Home was something that should compass about you like the wind, Gretta thought—you shouldn’t have to think about it. And you certainly shouldn’t have to build it out of nothing at all, with only love and your bare hands, the way she’d had to do.
Today, though, for all its hard-won familiarity, Sloan’s Crossing was strange and cold, the air so thin she found herself taking big lungfuls of it to ward off lightheadedness. She walked with her satchel down Railroad Avenue, feeling more alone than she had on the afternoon her boat landed in New York and she found no one waiting to meet her in that city of peculiar smells and odd-sounding talk—though at least then she’d known herself for a stranger and hadn’t been reminded by every tree and lamppost of those she’d lost, or in that case, left behind. For the past two days, in St. Paul and in Minneapolis, she had followed after leads, none of them fruitful. At the office of the Grand Army of the Republic she’d found her husband’s name, or former name, and verified his part in the Indian campaigns and his service with Custer’s Seventh. She’d also found the name of Ulysses’s friend and correspondent, Jim Powers, only to learn the man had been dead for a year, and also several other names, including one she managed to track down, an Indian who had served in Minnesota’s Ninth during the Great Rebellion and lived in a rowhouse on Washington Avenue, above the flour mills. He had answered her questions patiently but had no memory of Ulysses. When Gretta described the beaded tobacco pouch, he’d shaken his head and called into the backroom for his wife, who came out and gently escorted Gretta from their home.
The first person she saw after leaving the depot was Mrs. Rolfe, the pastor’s wife, walking with an arm around her daughter’s shoulder. Gretta slowed her pace to greet her friend, whose eyes brightened before bending away.
“Afternoon,” Gretta said.
The pastor’s wife pulled her daughter close and glided on by. Gretta turned to watch their progress down the boardwalk, humiliated though not surprised, the snubbing a corroboration of the shame that had been growing inside her through the night and morning as the train carried her here. At the pharmacy she stopped for ointment. Two women stood just inside the door, heads bent close together, the lawyer’s wife, whom Gretta knew only by way of saying hello in the street, and Emma Carlsen, the mother of Danny’s friend Peter.
“Hello,” Gretta said.
The two women glanced at one another, then down at the floor.
“I’ve been gone,” Gretta added.
“So we’ve heard.” This from Emma, who managed a half smile.
The lawyer’s wife muttered something about a pie to bake and headed out the door. Emma hurried to catch up with her.
The druggist prepared the ointment and accepted the fifty-cent payment, cordial as always, though Gretta was aware of his eyes regarding her differently than before, moving to her neck and then farther down as he asked if there was anything else he could do. He was short and slight with a closely trimmed mustache, a man known for his prudent way with money. Evenings, he drove his wife about town in a surrey with flowered draperies.
The way home wasn’t long, five blocks, and Gretta walked fast, hoping to get there before she saw anyone else she knew. As she rounded the last corner, something caused her to stop mid-stride. In front of their house, in the place beneath their kitchen window where she always kept a large urn of geraniums, there was nothing, only a bare circle in the grass. The welcome sign above the door that Ulysses had fashioned from a cedar shingle was gone. She hurried forward. Bolted to the doorframe was a new hasp, and hanging from it an iron padlock of the sort Ulysses had clamped onto the trunks they’d shipped from St. Paul after the wedding. Gretta felt the blood drain from her face and reached out to steady herself, laying the flat of her hand against the door. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she didn’t allow them to come. For a few moments she stood there, gathering her strength, then she turned on her heel and headed straight back downtown, to Fogarty’s office at the rooming house, and knocked on the door.
He opened immediately, as if expecting her, but feigned astonishment all the same, lifting a hand to his mouth. She couldn’t help but notice his bare feet, which were pale, glossy, and purple-veined, like tulip bulbs.
“Come in, come in,” he said, his hand spinning like a little wheel.
She stood in place, arms crossed in front of herself. “Are you going to unlock my door for me?”
“Your door?”
“My door, yes.”
“My door, you mean to say. And of course I will, as soon as I receive my overdue payment. And additionally, the five dollars you stole from me.”
