The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout Read Free Book Online Page B

pulpit, put on his hat, and rewound his muffler. “Aren’t you going now?” he asked. “If you are, I’ll ride partway with you.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I’ll stay. To think.”
    â€œOf course.” He moved to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Goodbye, my dear. Thank you for all of us. If anything should go amiss, get word to me. Or if you should reconsider.”
    â€œGoodbye, Alfred.”
    He stepped lively to the door, and then, before opening it, turned back to her a second time. “Let us pray,” he said. She bowed her head. He placed a gentle hand upon it. “Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “look down upon Thy daughter. Bless her in this undertaking. Grant her Thy strength. Guide her with Thy grace. Let her bring them home. I beg Thee in the name of Thy Son, who gave his all for others. Amen.”
    â€¢   •   •
    At last she was alone.
    As day faded from the windows she sat still on the bench, hands folded in her lap, a wide-shouldered woman wearing a rabbit hat and a black melton coat and a man’s hickory shirt and ducking trousers and good four-dollar boots. The hat, close-fitted, with earflaps she could hook on top when it was mild, was her pride. She had shot the rabbits, scraped and dried the skins, cut them to her own pattern, and sewn them with #8 waxed linen thread. The wind outside warned her not to think about what she had offered to do. Instead, she forced herself to consider summer and fall. She would have sixty acres into wheat, which she calculated would bring forty to fifty cents a bushel. Hogs, she guessed, would go for three dollars a hundredweight come fall, so she intended to buy shoats this spring and fatten them on corn she had saved from last year’s crop. She planned also to put in some pumpkins. Two or three loads would fetch a fair sum in town, and what she couldn’t sell she would feed to her cattle. Cattle took to pumpkins the way horses took to apples.
    There was an early line in Genesis: “And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” She took the word “deep” to mean the void, which was dark. What had happened to her lately she thought of as going void. She was suddenly empty inside, absolutely void. In her was a great, dark deep. Then one of two things occurred in the void. A match was struck, a light flared, and soon she was full of flame. That was fury, as she had been furious at Vester Belknap. Or, like a seed, a crystal of ice formed and grew, and soon her deep was solid ice. That was fear, as she had feared the snake. Going void was fear more often than fury, she had found, especially on long winter nights in her house when wolves howled and she was alone as now, sitting on the bench, emptying inside, and feeling the first crystal form. She shivered. She stood up and went to the door. Once outside, in near dark, she decided to relieve herself before starting, so walked around Kettle School to the outhouse at the rear. She entered, closed the door, opened her coat, pulled down her britches and the drawers made of Queen Bee Flour sacking, and seated herself over the hole. The second she did so, she thought of Theoline Belknap. She cried out in horror. She sprang up, pulled herself together, buttoned her coat, and burst from the outhouse, running. Now she was solid ice inside, solid fear. She untied Dorothy from the hitch rail, mounted, wheeled the mare and gave her a bootheel in the flank, then another out of the trot into a slow gallop.
    It was not only what Theoline had done.
    It was what Mary Bee Cuddy had done.
    For she knew she could not. Alone, by herself, she couldn’t possibly handle a team and wagon and feed and nurse and protect and comfort four such cases all the way to the Missouri River, not alone, not by herself. She knew in her soul she couldn’t possibly. What woman in Christendom could?
    She must have