EXCERPTS FROM "DANCING ON HIS GRAVE"

PROLOGUE

During my mother’s life with my dad, he gave her many opportunities to remember what her sister Virginia, or “Din,” told her when she first started dating him. “You don’t want to get serious about that guy.”

“Why not? I thought you liked him,” Mom asked.

“I thought I liked him, too, until someone pointed out that all his horses are head-shy.” Din said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom demanded.

Din said, “It means he beats them over the head with a fence post because he can’t do enough damage with a whip.”

“I don’t believe that!” Mom retorted.

“If you don’t believe me, ask a horseman,” Din said.

Mom laughed and told Din she thought that was a funny way to judge a man. “Anyway, what does that have to do with me?”

•

The old red gelding lay in the stinking mud of the alkali creek. After two weeks, he was a rack of bones. Dad had exploded the horse’s remaining eye with a picket chain, and he staggered out into the pasture, fell off a high cutbank into the creek and broke his shoulder. The mud was caked around his head, where his weeping eye sockets kept the mud wet. He was barely moving. He hadn’t been able to stand to get water since he broke his shoulder. Dad had beaten his first eye out several weeks before. He was a retired work horse that Dad had bought from a neighbor to help train green broncs. He harnessed the old horse beside the green one, with the idea that the experienced horse would help him control the young one. His idea of control was a “short-tug” cut from scrap harness, or a chain.

Mom wrote in her journal, “I guess maybe he left him laying there in the mud because he thought the broken shoulder would heal up and he could still work him blind.”

Or maybe Dad was getting revenge for disobedience. At least that’s what my sisters thought, every time they tiptoed past the poor dying horse. They were learning what happened when you made “Daddy” mad. Finally, Dad hooked a team to the horse, pulled him up onto the creek bank and shot him. The carcass lay there until it was nothing but bleached bones. After that, Dad had to work two green broncs at a time, because the other wheel horse he had used was also missing an eye, for the same reason. He was in a rage almost constantly…

•

KATHLEEN

I drift into consciousness, and have no recollection of where I am, or who I am. It’s morning, isn’t it? I slept the whole night through without a nightmare. Or did I? What happened to yesterday? No, it’s afternoon now. Have I had dinner? Yes, I can remember passing the salt and pepper to somebody, but who? I’m getting scared now. Paralyzing fear. Have I lost my mind? I’ve got to ask Frances and Pat what happened. We were going to brand calves today, but there’s nobody around. Somehow, I sense I’m supposed to stay in this bedroom, but why?

Frances comes into the room. I ask her what happened. She only knows that he sent me up the coulee to get the saddle horses and I came back in a trance. I went into the bedroom and have been there for three days, only coming out for meals. Pat comes in, and she only knows that I got a beating, but she’s not sure what for.

It seems like much later, now, days even. I’m still having trouble seeing and remembering. Mom doesn’t know what happened either, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s anything to worry about. A few more days pass. I still can’t remember, but my vision is working and the terrible headache is better. Then the morning comes when I hear the familiar shout, “Daylight in the Swamp!” snatching me from sleep, and I know I am expected to act like nothing happened…

•

It’s a cold, windy day in spring. Dad and I are trying to bring in some horses that have been running out all winter. They are thin, with shaggy, long winter hair. One mare has a new-born colt. He is in the pickup and I am on Minn, our old white kid horse. The horses are wild and won’t respond to my efforts to herd them toward the corrals. The terrain where we are is too rough for Dad to do much with the pickup, so about all he is doing is screaming at me from half a mile away. In that wind, I don’t know for sure what he is screaming about, or what he wants me to do.

Suddenly the horses start milling around in confusion, and I am able to ride right up to them. Bewildered, I see that the mother of the baby colt has her head down. She is bleeding through the nose, and I can hear gurgling. She nickers softly to her colt. Then the baby colt falls dead and almost at the same moment I realize that he is shooting. I don’t know if he is shooting at me or the horses. I am so scared that I just blank out. I see the rest of the slaughter as from a distance, through kind of a tunnel. Two more young horses hump up as the bullets hit them in the “guts,” and the mare is now on the ground, breathing her last. I’m paralyzed. I can’t even climb down from Minn to protect myself. Another horse goes down squealing in agony.

