“You ought to find a husband,” Frieda had been telling her since 1942. Martin had died in December of forty-one, and Frieda had allowed him eleven months in his grave before she had started in about finding a husband.
Ten years ago Frieda had said, “You’re a young woman, only forty-nine. You should find a husband.” Now she said, “You’re a young woman, only fifty-nine. You should find a husband.” Kate had never given a thought to finding another husband. For thirty years Martin had suited her entirely. She was all married out.
Besides, she enjoyed her life with Bess and Harriet. Hadn’t these been good years, the three of them living together like three peas in a snug pod? This summer was the twilight of that, she supposed.
“Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a husband?” Frieda asked, placing a dish of butter mints and peanuts in front of Kate. “Then we’d be a foursome for cards, you and me and Arnold and your mister. We wouldn’t always have to depend on Marie Wall.”
“My, the butter mints taste fresh. Did you buy them here in town?”
“Nah. We got them in St. Bridget.”
“Anderson’s should carry butter mints or Mather’s or the drugstore. The mints at Truska’s taste like they’ve been around since before the war.”
“The Civil War.” Frieda laughed and went to fetch the tally pad. Returning, she asked, “Where was Bess off to?”
“I don’t know. She was meeting Donna Olson. They might go to the band concert, she said.”
“It wouldn’t hurt her to stay home once in a while and keep you company.”
“But then you might not ask me for cards.”
“She’ll be gone soon. She should spend some time with you now.”
“She’s seventeen. Seventeen doesn’t think that way. Did you when you were that age? Anyway, she’s a good girl. She works hard and she should get out and have fun.”
Frieda was childless, and her opinions about what children should or should not do reflected this. “Where would she be without you?” she asked. “It’s for sure Archer didn’t leave her anything.” Frieda stood beside the bridge table, picking a butter mint from among the peanuts in the candy dish. She glanced sideways at Kate. “Speaking of Archer, Mabel Pickard was tongue-wagging about him at Study Club the other afternoon.”
“In front of you?”
“Nah. I was in the kitchen. She didn’t think I could hear.”
“What was she on about?”
“Archer and the Jessup girl.”
Dismayed, Kate shook her head. “Why now?”
“Some high school girl was sent to Chicago to ‘look after her sick aunt’ this spring, so of course the conversation got around to Archer.”
Things always came back around to Archer.
“Remember the first time we saw him, I was with you?” Frieda asked, sitting down at the table and fussing with the tally pad and pencil, trying to fit the pencil, which was too large, into the loop provided for it on the pad.
Frieda had brought up the subject of Archer at least once a month for ten years. Of course Kate remembered. How would she forget?
“He was a good-looker,” Frieda said. “Everyone on Main Street was gawking, trying to figure out who he was.” She folded her hands together on the bridge table, fingers intertwined. “Such a clean white shirt he was wearing. Mrs. Jessup or the Jessup girl must have washed and ironed it for him.”
It had been a hot night, like tonight, only it was Saturday, and Saturday nights everyone came to town and parked on Main Street. In those days the stores stayed open on Saturday nights so the farmers could do their shopping. Nowadays they didn’t stay open any night.
Kate had looked forward to Saturday nights then in a way that she looked forward to nothing now. Archer had come in thirty-two. That year people didn’t have much to look forward to, but still everyone looked forward to Saturday night.
Even if you didn’t have a dime, you could stand on Main Street and jaw, or sit in your car, if you had one, and watch people parade by. And you’d holler to them if they didn’t see you sitting there; “Nellie, Ivan, here! Here in the car.” And they’d come over and say hello, put a foot up on the running board, lean on the door and see who was with you, tell you what was happening, how the grain was doing and how it would soon be time for threshing.
Anderson’s Candy and Ice Cream, beside the Majestic theater, did a land-office business. And Grandpa Hapgood set up his popcorn wagon down on the corner. Martin always bought the largest-size bag because he knew how Kate enjoyed it. They sat in the car and ate popcorn and talked to their friends.
