The Broken Statue

Six

SixDressed in her heaviest dungarees, Bridget paced in her cold room.

Thayer still snored on the sofa though the sun was nearly up. She didn’t want to go down and possibly wake him trying to sneak by. Didn’t want to see him at all, but she had work to do and a barn door to check. Yesterday morning, before Thayer arrived with the other two, Cora had helped Bridget work the large stone back underneath the sagging door, then wedge the two-by-four buttress into place. After a long, windy night, the door may have shivered off the stone, the cows needed milking, and the horses waited for feed and water.

From the bed, Wire let out an impatient sigh that sounded more like a whine.

“You didn’t sleep either. Did you?” She scratched behind his ear. “I miss him too. If I’d only gone with him, I could have grabbed a pitchfork, jumped the murderer’s back. The two of you would be out there now.”

Seeing Grandma Teegan’s braid hanging from the frame of her mirror made her think of the death space. Even as a very young girl, she’d seen the death space. The cloying shadow attached to the backs of the dying and swelled like a blooming black rose. People who rode by on horses or called out hello in the mercantile with no idea the horse would throw them just down the road, or the drunken neighbor would accidentally shoot them that afternoon while hunting a turkey. The curse—how else to view it—seized her only a time or two a year. Some years not at all. When she saw the maw, it took her breath, left her staggering. Why in Papa Henry’s case, when she’d needed to see it most, hadn’t she? She would have gone to the barn, stood over him like an archangel, fought off his leaving this realm and his entrance into the Otherworld. She hadn’t, and the failing felt double. This even after the deer visited. If she’d understood nothing else of their coming, she should have known to stay aware, to heed the world.

Wire stared at her, and she tried to read his eyes. “You were there. If only you could talk.”

She’d spent the night trying to imagine who would steal a horse and murder a man. She and Papa Henry both rode Smoke into town when the errand was simple and the bother of hitching the wagon unnecessary. Everyone in Bleaksville had seen the spotted horse dozens of times. His markings made him striking but not famous. He’d won no big prize monies, wasn’t sought even for stud fees. No one outside of a twenty-mile radius likely even knew of him, so it made no sense to suppose he’d attracted a big-time thief. And locals? The whole county consisted of hard-working people, mostly farmers. Feeding, shoeing, and stabling a horse that couldn’t be ridden in the open and was of no use in the field was too costly. Unless Smoke was sold and quickly, before he was seen. The nearest place to sell a horse was likely Omaha. There were other small towns, but in Omaha, Smoke could be led onto a train car and sent to Kansas City, Chicago, Denver. Once that happened he’d be gone for good, and so would the only evidence pointing to Papa Henry’s killer.

Sheriff Cripe. The name, like a blistered heel, wouldn’t leave her alone. He thought himself a dandy, a modern-day Wild Bill Hickok. Strutting with his wide mustache, his thumbs in his belt, and wearing a showman’s costume years out of fashion, but an identity to grab and model when you lacked another.

Cora, still asleep in the bedroom across the hall, had made legitimate points. Cripe hadn’t been around the village for at least a fortnight. Rumor said he was enjoying the pleasures of Omaha. A woman who’d taken the train in for a day’s shopping claimed she’d seen him on the street with a girl “overly rouged.”

“Busy there,” Cora had asked, “why would he do something so horrific in Bleaksville now?” Still, who but Cripe carried such hatred for Papa Henry?

Bridget rolled onto her back, pulled Wire close, and remembered a day a full two months ago. The weather already cold, Cripe shouting at her and Papa Henry as they were leaving the mercantile. He eyed them, his chest out and puffing against his thick vest with its tooling of bucking broncos and border of silver studs. The tassels on his buckskin coat dangling. “Them’s against the law,” he said of Papa Henry’s braids. His hairy mustache, waxed and flaring, like miniature horns on a miniature steer. “The commissioner of Indian affairs says you bucks got to cut them.”

Bridget’s hands had itched with wanting to reach up, break the wax of his facial hair, and watch the droop. He thought them a symbol of his masculinity while Papa Henry’s braids were somehow an affront to white, Christian sensibilities.

That day, Papa Henry ushered her away.