The rest of the day is forever erased from my memory, except for the never-ending scene of the dying horses and my conviction that I will never live to be an adult.

•

FRANCES

She is six, and she and Kathleen have been told to go bring in the sheep. She is trotting along behind the band, the yellow clouds of dust kicked up by their sharp hooves billowing around her and settling on her freckled arms and sun-bleached hair. She starts picking up pretty rocks and putting them in a pouch she fashioned in her shirt-tail. Suddenly, as she straightens up with a new treasure, there he is, looming huge right behind her. She hears, “Git them sheep on the run, you sonovabitch!”

She feels the big boot hit her in the spine. Her rocks go flying. As she comes back to consciousness, all she can remember is the terror. She’s on her feet, and they are moving, the sheep are still in front of her, but he has disappeared. When she looks back, she’s even more terrified. She is way down the coulee, a long way from where she was just a split second before when he kicked her. She realizes she has a big bruise on the side of her head, and her hands are cut and bleeding.

The awestruck fear stays with her all through the chore of watering and penning the sheep. She eats her supper in silence, her head aching, big round eyes watching him from the end of the table, wondering how he made her forget going all that way with the sheep. She doesn’t remember him kicking her down until a long time later.

•

PAT

He is trashing the house again. He has already knocked Mom across the room, blackening her eye. He tips over the table, smashing the half finished meal and dishes, and rips down the soot filled stove pipe. The baby is screaming in her crib. The older girls are hanging on his arm begging him to stop. They go flying when he swings his big arm. Pat runs and climbs up in the old rocking chair and starts rocking furiously. She slaps herself on the cheeks over and over with both hands, crying frantically, “You don’t have to beat me, Daddy. I’ll slap myself! See, Daddy, I’m slapping myself!” She’s three years old.

•

BARBIE

She is screaming, dancing and side-stepping around the table; I can see her back through the window facing the camper trailer where I slept until the crashes and screams launched me to my feet, trembling in fear; the light cold and gray like the terror, landing on her and me through our respective windows. Please Daddy; Please Daddy; Please Daddy Honey; the refrain so familiar, repeated daily, weekly since I’ve been able to understand words. “Please Daddy, don’t kill anybody else,” her voice is a shriek, keening like the cold wind racing between the trailer and gray shabby house.

Oh, God, no, please. He didn’t. Oh, God. He’s done it, finally done it. But they’re not all dead yet. I must help, it’s my job, he likes me best. I have to hurry – into the nightmare. He hates Norma, but she’s not dead, dancing behind the window, so it must be Mom who he hates or Frances who he also hates. I will hurry maybe I can save Pat or Kathleen or maybe the other one who is not dead yet. My stomach is cold knotted but not sick anymore.

Cold stiff fingers try to zip my jeans, feet resist thrusts at my tattered sneakers; no need to be quiet this time, shaky legs carry me through the kitchen door. Cautious now, senses flaring, testing the scene: heating stove on its back, contents of the pot belly regurgitated, black soot, gray ashes, framing scuffled footprints on cabbage flower linoleum. Table legs turned up, smashed dishes, food stuck on walls. No blood; no prone body. White faces, trembling lips, no tears--too much terror for tears--Mom’s black eye. Dawning relief. Two walls and the whistling wind transmuting her words, “Please Daddy don’t hit anybody else,” into the certainty that this was the day we have awaited for years, our last on earth. If he kills one he will kill us all. No, not today. The terror continues.

