For that was what we had become, by the time the spring thaw finally arrived: a family. We didn’t love one another—at least, Nettie Mae and my ma didn’t love one another—but we had grown close in the confinement of the sod-brick house, as close as natural-born family. We had each learned to rely on the strengths of those around us. The little ones knew to run to Nettie Mae for the things only she could provide—firmness, decision, certainty enough to guide them through their days. All of us depended on my ma for feeding and the maintenance of our routines, the slow-moving clock by which winter kept its monotonous time. Clyde was our protection—and, as the man of the house, the one who made whatever decisions Ma and Nettie Mae couldn’t agree to with mutual interest. Ma and Nettie Mae certainly didn’t delight in one another’s company, but they had learned to pull together for a greater good. By winter’s end, most of their sharper angles had worn away. Each had come to tolerate the other’s weaknesses and habits, and perhaps that was the best any of us could hope for, given our circumstances.
I can well recall the moment when I knew we had come through the grimmest of our troubles. I had just crawled into bed—still shivering, for the blankets hadn’t warmed yet—and I was watching Ma as she bent over the basin. She rubbed a sliver of cracked, soot-darkened soap against her washcloth, then worked it over her forehead and nose, clearing away the grime of another day’s labor. Just as she bent to splash clean water on her face, something outside our bedroom window gave a short, wet crack. A moment later, we heard the soft sound of impact from the ground below.
Ma looked around, water dripping from her pointed chin. The water caught the glow of our single candle and looked like golden beads or drops of honey.
Ice is melting, I said. Icicles breaking off the eaves.
Ma stood up straight, and in that moment—just for that brief, sighing moment—the weight of winter lifted from her shoulders. She said, The thaw has come. Thank God. Not a moment too soon.
The thaw had come, sure enough—weeks later than it usually began. But once the world determined that spring must come in, the season progressed with as much speed and determination as the winter had shown. Next morning, when I went out to scratch the cows between their soft, mournful eyes and feed them their breakfast of faded hay, the snow felt loose, sliding beneath my feet. The sun had lost its weak, white outer ring of light; it shone with a new energy, so near and warm it felt like a thing remade. By day’s end, the drifts had begun to recede from the side of the barn. They left dark undulations in their wake, wet impressions against the wood like ripples on the surface of a running river.
In the days that followed, as I went about my work, I could feel life rising, stretching, waking from its months of slumber. The trails we had worn through the deep snow melted away first. Compacted footing, dirty with the leavings of our animals, thinned and formed fragile, icy crusts that broke under my boots, revealing the chestnut red of clean, wet mud below. The paths broadened as drifts melted, opening wide their windows to bare and ready earth, till only the great heaps of snow Clyde had shoveled away from the sheepfold and the walls of the house remained. The yard and fields greened with tender new shoots. Under the apple trees, where the naked branches cast a net of shade across the ground and patches of snow hung on, the slim, dark spears of turkey peas and yellow bells protruded through the ice. The spring-lambing ewes grew fat and restless, complaining of their swelling udders, rubbing against the gate, longing for the freedom of the open fields.
I felt the emergence within myself, too, more forceful and definite than any other spring I could remember. Change was coming for me—for all of us, perhaps—a shift like the turning of the seasons, wise and inevitable, a change to remake a world we’d only thought we knew. I was unafraid; I welcomed the rolling of the wheel. But whether my ma and Nettie Mae were prepared, I surely couldn’t say. If they could open their hands and release the old guide ropes to which they had always clung—anger and timidity, lonesomeness and fear, judgment and the fear of being judged—they would free their spirits to seek and find a new way of being, new eyes through which to see.
By late March, the garden was cleared of winter’s debris, its fences had been repaired, and the hens and pigs had turned the soil. The first weeks of planting had begun. Clyde and I rummaged through the barn shelves till we found the seeds we had saved for a new year of sowing. We carried our jars across the farm—the wakened, restive farm—and the seeds made music to accompany our steps. The rattle of peas, yellow and wrinkled, and the chatter of spinach and beet seeds sounded like rain against a roof.
The restriction of cold and snow, the long slumber of our land, had kept us separated, Clyde and me. But though we had scarcely worked together since the first snowfall, we fell back into our pattern of trust, our quiet cooperation, as if the winter had never been. Side by side, we walked the garden rows, pressing our planting sticks into wet red ground, weaving trellises for the peas out of thin new twigs of willow. And then it was time for the task I loved best, the one I looked forward to all year round: committing the seeds to the soil.
Clyde tipped a jar and filled his palm with peas, then went to the head of his row and began dropping them, one by one, into the planting holes.
