question, and the blight seemed to have picked where it would settle heaviest: while old man Praeger bragged about real drouths, one had sneaked up and settled flat on him. The sight surrounding Beidermann was inauspicious. Even the Widow’s place, farther out of the river bottom than old Praeger’s, was in better shape, with a touch of green still, wheat with a sizeable kernel, corn promising at least half a crop. Swede had made a fair claim when he had settled; Krupp, too, was in decent shape; Reinhardt as well. Praeger’s “dry spell” was hitting Praeger hardest, and why was that?

  Maybe he was being prodded from on high for his damned gluttony, Beidermann thought. One man did not deserve that much land. Beidermann didn’t know how much it was, but all the grown boys had made full claims—homesteads, preemptions, tree claims—and bought up relinquishments all around. Krupp told a snide story of old man Praeger even trading a pair of mules and a wagon for a quarter-section from a Norwegian who’d gone bust.

  Old Praeger ran it all as one—a damned kingdom, Beidermann thought; and given the reach of it, bad weather at one end did not mean the same at the other. He wondered whether parts of it that he had never seen flourished now, while other parts, such as this he crossed, withered; and old Praeger, averaging it all out, came up with his “dry spell.”

  It was probably Otto’s claim he was on, Beidermann decided, since it was near the river, next to where the old man claimed first, and Otto being the oldest would have made the second-best claim, which this looked to be.

  Otto—there was a strange case. Why was he still kicking around his old man’s place when he couldn’t hope to see it passed on to him? Oldest son be damned. There were a couple of mean ones in the brood—Harris, Cornelius—who wouldn’t hold to any “oldest son” bullshit. There was sure to be a fierce battle when the old man died. Yet Otto hung on where another man would long ago have found a life of his own. Did anything about that, Beidermann wondered, involve the Widow? He didn’t think so, but he had seen a few old boys jump through some hoops for lesser women.

  AT TIMES THE TRAIL swerved off through the brittle grass into two parallel tracks, then swept back into a single one. From a little distance, and on the slight rise in the prairie, this gave the trail a scalloped look; it was like the hanging trim of the fancy table the Widow had in the room behind her kitchen, on which her Bible lay. Beidermann recognized this with surprise, but then the wind folded down the grass to hide the design.

  This was not a wind that stopped. Sometimes it lessened at dawn, again at dusk, but it never failed to build itself back to a stiff blow. Nor did Beidermann ever stop noticing it, although it was nothing he would have thought to mention. He remembered it as being perhaps a little worse above the border. It was always a matter factored without thought into the day’s business. If he needed to travel twenty miles into the wind, then by instinct he would go twenty-one, for the wind would bear him back that lost mile.

  As pretty as this country was with all its grass, there were spots above the border prettier still. Beidermann remembered high ridges in the foothills, no grass there, only yellow rock off which the sun glinted and the wind skipped cold even in the middle of summer, never mind winter. Those were ridges he had gotten to know well, following his pa, Adolf, who ran traps among them and into the mountains, high as a man would want to go, to places where snow lay all summer, never melting a drop. Ermine didn’t bother to change into their summer coats, and Adolf bragged that from secret places that he knew better than he knew his prayers, he could bring in white skins all year round. No one else would go, as it was too risky, too cold, too hidden, too far. Many a time Adolf had taken little Leo when he was nine, ten—the age of old Praeger’s twins now, though it seemed to him he had been bigger and tougher.

  He recalled it well enough, those icy days and forlorn nights, riding always a quarter-mile behind the old man, who never waited, sore in the worn and cracked saddle Pa had traded a jar of whiskey for to a Sheepeater Indian. Old Adolf had upward of a hundred traps out, and every time Leo dragged up through the snow to see what the old man had caught his pa had already removed his catch; the frozen martin or fox was stuffed into the big pouch of the pack mule to be skinned when they camped, and the trap already rebaited or pulled. Without a word Pa had swung his stiff right leg across the saddle—it stuck out too far to fit the stirrup—and headed up the trail, leaving young Leo to stare at the new set—if, indeed, there was anything to see; a stake, smoothed-over snow, a bent branch. And yet, laying eyes on these things often enough, Beidermann somehow learned the traps with the old man saying hardly a word, other than to swear at him for snagging a line or getting his pony hung up in shoulder-high snow. And while he did learn, it stayed in Beidermann’s mind that he had never set a trap to fool a wolverine, which the old man had done more than once. He had shot one of the bastards in later years, but never trapped one.

  About snares the old man taught Beidermann one good lesson. While the boy was fastening a wire loop to a stout willow limb along a frozen creek where snowshoe hares ran, he clumsily managed to set it off, and with his own wrist snubbed tight, the sprung branch pulled him to his toes. He yelled loud enough to be heard in Regina. From a half-mile up the trail, his old man rode back, swung slowly off his horse and, before freeing young Leo, gave him a snowy boot in the ass with his good leg.