That car was an old 1911 Model T Ford touring car that had come to Martin from his uncle Ernest, who’d been killed in an Oklahoma oil field accident. The Ford had seen better days when Martin came into it, but, bless his heart, he’d kept it running until 1935.
And Celia, when she was little, sat like a princess in the backseat as if the car were still as grand as it had once been. Or she settled on the curb beside the car with the pennies Martin gave her on Saturday night. With quiet pride and patience she sat arranging them in patterns on the ground, putting them in her pocket, taking them out to play again, saving them until it was time to go home. When the stores were closing and the cars began to load up and leave, Martin would say, “I think it’s time we got home, girls,” and Celia would dash for Anderson’s to buy candy to take home.
As she grew older, Celia met her girlfriends and they promenaded up and down Main Street, looking in Lundeen’s windows, dropping into Mather’s Five and Dime for bobby pins and ribbons, or into Haroldson’s Pharmaceuticals.
The night they first saw Archer, Celia and her chums were sitting on the front fenders of the car giggling and talking about boys. Frieda was in the backseat and Kate was in the front. Martin had walked down to the pool hall to buy cigars.
Frieda had asked, “Now, who is that?”
Kate had been sitting sideways in the seat, and she turned to look where Frieda pointed. Coming up the street was a young fellow, maybe twenty-two or -three, dressed in dark trousers and a clean white shirt open at the neck. He had his hands in his pockets and he was whistling. He paused to scan the window of Mather’s Five and Dime, and Kate wondered if he wasn’t doing it to give Celia and the other girls time to notice him.
“Not from Harvester,” Frieda had remarked. “A farmhand, I expect.”
After a few minutes of looking over everything in the window, the young man had opened the screen door and gone in. A minute or so later he came out without any bag or box, his hands back in his pockets. Had he gone into Mather’s to see how long he could hold the attention of the giggling girls sitting on the Drew car? As he had no doubt figured, they were waiting for him to reappear, though they pretended not to notice when he let the screen door to and continued down the street. As he passed, he nodded. “Ladies.”
They studied his back as he strolled, without a seeming care, down Main Street, stopping at the popcorn wagon. He paid for the popcorn, picked up the bag, and lifted it to his mouth without ever removing his left hand from his trousers. Somehow Kate knew there was something wrong with that hand.
At the corner he turned right, out of sight. Those girls would have given a good deal to have followed and seen what car he got into.
He had been a looker, all right, with straight dark hair that fell over one eye, skin tanned darker than an Indian’s, and eyes a pale, shocking blue. His cheeks were high and prominent, and his eyes were long, and they tilted where the cheekbones rose. His jaw was hard and angular, his mouth almost without curve.
The face was full of something older than anger, some combination of resentment and deprivation. The girls on the street, and Frieda too, had been repelled at the same time that they were attracted. A year later Celia married him.
A knock came at Frieda’s porch door and Kate was recalled from the past by Marie Wall’s airy, girlish voice calling, “Okay if I come in?”
Frieda’s husband, Arnold, appeared
from the kitchen, where he’d put the chocolate ice cream away in the freezing compartment. He hailed Marie as she tripped into the living room: “You going to help me take these two old ladies to the cleaner’s, Marie?”
“Old ladies, are we?” Frieda snorted, shuffling the cards. “You hear that, Kate? These two old ladies’ll teach you how to play cards, old man.” Setting the deck down in front of Marie Wall so that she could cut the cards, Frieda said, “Behave yourself, old man, and maybe Kate’ll read your fortune later.”
Arnold laughed. “My fortune’s in the new grease rack,” he said, referring to the latest wrinkle at Drew’s Body and Lube.
“Oh, read mine, Kate,” Marie implored, giving the deck a knock with her knuckles.
They played until midnight, when Constable Wall drove by on his way home. Then Frieda rang him to come for ice cream. And after Kate had read Marie’s fortune, which she dressed up a bit since the unvarnished version was as exciting as boiled cabbage, the party broke up.
