The Horseman's Graves
By Jacqueline Baker
HarperCollins, 432 pages, $32.95
In The Horseman's Graves, Jacqueline Baker returns to the geography of her first book, A Hard Witching and Other Stories, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, among others, and was a finalist for the Rogers Trust Prize for Fiction. Both are set in southwest Saskatchewan near the Alberta border, the South Saskatchewan River just north and the Great Sand Hills just east.
The novel opens in 1909. The Krausses have rolled in on the tide from the old countries -- Germany, Norway, Poland, Russia -- bringing their bad blood with them. Or that's the story, anyway:
"Mean in the old country, mean over here."
"That's how meanness is."
The bad family, the community black sheep, is a character type Baker uses in her first book, too. Here, fleshed out through time, event, consequence and town gossip, the idea of a family tainted "if not by blood, then by example" is allowed to ripen, suggesting the broader implications of how people are marked by their lives, their histories, where they live. And how others read those marks.
Hard times tend to light a fire under people's interpretive faculties, and in the parish of Knochenfeld, farming land that John Palliser in 1857 famously designated as uninhabitable, things aren't easy. Each immigrant group arrives with preconceptions of the other. Anyone named Krauss is not to be trusted.
Their neighbours, the Schoffs, are a respected family, but they also have a bit of money when others don't, and Helen Schoff is considered prideful and standoffish. So when the little Schoff boy is badly hurt in a farming accident, Helen having already buried one child and miscarried another, people wonder if it's not "a revelation or a prophecy or an accusation, something." The boy is all but ostracized; he represents all the children lost to flu, wells, accidents. He is "death so close to the living."
Lathias, the young Métis hired man at the reins of the wagon that maimed him, is scarred with guilt and becomes his friend and protector. "Even a crooked pot has got a lid, not?" some people say, while others wonder aloud: "What does that half-breed think he's doing?"
Leo Krauss, meanwhile, is the last Krauss left on the farm. The community tolerates him, for the most part, and a few try to look out for him, but even when he strikes a pitiful figure he is also irritating as hell. Some folks detect a whiff of sulphur about him. His pathetic attempts to find a wife result in his being presented to the slightly mentally disabled sister of a neighbour.
Cecilia accepts, and things seem to go okay. They have five children, Cecilia cleans up the house and the yard, and though they're a weird bunch, they seem happy enough. But Cecilia begins to look tired, and then she dies. Presumably like her mother-in-law, who never saw 50, from overwork. This time, Leo goes south for a wife, to the Dakotas, and when he returns he has with him a dull, shamed young woman and her illegitimate daughter -- a strange, beautiful, angry girl with witchy red hair. This girl, Elisabeth, the alien element, is the catalyst for the tragic events that follow.
Though the geographical, cultural and temporal setting of The Horseman's Graves might generate comparisons to early 20th-century practitioners of "prairie realism," Baker displays little of their inclination to romance, nor does she set up the prairie landscape and community to represent oppressive forces to be succumbed to or transcended. Her judicious plotting avoids parable and object lesson, and insists that the story of these people in this place is worth telling for its own sake.
The atmosphere of open-endedness speaks to the heart of the book. The tone it strikes is expansive; when Elisabeth declares that "there are no accidents," when Lathias says that no one ever sees it coming, when neighbours conclude, "That's the way it goes sometimes," we are left with them, trying to make sense of it, believing that all of these things might be true.
The novel is written in a third-person narration that floats among characters. Though omniscient, it's neither wholly transparent nor entirely disinterested. When it threatens to become a little too homespun, Baker's directness and dry wit rescue it. And while a tendency toward subordinate clauses, parenthetical asides and tangents set off by dashes might at times inspire a reader to skim, at other times it works as the personality of the narrative voice. Dialogue is one of Baker's strengths. It's completely natural -- the diction, the expressions, the wry humour. Early in the novel, Helen just imagines what would be said of the meal she's taking out to the men:
"Only one little one at home and she can't even bring a hot meal to the field?"
"Can't even bake a ham, boil some potatoes?"
"What does it take to boil potatoes?"
"That's nothing, I heard Stolanus sometimes does his own cooking."
"No. Not really."
"Yes, really, do you think I would lie about it?"
Authentic, and, more important, well written, it speaks volumes in its spareness. It gestures toward the tremendous silence at the core of all the gossip, all the talk. Years after the Schoffs' dog gets rabies and Lathias shoots it, it occurs to the boy "that no one had ever said anything about that dog, once it was gone. It had troubled him at the time, and it troubled him now. The empty pen, the dog dish gone, and everyone walking around like there had never been a dog there at all."
Lurking in this silence is the suspicion that loss cannot be made sense of -- not by faith, or superstition, or practical ideas of justice. That perhaps it comes down, meanest of all, to chance. And that this, if anything, is what the landscape represents. The task remains to live in it. In The Horseman's Graves, the landscape and its people live vibrantly and memorably.
Karen Solie has just completed her year as writer in residence for the University of New Brunswick. She grew up on a farm near the village of Richmound, Sask., 30-odd kilometres from Burstall, where Jacqueline Baker is from.