“You gave me the money of your own free will.”
He laughed. “I did?”
“You said it was mine if I helped you find your keys.”
“But we didn’t find them, did we. I had to hire a locksmith and pay him a fortune, in case you’re interested. And furthermore, I thought we had an agreement about the rent. Unless my memory fails me, your intention was to go and fetch your errant husband, the assumption being that he would come back with you and present me with said payment.”
She watched him. He rubbed a finger on his lips, thoughtfully, and blinked at her.
He drew a handkerchief, white and neatly pressed, from the inner pocket of his jacket and offered it to her. “You’re perspiring,” he said.
“I would like to able to go home, Mr. Fogarty.”
He returned the handkerchief to his jacket. “It’s not your home, Mrs. Pope. It’s not even your house. And I’m not sure what you’d gain from going inside, since your possessions aren’t there. I’ve had them removed.”
“I’ll call Mr. David,” Gretta said, although her spirits were flagging. Lionel David was the local sheriff, whose paycheck came from the town council, on which Mead Fogarty sat.
“Please do. Tell him that you haven’t kept up on the note your husband signed. And tell him also, for me, that it’s not my inclination to store your possessions free of charge. Best not mention the five dollars you stole, however—he may not have heard about that yet.”
“Where is everything?” Gretta said.
“Oh, it’s quite safe. No cause for worry. I moved it all into the building right back there.” He aimed a thumb behind himself. “That old hog shed in the alley. It’s dry and locked up tight. You may collect your things now, if you would like to. I’ll open it up for you. I can even find someone to help you move it. Then again, if you’re still making arrangements and need only a few items to tide you over, that’s fine too. You see, I’ve never been one to hold grudges. And certainly not against you.”
Gretta’s impulse was to say, Yes, open it, just to exercise a bit of control, but the naked bulge of Fogarty’s eyes and the appearance of his bright tongue at the corner of his mouth caused her to change her mind. She turned and walked down the hallway, not stopping at the sound of his voice.
“Please don’t underestimate the appeal you hold for me,” he said to her back. “I am not a handsome man, of course, but I can offer you a life. Which is more than you have at the moment.”
She continued down the hall and out the door and back into the street, where the shadows were stretching east and the air was cool on her face. She had a mind to return to her house and break a window to get inside where she might feel safe, at least for a while. Then the knot in her stomach bent her forward to expel the ham sandwich she’d eaten on the train—except it wouldn’t come up. Nothing would, although a jabbing pain in her jawbone brought a rush of saliva. Once again she remembered getting off the boat in New York all those years ago and listening to the nonsense of languages as she walked the harbor district, waiting for the man her aunt and uncle had promised would be there to meet her. By the time he finally arrived, it was nearly dark, and she had been approached by two rough boys who told her they’d be glad to help her find a place for the night. One of them she still saw in her dreams, his face like the blade of an ax, his eyes eating her up. A stale, rotten smell clung to him, and he talked with his hands, which looked heavy and purposeful, as if they were meant for prying into and breaking things, each finger a separate threat. She tried to get free of the boys, pretending to know where she was going, stepping aside when they blocked her path, and explaining that she had a friend on the way, but it was only when her uncle’s cousin arrived and showed them his pistol that they finally turned and drifted off in the dark.
Now, though, there was no one to save her, no one to go to for help, no one, it seemed, even willing to speak with her in the place she had lived for nearly seventeen years. It was as if she had left Sloan’s Crossing as Gretta Pope and returned as somebody else. When she tried to think of who in town was least in Fogarty’s debt, Mrs. Peterson came to mind, the dressmaker, a woman who had managed to hold her own among the merchants on Main Street, in part because of the mystery surrounding her husband. Depending on who you listened to, the man was serving time in federal prison, acting in Broadway plays, or piloting a steamship on the Missouri—though people also said he was an invention useful for keeping interested men at arm’s length. Several years ago Mrs. Peterson had donated money to the courthouse for a mural commemorating General Stephen Sloan, the town’s founder. She was neither a friend nor a peer, it was true, but nonetheless she often hired Gretta for tailoring and hemming jobs. Maybe she would see the similarity in their plights? Gretta approached Mrs. Peterson’s Main Street shop and climbed the stairs to the apartment above it.