“Arnold’ll drive you home,” Frieda told Kate.
“No, he won’t. I want to walk. If I stop walking, I’m done for.”
Bess’s handbag wasn’t lying on the dining room table, where she usually tossed it. Nor was Harriet’s Ford parked in the back driveway, so Kate left the stove light burning for them when she went up to bed. Dragging unwilling legs up each step was a test of her stubbornness. One of these days the stairs would be too much and she would have to put a bed in the sewing room, off the dining room. Not yet.
Old age was a forced retreat. You carried with you as much of what you had been as you could. Some of it—often the best of it—you had to abandon. Kate had had to give up the garden.
Wearing her nightgown of soft, much-washed white muslin, she sighed, sitting down on the side of the bed. The walk to Frieda’s and back had cost her. Easing her legs up onto the cool sheets, she closed her eyes and conjured herself back on the farm. She saw the jar of cosmos she had picked from the garden and set on the washstand beside the bed. She saw herself in the old rocking chair by the bedroom window, gazing down at the big garden, then turning to write in the journal book. However haphazardly, she tried to put something down in it two or three times a week.
The journal book is just an old ledger that Martin’s mother has given her and into which she crams a miscellany of recipes, many for herbal remedies, along with thoughts and plans and letters from her sister Clara written after Clara married Chauncey in 1914. There are notes from Martin as well, two- or three-lined missives which he has tucked into her apron pocket over the years.
“To My Lady Farmer—I guess I tempted you into marrying me by holding out the farm as bait. But whether it was me or the farm that brought you here, it doesn’t matter. I see that you love me almost as much as you love the place and that is all I need.
“From Your Country Man”
She is ever chastened by those words and regrets that Martin saw so well how things were. However, he was not chiding her for loving the farm so dearly, but reassuring her. And his generous nature has deepened her love for him.
In his notes Martin expresses what he cannot comfortably say aloud. When Clara and Chauncey were both struck down with influenza in 1917, he wrote: “If they God forbid die, we’ll take Celia and love her more than sunshine.”
And they took three-year-old Celia and loved her more than sunshine. She wasn’t with them a week before they forgot that she hadn’t always been there. Kate mourned her Clara. But Celia seemed to have grown out of Kate’s heart.
Rising from the rocking chair, Kate lays the ledger on the washstand and climbs into bed, plumping the down pillow and arranging tired limbs. Martin has taken a lantern to the barn to check on a sick heifer.
Crying out, Kate lurched up in bed. Moving as quickly as she was able, she pulled back the single sheet that covered her and let her feet over the side of the bed. She’d heard a crash.
Where was Bess? Kate’s cane stood against the bedside table. Reaching for it, she pushed herself up and shuffled to the window.
She brushed aside the lace curtain, looking down toward the corner of Second Street and Third Avenue. She was awake now and knew she would see no cars there, certainly no crumpled, mangled cars with torn bodies in them.
The dream recurred every few months. Each time she cried out and woke and shuffled to the window, even as she realized that it had been a dream. What if there were an accident down there? What if …
The Big Ben clock, whose alarm she never set, said one-thirty. She hobbled into the hall, not turning on a lamp. At Bess’s door she looked in. Light from the street revealed an unmade bed covered with clothes and books but no girl. At Harriet’s door it was the same, except that the bed was perfectly made and had no clothes lying on it, only a ruffled satin pillow Harriet had run up on her Singer.
In the bathroom Kate swallowed three aspirin with water. The headache was like an iron cap, and the dream had made it worse. She studied the face in the mirror above the sink. Her hair had gone white when Celia was killed, but her brows were still jet.
Making her way back to bed, Kate left the sheet off. She was perspiring. The room was breathless. She stared at the ceiling’s white-on-white-patterned wallpaper. She didn’t want to fall asleep until she knew that Bess was safe.
These panics came over her now and again and she couldn’t reason with them. If only she knew where Bess was. Was she in someone’s car? Maybe she’d run across Harriet and Rose and joined up with them. But Bess and Harriet rarely came home together. Each had her own friends, her own haunts.
