The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout Page B

stopped.
    After that she couldn’t sleep but lay still, the shotgun beside her on the bed and loaded.
    Later, she heard scratching at the wooden door. How could she open it to fire outside without letting them leap through the crack onto her? It was hung on leather hinges. If they jumped at it, two or three of them, the way they did at cattle, might they not tear it off the hinges?
    She had insisted that they bring their bed with headboard and footboard of solid oak, hers and Otto’s, from Illinois. It was their wedding bed. The scratching continued. Partitioned off by a hung blanket, the boys slept behind their parents on a bed of strung rope and poles braced by the sod walls.
    She sprang out of bed, gun in hands, and moving around the bed, putting the headboard between herself and the door like a wall, laid the weapon over the headboard and, stooping, aimed it at the door.
    Wolves were born hunters. They knew someone, something alive was inside the house.
    Suddenly there was a great crash of glass, of the window glass beside the door, and she turned the gun barrel toward the shower of glass and pulled the trigger.
    Inside the house the roar of the weapon was even louder. When her hearing returned, she listened. She couldn’t see the animal. Had she killed it? Wounded it? Or missed it altogether? But the silence was more fearful to her than sound, and after a minute she sank to the floor behind the bed, tore the hung blanket down about her, and began to sob. Later, as light entered by the shattered window, she still sat there, bundled, shaking cold.
    In full morning she roused herself. The wolf that had leaped through the window lay dead at the foot of the bed. It was thin, its ribs could be counted, and its head was bloody. She opened the door and, taking it by its tail, dragged it outside. She went to the stable to feed the stock, and to the outhouse, through heavy snow drifting down under a sky the color of dishwater. They couldn’t be home today, not hauling a wagonload of wood. She would be alone another night.
    Somehow she passed the day. There was no use lighting the stove, not with the open window. She ate nothing. Her right shoulder was sore from the kick of the shotgun. From the trunk she took a packet of letters from her two sisters-in-law in Illinois, received and treasured over the past two years, and read them aloud one by one to hear the sound of a voice. The Petzkes had not had mail since November. There was an old German saying, “ Reden ist Silber, schweigen ist Gold, ” “Speech is silver, silence is gold.” It was not true.
    In the afternoon she made ready. Using some sticks behind the stove, she pegged up a blanket over the window, then stacked two chairs, one atop the other, in front of it. She fed the stock again. It had stopped snowing. As the day darkened, she moved a third chair behind the headboard of the bed, lit the old hussy, placed the boxes of shells on the boys’ bed behind her, easy to reach, then wrapped herself in another blanket and seated herself on the chair, loaded gun across her lap.
    Hedda Petzke waited.
    She had not done enough to save Eva, her baby, sleeping now in a lonely grave beside the Platte. She had not done enough to save Gerda, her four-year-old, laid low last summer by a rattlesnake bite. She had gone on the run at Gerda’s scream by the stable, killed the snake, which was a yard long, with a hoe, carried the child into the house, and run into the fields screaming for Otto. They gave her whiskey, then Otto saddled up and galloped to the Iversons, caught a chicken, galloped back, and together they tore the hen apart and bound the heart over the bite, by the ankle, to pull out the venom. The nearest doctor lived eighteen miles away. All night they gave her whiskey and kept the heart over the bite, but in the morning Gerda died. They buried her near the house. Hedda had lost both her girls. She had failed them. He knew that, too. It was