“I need to see you,” Gretta called, after knocking.
The latch twisted and the door swung in, the woman standing tall and well-arranged in a pleated skirt and tailored jacket, hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her face was large, its individual features—nose, mouth, eyes, and cheeks—generous and symmetrical.
“I suppose you’re entitled to your side of the story,” she said.
“It would help if I knew what the story was.”
“Spare me your self-righteousness. You bear some responsibility too.”
Gretta summoned her courage. “Responsibility for what? You’d think I’m a criminal.”
“Here.” Mrs. Peterson moved Gretta brusquely toward a hard chair at the kitchen table and then took one across from her. She sat straight, her mouth severe. She said, “With a man like Fogarty, it’s a grave mistake to put yourself in the position of having to tell him no, and then tell him no. As I suspect you did. Don’t you understand that?”
Gretta resented the woman’s tone.
“He’s got you in his vest pocket, to put it tactfully.”
“What has he been saying?”
“That you offered yourself to him. That you got him drunk, and that before he woke up you had taken his money and fled. He’s ashamed, of course—but in a way that lays all the guilt on you. He’s getting it both ways, can’t you see? He’s taken your honor and then doubled his pleasure by confessing himself to a town flattered to be given the privilege of forgiving him. And there’s not one thing you can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it, for that matter—he owns half the buildings on this street, including the ones on either side of mine. He means to drive you out of town, Gretta. Or else into his arms.”
“I did nothing wrong,” Gretta said.
Mrs. Peterson rolled her eyes then looked away, as if the conversation were over. “You’ve let Mead Fogarty’s manhood become the most interesting subject in town, and that’s a fine thing for any man, as long as he’s the one telling the story.”
Gretta put her hands on both sides of her head as if to keep her brain from exploding. “Where do I go?” she asked. “What do I do?”
Mrs. Peterson smoothed her dress against her thighs. She lifted her nose and sniffed, as if detecting something unpleasant in the air. When she stood from the table, Gretta stood too, automatically, and then allowed herself to be led to the door and dismissed.
Numbly, bag slung from her shoulder and valise at her side, she walked down the stairs and outside, where the sun was dropping into a bank of orange and purple clouds, pulling with it any warmth it may have lent the day. A shiver passed from the top of her neck to the backs of her knees. With two dollars left in her purse and not a single blood relative in all the North American continent—aside from her own two sons, whose whereabouts were unknown to her—she walked toward the town’s least savory hotel, the one favored by railmen and seasonal farm workers. Last year a man had been murdered there, killed for his new suit of clothes by a drifter who was then arrested at the depot, dressed in those clothes. Gretta wasn’t thinking about that crime, though. She thought only of a room with four walls to block the view she presented to the town, a room where she could find a way to collect her wits and plan the next hours of the life Mead Fogarty said she didn’t have.
But then at the alley beside the newspaper office, she caught a hint of tobacco in the air, and her eyes fell on the yellow window of a converted rail car tucked away between the photography studio and bookkeeping office. It was the home of Two Blood and his wife, Agnes, who had claimed the silver Pullman after the big derailment of seventy-eight and moved it to this small lot sold to them by Fogarty. He’d considered the land unbuildable on account of its dampness. In fact, there was a natural spring here that Two Blood had tapped with a pipe, and now he sold water to residents of the town’s east side, where all the wells tasted like rotten eggs.
“Ho,” Two Blood said, appearing in his doorway. He had to stoop in order to fit beneath the metal casing. Beside him, under his raised arm, his wife’s face came into view, unlined and fresh despite her long white hair. Agnes had attended Eli’s birth and would have helped with Danny’s as well, if he hadn’t decided to show up early that day on Mills Island. Until the arrival of Dr. Harris from Minneapolis, Agnes had been the town midwife, requiring only tobacco and eggs as payment. She was known for her gentle confidence and for the balm she made that smelled like rancid cheese but worked like nothing else to smooth the way. Dr. Harris had rough hands and made a habit of using steel forceps.