  This was one story Beidermann still told about his pa, when he told any; and when one noon he told it to the Widow she was startled and drew up, saying it was something her father would have done too, would you think it? He had slapped her hard just for accidentally locking herself in the root cellar when she was nine. It wasn’t fair. When she was naughty, of course she expected to be slapped, and if she was bad enough, even whipped. Beidermann nodded knowingly. The Widow went on, but when it was something not your fault—

  They were sitting over pie and coffee at the scallop-edged table, and what they told each other then sometimes drifted back into Beidermann’s head—the trapped girl, the snared boy.

  . . . That was all another time, another place. The phrase came to Beidermann suddenly, seeming meaningful. He recalled it as something old Praeger had said to him: another time, another place—that time being Praeger’s youth and the place the Wisconsin woods. A terrible time, a terrible place, as the old man told it, a dark world of men cutting off their own feet with slipped axes; the screams of horses dragged down a hill by logs too heavy to haul upward; widows with clutches of knee-high children come to retrieve the bones of
Gustav or Dieter still buried in the snow beneath the pine he’d been felling; men shooting into their own heads in fits of drunken insanity, their families giving silent thanks that it had been done before they had smashed in the skulls of wife, children, in-laws, as they had vowed to do, as God was their witness.

  No wonder the old man had given that over to set up in the West; it was happenstance alone that he did not set himself up so handsomely as he might, for all the length and breadth of his holdings. Perhaps it was too much time in the woods, but he was an indifferent judge of prairie land. The southern sections that he might have had, Beidermann now held. And where old Praeger kept tacking on acreage, it was always in the wrong direction; for it was a mile past Praeger’s southernmost boundary, in the center of Beidermann’s claim, where by the greatest good fortune and the grace of Almighty God a copious spring had spontaneously bubbled forth during Beidermann’s first summer. It poured forth out of what had been a rocky draw, without grass, let alone a trace of moisture. Now its waters ran miles into Beidermann’s fields; he was proud enough to believe that had Praeger settled there, no water would have appeared for him.

  ALL SPORT WAS out of his hounds in this heat. They padded behind. Old Praeger’s barn shaped up clearly through the prairie haze. His horses could use water. They moved at a decent pace, a little slowly. Animals that size weren’t made to travel fast. Even so, they were a quick team. At threshing at Schneider’s, he had matched them in a pull of loaded racks against four other teams—one of looming Missouri mules, taller than his Percherons, though not so wide—to run ten rods from a dead start. They had finished a half-rod ahead of the big mules.

  Beidermann doubted that any man who looked on those horses failed to admire them, and most did so aloud. Last summer in Skiles, when he’d brought in a load of hay that Applewine at the livery stables had contracted for, a white-haired old man emerging from Schwantz’s Mercantile had suddenly seen the team across the road and drawn himself up to take them in, hoof to ear and nose to tail; he had walked up to run his hands along the mare’s leg and rump until Beidermann warned him off, and then he’d said, not to Beidermann but to a small fellow sagging at his side, “I’d pay five hundred dollars cash money for that pair right here and now.” He reached into his shirt pocket as if to produce that sum until his friend poked him and said, “Not till you pay me four bits for them shots.”

  In fact, Beidermann had seen real money offered. When he was leaving Canada, a lame old snuff-drizzler at the border, who was running sheep, from the looks of the few in sight, and housekeeping in a dugout with a lean-to sod roof out front for a kitchen, and a sullen Indian in ragged blankets as a hand—this dwarfish old boy pulled a buckskin sack from out his britches and, to Beidermann’s astonishment, spread out in his crimped hands what he claimed was three hundred twenty dollars in hard gold coin: his offer for the team. He held his rifle snug under one arm, waiting for Beidermann’s response.

  “What the hell would you do with them?” asked Beidermann, who’d had the pair less than a year himself. Looking around into the hard wind, he saw nothing but the old man’s dismal cave, a few dozen sheep that had chewed up all the buffalo grass in sight, and sheep shit piled a foot deep around the muddy watering hole scraped into the creek.

  “Them’s fine horses,” the old boy said, with a glaze in his eye.

  Beidermann knew the look. It came from penniless old men imagining themselves slapping harness on these behemoths, hitching them to a new two-bottom plow—when they owned neither halter nor hoe. Understandable to Beidermann that a man who spent his days trailing sorry sheep would go a little queer in the presence of animals so unlike any others in his daily life, even though they would eat him into the poorhouse in winter. He had noticed that the Widow, too, with no talent for animals—unless those raucous geese counted—even she eyed them with quiet speculation. It was the same look Beidermann fancied she sometimes directed at him. That was good for a chuckle. Folks might think he was after her place, but what if it was her coveting his horses?

