Tallgrass

by Sandra Dallas

  The sheriff turned to me, and I shook my head. “Not unless he came while we were at Tallgrass.”

  “You didn’t see any sign of anybody, Mr. Stroud?”

  “Didn’t look.” Dad shifted in the sleigh. “Is Gus still on the morphine?”

  “That, I couldn’t tell you. He looked all right to me, but I don’t know much about those things.”

  I wondered if Mr. Snow would make Betty Joyce go to work to earn money to buy him drugs. If Mr. Snow had gotten morphine from Beaner Jack, as Mom suspected, then Betty Joyce would have to be nice to Beaner. I was worried that Mr. Snow would make her marry one of the Jacks, and then she’d be just like Darlene Potts. I thought of the way Betty Joyce had been just before she came to live on our farm, tired and beaten down. She’d been so happy since she’d moved in with us, but I knew it wouldn’t take much to turn her into her mother. “Couldn’t she go live with her mom?” I asked suddenly.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Sheriff Watrous chewed on the end of the cigar for a minute. “But with the wires down, I can’t even telephone to her.”

  Dad asked when the lines would be fixed, and the sheriff said he thought it wouldn’t be for a day or two.

  “Mr. Snow could find her by then,” I said.

  “I kind of hate to wait that long myself,” Sheriff Watrous said.

  “Maybe Mrs. Stroud could take her to Pueblo,” Dad suggested.

  The sheriff nodded. “I was hoping you folks’d see it that way.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the end, which was soggy.

  “Will it be all right, Betty Joyce just showing up like that?” I asked.

  “It will,” the sheriff replied. “LaVerne Booth—that’s Mrs. Snow’s sister, I think you know—she’s an odd one, but she’s got a soft spot for a hard case, unless it’s Gus Snow. She takes in stray dogs, cripples, widows, orphans. She don’t know a stranger.” He put the cigar into his pocket.

  “I guess we’d better go talk to Mrs. Stroud. They’ll be wanting to leave pretty quick, before Gus comes here.” Dad stepped down from the sleigh and held out his hand to me, and we went into the house.

  Mom and Betty Joyce were waiting for us in the kitchen, and when the sheriff told Betty Joyce that her father was in town, she clasped her hands together until they turned white. Then she moved behind Mom. I went over to her and pried one hand loose and held it, whispering that everything would be all right. We’d become almost sisters in the time she’d lived with us, and I hated to see her leave. It would be just like Marthalice going away. But there wasn’t any choice. I couldn’t ask her to stay on with us if there was danger of her father coming for her and taking her away.

  “I like it here. I’ve never been with a real family before,” Betty Joyce told Sheriff Watrous. “I’m scared of him.” And I thought again what a terrible thing it was to be afraid of your own father. Betty Joyce said she’d run off before she’d go back to him.

  “You don’t have to do that, sis. I think we’ve got a plan,” Sheriff Watrous said. He turned to Morn and asked if she’d be willing to take Betty Joyce to her mother in Pueblo. He’d drive the two of them to Lamar on the hard road, which had been plowed, and they could catch the train there. That way, they wouldn’t chance running into Mr. Snow in Ellis. I helped Betty Joyce pack her few things, and I pinned the new V for Victory pin onto her coat. I’d sent money to Cousin Hazel to get a second one and had given it to Betty Joyce for Christmas. An hour later, Betty Joyce and Mom were gone.

  Before they left, Dad gave Mom a check for Mrs. Snow, to cover the items Dad had taken from the hardware store. When I asked him why he did that—because, after all, Betty Joyce had lived with us since fall and Mom was paying for their train tickets—Dad replied, “It wouldn’t be right not to.”

  Mr. Snow never came to our farm. He stayed around Ellis for a week or two, living in the hardware store, although the heat and lights were turned off. He sold everything in the store that was worth a nickel, the stock as well as the furniture and Mrs. Snow’s dishes and silverware, even her old shoes and aprons. Mr. Snow spotted me in town once and yelled, but I ran into the Lee Drug, and he didn’t follow me. Mr. Lee said I could go out the back door and that he’d drive me home, but Mr. Snow wandered off toward Jay Dee’s and disappeared.

