The High Divide Read online

  In the first days of his father’s absence, Eli had decided he was obliged, on behalf of his mother, to go off and find him. Each week he’d put aside from his wages a dollar and a half and had hidden it in the loft where he and Danny slept, behind a loose board in the wall. The money was still there, more of it now. He checked on it every day, counted it to make sure his brother hadn’t stumbled across it. He’d also squirreled away a loaf of his mother’s bread and half a dozen eggs that he boiled up one day while she weeded the garden. Then late one night in the middle of August—it was the same night the summer’s long pattern of windless days and thick fogs finally broke—he’d stolen outside and sneaked through town to the depot, where he waited behind the water tank for the eastbound night freight. Partly it was the weather—rain, lightning, a terrific wind—and partly the fear of leaving his mother and brother behind, but mostly it was the image of himself in a rattling boxcar, alone and hurtling east toward St. Paul, a city he’d never visited, that made him turn around and walk back home in the driving rain. There was no evidence, after all, beyond his mother’s hunch, that St. Paul was the place to start looking. In fact next time he’d be heading west when he left, not east, his destination certain—at least the first leg of it would be—and nothing was going to stop him.

  2

  Green Turtle

  Tonight, a similar night with rain and wind, Gretta lay in bed remembering her first time with Ulysses, their wedding night, and the fine-linked brass chain he’d worn around his neck, and how it dangled above her as they made love, and how the small green tin turtle, strung like a pendant on that chain, dipped to touch her breastbone again and again, a cool, light tapping she would come to know so well. The chain had been his grandmother’s, he explained, telling her this so seriously, and the tin tag, no larger than a dime, a plug-marker from the brand of tobacco he favored during his service years. Gretta remembered, too, the day before he left, in July—more than six weeks ago—and the bitter argument they had in front of the boys, something they’d never done before, and the way she shouted in his face, saying things she didn’t mean. And then that night, turning him out of their bed, angry.

  She still couldn’t understand him, though. It was one thing to sign a note that put their home at risk, making an arrangement with Mead Fogarty of all people, and then keeping that loan a secret for months, but something else again to leave as he had without warning or explanation, and allowing her with every day that passed to wonder where he’d gone and whether he meant to come back, or whether he was even alive—although she believed he was, she could feel it, just as she believed he still loved her. There was some relief in allowing herself to picture him coming through the door some afternoon, just walking in and laying out on the kitchen table the cash he’d earned, then wrapping his long arms around her and pulling her close. But she tried to keep from doing that, it was too dangerous. Time and again, she told herself that his leaving had to do with their money problems—because there were things harder to fix than money.

  At dusk this evening a storm had moved in, a sudden hard blow followed by an unholy rain, and now the streets were all mud, the town littered with yellow leaves and tree limbs. She was listening to Danny’s uneven breathing and wishing for sleep herself when she heard the rapping at the door. She eased closer to her son, curled like an infant beside her, and prayed whoever it was would go away.

  The knocking came again, louder. Where’s Eli? she thought. Why doesn’t he go answer it?

  She started sliding toward the edge of the bed, then heard her son’s feet on the ladder, descending. He landed easy, a soft thud, and then moved quickly to the front door, which gave a shriek on its hinges. Gathering her flannel nightdress close around her neck, Gretta heard the male voice, pitched a few notes higher than Eli’s, its tone abrupt and self-assured. Fogarty, damn him. She knew what he wanted, and in fact had gone out of her way to avoid him since the first of the month. Yesterday when he’d come by with his laundry, she’d hidden in the small dirt cellar beneath the trapdoor in the kitchen, holding her breath as he traipsed all through the house, finally leaving his bag of soiled clothes on the kitchen table, of all places.

  Her bedroom door cracked open, and Eli spoke without coming in, his voice controlled as it nearly always was now, a man’s voice. “It’s him,” Eli said. “I told him you were sleeping.”

