Some critics consider the geographically grounded novel passé, an outmoded form of expression no longer suited to the atomized, urbanized, globalized reader. And yet publishers still publish such narratives. And readers still love to read such stories.
The Horseman’s Graves is such a work. It follows the 2003 publication of Jacqueline Baker’s story collection, A Hard Witching, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction. The Horseman’s Graves is a conventional realistic novel in that its setting and plot are every bit as important as its characters. In fact, setting often shapes much of what happens in its characters’ lives. And it is also what literary critics call a “linear novel” in that the story moves sedately forward without discontinuous narration or alarming leaps through time.
And what a fine novel this is: it reveals a young author wonderfully in control of her voice and her material, who knows her characters’ foibles and their strengths and has at her fingertips their life-giving particulars. The Horseman’s Graves is a bewitching, satisfying read.
Baker writes about Saskatchewan, where I was raised, but I would love this book equally if it were set in New Brunswick or Alberta. Once you have finished The Horseman’s Graves, you cannot imagine it being set anywhere else. And that is because Baker has so effectively rendered a particular place and people. Consider this incredible sentence, surely a tour de force of both description and punctuation:
Then it was almost September, and the land had grown golden, crunched dryly beneath their boots, and the days were shorter and Lathias became busy with the late harvest, leaving the house before sunup, returning at dusk, or sometimes after, when he would wash hastily by that long sliver of light at the western horizon, rubbing his hands and face and neck under the pump in the yard, half asleep before he had even climbed the ladder to the loft, awake again before he was aware he had slept, dreaming what he saw during waking hours—the endless swaths, the hot golden rush of grain, the suffocating, impermeable bell of sky burned white—until one day simply bled into the next and the moon rose hugely each night, red and swollen with the dust of the fields and the days red also and everything was so hot and dry that fires began to flare up at the Sand Hills, where the brush was thickest, but without any recognizable cause, it seemed and the men would ride watch-parties out though they could hardly be spared from the fields.
Baker’s setting is the sere Sand Hills farmland on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, the land of trouble and hope in the region known as Palliser’s Triangle. Her characters are people anyone raised on the Canadian prairies, perhaps anyone raised in a rural community, will recognize at once and remember always. She imagines her way into a German community where the promise of a new life contends with the values and strictures of the Old World incompletely left behind. Come to think of it, anyone who has migrated, moved his or her life from one country to another, will recognize these characters also by their strange meld of adaptability and intransigence.
Although the events of Baker’s narrative begin in 1909, they are oddly timeless, as are the family conflicts she documents. The newcomers to the “haunted” hills believe they are travelling toward “life not death,” in the “big clean dome of pure sky. Infinite, unfettered space. A new start.” Yes, the space may be unfettered, but of course baggage is always more than physical and sometimes people carry burdens of myth and psychology that generate their own weight.
Baker sets up what might be a cliché if orchestrated by a lesser writer: the age-old feud between neighbours, in this case the Krausses and the Schoffs, that continues down generations. The Krauss patriarch, never known as Gustav but always called Old Krauss, is what my relatives would call “a mean old bugger.” He is equally cruel to wife, children and dog. He picks the worst land possible, even though there is better to be had. He revels in being miserable. And his legacy lives on in his rag-tag children.
“Mean as crossed rattlers, those Krausses,” that’s what people said about them.
“Mean in the old country, mean over here.” “That’s how meanness is.”
“Can’t shake that kind of thing out of the blood,” was what they said.
That sample of dialogue from the second page of Baker’s novel encapsulates the third strength of The Horseman’s Graves, its distinct and powerful voice.
As the Krauss clan is feckless and pinched, so is the Schoff family, led by the God-fearing Pius Schoff, its opposite. The Schoffs are honest, hard working, built to succeed in their new place. And, of course, therein lies the revenge narrative’s dynamic. “May God forgive me,” [Pius] would say, shaking his head, “but I hope that son of a bitch rots in hell.” In the end, only one Krauss, Leo, remains on the land; left next door is Pius’s eldest son, Stolanus, and his wife, Helen, who have their own tragedy—an only child injured in a farm accident—to preoccupy them. With the Schoffs lives their hired hand, a Métis man named Lathias, the unofficial nurse for the boy, who recovers from his near-fatal accident but is grotesquely scarred, regarded by the neighbours as “touched.”
And so, when Lathias was not working, and sometimes even when he was, the boy was almost always with him. He followed Lathias around like a little lost puppy, that is what people, the kinder ones, said.
“Ach,” they said, as they had once said of Leo and Cecilia Krauss,“even a crooked pot has got a lid, not?”
The others: “Tell me, what does a man his age want with a boy, and a boy like him? What does that halfbreed think he’s doing?”
What Lathias is doing, of course, is both innocent and powerful: he is caring for the boy, nurturing him with his stories about his own people, the land they understood so well. His compelling tales about the horseman’s graves become a crucial meeting point within the novel. There are several mysteries at the heart of The Horseman’s Graves, and to reveal them here would be a disservice to potential readers. Let me say only that there is a girl named Elisabeth Brechert, who, like the boy, comes back from the dead, and with whom the boy has a special bond. You will have noticed that I have not named the boy. Baker does not either, not once throughout her novel, and her epilogue tells you why. I will not.
A sad novel? Yes, sad and magnificent, and mystical and sweeping and oh, so true, in the way only good fiction can be. Authentic, that is the word. Jacqueline Baker is an authentic writer, and this novel is genuine, a gem to be looked at in a variety of lights and moods.
Lynne Van Luven is the editor of the anthology Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids (Touchwood, 2006). She teaches at the University of Victoria.
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