Black Hills (9781101559116) (6 page)

“Oh, pipe down,” he called at the birds, and sailed a rock at them while on the way to the barn with the milk pails. He didn't really want to hit one; he just wanted them to shut up. He was in no mood for their racket.

As hard as he knew it was going to be to return to the potato field, there were potatoes that would rot in the sun if he didn't get them picked. He had no time to lie around and feel sorry for himself. After a breakfast he ate little of, he called in the team and hitched up the wagon; the potato bags Becky, his mother, and himself had already filled were waiting to be brought in, and the remaining spuds, as his pa had called them, needed to be picked.

Within the hour, he was joined in the field by Mrs. Schwartz and the redheaded girl. They didn't say a word. They just began picking. When Cormac reached the end of a row and turned to start down the next, there they were: inexperienced and fumbling, but putting their backs into it. Cormac, his mother, and Becky had had the field mostly done, and now, with the help of Mrs. Schwartz and Lainey Nayle, all of the potatoes were in by suppertime with enough time left to do the evening chores: milk the cows, and feed the pigs and chickens. The corn and flax would be needin' to be harvested in another week or so. There was a lot of work needin' to be done . . . soon. Cormac gladly accepted when they offered to stay and help him get in the crops.

“I been doing some thinkin',” Cormac told the Schwartzes and Lainey a couple of weeks later. “Ole man winter's fixin' to come blowin' in here 'fore long, and when he sets his mind to it, he can get right ornery. Now, the way I see it, Mr. Schwartz needs a place to be still for a while, and you folks got no place to live. This is a good, paying farm, but I can't work it by myself if I work thirty hours a day. Pa did a right good job of layin' it out, and the buildings are strong and built to last. Why don't you just stay on here? If it doesn't work out, you can pack up and move on. If I decide to move on, I'll sell it to you.

The farm had been laid out in an efficient and well-ordered manner with attention also having been given to its appearance. It was a good-looking farm. The buildings were indeed built to last and the crops located for easy rotation to leave one section to go to grass every year. When it was plowed under in the fall, it would rot and the soil would be rich and rested for spring planting. His pa always plowed all of the fields deep every fall to let more of the melting snow and spring rains soak down into the subsoil. It was an excellent piece of land and an excellent offer for the Schwartzes.

Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz didn't hesitate. They looked at each other briefly and Mr. Schwartz offered his handshake. Cormac accepted it and an amiable working relationship was created on the spot. Lainey Nayle, on the other hand, was a different story. She spoke to Cormac only when necessary and even then with thinly concealed hostility.

Mr. Schwartz mended slowly. The first week, he remained weak, and though he insisted on taking care of all of his own personal needs, Mrs. Schwartz constantly hovered close by. Cormac noticed that whenever she was away, Lainey always seemed to find something near Mr. Schwartz that needed doing. The third week saw him starting to come out of it and progressing rapidly after that point; first helping with light chores and housework as soon as he could walk, then, as his strength returned, moving outside to more strenuous tasks.

His first name was Herman, but it didn't feel right for Cormac to use it. John and Amanda Lynch's training to respect his elders ran deep; to him they would always be Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz. There was no way of knowing what had made Mr. Schwartz so weak and poorly. He had been stomach sick, very hot, and had what a lady doctor they had met on the trail called dyspepsia. The doctor had given Mr. Schwartz some medicine that eased his stomach pains while he waited for it to go away, if it ever did. Mrs. Schwartz believed a lesser man would have probably died. Cormac Lynch was to learn that most of the people coming over from the “old country” were workers.

Herman Schwartz was not as big as John Lynch had been, but he could get a bunch of work done before the sun went down of a night. By the end of week four, he had regained his full strength and proved to be a strong and willing worker, as was Lainey, in spite of her stubborn attitude toward Cormac.

On the morning after the Schwartzes had agreed to stay, Cormac slipped out of the door with the lantern to do morning chores just before sunrise as he had so many times with his pa. By the time he reached the barn, he realized Lainey was following along behind.

He stopped walking. “Good morning,” he said, surprised.

“Morning,” she responded in a dull, matter-of-fact tone. “Don't let me slow you down,” she told him while motioning with her hand in a dismissing manner for him to continue. “I just want to see what you are doing.”

With a shoulder shrug, Cormac filled a bucket up with grain and spread it around the ground near the chicken coop repeating, “Here chick, chick, chick. Here chick, chick, chick,” as he did so. After filling their shallow water trough, he threw a couple of buckets of corn on the cob into the pigpen. “Here you go, guys. Here's breakfast. Come and get it,” he told them. Then he added several deep and guttural
oiyeenk, oiyeenk, oiyeenk
s. He finished that chore by emptying another bucket of corn into the sty and two five-gallon buckets of milk into their trough.

Looking at Lainey, he told her, “Be careful if you get around this building. It's called the pigsty. It's for them to get inside during the winter or whenever they feel like it. Right now there is a new mama pig in there with three suckling shoats, and she's right cantankerous. She'll know I'm no threat to her piglets, but she doesn't know you yet. She'll come after you in a hurry.”