  She bent to put on her deerskin slippers, then lifted her robe from the hook on the wall. Behind her Danny groaned and curled up tighter.

  Eli had lit the oil lamp, and within its circle of light Mead Fogarty stood just inside the house, squinting through his thick, rain-spotted glasses. He was a short, wide man—wide face, wide red nose, wide chest and hips, widely spaced eyes. Gretta thought of him as measuring his life according to what he could gather: food, money, property, the good graces of the townspeople—all of which he possessed in abundance. He wasn’t lucky, though. A year ago his tiny, barren wife had died of pneumonia, and since then he’d neglected himself, going about unshaven and carrying a smell so strong that Gretta wondered if he’d given up entirely on bathing. When she started doing his laundry, as partial payment of their rent, she’d expected an improvement in his smell at least, but it hadn’t seemed to make a difference.

  “May I?” Fogarty asked, looking past her toward the kitchen. He offered a mechanical smile, revealing a set of stained teeth.

  Eli, standing apart, pointed down at the man’s wide-toed boots, encased in mud from the street.

  “It is a mess out there, isn’t it,” Fogarty said. “Might freeze too.”

  “It’s late,” Gretta said.

  “For which I apologize, Mrs. Pope. But you’ve been difficult to find, and I do have a subject to broach with you.” He turned to Eli and regarded him coolly over the tops of his misty lenses.

  With a pang in her chest, Gretta turned. “You can let us talk now, Eli.”

  Her son regarded her a moment too long and then left. Fogarty shoved a plump hand into the front pocket of his trousers, moved it about down there, brought out a piece of rock candy and held it up to the light with his thumb and forefinger. Popped it in his mouth. A sharp lemon scent cut through the reek of his breath, and he sucked and clicked on the candy with relish. When he took a step forward, Gretta found herself backing up.

  “Your boots,” she managed to say, putting up the flat of her hand.

  “Ah, forgive me.” He bent over, grunting, to remove them.

  “No, no, here,” she said, and guided him back to the hemp mat by the door. “Danny’s sick and I don’t want to wake him. Please, I just need a few more days.”

  Fogarty cracked down on his lemon candy, shattering it with a violence that sent a spike of pain through Gretta’s stomach. “Mrs. Pope, believe me when I say it’s not the rent that concerns me. You need to consider your future, not to mention the well-being of your two boys.”

  “He’ll be home soon,” Gretta said. “By the end of the month.”

  Fogerty shook his head. “I spoke with Smith a couple days back, and he’s seen no letter from your husband. And Percy tells the same story.” Percy was the telegraph man.

  “I know where my husband is, Mr. Fogarty,” Gretta said. “I know where he is and what he’s doing, and you can be sure that when he returns you’ll have every penny you’re owed, with interest. According to agreement.”

  Fogarty touched a stubby finger to his chin. His eyes—magnified by the glasses—widened, then narrowed to slits. “I admire you, Mrs. Pope. Loyalty is a solid quality in a woman. Understand, though, I’m a man of business, and I’m better than you are at seeing the world for what it is.”

  “You don’t know him,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I know there’s nothing left for him in this town. His bridges, you might say, have burned to ash and scattered to the winds. Don’t be naïve.” He propped an elbow on a bookshelf against the wall and stared at her.

  She couldn’t help thinking of the day last spring when
Ulysses, all by himself, had spoken up in favor of Mary Bond’s request to bury one of her girls in the churchyard. It was humiliating enough for Gretta that her husband would take up publicly for that woman—but then, right there in the sanctuary, Ulysses raised his arm and pointed at the pastor, at the banker Stroud, at the mayor and several of the town’s prominent businessmen, most of them sitting with their wives. He said, “If those girls of Mary’s haven’t done you boys any harm lying next to you in bed, I don’t see the danger in letting one of them lie out there under our grass.”