“I thought we might see you,” Two Blood said.
Agnes stepped out from behind him. “He keeps asking me,” she said, “‘where has that Pope woman taken herself?’”
Gretta was unable to muster a smile for them, but the nervous pain in her stomach was already fading.
“You didn’t find your men,” Two Blood said.
She dropped her satchel to the ground and let her tired arms hang. Two Blood leaned over and picked it up, then ducked through his doorway. Agnes nodded at Gretta to follow him. The long, single room was like a cave, but dry and warm nonetheless with a slow fire burning in the barrel stove. Agnes sat Gretta at their tiny kitchen table, and Two Blood sat down across from her. He turned sideways to face the fire.
“I don’t want to be a bother,” Gretta said.
With a flip of her hand, Agnes shooed away the words. “We saw him moving your things,” she said.
“Bastard,” Two Blood muttered.
Gretta didn’t allow herself to make a sound, but sitting at their table her shoulders shook and her tears streamed as Agnes and Two Blood looked down at their hands. When she was done crying, Agnes fried slabs of side pork then mixed a bowl of thick cornmeal batter and set it sizzling in the pork fat. She put it out on plates, and then watched as Gretta ate like she hadn’t eaten since Ulysses left in July, leaning into it and drinking cup after cup of the cold spring water that Two Blood replenished from a large brown crock in the corner.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said when she’d finished.
Two Blood looked at her, chewing his food. “Where did you go off to?”
She explained about seeing her husband’s sister in St. Paul but said nothing about the discoveries she made, the secrets he’d kept for so long about the Seventh Cavalry and his name change, revelations so personal she couldn’t imagine putting them into words. The humiliation would be too much to bear. And what would Two Blood and Agnes think of her if they knew Ulysses had been in Custer’s regiment?
Agnes, who hadn’t eaten yet, sat down with her own plate of food. She said, “He believes Ulysses went that way,” and pointed a finger at the west wall.
“Why?” Gretta asked him. “Why do you think that?”
Two Blood filled his pipe and went over to the stove where he took a long twig and poked it in the coals and used it to light up before coming back and sitting down again. “He and I smoked together sometimes, in my shop. He liked to ask questions about when I was young, about hunting the blackhorns and stealing horses from the Crows. He wanted to hear about the wars I knew and what I remembered.”
“Please, if you know where he went—”
He shook his head.
“Did he ever talk about his own wars?” she asked.
Two Blood drew on the pipe and blew out a long stream with its sharp, burnt-apple scent. “No,” he said.
Gretta thought of how little her pride was worth—how little it mattered what anybody might think about her husband and his secrets. And considering how people in this town treated Indians, weren’t Agnes and Two Blood likely able to bear most any injury? She summoned her courage and said, “In St. Paul I learned from his sister that he served out west”—she looked at Agnes then turned to her husband—“with the Seventh Cavalry.”
Agnes glanced over, but Two Blood only lowered his pipe to the table and scratched his long nose. In the distance, a train whistle heralded the arrival of an eastbound.
“I knew about his time in the Union Army, during the Rebellion,” Gretta continued. “But now I learn that he signed up again after the war and stayed till sixty-nine. I met him later in the year he mustered out, and he never told me anything about it. He led me to think he’d been out of the service for years.”
“Sixty-nine?” Two Blood asked, his eyes on her.
“That’s right.”
He looked off through the small window, and doing likewise Gretta could see the quarter-moon balanced on the very tip of the Our Savior’s steeple. Agnes moved to the corner behind the stove and laid out a heavy robe and on top of this a gray wool blanket. “You can lie here tonight,” she said to Gretta. “You’ll stay warm.”
But Gretta wasn’t ready to sleep, not even close. She wasn’t the least bit tired, and had a feeling Two Blood might have something more to say. Leaning toward him across the table, she asked, “Didn’t he talk about himself at all? Didn’t he tell you anything about what’s happened over the last year? About losing his contracts? Losing his job at the depot? Anything?”