•

NORMA

Breakfast is over; Mom and Dad are sitting at the table finishing their coffee. Norma, age five, quietly sidles up to Mom, hoping for a touch or hug, any small show of affection. As she approaches, she rolls her feet to the outside edges, so her footsteps won’t make noise. Her shoes are run over from her established style of walking. Trying to stay far away from Dad, she gently leans on Mom’s shoulder. Mom’s arm slides around her waist. Dad’s head jerks up from his newspaper. “Quit hangin’ on yer mother, you sonovabitch!” Mom starts guiltily and snatches her arm back. Dad swivels in his chair, and planting his boot in Norma’s small chest, shoves her with his foot as if she was an obnoxious dog. She goes flying, scrambles to her feet and scuttles out the door, still rolling her feet outward for silence.

•

MOM

March 18, 1952
My, I hope no one ever reads this journal but me. They’ll sure think I’m a chronic complainer if they do. Really it’s just letting off steam in a place where it won’t hurt anybody. I have sense enough to know that to go around all the time with that stuff in your head and to be eternally choking it off and not letting any of it escape is unhealthy and liable to lead to many bad things, but I can’t go around taking it out on the family. My girls don’t deserve such treatment. How it tickles me to watch them when they are engrossed in something the way they were with that calf this morning – and then coming out to wash their hands and so eager to tell me all about it. I hope they will always eagerly tell me every little detail of what interests them.

And Kathleen! I wish I could tell her or let her know in some way how well I know what she thinks about, and what bothers her. I‘m sure I could help her to see plainly – Oh well – Anyway, she knows I’m always here for her to call on when she needs me, and I’m always for her – and all my little girls, one hundred percent. That helps some, I hope. I guess I’m not really a very good and wise mother, but I do the best I know how, and my love is unlimited. And they do have a good father. That much I managed to do. In fact, he is a wonderful father. I hope they will always remember what he has given them – not money and things, but love and understanding. It makes a lump in my throat to see him carefully and patiently explain something to them, when they come to him for information So many men are so completely uninterested in their children.

Oh dear! My fountain pen is running dry and I’m afraid I’ll wake him up if I get up to hunt for ink, and that would be bad. More later.

---

EXCERPTS FROM "WALKING WOUNDED"

I struggle upward through layers of heavy sleep. The house is freezing. There must be something wrong with the furnace. It’s dark outside the windows, but I sense that it’s morning. My two babies, Marty, two and a half, and Tammy, seven months old, are still asleep in their bedroom across the hall. I stagger out of bed, into the long hall that leads past our bedrooms, through the laundry room to the back door. The thermostat reads forty degrees. I open the door to the basement. The furnace is going full blast. What in heaven’s name is wrong?

Fully awake, I become aware of another sound, above the hum of the furnace. It’s the scream of a hurricane wind. Turning on lights – thank God they still work – I enter my small kitchen. The big window at the end of the kitchen is covered with a layer of frost. I scrape a hole in the frost, and find only a peculiar shade of dark gray behind the glass. I can see horizontal movement. I feel strange, sick. I move to the living room, and another window. It’s the same gray as the kitchen. With vague detachment, I realize that we’re having a blizzard. But I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s still dark because of the huge amount of snow moving horizontally across every window. I can’t see the neighboring houses on either side, even though they’re only twenty feet away. It must be terribly cold, and the furnace can’t keep up. There’s no way I can open my beauty shop, located at the front of the house, today. I go back to the kitchen, open the oven door, and turn on the oven and all the surface burners.
I turn on the radio. A public service announcement repeats, over and over: thirty-five degrees below zero; forty-five miles per hour winds, gusting to seventy miles per hour; twelve to twenty inches of new snow; stockman’s advisory, stockman’s advisory, stockman’s advisory.

I go back down the hall to the kids’ bedroom. The baby is awake, and Marty wakes as soon as I pick her up. He’s cold and wet, and he starts to cry. Holding and comforting him with one arm, I push the baby’s crib out the door and into the kitchen. I take off his pajamas, dress him in dry clothes and put him in his high chair. I’m feeling more sick, and my joints are weak and painful. What’s wrong with me?