Kate clenched her hands into fists and searched the wallpaper for hidden signs, bleached entrails, snowy foretokens of an untroubled dawn.
Chapter 12
BESS
Bess was with Doyle Hanlon. Ten minutes before the strains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart” were struck up, and while Jim Arliss was dancing with Donna, Bess and Doyle and Earl Ingbretson walked out of the Dakota and piled into Doyle’s car.
Bess had taken Donna aside and told her that she, too, was welcome to ride home in Doyle Hanlon’s car. But Donna said no. She’d danced most of the past two hours with Bob Arliss, who was a nice boy and sober, so she would let him take her home.
“I’ll stop in the Loon tomorrow and let you know how it went,” she said, examining her lipstick in a mirror no bigger than her thumb.
So, at a quarter to one, Bess squeezed into the car again between the two men. They’d all been up since early morning and would have to be up in the next day’s early morning, so conversation was less antic than during the drive over.
Doyle and Earl discussed a ten-day fishing trip that Earl and his family were taking to Leech Lake. His wife, Barbara, wasn’t worth a tinker’s dam with a rod and reel, Earl said, but he was damned if he was going to do without a fishing trip this year. Barbara had known he liked to fish when she married him.
“Why don’t you go alone?” Bess ventured.
“What kind of vacation would that be for her?”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Doyle said without rancor.
Although seated benignly, hands folded, Bess was thrashing around in her mind, panicked, ecstatic, and depressed. She felt compelled to jump out of the car and run across the fields, to save herself. Simultaneously she wanted never to get out of the car at all, but to cling to the steering wheel or door handle until someone dragged her bodily from it. An aching had taken hold of her. She was a little delirious, she thought.
Doyle braked for the stop sign where the road met County Road 14, then swung right, heading toward Harvester. No stop sign had stood at this crossing the night that Archer missed the turning, if “missed” was the right word. Resting her head against the back of the seat, Bess closed her eyes, shutting out the cottonwood grove and the Jessup farm.
They drove slowly into Harvester, now mostly closed down. “Anyone want to stop at the all-night?” Doyle asked.
“I gotta get home,” Earl said. “The old
lady’s gonna have a fit.” But his house was dark when they stopped to let him out. Barbara hadn’t waited up.
Earl opened the car door. “Behave,” he said. Was that something he always said, or was it meant for Doyle? Did Doyle often misbehave?
Doyle Hanlon turned right at Eighth Street, in the direction of Bess’s house. “You know where I live?” she asked. Why was it hard to speak?
He nodded, and they drove in silence. At Eighth and Third Avenue, he said, “Could we ride around for half an hour?”
“It’s pretty late.”
“Don’t be afraid. I just want to be with you. You can say ‘Take me home’ any time, and I will.”
Bess said nothing. Doyle Hanlon had power over her. This must be what people meant by “chemistry” between a man and a woman. Chemistry had her in its grip.
Slowly, because they were not going anywhere, they rode up and down country lanes, windows wide open, while the radio played softly, a powerful station from far away—Chicago or somewhere. A clear-channel station.
On the gravel roads, the Mercury’s headlights picked out jackrabbits and raccoons, and in the tall, dusty grass, they caught little burning eyes staring out. Across air heavy with clover and black earth, fields of corn whispered.
Drifting as far north as Ula, Doyle swung the car back toward Harvester. If he had driven to the far side of the earth, Bess would not have had the starch to say “Take me home.”
He reached for her hand and she gave it to him, her heart swooping and curveting wildly in the sky.
Five miles from town, he pulled the car to the side of the road, stopping beneath a row of box elders, part of an old grove. Yes, she had expected this.
With the engine off, the sound of crickets was deafening. In the distance a farm dog barked, and close at hand a rotted fence post creaked. Doyle took her hand again.
“I want to kiss you good night,” he said. “And I won’t be able to do that in town.”
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