  Not long after that, Mr. Snow went on the tramp. For a time, people thought he’d turn up, asking for a handout, whining about his luck. I worried that he’d blame us for what happened to him, that some night when it was darkest, I’d go into the barn and he’d be waiting there, crazed on morphine, and push me into the tack room and kill me. But that didn’t happen. After a while, Dad decided Mr. Snow had just drifted off, maybe froze to death on the prairie or died in a hobo jungle.

  DAISY CAME BACK TO work for us a couple of weeks after Amy Elizabeth was born. “I’m as strong as a tractor. I feel like a million,” she insisted. When Mom told her it was too soon, Daisy said, “Here’s the dope: I can come here and be useful, or sit in that darn barracks and go crazy. Now that’s the straight stuff.” She sounded like the old Daisy. And she was the old Daisy. Maybe it was having the baby to live for that had restored her.

  While Daisy worked, Amy Elizabeth slept in our family cradle, which Dad took down from the hayloft and set up in the living room. Mom scrubbed it and fitted it with a new mattress, and Granny worked a couple dozen baby quilts for it. Hut Daisy said her favorite was the one that Betty Joyce and I had made.

  When Daisy hung up laundry or worked in the yard, she carried Amy Elizabeth around in a sort of sling across her chest. Daisy chattered to the baby all day long or put records on the phonograph and jitterbuggeed around the living room with Amy Elizabeth in her arms. “She’s the nuts,” Daisy said. The little girl had inch-long black hair that stuck out all over and eyes as black as currants. Amy Elizabeth hardly ever cried, and she smiled before she was a month old, and after she stopped looking like a walnut, she really was pretty.

  Dad worried about Daisy, Carl, and the baby coming to the farm by themselves in the mornings. He offered to pick them up in the truck. “You can’t carry the baby all the way from the camp, especially in this weather,” he told Carl.

  “That baby doesn’t weigh any more than a sack lunch,” Carl told him, and he refused Dad’s offer of a ride.

  Still, some mornings when he heard a truck or a car going down the Tallgrass Road toward the camp, Dad went out on the porch and watched for Carl and Daisy. He said he’d feel better when spring came and Carl hired boys from Tallgrass to help with planting. It wouldn’t be long now. Carl and Dad were spending more and more time preparing the fields instead of repairing equipment and working in the barn.

  One Friday morning, when school was closed for a teachers’ conference, Mom asked me to go with her to town. A storm was threatening and she’d run out of her medicine. The winter had sapped Mom, who was feeling weak again and was glad that Daisy had taken over the heavy work. Mom didn’t like driving the big, awkward truck. But Dad was off at the sugar refinery with the team and wagon, and she didn’t want to wait until he returned. It was too cold for me to walk into town, Mom said, and she’d feel safer if I drove along with her. “I just don’t know how I could have let a thing like this slip my mind, but I hate to go without those pills,” she told me. Daisy, with Amy Elizabeth in the sling, was hanging out the wash when we left, and Mom called to her and said we were going into Ellis.

  She pulled out onto the Tallgrass Road and drove with both hands clutching the wheel, staring straight ahead, barreling along at five miles an hour. We could have walked faster. When a beat-up truck passed us, going the other way, she slowed down. “How those boys do speed,” she complained. We hadn’t gone far when a dog came out of the field and ran alongside us in the ditch, unnerving Mom. She used to be just fine driving Red Boy, but since she’d been sick, she’d lost her self-confidence along with her strength. Mom slowed, glancing at the road, then at the dog, her head going back and forth. Finally, she stopp
ed to let the dog cross in front of us, but it only continued along in the ditch. So Mom started up again, and in a minute, the dog disappeared into the field, and she breathed a sigh of relief and stepped on the gas.

  At that moment, a jackrabbit darted in front of the truck, and Mom turned the wheel hard, too hard. She corrected, turning the wheel in the opposite direction. Red Roy jerked one way, then the other, and the right front wheel plunged into the ditch and we came to a stop. “Well, darn it all!” Mom said. We were going so slowly that she barely hit her chest against the steering wheel. “Rennie, are you all right?”

  I’d put out my hands and caught myself against the dashboard. “Yeah.” I blew out my breath and looked at Mom and almost laughed. We were no more hurt than if she’d stopped at a red light. I opened the door and got out and looked at the front wheel, which was all the way down in the ditch. I climbed back in and told Mom the truck was all right, too, but there was no way we could back it out. “Dad and Carl will have to bring the horses and pull it out.”