I move back down the hallway to the bathroom. Passing the mirror, I catch a glimpse of my face. It’s covered with a red rash. I unbutton my pajama top. I have rash from head to toe. It’s Rubella, German measles. Two weeks ago, Marty broke out. I thought I’d escaped. The day that Marty broke out, one of my beauty shop customers had said, “I sure hope you’re not expecting,” and then she proceeded to tell me all the terrible things that Rubella does to unborn fetuses of less than three months gestation – mental retardation, blindness, deafness, missing limbs—she had a whole plateful for me. She described a retarded princess of the Netherlands who was the victim of Rubella, and said there is a world wide epidemic taking place, that is expected to last at least another year.

I assured her that I wasn’t expecting. It was a lie. I’m two and half months pregnant. I can’t think about that right now.

I pull the quilts from our beds, find a hammer, and nail the quilts over the kitchen window and the open doorway. I make a pallet on the floor for Marty and bring in his toys. The baby has to stay in her crib. We have soup, we have the electric stove for heat. Please God, don’t let the wind blow down a power pole. I can sit in a chair with my feet on another, a makeshift bed. I’m sick, but I have to take care of my babies. Ray has been gone for almost two months.

•

Over the years, Mom kept secrets from her daughters, an act that in hindsight was reckless and irresponsible, for both us and her, but totally in keeping with her lifelong system of denial. One of the secrets she revealed later was that Dad had carried a concealed weapon for years. At first it was a little .22 caliber Derringer in a shoulder holster under his arm. He wore it everywhere except to bed. She said, “Then after the trouble over Joe shooting the colt, added to losing all those cattle and his obsession with national news, he decided that everybody in the world was out to get him.” He bought another little pistol, a tiny little thing that looked like a toy, she said. He started carrying it in his boot, in addition to the derringer in the shoulder holster.

Then he started picking up old rifles at sales and auctions, anything that would shoot. Through the mail, probably through ads in his crime magazines, he got a sack of shells for each rifle. He took the weapons home, oiled and refurbished them and filled some parts with grease for rust protection. Then he chose a spot on a side hill around some brush and laid a barrel on its side with the open end downhill so the moisture would run away from it. That way the weapon that he placed inside stayed dry. “He must have hidden ten or twelve of them like that around the place,” she said. “He said he had them for an ‘emergency.’”

She told me, “We had that ten by fifty foot mobile home by then. It had a bedroom in each end. He was sleeping in the front bedroom and I was sleeping in the back. Of course the trailer was small and I could hear everything. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear him out in the front room, in the dark, talking to himself. He was awake, not talking in his sleep. He’d say, ‘Them God-damn sonzabitches. They’re not gonna get me!’ It was spooky. It was really scary.”

The situation reached a crisis level during the summer of 1967.

August 21, 1967

I haven’t written anything in this journal all summer. There is a very good reason for this. My last entry is dated June 9, which was just a couple of days before Fiona came for her vacation; then a few days after that we branded. The day after branding something happened that made me think I might die. This is for real. I actually thought so, and I gathered all my diaries and hid them. So thoroughly that I’m sure no-one will ever find them if I do die without telling anybody where they are. It’s funny how your outlook on life changes when you look death in the face. First, it made me afraid, terribly so, and then all of a sudden I didn’t care. I decided I’d just as soon die as live in fear, and I still feel that way. It’s funny what a feeling of relief I experienced when I made that decision. I must admit, though, that it’s hard to overcome the habits of a lifetime.

