Klassen returned two days later as the sun rose over the Iowa prairie. It was crisp that morning; a cold winter wind blew some light snow out of the northwest: the seasons had begun to change. Klassen bellowed for Smid the moment his rig entered the yard, but when he got no response, he sent his family to the house carrying their own bags. He leaped from the wagon and ran to the barn, incensed at the tardiness of his hired man. He jerked the iron latch and swung open the barn door, letting it fly from his hands. The barn shook as the door hit the wall with a violent slap.
"Smid!" he yelled again. But there was no reply.
He broke out of the barn, slamming the door behind him, and nearly ran to the shed. It was empty, except for nine purpled corpses suspended, still as death, from the rafter, and nine matching silhouettes etched against the wall by the flickering lantern.
He rushed back out, yelling as though his fury could compel obedience, but Smid was nowhere on the homestead.
He found him near the river, lying on his side with his feet planted in the wild oats on the bank. He seemed to blend into the grass, for his hair was sugared by the frost, and his face and clothes were layered with a thin, white crust of early winter snow. There was no sign of movement around him.
Klassen's gun lay at his side, and there was a hole the size of a pea in his right temple.
Evert Klassen picked up his pistol and swept off the frost and snow. He straightened up and stepped back to the river bank. The forked stick stood upright in the middle of the wild oats, messing the yellow shafts. The trap was sprung, its upright jaws harmless in the mud just beyond the flow of the river.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
There were enough tracks in the snow of the story to allow the reader to imagine the ending. Fifty years ago, I was already beginning to understand that there's always a game in a story, a match between reader and writer: if the reader knows where is a story is going before he or she should, the writer loses--and, often enough, the reader shuts the cover. Great writers claim an ending should not be a total surprise, unexpected maybe, but still satisfying, but never unearned.
My dad told me a story long ago about two women in our church, my boyhood church, who lived on different stories in the same house. They were old and had never driven a car; they needed rides to church.
Yes, there's a catch here. They were and had been from different social classes in Holland. One of them knew herself to be of more significant status than the other, an ordinary farm wife. Dad visited both of them, introduced the idea of their coming together with one driver on Sunday mornings. But the upper-class woman, Mrs. Berghacker, was shocked, dumbfounded. It had never occurred to her that she might share anything with someone of Mrs. Veldboom's caste. "But what would I say to her?" she asked my dad, as if the two Dutch women in fact spoke a wholly different language.
That little anecdote stuck with me, not as criticism of Mrs. Berghacker, but as an artifact of the whole immigration experience and the kind of adjustments required by a new society. That story is part of the thematic foundation of "The Trapper."
Tomorrow, I'll drop in the story which birthed Adriaan's sad story.
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