  “Well, that’s a heck of a thing,” Mom said. “What’s your Dad going to say about that?”

  “Probably ’Thank the Lord you’re both okay.’ ”

  Mom reached over and squeezed my hand, and there were tears in her eyes. Dad was the only man in the county who wouldn’t blow up at his wife for running his truck off the road. “I guess we’d better get out and start walking,” she said.

  As we started back up the frozen dirt road, it began to sleet— hard little granules of snow like clumps of sugar that hit our faces and necks. After a minute, they turned into snow. “I hope your Dad can get the truck out in time to drive the Tanakas back to camp tonight. I don’t like the idea of them walking home in this storm with that dear little baby,” Mom said. We shivered as we walked along, and Mom drew me close to her to keep us both warm. For a few minutes, we sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” marching along in tandem. We finished the last verse hut kept on taking big steps together until we reached our driveway. As we turned in, Mom stopped and scanned the yard, frowning as she looked at the clothesline. A sheet was half-pinned to the line, and the clothes basket was turned over. “Where’s Daisy?” Mom asked. She sounded confused more than worried.

  “She probably went into the house to check on Granny. Or maybe she’s putting Amy Elizabeth in the cradle,” I said. But the door was closed, the storm door shut tight, just as we had left them. If Daisy had gone inside for just a minute, she wouldn’t have bothered to secure the doors.

  Then I pointed to the rusted old truck that had passed us on the Tallgrass Road. It was parked by the side of the barn, the engine running, the driver’s door open. I knew that truck. Mom and I started running. As we got closer, we saw the wind whipping one end of the sheet back and forth across the ground. Daisy wouldn’t have left it like that on purpose, one end pinned to the line, the other loose, because now the sheet would have to be washed all over again. Beneath the line, the wet clothes from the laundry basket were spread over the dirt.

  “Daisy!” Mom called. She looked around frantically. From somewhere we could hear Sabra and Snow White barking, but the wind had picked up, and I couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from.

  I grabbed Mom’s arm and showed her the clothespins scattered in the dirt. Most were under the sheet, but a few lay beyond, as if Daisy had dropped them as she ran away from the clothesline. “The barn. She’s in the barn,” I said.

  “Daisy!” Mom called as loudly as she could so that not just Daisy but anyone in the barn would hear her, but the wind drowned out her words. “Daisy!” It was almost a shriek. We started for the barn, both of us running.

  When we reached it, we stopped at the door, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness inside. All I could see at first were big black shapes in the light that sifted through the roof. On one side, bales of hay were piled halfway to the ceiling. On another were the stalls for the horses. From the hayloft came the sound of the radio turned up loud. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Daisy backed up against the hay. Amy Elizabeth was still in the sling, but Daisy was clutching the baby against her chest, protecting her. Danny Spano stood in front of her, a beet knife in his hand. Neither of them saw us.

  “I’m not telling you again. Give me the baby,” Danny said.

  Daisy didn’t reply, only held Amy Elizabeth tighter.

  “She’s mine, and my kid ain’t growing up in no damn camp. I’ll take her, and you’ll never see her again. She’s a Spano, not some dumb Jap.”

  “She’s not yours.”

  “I’m her father, ain’t I?”

  I turned and looked at Mom, who had a stunned look on her face. I mouthed, “Is he?” Rut he couldn’t be, I thought. Daisy wouldn’t have had anything to do with Danny Spano. Harry Hirano was Amy Elizabeth’s father.

  “You don’t give her to me, I’ll take her. I’ll kill you if I have to. Wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Call the sheriff,” Mom whispered, her voice so low that I could barely hear her above the noise of the radio. I hesitated only a second before I backed away and raced for the house, covering the ground in seconds. I yanked open the storm door and was twisting the knob of the back door, pushing it open with my hip, when I heard the scream. It didn’t seem like a human scream, and it was so loud that it carried through the wind. The closest thing to it that I’d ever heard was the sound of a pig being butchered, the high-pitched squeal of fear at the instant of death. The sound from the barn chilled me like nothing else I had ever heard. Daisy, I thought. I turned and retraced my steps as fast as I could, stumbling and pitching forward onto the frozen ground and scraping my knees. I scrambled to my feet and ran on, moving, it seemed, as if in a dream where no matter how fast I tried to go, I stayed in place. But at last I reached the barn and stopped where Mom and I had stood, not sure what I would find.

