Charity Read online

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, William F. Magnus.

  For Greg Carstons, Beloved Critic

  The names for the months (moons) varied among the different branches of the Siouan family. This translation of the Dakotah months is used with permission from The Native American Community Board (NACB). http://www.nativeshop.org/

  January:Hardship Moon

  February:Half Days Moon

  March:Sore Eyes Moon

  April:Geese Laying Eggs Moon

  May:Planting Moon

  June:Red Strawberries Moon

  July:Red Chokecherries Moon

  August:Harvest Moon

  September:Leaves Turning Brown Moon

  October:Falling Leaves Moon

  November:Shedding Antlers Moon

  December:Trees Popping Moon

  She nursed him until he was old enough to ask for it. They told her she must stop, that it was not decent. But she continued in secret, long after they forbade it. “You’ll always be my baby,” she whispered.

  She nursed him long after they had forbidden it, and even after her milk finally dried up, she held the boy in her arms and gave him her breast. It was a comfort to them both. “You’ll always be my baby, won’t you?” she crooned.

  When he became too big for sitting on her lap, they lay on her bed together. She undid her buttons, and he found the comfort he remembered. At times, there would be just the nipple blossoming in his mouth. At other times, the nectar would flow.

  “You’ll always be my baby, won’t you, dear?” she whispered.

  “Yes, Mama. Yes.”

  Sometimes he felt a loathing for the blossom and its nectar, but then he would find her crying in pain, and he would try to remember the old sweetness, and for her sake, undo her buttons, and lay down beside her. “I’m here, Mama,” he crooned. Don’t cry, your baby’s here.”

  Prologue

  She has lived many years. Close to the earth. Her home, her safety, her life’s burden on her back, she makes her ponderous way forward on stubby, powerful legs.

  To the young watcher, it is an agony of time before she pulls herself up the slope of the gully and continues across another stretch of prairie toward blue water.

  “Coming back to the lake,” the old woman mutters. “Comes back every year.”

  The young woman asks, “Grandmother, how do you know it’s the same one?”

  The old woman pulls her blanket closer around herself against the sharp, spring winds. “I know. Before I came to this place, she was here.”

  “Where does she come from?”

  The old woman points with her chin toward the south. “The slough.”

  “Why does she travel so far?”

  The old woman shrugs, and the blanket brushes her ear lobes. “It is her way.”

  As the turtle comes closer, the two women stand back so she can progress in her timeless plodding in a straight line toward the lake. She passes close enough for the young woman to observe her leathery face, her slow-blinking eyes. The young woman smiles, ever so slightly, for she is reminded of the ancient face of the old woman at her side.

  “Why does she come?”

  “She lays her eggs in the sand. It’s warm there.”

  “She still has such a long way.”

  As the young one, on light moccasinned feet, steps up behind the turtle, the old woman shrugs again and warns, “She’s a snapper.”

  “I’ll be careful.” She places her hands firmly around the shell toward the hind feet. The turtle withdraws her head and feet and tail. The turtle is heavy, but the young woman is strong and carries her easily down to the lake shore and gently places her on an open stretch of sand. She steps back quickly.

  The old woman, still standing on the rise, wrapped in her blanket, smiles and says, “Wasté! Wasté!* She will have many children!”

  “Mmmm,” the young woman replies drolly. “I’ll have to watch my toes.”

  The old one laughs and claps her hands. “Maybe. Maybe not. The Mother will protect you.”

  The women watch the old snapping turtle inch along the shore searching for the right patch of sand to dig her womb hole.

  * “Good! Good!”

  Red Strawberries Moon

  Alvinia Torgerson’s youngest child had the whooping cough. Cradling little Kirstin in her arms, Alvinia walked the floor all through the cool June night, from room to room, window to window, humming “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to comfort her suffering infant.

  It was she who reported seeing Will Kaiser staggering out of Pa Kaiser’s barn before the sun was up and just before the old man was found lying comatose on the dusty threads of old straw, looking peaceful except for the bright spot of blood emblazoned on his left temple.

  Will was picked up while he was still drunk and left to sleep it off in the county jail. This was nothing new. However, when Will woke up, Sheriff Sully did not unlock the door and let him go with the usual, “Yup, Will, better get home to that pretty wife of yours.”

  When Will heard his pa was dead—murdered—he buried his face in his hands and cried. When he was told that he was the only suspect, he stopped crying and sat, hands dangling between his knees, staring at the floor. A man of great appetites, that morning Will Kaiser ignored his breakfast.

  Dennis Sully rode over to Will’s house to break the news to Lena. He stood outside peering through the screen door, savoring the warm yeasty fragrance of fresh baking and the sight, though dim in the darkened shanty, of a small woman with reddish hair and a pink complexion. Guilty or not, Sheriff Sully thought, Will Kaiser is the biggest damn fool in the county.

  Lena did not bother to open the door and invite him in. The sheriff or his deputy often stopped by to tell her that her husband was in jail and, as soon as he woke up, they would send him home. She seldom responded with more than “I expected as much.” What could she say? She had swallowed so much unleavened humiliation over the years she was full right up to her throat.