What are you doing? I said.
He looked up, curving one side of his mouth in that funny way he had—the way that said, You’re cracked as an old eggshell, but I like you all the same.
Aloud, he said, I’m planting peas. What does it look like?
You’re doing it wrong.
No, I ain’t. If there’s some way to plant seeds other than putting them in the ground and covering them up, I’d sure like to know it.
I laughed and left my row, joining him where he stood.
My pa showed me, I said. You’ll grow a bigger harvest if you plant enough for everyone.
That’s what I aim to do, Clyde said. Enough for you and me and the little fellas, and Miranda, and—
No, I said, that’s not what I mean.
I held out my cupped hand. Clyde poured the remainder of his peas into my palm.
You must plant enough for everyone. Everyone who comes to feed from our garden. And you must let all the creatures take what they will—within the bounds of reason, of course—and if you’ve planted enough seeds, then you’ll have plenty left untouched for the rest of us to eat. My pa showed me how to do it right when I was just a little girl.
All right, Clyde said, stepping back, hands on his hips. Then show me, if you’re so smart.
There’s a rhyme you say as you tuck the seeds in, to be sure you plant enough.
I stooped and let four peas fall from my fingers into the soil, reciting the rhyme as I did it: One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.
Then I straightened and returned half the peas to Clyde.
That’s mad, he said. If four shoots come up out of one hole, they’ll only crowd each other and die off.
Not if the cutworms and the birds eat some of the shoots first. They’ll eat their fill, and then move on.
You’re crazy if you think we ought to feed a lot of crows and grubs.
Well, why shouldn’t we?
Because they’re . . .
Clyde stopped. He looked away, past the fence and the field to the river trail, to the bank where the coyote lay buried. He had almost said, Because they’re only animals. That wasn’t the sort of thing Clyde said anymore.
When he looked at me again, he shrugged, but I could see the flush fading from his cheeks. He said, Because we got to feed our own. Let the other critters worry about their hides and their bellies; we got enough work to do around here.
Are the birds so different from us?
He laughed. I ain’t never seen you flying. Then his eyes slid down the garden row, away from me, for he couldn’t bear to look at me just then. Quietly, so quiet I don’t think he meant for me to hear, he said, Though it wouldn’t surprise me much if I did see you fly.
I said, My ma reminds me of a bird, you know. A blackbird. They love society; they never go anywhere but in a flock.
Yes, Clyde said, a great big hungry flock that’ll strip a garden bare.
All the more reason to plan for their visits, and plant some extra peas. I sure don’t like the idea of running outside waving my bonnet whenever I see a flock of blackbirds coming.
Clyde jabbed his planting stick into the ground and leaned on it one handed, as if it was a walking cane. All right, he said, if Cora’s a blackbird, then what sort of bird is my mother?
She ain’t a bird at all. She’s the cutworm, I guess. Gnawing and gnawing, never satisfied. She’ll eat up anything you put in front of her, and it’ll stick in her gullet and make her all the angrier, and then she’ll go on gnawing all the more.
The smile slid from his face. He said, My mother’s got plenty of reason to be angry, and you know it.
I know, I said. The only wonder is that she’s not any crosser. I’ve never seen a woman endure so much. What strength of character she has, that life hasn’t broken her, and hasn’t made her harder than she is. She’s a right tender spirit, when she’s with the little children. I don’t dislike your ma, Clyde. In fact, I admire her.
That seemed to placate him. He took up his stick again and shook the seeds in his hand. We’d best get back to work. There’s plenty more to be done once we’ve finished here.
Clyde moved along the row in his usual brisk way, reaching down to drop the peas into the waiting soil. But each time he bent, I saw four small golden seeds fall from his fingers before he tamped the earth flat with the toe of his boot. And now and again I saw his lips move, silently reciting the words I had given him.
CORA
We’ve finished here. Cora took one last look at the sod-brick house as the children ran ahead, skipping and tumbling through the sage toward the Bemis farmhouse—their house, their home. Finished, and thank God; I can be the mistress of my own life again, free from Nettie Mae’s ceaseless anger.
The little gray house was musty from months of disuse, but Cora set to work at once, tidying, sweeping, directing the children in new chores. When she grew weary of the work, she sent the children back to the sod house to gather up their toys. Then she took a rag from her apron pocket and flicked away the cobwebs that had gathered along the spindle back of her rocker. She pulled the chair across the floor to the sitting-room window that looked south, across the sage-dotted pasture to the Webber farm. There she sat, swathed in silence, save for the minute echo of wood dragged over wood, more vibration than sound. She could feel the stillness, dense and palpable against her skin, and she didn’t know whether the sensation was a relief or a new sort of anxiety.