“You want to live amongst decent folks,” Cripe yelled after them, “you oughta try and look like us. No telling what might happen to a buck around here.”

There was no such law concerning his braids, Papa Henry explained later, though a sad proclamation had been aimed at reservation Indians who seemed less than eager to convert to the ways of their conquerors. He owned his two hundred acres and would keep his braids.

She’d begged him not to be dismissive of the sheriff. Cripe could deputize any man, any number of men, a posse of dozens, to come and assist in an arrest. Like the murder of Sitting Bull only a decade and a half earlier, Papa Henry could be shot in a botched, or fake, arrest. He wasn’t well known like Sitting Bull, but the story could be whipped up. Keeping the country afraid of Indians was a fire needing constant attention. Nothing else sold as many papers or riled as many citizens at campaign rallies. Shouting out over the heads of a nodding crowd how Indians threatened to cross reservation borders and overrun the country ignited voters. Politicians knew to find what frightened the blood out of people, add details that titillated, and turn the line into a catchy slogan.

The truth didn’t sell papers; fear did. In addition, fear needed big, splashy stories like how Henry Leonard was a braid-wearing, thus lawbreaking, Indian living off the reservation. Fashion the story, tell how good Christian men exterminated a murderous renegade.

And Thayer? Would he put as much effort into the case as he did into his snoring?

The bang of the back door made Bridget ease out a breath she felt she’d held all night. Finally. The man was leaving.

Cora stepped into the doorway. “He’s gone. Did you sleep at all?”

“Did you?”

“People fuss too much over sleep.” Cora shrugged. She’d let her hair down for bed and now scooped it up whole, twisted it a couple of times, and began putting in her pins. “I need to fix my husband’s breakfast. He can run a mercantile, but he can’t fry an egg or pour himself a cup of coffee.” She gave Bridget a second smile, this one sad. “Will you be all right for a few hours?”

I’ll never be all right. She knew what she had to do. “I’ve got the chores. I’ll be busy. You don’t need to rush back.”

“I’ll hurry and help you.”

“Please don’t. Take my chores, and I’m staring at a day of boredom. I need the extra work to fill the hours.” Did she sound convincing? “You’ll be back tonight, though? You’ll sleep here again?”

“As many nights as you’ll let me.”

From Papa Henry’s bedroom window, Bridget watched Cora in her winter clothes walk to the barn. The track was wide now and well trampled, but either side and to the river and beyond, the world looked crisp. So clean it had to be make-believe. She felt she could poke a finger through the chimera and have it all tinkle down like thin, broken glass.

In this world, even in its beauty, Death could snap fingers and pluck a soul.

Late the evening before, Cora’s husband had brought out her horse, but Bridget imagined her first kneeling a moment at Papa Henry’s box, dirtying the knees of her wide-legged skirt again. Then she’d go to Luna-Blue and stroke the horse’s muzzle before throwing a saddle over her own horse.

When Cora rode down the lane, Bridget forced herself from the window. It was time.

She took the stairs slowly, sliding her hand along the railing. Papa Henry had gripped the same wood from the time he’d been tall enough to reach it. His father had built the house in 1818, hewn the mantle, fashioned the windows looking out on the river. Here the elder Mr. Leonard had brought his wife, an Omaha Indian. At the time, white women were scarce in the territory, and men’s needs for helpmates gave Indian women a modicum of acceptance. As more and more white females arrived, or came of marriageable age, darker skinned women were pushed aside. Seen as having served their purpose.

Papa Henry’s father had not done so. He loved his wife, and they remained married until he died. They raised their son in the house. After Henry grew, he married and lived there with his own wife and son. Until tragedy struck. The boy drowning and the wife lifting off and away like weightless thistle in the wind of heartache.

Now Papa Henry’s desk, the chairs, the kitchen table with its lantern—all seemed only props on an abandoned stage.

She’d let Papa Henry down when she’d stood in front of the medical school’s admission’s board. Stood there placid, mute. She’d let Papa Henry down, allowing him to go alone to the barn, even though she’d known some ruckus mattered enough to drag an elderly man out of bed and into a winter night.

She let Wire out to do his business, her mind flipping through tasks to complete before leaving. At some point in the night, it had become obvious to her: she had to find Smoke.