The old man seemed not to hear Gretta’s voice. In the silence she listened to his breathing, and to the soft whistling in his nose every time he exhaled. His pipe had gone cold and lay untouched on the table. Then he turned to her, his eyes as dark as rifle holes. “My father died when I was small,” he said, “but I had two uncles, both good men. They taught me what I needed to learn. My mother’s brother, he was a man of words. He told me where we came from, and about the land. He told me about the birds and animals, the weather. He knew how to fight also. He had stories about raids into Crow country and the times he had counted coup. He liked to show his scars, could talk all night about each one. Later, though, after the battles, when they started moving us to the reservations, he understood what was happening and he urged everybody to save themselves, make the change. He said, ‘Put down your guns.’”
Two Blood lifted a hand in front of his face and held it there, as if to divide his head in half, an eye on either side as he stared at Gretta. “Do you hear me?” he asked. When she nodded, he lowered his hand to the table.
“Now my father’s brother, he was different. He wasn’t one to say things, but showed me how to ride and shoot, and how to stay warm in the cold. And when they tried to make him farm the land, he laughed and rode away—north, over the medicine line. He wouldn’t let his shadow fall anyplace near the land they pushed us onto. He was killed at Slim Buttes, along with American Horse. I never heard this uncle talk about battles or raids. I would not call him a man of war. But you see, he wasn’t able to live in two worlds, because he was all one thing. That might be the kind of man your husband is.”
Two Blood reached for his pipe and got up from his chair. Agnes called out to Gretta from the darkness. “There’s a bowl of water on the cupboard to wash. Privy is out back, up against the fence. The door sticks. You have to push your shoulder into it.”
“Thank you,” Gretta said.
“Get some rest now,” Agnes said. “You need it.”
Gretta didn’t sleep, though, not for hours. It was comfortable and warm, lying on the heavy, furred robe and wrapped in the wool blanket, but her mind was working so hard that her brain hurt. Two Blood might well be right about her husband—that he was all one thing. But knowing that didn’t tell her where he was. The old man might be right, too, about Ulysses going west. But how was she supposed to find him out there? Her comprehension of that territority was vague, mountains and hard-flowing rivers and vast deserts of buffalo grass and sagebrush, a brown and dull-green world with cruel, empty skies. Gretta had never traveled west of Fargo, which was set down in a land so flat and treeless that the first settlers built their homes out of sod. But now she had to imagine going off into the emptiness beyond it, far beyond it, and going alone—although if she couldn’t find some kind of evidence that pointed to where he’d gone to, what was the use in even starting out?
At first it had been hard not to think he’d gone to another woman. That would explain why he left without telling her. And when she’d set out for St. Paul three days ago, she did so bearing the dead feeling in her stomach that she was about to discover a shameful truth. Of course she might still have to swallow that pill, but the nature of her dread had changed in the past few days, shifting inside of her, moving higher somehow, and now it seemed to be centered in her lungs and heart instead of in her belly.
Not that it mattered, because when morning came she’d simply have to continue her search. And wherever it took her, even if she came up with nothing, she would have choices to make: how to start life over again, with or without him—and if without him, whether to take advantage of Mead Fogarty’s selfish offer, or do what she’d thought of many times since Ulysses left in July: return to Copenhagen.
What must it be like, she wondered, in the city she’d left at seventeen? How much had changed there? Did her childhood friends still fill their days with talk and with trips to the harbor? Did they still act out their favorite stories in the gardens at Tivoli? Spend their afternoons boating in the canals? Did they ever wish they’d done as she had and gone off to America to start new lives? No doubt they had families of their own by now, husbands and children and houses to keep, their own worries and disappointments, their own regrets. As Gretta slipped finally toward sleep, she thought of how things used to be—recalling her summers there, with the beach at Havnebad brooding in the near distance, she and her mother walking out along its sandy, blue-green shores and swimming in the cool water, naked, on those long evenings when dusk lingered past midnight.