  Mom had gone inside the barn. Slowly, I made out her figure standing next to Daisy. And Carl was on the bottom step of the ladder that led to the hayloft. They were all three frozen in place, silent. The only sound and movement came from Amy Elizabeth, who cooed and swung her little arms back and forth from the sling on Daisy’s chest. Then I saw Danny Spano sprawled on the floor, a beet knife sticking out of his stomach. I crept up to Mom and looked down at Danny. His eyes were open and glassy. Mom, still staring at Danny, reached out her hand to me, and I gripped it.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mom whispered.

  No one spoke after that, not for the longest time. We just stood there and stared at the body. I couldn’t move. Even my eyes wouldn’t move. All I could do was look at Danny. Then Daisy began to shake. Her body jerked violently, her arms going in all directions, her chest heaving, her head swinging back and forth, her teeth chattering. She shook so hard that I thought the baby would fly out of the sling. Carl stepped off the ladder and took off his jacket, putting it around Daisy and holding her tight. “It’s okay, Dais. It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.” He held her, repeating over and over again that everything was okay, and after a bit, Daisy quieted down.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked Carl.

  He gestured to the haymow. “Up there. The radio was on. I thought that was Mr. Stroud talking to Daisy.”

  Nobody said anything, until I asked, “Was Danny really Amy Elizabeth’s father?”

  “Hush,” Mom said.

  “He’s the one who raped you, isn’t he?” Carl asked, and Daisy nodded. He released Daisy then and spit on the barn floor next to Danny.

  Mom’s hand went to her mouth, and she said, “Oh, Daisy.” I opened my mouth, but no words would come.

  Carl turned to Mom and said, “When Daisy was walking home by herself that time, that boy caught up with her in the arroyo. She tried to fight him off. I should have been there to—” Carl broke off, slamming his right fist against a wooden post. I sucked in my breath, thinking that something terrible had happened to Daisy on our farm, and we hadn’t even known about it. She had been ravished
, just like Susan Reddick. The same horrid thing had happened to her, and she’d kept it to herself. She’d let us think Harry was Amy Elizabeth’s father, when all along it was Danny Spano.

  “I would have killed him,” Carl said. “Harry and I would have killed him, but Daisy wouldn’t tell us who he was. I didn’t know till now.”

  “And of course you didn’t know then you were pregnant,” Mom added.

  “Is that when you said you fell in the shower house?” I asked. “Is that when you broke the compact?”

  Daisy nodded and looked at Amy Elizabeth. I sneaked a look at her, too, but I couldn’t see that she looked like Danny Spano.

  Daisy began to sway, and Mom took her arm and made her sit down on a bail of hay.

  “You didn’t tell the sheriff,” Mom said.

  “Who’d believe her?” Carl asked angrily. “Nobody’d believe a Japanese girl, even about Danny Spano.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” Mom said.

  “I would.” The voice came from behind us—small and quiet, but clear—and we all whirled around. No one had heard Granny come into the barn. She stood a few feet behind us, a tiny figure, her head high, her hands clasped in front of her in her apron. I wondered how long she’d been there and if she understood what she’d heard.

  “Granny,” Mom said. “Rennie, take Granny—”

  “No, Mary,” Granny said. “My mind is clear. I believe Daisy. I know that boy did that bad thing to her.”

  “Well, of course, Granny. Now don’t you worry.”

  “Don’t baby me,” Granny snapped. “Don’t you doubt that girl. I saw that awful boy in here with Marthalice, too.”

  Mom drew in her breath, then asked in a sharp voice, “What are you talking about, Granny?”

  “Sometimes at night, when I was in the yard, I’d see Marthalice sneak out and go into the barn. I followed her once, and she was with this boy.” Granny pointed at Danny. “They were doing things . . . . Marthalice was crying.” Her voice trailed off. “I’m sorry, Mary. I didn’t know what to do. Marthalice wouldn’t like it if she found out I’d snooped, but I didn’t want you to be angry with her. I was so confused, and then I forgot about it. Maybe he’s the reason Marthalice went away . . . .” Granny’s voice trailed off and she sat down next to Daisy, reaching out her finger so that Amy Elizabeth could grab it with her little fist.