---

EXCERPT FROM "CHASING GHOSTS" - (Work in Progress)

This was Lillie’s water day. She woke up to a cold, miserable late November day, looking like snow. It might be a tough winter. She’d been responsible for watering the livestock for almost eighteen years. As long as she had lived on the homestead with Gus, they didn’t have a well or spring, their own source of water. For all those years, she’d been hauling two fifty-five gallon barrels of water every other day. She’d developed a system, lifting the barrels into the back of the wagon, tying the two cows on behind, and with the team pulling the wagon, trailing the livestock seven miles down east, past Vida to the spring in the creek bank. There she dipped the water into the barrels with a bucket while the team and the cows were drinking. With her barrels and livestock full, she drove the wagon up to the Vida post office, to Bud Nefzger’s well. She filled up a ten gallon cream can for the house for drinking water. Back at home the next day, she watered all the livestock out of the barrels, and was able to skip a day of hauling water. The first spring on the homestead, in 1913, Gus had built a little dam for the livestock, but it was usually dry. Sometimes in the winter, she’d let the animals eat snow, but other times when the snow didn’t come, she had to take an axe along to the spring and break the ice to get her water. She was a small woman, about five feet four inches, and since coming to the homestead, she had become so thin she thought she looked scrawny. She weighed only a little over 100 pounds, and her hair had turned completely gray in the last few years. But then, she had turned forty-five her last birthday, so it was to be expected.

She and Gus, a tall, good-looking man, had been married for over twenty six years. Their relationship had always been stormy. Lillie found out soon after their marriage that he was a womanizer. She and Gus had split up two years ago because of his philandering. That terrible day, when she’d decided she had just had enough, she had been out in the field trying to get the crop in with a team of four horses. Gus was supposedly laid up in the house with a bad back. They had hired a girl to come in and help with the housework, and when Lillie came in from the field, she found her hired girl in bed with Gus. In a flat, subdued voice, she told him, “Gus, I told you if that ever happened again, I’d leave you.” And she did. She left right then, and went to Ed’s place.

Then twenty-four years old, he’d rented the place down the road when he was eighteen. When Lillie had arrived at his bachelor shack – in 1928 – Ed didn’t hesitate a minute. She knew he had seethed for years over what he saw as his father’s shoddy treatment of her – his womanizing, and earlier, ridiculing her when she’d tried to learn to read when he and Frank started school. Every time in the past years when she had commented that he didn’t want work as hard as she did, he’d say, “Well, you’re the one who wanted to be the farmer. It was your idea to come up here in the first place.” That was his excuse for being a “Manana Man,” and putting all the responsibility on her shoulders.

Apparently Lillie coming to him for sanctuary after she left Gus was what Ed had been wanting. She and Gus reached an agreement and split the homestead, each deeding half to the other. They each got about 320 acres. Ed let his rented place go, and he and Lillie moved a one room shack onto her half of the homestead. Since then, he had been more of a help-mate to her than his dad ever had. But now that might be getting out of hand.

As far as Lillie knew, Ed had never had a girl-friend. When he came back from that winter in Butte five years ago, in 1925, he was twenty-one. He had started attending all the local functions, something he hadn’t done much before – except to look for fistfights – and cultivating an image as a lady’s man. He carefully practiced proper etiquette in dealing with the ladies. He had learned to be a really good dancer and he found lots of partners. He later bragged that he would go to a dance, find out the number of dances that would be played the whole evening, and line up a different girl to dance each dance with him. It was a source of great pride that he never forgot which girl had been asked for which dance, even four or five hours later. He was precise and even grand in his manners and language around females. But he didn’t seem to be the least bit interested in a long term association with a woman. He never did any kind of courting beyond the local dances, and he always seemed to prefer the company of the young bachelors from the community.

One of the reasons all this was troubling to Lillie was that Ed was way too involved in things that went on between her and his dad, Gus. That didn’t seem fitting. He and his dad had always had a violent relationship, and when he was a kid Ed had been on the receiving end of many severe beatings from his dad. Lillie thought that Gus was way too hard on Ed. One time when Ed was only about ten, Gus laid his finger wide open during a whipping with a buggy whip. Lillie had to soak the finger and then dig dirt out of the cut before she bandaged it, while the boy squirmed and tried not to cry. She saw the hatred in his eyes when he looked at his dad. His beatings were usually for fighting with his brother Frank. Lillie knew that some people, including Ed, thought that Frank was a sneaky, mean trouble maker and a damn bum. In the early years it seemed like he just loved to deliberately do things get people mad at him. At fourteen Frank had started running off from home. He’d go off somewhere and get thrown in jail, and then write home to Lillie for money. She’d send him money or a train ticket, and then he’d come home and live off of her, until the next time. Ed and Frank fought bitterly, and Gus had always thought it was funny to stick up for Frank just to make Ed mad. It had really caused a lot of trouble in the family.

