Charity Read Free

she had, so she continued, straightening her back, “You and Fritz help yourselves. He can’t eat them all.”
    Lena left the office, stood on the street, and wondered what to do. She had to keep moving. Keep busy. Think. Most of all she needed someone sensible to talk to. It was a long walk out to Gustie’s, but Lena did her best thinking on her feet.
    Lena walked east, crossing the road she had come uptown on, and continued due east on an even narrower dirt road that led straight out into the country. Not much thinking was required to know where to look first for Pa’s killer. You didn’t have to strain your eyes looking beyond his own family. A nasty bunch—the whole lot of them. Always fighting one another—like badgers in a sack.
    She sighed. They’d had a reputation, the Kaiser boys. Will chased her around three counties before she consented to marry him. It was because he had chased her, and because he was...well, never mind he was the tallest, best looking man in those three counties—he was, in spite of his family, a kind, gentle man, and full of fun. At least he was before the drink took him. But blood tells and it had spoken loudly in him eventually. They’d had ten good years. He had taken to booze and throwing his fists around after he’d lost the sight in one eye and the hearing in one ear the same year. The blinding had been an accident—he caught a tiny piece of metal shaving in his eye at a drill sight. The ear was lost when Oscar took a shot at him and missed. The shot was so close it had destroyed his ear drum and the nerves.
    Anyway, she reflected, Will never did any fighting when he was sober, and he was sober more than half the time. That was still the difference between her man and his brothers. Stone-cold sober, Walter shot Oscar’s arm off when they were kids in some quarrel over something nobody could remember any more. Even with one arm, Oscar remained a violent man with his wife and his horses, and he seldom drank. He’d been sober when he fired at Will, too. These boys were mean whether they were drunk or not. They’re mean when they’re asleep, she thought.
    Frederick, the youngest brother, was not a brawler or a drinker, but Lena had never completely trusted him in spite of the fact that he had always been pleasant to her and was the only member of the Kaiser family to regularly wear clean clothes. Will had not had clean clothes every day till she married him. Lena thought Frederick was lazy and some kind of a conniver. He did no visible work, and yet he always had money to spend.
    Ma Kaiser. She could have killed the old man. She was strong enough. Gertrude Kaiser had the size and strength of a bull, if not the sweet disposition. Her thoughts went back to Oscar, the oldest, the one who was most like his mother. Silent and brooding, one never knew what Oscar was thinking. Maybe he didn’t think at all. He walked with a stoop that made him look much older than his years. Lena imagined he had developed this hunched-over posture to make less noticeable his missing arm. Hank Ackerman had remarked once that because they up and sawed his arm off—never mind it was to save his life—Oscar got cranky. Lena always chuckled at that. Cranky did not describe Oscar by half. They said that when he was a boy of about twelve, he killed a dog that his dad had brought home for him because he got tired of it always following him around.
    Walter, now, was much better natured than Oscar. He strutted around like a banty rooster, a cigar always cocked up between his teeth. He did not seem to be a likely killer. With him, it would have been some fool accident. He got scared and ran off, and yet when he shot Oscar, it had been no accident. Frederick. Hard to think of Frederick as a killer. It was hard to think of Frederick at all. The youngest brother was sort of invisible. One didn’t think of him in his absence. He left little or no impression. Lena only thought of him now as she was ticking off the