Tie My Bones to Her Back Read Free Page B

so hot and dry that your nose bleeds. Often you can’t bathe for weeks on end, out in those badlands where the buffalo are today. You can’t even wash your face or brush your teeth. And nothing to eat but buffalo hump and hardtack, day after day after day.”
    “I know.”
    Christ, she was stubborn! She didn’t know. She’d only read newspapers, or maybe some silly dime novel about valiant, handsome, devil-may-care buffalo runners. If only she could smell one.
    T HE FUNERAL SERVICE was short but solemn, Pastor Koellner’s words heartfelt. He had stretched the rules concerning suicide, making it sound as though Vati had died in a farm accident and Mutti, in her grief, had returned to the house distraught, grabbed a bottle she thought contained Himbeerschnaps, and taken a fatal draught before realizing it was carbolic acid. No, the Dousmanns were not the first suicides the pastor had buried. America was a hard place.
    Otto hadn’t been in the wooden church since before the war. He had gone then only to please his mother, as had Jenny. He recognized many faces in the congregation, but had difficulty at first putting names to them. Herr Albrecht, the stone mason, with his ruddy, wind-scoured face and hands hard as horn. Beside him Mrs. Obst, the schoolteacher—old now and, though dressed in her churchgoing finest, still smelling of chalk dust and India ink. Ursula Frischert, the love of his youth. Beside her stood two sturdy children, redheads both, a boy and a girl, and her husband, Otto’s marching Kamerad from the 2nd Wisconsin, Lud Nortmann, balding, he saw, with the stooped shoulders and spidery, ink-stained fingers of a bookkeeper. And when Ursula—whose waist Otto had once been able to span with both hands—turned sideways to whisper something in Lud’s ear, Otto noticed that she was with child once more. With sudden clarity Otto recalled a morning in the autumn of 1861 when Lud Nortmann, younger, slimmer, untried in battle, had been splattered with the brains of a comrade—was it Sergeant Houghton?—on a dusty road in southern Maryland and, while a volley of musket shots sought the Rebel skirmisher in the trees beside the road, had collapsed against Otto, weeping hysterically. They hadn’t killed the Johnny, either.
    Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott . . .
    L ATER SHE STOOD beside him, dry-eyed, the grief leached out of her. All that remained now was the graveyard. She’d weather that. Then Otto would go down to the bank and speak with Herr Sauerweiz. He would gladly accept Otto’s money in payment of the mortgage. Why, he must have dozens of farms on his hands by now, what use would another be to him? Otto would make some kind of arrangement regarding the farm with Herr Wieland. He was an honest man, Herr Wieland, and he knew as well that if he cheated the Dousmanns, Otto would simply return and thrash their money out of him. There were advantages to a soldierly reputation. When those matters were out of the way, along with her packing, Otto and Jenny could depart for Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Topeka, and the Great West. Otto had said that the buffalo herds should be moving by now. There were “shaggies” to slaughter, money to be made, a whole new direction to her life. She had known her brother could not refuse her, no matter how grimly he described the West. For the first time in days she felt hopeful again.
    T WO DAYS LATER they were on a train. Jenny sat in the swaying car, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, jaw set, eyes hard, so firm in her childish convictions, Otto thought—so clean and sure in her crisply starched shirtwaist, her neatly pleated wool skirt, her pert little cap with a stuffed bobolink perched on top. The true West would be a rude awakening.
    They had left Chicago that morning and now the train was rolling through rich Illinois farmland. Cow corn stood tall in the fields, hardening off for the silos, pumpkins bright between the rows. Big red slate-roofed