  This morning Dennis Sully looked like a man who needed sleep. He crushed his hat in one hand and scratched the overnight growth of beard with the other while he told her, in few words, how they had found her father-in-law, not dead when they found him but dead now, and that they’d arrested Will.

  Lena Kaiser was not given to faints. “Thank you for coming yourself, Dennis,” was all she said.

  “Can I do anything for you? Get your sisters? I could send Fritz over to Wheat Lake.”

  “No, they’ve got a plateful as it is. I’ll be all right.”

  Lena closed the inside door against the beauty of an early spring morning which had nothing any more to do with her. Through the tiny shanty—past the pegs where Will’s jacket hung next to her sweater (beneath them, rubber boots—his and hers) she went, her mind spinning, into her kitchen. She had baked bread and cookies that morning. On the nights Will did not come home she never slept well, if at all, and was up long before dawn. The sun was just now sifting into the corners of her kitchen. Four loaves cooled in a row on the counter. Their rounded crusts, lightly brushed with butter, gleamed like polished oak. Lena was struck by how much they resembled coffins. She draped a dish towel over them. That was worse. She pulled it off. One thing she knew for sure: Will, faulted through and through though he was, could never kill anybody. Never. The man didn’t even swat flies.

  There was nothing more to be done with the bread. The cookies were cool. With a thin spatula, and in spite of her shaking hands, she slipped them one by one off their baking tins onto her best china plate. When that was piled high, she filled the cans she had already lined
with paper.

  She might have known something like this would happen. This was the third thing. It started on Monday when workmen digging for a new road north of town found some little bones and the remnants of a child’s laced shoe. Doc Moody determined that the remains were of four children—probably the children of some early immigrants. They had been buried in shallow graves in a sand pit by a lake where immigrants were known to have camped. The thought of those children dying had saddened Lena, but the little laced shoe spoke rivers of sorrow; it broke her heart. On Tuesday, her cousin Alma told her about Clifford Czmosky’s horse. Clifford was Alma’s closest neighbor. He heard horrible screaming coming from his barn and went out there to find that someone had cut the tongue out of his horse. Clifford went crazy seeing the animal screaming, her eyes white, and blood gushing out of her mouth. Howling bloody murder he ran to his house, got his gun, and shot his horse in the head—dropped her right there in her stall with one clean shot. Then he went looking for the devil who’d done it. That and the vision of the little shoe kept Lena crying all Tuesday. She’d had a bad feeling. Things like this always came in threes. It was Wednesday, and this was the third thing.

  She had cried for the children and for the horse. She bit her lips and vowed she would shed no more tears for Will Kaiser. She sat down to think some more, one hand in her lap still holding the dish towel, the other at her mouth where she absently sucked on the tips of her thumb and forefinger.

  The first thing she should do, of course, was bring him a change of clothes. She hung up her towel and her apron, then went into the bedroom and pulled out the drawers in the chiffonnier where Will’s clothes were folded, clean and carefully pressed. She took out underwear, pants, shirt, and suspenders and put them all into a clean pillow case. On her way through the kitchen she dropped in a can of cookies and tied a knot in the end of the case. She tucked her pocketbook under one arm, pulled her sweater off the peg in the entry, and stepped outside.

  Charity, South Dakota, like the other prairie towns in which Lena had worked since she was twelve years old, was a stagnant pond. Gossip grew like scum on a slough. Rumors, opinions, and judgments spawned and flew about, greedy for blood and spreading their venom with each bite. This morning, Lena knew the blood they’d be thirsty for was hers and Will’s, so she avoided Main Street, walking three blocks east on the dirt road that passed by her house to another that ran north the length of town just inside the city limits. On her left a few houses looked across the road at the plowed fields and marshes on her right. Lena walked briskly, wrapped tightly in herself, carrying her bundle high, pressed hard against her chest. Last week this road had been muddy and impossible to walk. It had since dried so that with each step little clouds of fine dust puffed around her ankles. Only Main Street was topped with gravel. The town elders were planning such refinements for Charity as befit a county seat (which it was) and growing town reaping the benefits from prospering farmers and their burgeoning families buoyed by turn-of-the-century optimism. Everyone’s well-being, however, hung precariously on the weather: tear-freezing winters, mud-drenched springs, hot summers, and autumns either too dry or too wet. They could stand anything as long as nothing went on too long.

  Lena was a true sod-buster’s daughter with a sharp eye for the skies, but she did not think about the weather now. She kept her eyes straight ahead and marched resolute and joyless. After twelve blocks, she turned left back into town till she came to the plain wood building that was both City Hall and County Jail.

  Dennis Sully sat behind his desk sipping coffee. He looked up, surprised to see her, and offered her the straight backed wooden chair next to his desk. “Coffee?” He nodded toward the coffee pot that perched uneasily on the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room.