The last chore was to sit on one of the one-legged milking stools and milk their three cows. With their own two feet on the floor, the one leg of the milk stools made a secure tripod place to sit. Two of the cows were black-and-white Holsteins and one a brown Jersey but all were plentiful givers and filled several one-gallon pails that would then be emptied into the two-handled milk can. Four cats and a couple of kittens materialized from out of nowhere to sit near the edge of the lantern light to meow over and over. “Good morning, cats,” he said to them cheerfully. “Who's first?” They all yowled some more. Cormac turned a teat in their direction and covered their faces with fresh milk, which quieted them long enough to clean themselves with their paws and cry for more. Out of the corner of his eye, Cormac could see Lainey smile.

While milking the Jersey last and glancing at Lainey, he told her, “If you learn to milk, be careful that this one doesn't kick over the . . .” His intended statement was demonstrated by a swift forward kick from the cow's strong hind leg that sent his milk pail flip-flopping across the dirt floor, splashing milk in every direction.

“Damn,” he said simply as six balls of furry felines scampered happily to lap up as much of the spill as they could before it soaked into the ground.

For the first time Cormac heard Lainey's laugh. It was a nice sound.

The next morning, Cormac was surprised to find the lantern not hanging on it's hook or visible anywhere nearby. It was more surprising to step outside and hear Lainey calling, “Here chicky, chicky, chickys. Time for breakfast. Here chicky, chicky, chickys.”

He stopped when he had rounded the corner of the house enough to see her feeding the chickens and could see the prepared buckets of corn waiting by the pigpen. He took and exhaled a deep breath while shaking his head as he had seen his pa do many times, and as he had heard his pa say many times, “I will be damned. I'll never understand the female of the species.”

He had one cow milked and was working on the second when Lainey grabbed a milk stool and sat down by the last Holstein.

Cormac listened in silence as she grunted, sighed, and made frustrated sounds in general until finally she had to talk to him. Disgustedly she asked, “How do you make these darn things work?”

Smiling to himself, he paused to enjoy the moment before answering. “Squeeze your fingers closed one at a time from the top down in order. It forces the milk out the bottom. Try it a few times and you'll get the hang of it.”

A few minutes later, he smiled again when he heard her happy yelp immediately following the clear sound of a milk-squirt hitting the bottom of an empty pail.

They finished milking and settled the lidded milk storage cans into the tank of continually flowing cold artesian well in the special area his pa had made just for such a purpose before going in for the breakfast they knew was waiting: bacon, eggs, flapjacks in gravy or molasses, and lots of coffee. A meal prepared by Mrs. Schwartz to last hard-working people until dinnertime.

Their accent, as Cormac had previously noted and which Mrs. Schwartz now explained, was from Germany. Lainey, it turned out, was from Ireland, which explained why she spoke differently, and why her last name was Nayle instead of Schwartz.

“No, I do not have an accent,” she told Cormac nastily one day. “
You
do.” She described the soft manner in which she spoke as speaking with an Irish lilt.

After supper of an evening was the best time for them to talk, and it was explained to Cormac by Mrs. Schwartz during one such conversation that during a sudden severe ocean storm on the boat trip over, Lainey's parents, Connor and Jasmine Nayle, had been accidentally knocked overboard by something called a boom that had been poorly tied. She had no other family, and for some unknown reasons, although the Schwartzes wanted and were impatient to have children, it was not meant to be. As soon as they arrived in America, they eagerly adopted her and began thinking of her as their own and they as her parents. Lainey, not speaking to Cormac unless necessary, as was her habit, remained silent.

In a distressing and repeating dream, Cormac had wandered, unsuccessfully searching for his family's graves. In reality, he had visited their burial site and talked to them many times, but in his dream, he could not locate them: their graves were unmarked. He would fix that. With time on his hands during a three-day rainstorm, Cormac worked in the barn and cut three crosses. With his pa's big knife to do the carving, one of his mother's books to show him appropriate letters, and Becky's favorite pencil to lay them out, he had painstakingly carved each letter with care.

Finishing Becky's last, he brushed off the final woodchips and leaned the crosses side by side against the wall of the barn while he backed away to look at his handiwork. Closing his eyes, he pictured in detail each member of his family in turn, along with the laughter and fun they had shared, as clearly in his mind as looking at a photograph. He remembered birthdays and Christmases and his mother's kisses, baked pies and taters and gravy, walking to the fields with his father in the early-morning sun, sitting out a sudden thunder shower under their tree, and laying in the grass looking up at a night full of stars with Becky beside him . . . and his mother's kisses.

Opening his eyes, he found Lainey quietly standing beside him, looking at the crosses with tears streaming down her cheeks. For a long moment, they looked silently into each other's eyes, sharing their pain. She, too, had lost her family. In silence, she took his hand and they walked out of the barn together.

It occurred to Cormac that while Lainey had also lost both of her parents, she had no place to pay her respects, or to feel close to them. Working secretly, Cormac engraved a fourth cross and placed it with the others. The next day being Sunday, he told the Schwartzes his plan and arranged for them to accompany him and Lainey, and without explaining to Lainey why, took her to their own private graveyard.

The morning sun lit the white crosses under the spreading branches of the tree as Lainey stepped down from the wagon and turned to take Cormac's hand. She disliked him and had no use for him, but she understood all too well the pain he was suffering. Inadequate as it would be, she would give him her support the best she could.