  Fogarty filled his lungs and exhaled dramatically, as if for her sake he was going far beyond his obligations. “I have a proposal to make,” he said, “one you would be wise to consider. There are currently fourteen men in my establishment renting by the month, and I’m in need of a cook and housekeeper. If you come to work for me, you will have rooms of your own, you and your boys, at no charge to you, and free board as well, in exchange for cleaning and cooking. I can arrange also for a small salary.”

  Gretta tried to read his face, the curl of his heavy lips, the pricks of light sparking from his eyes. Does he pity me? Is he pleased with himself? She couldn’t help but wonder whether any woman had ever loved him, whether his dead wife ever looked at him and felt what she herself felt now, the pressure at the back of her throat as the taste of her last meal—pork hocks and boiled cabbage—rose into her mouth.

  From her bedroom came the small sound of Danny crying out from his dreams.

  “Eli,” she called, “please check on your brother.”

  “Aside from my churchgoing, I’m not partial to religion,” Fogarty said, “and no doubt at times I’ve advanced my own case at the expense of other men. But your husband—my God, what he’s done to you makes my sins look like virtues.”

  He turned in his muddy boots toward the door, and when he opened it a bitter draft rushed in and parted Gretta’s robe, exposing her knees to the air and also to Fogarty, who glanced backward, as if sensing an opportunity. She snapped the robe back in place. He made his exit at once, leaving the door open behind him so that she had to shut it herself, heaving with her shoulder until it latched against the wind.

  In the kitchen she heated water for tea and sat down with her grandmother’s blue teapot in front of her, hands wrapped around a small cup for warmth, her feet and legs folded beneath her on the ladder-back chair. She hadn’t worked up the courage to look inside her husband’s locked trunk until the day after he left, after going to see the chicken farmer, Bulwick, who told her Ulysses had been there indeed and put up a brooder house as promised—“See for yourself,” he’d said, pointing. Ulysses had left the rusty-feathered rooster, too, for which Bulwick claimed to have paid him two bits, a generous sum, considering the bird’s age and disposition. “And here’s a dollar for your husband’s labor,” he added, producing a silver coin for Gretta. “He told me you’d be around for it.” The man could tell her nothing else of any use. Ulysses had finished his work at sundown then walked off, apparently toward home.

  When Gretta had finally searched the trunk—its key resting in the usual spot—she’d found their savings intact, all twelve dollars. The only items missing had been his mouth harp and the beaded tobacco pouch. His other treasures—canteen, compass, beaver hat, things mostly from his years in the service—all were still there. She’d also found in the flattop trunk his brief farewell note, such as it was.

  Although her husband’s leaving was something Gretta had not anticipated, his behavior had grown strange over the past year, ever since his river baptism by an itinerant preacher whom Gretta did not care for. She’d noticed in Ulysses a growing distractedness, his eyes often roaming the distance. Also an almost volatile impatience with people’s weaknesses, and a tendency to judge them according to his newfound piety. Was he trying to make up for his own sins? Had he been a visitor himself at Mary Bond’s house north of town? Gretta didn’t think so. But he had stopped playing whist on Saturday evenings, and stopped visiting the Old Vine Tavern with his friends, and he’d taken to sitting alone in the kitchen, late into the night, reading his Bible and muttering, his head in his hands. As for the tobacco pouch, the fact that he’d taken it with him worried her, object of beauty that it was—a piece of woman’s work, clearly. When she’d asked him about it years before, the explanation he’d given was too simple: a gift from a fellow soldier, an Indian from northern Minnesota, and she’d always believed there must be more to the story.

  She lifted the teapot and poured hot water, set it back down. Gretta had been twelve when she bought it for her mother in a shop down by the canal, eighteen when she left Denmark and begged her mother to let her take it with her. For years after, the little blue pot provided comfort, a bit of home and childhood. Now as she drank the tea it reminded her of how alone she was. She finished the cup, got up and checked once more on Danny, whose breathing was steady, then moved across the floor to the ladder that rose to the sleeping loft, climbing until her face was on a level with Eli’s. It was too dark to see, but she could smell the down in his pillow, which she had sewn and filled after the hunt on Silver Lake when Ulysses and the boys had come back with fifty-six fat mallards in the back of the wagon.