  Lena shook her head and sat rigidly on the edge of the chair facing him, her lumpy pillow case in her lap. As many times as Will had been here, she had never before set foot inside this place. The sheriff’s office was a small room, devoid of decoration: rough wood floors (she thought they could have used a good scrubbing), a second desk and chair that she supposed were for Fritz the deputy, some cabinets against the back wall, and hanging on the wall above them a document of some sort in a black frame.

  Dennis Sully waited for her to speak.

  Lena began with a question she had forgotten to ask earlier. “How was Pa killed? Was he shot? You know Will doesn’t own a gun.”

  “Nope. Wasn’t shot. He was cracked a good one upside the head with a pipe-wrench or rock or something. We couldn’t find anything. We’re still looking.”

  “Well, you probably won’t find it. Whatever it is, it’s probably at the bottom of the slough or somebody’s toilet.”

  The sheriff nodded. What she said was likely true. He waited again for Lena to have the next word.

  Finally, looking at him directly, stabbing her finger on the desk top with each statement, she said, “He’s a drinking man. He’s a fighting man. It’s no secret. The whole town knows it. And I know it, too. But he’s not a killing man.” A final stab of her finger on the desk settled the matter.

  “Will is a mean drunk.” The sheriff did not look at her when he said it.

  The stillness curled itself around Lena. She often thought Will had killed her love for him. But even now, when she heard a word like this against him, though it was true, and though it wasn’t said to be unkind—as she knew this wasn’t—she felt a twist of pain. And shame. No, even now, she was not beyond humiliation. Her eyes tracked the seams in the wood floor. “I know that,” she said, “but I know there’s a line he wouldn’t cross.” She drew a line with her finger on the desk between them and tapped the place softly. “No matter how drunk he was. I know it because if he got that drunk, he would be too drunk to stand up—let alone throw a punch—let alone kill somebody.” She threw her hand up and let it fall into her lap beside her bundle. “Dennis, you know it, too.”

  The sheriff just nodded his head and rubbed his face with a meaty hand as if he could rub away the tiredness and his responsibility. “But I got to keep him in here. Everything points at Will. I got to keep him till the hearing. Then it’s up to the judge.”

  Lena massaged the space between her eyebrows. “When will that be?”

  “Circuit judge is due here sometime next month. Will’ll just have to sit it out.”

  She nodded, still memorizing the floor and rubbing her forehead. “He’s sober now.”

  “Yup. In rough shape though.” The sheriff, relieved to be moving, slid his chair back from the desk. “You want to see him?”

  She didn’t, but she stood, placed the pillow case on the corner of the sheriff’s desk, and followed him the short distance to the back of the office. He opened the door for her. “Back there. He’s the only one we got.”

  Lena felt a pressure square against her chest like something trying to keep her from crossing the threshold. She had never wanted to come here. By not coming here, she could pretend that this place didn’t exist, that Will hadn’t been here, that things weren’t so bad. But now it was too real. Will had forced her to this, and she was suddenly very angry. She stepped into the dimly lit hallway—so furious she did not wince at the sight of the bars along either side of her, or the barren yellow light bulb suspended from a cord in the middle of the narrow swath of ceiling that ran between the bars to the end of the hall, or at the rank smell.

  In the far wall she could see a small north window, the glass dulled by a dirty, oily film. Little illumination was allowed through there. There was no light nor any windows in the four small cells, two on each side. The smell was concentrated in the second cell to her right where she saw her husband caged. He sat on the edge of a narrow cot with his head in his hands. Perhaps he was dozing. He had not looked up when Dennis opened and closed the office door. She knew as she stood looking at his soiled, stained, and damp clothing that it wasn’t only the chamber pot, brimming with ex
crement and vomit, but the man himself who stank. Lena clenched her teeth until he looked up. When he did, she did not give him a chance to speak first.

  “Will Kaiser, you have shamed me for the last time!”

  “Oh, Duchy.” He put his head back in his hands and rocked once back and forward. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t change what you’ve done.”

  “I haven’t done anything.” His voice cracked. She suspected the puffiness in his face was as much from crying all morning as the whiskey the night before.

  “Oh, I don’t mean you’ve killed anybody, you fool, but if you weren’t a drunkard, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Now, I’ll stick by you till you’re clear of this thing and then I’m through with you. Do you hear me?”

  “Don’t leave me, Duchy.”

  “Don’t you ‘Duchy’ me!” She thrust her purse at him, emphasizing every word. “I won’t leave you till you’re free and clear. You’re a lying, drunken, dirty man. But you’re not a killer. I’ll do what I can for you.”

  She left him there, water streaming from the living blue of his one good eye and from the dead white of the other, his powerful hands wiping the tears from his face.

  On her way out, she stopped at the corner of the sheriff’s desk. Her gaze fixed out the window, she said, “See if you can get him a bath. There’s his clean clothes.” She pointed to the pillow case still lumped where she left it. “There’s fresh-baked cookies in there.” Suddenly, Lena was embarrassed. Her father-in-law was dead; her husband was in jail for murder; she had brought cookies. But it was all she had, so she continued, straightening her back, “You and Fritz help yourselves. He can’t eat them all.”