Things had started to change for the worse as Ed got older and grew bigger and stronger than his dad. Lillie remembered a fight a few years ago where Ed, aged twenty two, had fifty-year-old Gus down on the floor beating him senseless. Lillie had jumped into the fight and stopped him. “You just remember! That’s your dad you’ve got down there!”

A couple years ago, just after Lillie left Gus and moved in with Ed, Gus had finally had a well dug on the original homestead where he still lived. He had decided that watering the animals the way Lillie had done for years was too much work. After he dug the well, Lillie had started hauling her water from there. Now she only traveled half a mile from the shack where she lived with Ed to Gus’s well. The chore became so much easier than the fourteen mile round-trip to Vida had been. It left her plenty of time to sit with Gus and visit. They were getting along better now than they had for years.

Things had not gotten better between Ed and his dad since she and Gus had split, and maybe even worse. It seemed like Ed thought that now she and Gus were separated, she shouldn’t have anything to do with Gus. She could tell he stewed about it when she came back from Gus’s place with her load of water every other day. Well, she wasn’t going to answer to Ed or anybody else about how much time she spent with her own husband, she decided. And she wasn’t going to divorce Gus, no matter what. She wasn’t going to be like her mother or the rest of her family. No, the next time Ed started complaining about her “hanging around Gus,” she intended to have a talk with him. It was one thing for him to live there and help her on the homestead, and quite another to be treating her like his own private property. How could a guy be jealous of his own dad? She had to straighten him out on that. It was high time Ed got himself a woman, and quit worrying about her and Gus. Sometimes she wished that she had never gotten into this living arrangement with Ed. Things were sure tense.

She had started the noon meal when Ed came into the house. A jar of home-canned green beans were now simmering in a pot on the back of the stove. She was slicing some beef left over from last night’s roast.

“What took you so long, Ma?” Ed’s voice was silky. “Sure seemed to take you awhile to fill them barrels.”

“I was visiting with your dad.”

“What you got to say to that sonovabitch?”

“Ed, I’ve had about enough of this.” Lillie said firmly. “It ain’t none of your business how much time I spend with my husband, and don’t you forget, he is still my husband.”

She never saw it coming. The last thing she felt on this earth was her son’s big fist smashing into her jaw. She flew backward three feet, head first into the huge, cast iron wood-burning range. She hit the floor like a discarded rag doll, completely limp. He could see that she had wet herself. He sank into the kitchen chair, suddenly robbed of rage and strength, and waited. “Come on, Ma, get up,” he muttered. There was no response, not even a groan. Slowly, he got to his feet and bent over her. There was no movement. He had seen enough dead animals to know that she was gone.

He picked up her body and laid her gently on the bed that they had shared for the past two years. Then he began building his story, his lie. She must have died the minute she hit the stove, he mused, so there won’t be much of a bruise on her head, nor where his fist met her jaw. “Okay. I’m outside. I come in for dinner. She’s layin’ on the floor. I put her on the bed. There’s a bruise on her temple. It’s where she fell and hit the stove when she had the heart attack. That’s the way it was.”

Ed backed carefully away from her body and out the door, as if he might disturb her if he made noise. He saddled his horse and headed toward the Leuenbergers’. He’d leave it to them to tell the old man. In his haste to get away from the awful scene, he forgot about the string beans. By the time he got back with the neighbors, the beans were burned black in the kettle. The odor filled the entire house. For the rest of his life, that’s what he remembered the most about his mother’s death: the odor of burned beans. He never ate green beans again.