  “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, but the way he exhaled through his nose told her that he was awake.

  “Are you?” she repeated.

  “You can’t do it, Mother. We can’t live there. When Dad comes back, what are we going to tell him?”

  “So you think he’s coming back,” she said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. Well, yes.”

  “Why do you say it that way? What do you mean?”

  “A person gets tired, I suppose.”

  “You cannot be considering moving us there,” Eli said.

  “I have to look out for us, can’t you see? For Danny, more than for you. I have to make certain he is safe.”

  “He’s safe here.”

  “Mr. Fogarty owns this house, more or less, you know that. He holds the deed now. If we don’t pay him what we owe, he has every right to move us out.”

  “Dad left money behind,” Eli said, and the edge in his voice cut her deeply. “Where’s that?”

  “It takes money to pay the doctor, Eli. It takes money to buy flour and sugar, to buy pencils and paper for school. Everything takes money, don’t you see? And God knows there was not much to begin with.”

  “How much is there? Fogarty needs fifteen dollars, doesn’t he? Or twelve, since you’re washing his filthy clothes.”

  “I have seven dollars,” Gretta said, regretting the sweets she’d bought for Danny last week and the cotton for sewing a new slip, which she’d needed badly. We have to live, don’t we? she thought. She was already cleaning at the Star Hotel, Fogarty’s competition, and taking in sewing from the dress shop, trying to do right by her sons. Working herself to dust. What more could she do? “And I’ll have two dollars more tomorrow,” she said. “Which makes nine.”

  “What if I had three dollars for you?” Eli asked.

  “You don’t. Or if you do, I will be angry.”

  The agreement, when he’d gone to work for Goldman, was for him to bring home the two dollars he made each week and put it in the family pot. When he needed money for himself, he’d asked his mother for it.

  “I’ve done some extra jobs for him lately—deliveries. That’s why I’ve been late sometimes. Tomorrow’s payday, and I should be getting it. Then we’ll have Fogarty’s money for him. We cannot go over there, Mother.”

  Gretta reached out in the dark and found her son’s face and placed the palm of her hand on his cheek. For days she’d been haunted by a fear she couldn’t hold on to any longer. “Promise me something,” she said.

  Eli pulled away from her.

  “Please,” she said. “That you won’t go off looking for him. That you’ll stay here and help me. I need you here, and so does your brother.” She reached o
ut for his face again, but it wasn’t there.

  “Elijah? Do you hear me? Your brother needs you too.”

  When her son spoke next, it was in a hoarse whisper from a point farther away in the darkness, saying words she had no choice but to settle for: “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said, “I promise you that.”

  3

  Northern Pacific

  The rifle was a Spencer carbine, .50-caliber, an old army issue his father brought home from the war. It was kept in the mud room off the kitchen, tucked behind the winter coats in a tall chifforobe, and the next day after work while his mother and Danny helped their neighbor dress some geese, he brought it over to the shop off Railroad Street where Two Blood bought, sold, and fixed guns, but mostly fixed them.

  “He wouldn’t mind you selling this?”

  Two Blood’s eyes were the color of a sky in winter, a shocking light blue against his dark skin, and they had a way of making Eli wonder if the old man could read minds. His face and movements were smooth and young, but his fingers curled like tree roots. He wore his yellow-white hair in two braids to his shoulders. Ulysses had often come here to sit and smoke with him, and during the past weeks Eli and Danny had found themselves stopping in to look at the old man’s guns and his stuffed buffalo head, and to drink the cool milk he drew from a cistern beneath the floorboards. He was the only person in town whose questions about their father didn’t sound like accusations or gossip.

  “Do you want it?” Eli asked him.

  Two Blood lifted and dropped his skinny shoulders. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  Eli handed him the rifle. “Have a look.”