  Covet, he thought; a word pulled out of the past, when his mother had read the Bible to him. Always attached to it was thou shalt not. . . . It came attached, as well, to some feelings of his own. He had in mind the Widow’s pearls. He did admire them; no less, he thought, than that sheepman admired his team.

  It was the strangeness of them. They were the first pearls he had ever seen. They were three in number, centered amongst a few glass beads on a wire-string necklace. With no occasion to be worn, the string lay wrapped in flannel in the top drawer of her cedar chest. These—the pearls and the chest—said the Widow, were what her mother and grandmother had left her. Her girls clamored often to have the string brought out for a treat, to put in turn around each thin neck, for looks in the mirror. And so Beidermann was privileged to handle them more than once. They were yellowed and of uneven medium size. Under his crusty fingertips they were velvety as his mare’s nose, a promised moist smoothness within. . . .

  In the blowing, shimmering, sun-struck phantasmagoria he rode through, he could see himself as owner of the pearls, and the crippled sheep-follower the owner of his team, the two of them stunned, not knowing what they had done or what they would do next.

  HE CAME ON toward old Praeger’s southernmost planting: corn. It looked like hell. What there was, cutworms had got at. The old man wouldn’t get half enough for winter hog feed. Drouth did it every time. . . . Yet Beidermann had seen corn worse than this, up on the border, where there was more wind. First sun dried the crop up, wind blowed it down, nothing to cut; send the kids to pull the stalks for burning in the cookstove.

  Beidermann and God’s Gift

  1885

  MAY 29. The lively wind of the past three days abating, welcome weather visits us today; as the good Thomas Nashe has it:

  Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,

  Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

  Lambs frisk and play, the shepherd’s pipes all day. . . .

  Cuckoo &tc. . . .

  Having thus provided for our earthly comfort, can it be the good Lord now deems our souls might benefit from another laudatory report of the deeds and high accomplishments of the peerless Beidermann? For at supper come the twins squeaking forth news of our bachelor neighbor’s latest feat; and while Ma shoos the begrimed pair to the pump for a wash, with their sour brothers I await, no less sourly, their shrill account, no triviality withheld, of Beidermann striding like Jehovah across his driest acres—those high, tanned pastures near hailing distance of the badlands, this being as arid a location as we have in Dakota, in which water is scarcely known by name, let alone by sight, where the paltry spring rains race unavailing across an iron earth—here, where every sign points from such an event, here Beidermann has uncovered water.

  Yes! It is true! cry the twins; and he has divined it himself: he summons it forth from the thick crust with nothing but a damned willow twig.

  What? says Otto, who as the oldest has the responsibility to speak sense. Did you see it? Did you see the water running? Did you feel it? Did you have a drink of it?

  Oh no! The twins are surprised by his reckless supposition. The water is deep underground; he has only found where it is; the digging it up remains to be done.

  Huh, says Otto. That is the test, then, in digging it out. Tell me when you have a nice cupful of it, and it doesn’t burn your tongue off.

  But the twins have no ear for such caution: they describe their hero Beidermann treading the golden hip-high grasses of his upper plateau, where even so early in the season, dust claims the earth and crushed grass blows its powder in dusty puffs from beneath his boots as he plugs on with his forked willow branch. Over the second helping of fried pork and gravy-potatoes which Ma delivers to their plates, the twins’ eyes shine at the glory of it. Now soon, Radke, the well-digger, comes from Skiles with his rig to set pipe, and will that be a sight!

  The older boys quickly put away their grub, to escape this cha
tter.

  Oh, it was something to see! Over the baked land, the towering Beidermann, wand held out at the level of his belly button—

  I wonder that he has one, growls Harris; and as he rises from the table, roughly shoves back the bench, near dislodging August, sharing it. The two join Henry, leaving the kitchen to rinse the milk-pails, little mutters and half-laughs coming from them as they go.

  Across the dry land, the mighty wand extended, the twins in his dusty wake . . . until . . . until . . . the wand beings to dip—

  No, cries the other, it does not dip. It jumps, like a horse jerks a rein right out of your hand. A strong jerk. Yes, it pulled itself almost out of my hand when he let me grab it!

  Beidermann permits them each to hold the magic wand, although with one hand only, his own grip being required to power it; and when one of the twins holds it alone, it is no more than a dead stick. Beidermann is the engine.

  At last, the kitchen left to Ma and me, we exchange a look, and I wonder if I see in her glance what is perhaps also in the twins’ look as they go to throw down hay for the morning: if Beidermann can do it, why not this idling husband and father, forever grousing over lack of rain? Beidermann does it, how about you? But what is unclear in their heads is that it is one thing to parade around with a piece of stick and say, Here is water; and it is quite another to sink pipe foot after foot, yard after yard, rod after rod, until the money runs out—or perhaps first, by God’s grace, comes a sweep of brown liquid to make a goat retch.