She hadn’t set foot inside her own home for nigh on half a year. Reality was difficult to credit. The gray farmhouse no longer felt like her home at all, yet she must make it a home again, must resurrect the place from its sudden, untimely demise. Shrouded in dust and cobwebs, muted and begrimed by long disuse, the house was a graveyard of memory. Here the ghosts of Cora’s past walked their restless circuits, footsteps scarcely heard below the beating of her heart. When the spring wind moaned across the chimney and stirred the black ash in the hearth, Cora heard the cries of those she had wronged—long wails eloquent with pain.
A haunted place, and yet she had escaped to it gladly. The thaw was complete; Easter would soon be here. The waist-high snows had vanished from the fields, and the swollen river kept up its throaty roar. Cora had waited for this day—the day when she could escape the sod-brick house with its noise and cramp and the endless clutter of the children. A day when she could seek the refuge of peace, sink down in its forgiving depths and release some of the strain she had been carrying all those months under Nettie Mae’s eye. Her home, deserted, was a sad and colorless place. But the quiet was so welcome that Cora never minded the ghosts.
Cora lifted the lid from her carved box—she had carried it with her across the fields—and traced with a finger the shape of the two hearts carved inside.
Imagine me, Ernest, relieved to find myself alone.
Merely thinking of his name, his face, his hands that had fashioned the box, brought tears to Cora’s eyes. She made no attempt to hold them back, no attempt to wipe them away. In her own house, her own abandoned nothingness of a home, there was no one to see them fall. They traced hot lines down the sides of her nose, and salt stung the corners of her lips.
Was his jail cell cold? she wondered. Had the sheriff given Ernest enough blankets and warm woolen garments to see him through the winter in comfort—as much comfort as a man could expect in prison? Cora was gripped by a nightmare vision of her husband, pale and shaken, his hair long and tangled, eyes wide and unfocused with the strain of long imprisonment, the slow, monotonous torment of being held so long in a cage. Thin as a desiccated corpse. And Ernest still had time yet to serve—a year and a half more.
He’ll never survive. And I will not survive. There’s another winter to come before Ernest is set free. I’ll spend it under Nettie Mae’s roof and thumb again, unless I leave this place. Leave it all behind.
There was no need to travel all the long way back to Saint Louis. Cora saw that now. She traced the interlocked hearts again. Another tear fell. Surely the box was a sign that she had been forgiven—or would be forgiven, someday. Cora need only get herself and the children as far as Paintrock. There she could live off the sale of the president’s china—and the charity of the church, if need be—until Ernest had served his time. If indeed he had forgiven Cora, or might be convinced to forgive, then he might take comfort in her proximity. She could visit him at the jail. Bring the children to visit. Surely that would cheer him. Surely it would stave off the nightmare, the madness Cora felt certain must be creeping up upon him, day by day, reaching out its clawed hands to rip away his sanity and his gentleness, and everything else that had made Ernest a good and decent man.
If he does take me back, and I end up with a broken man for a husband, then it will be no more than I deserve.
Crows called, loud and harsh, from the untended garden. Cora looked up from the box. Through the rippled window pane she could see her daughter coming across the field. Beulah had grown over the winter; she was taller now, and more womanish. Cora could see it in the subtle flare of her hips, just visible through the windblown silhouette of her skirt, and in the way the calico had begun to strain across her chest. Beulah still tied on a pinafore every morning. The one she wore now was soiled from her work in the garden; the earthy red stains looked garish against the soft mauve of her ruffle-collar dress.
I will make for her several new dresses, as soon as we settle in Paintrock, Cora decided. And she must put away the pinafores. It’s time.
The decision flooded Cora with sorrow, for the first of her babies would never be a baby again. Her eldest was a child no longer; time had flown on its heartless and rapid wings. But this was a sadness more easily borne than the rest.
Paintrock was a far cry from Saint Louis, in every conceivable manner. It was hardly the sort of place where a young lady could expect to find good prospects for marriage. Certainly, there would be no hope for Beulah that she might rise appreciably above her present lot. In that small town she might hope to wed a farmer, or a rancher at best. But at least in Paintrock, Beulah could expect to meet some suitable young men and plan for a proper woman’s future.
The sooner we’ve left this desolate ruin behind us, the better.
Beulah climbed the porch steps at her usual unhurried pace.
I must teach her to step lively, if she’s to have any hope of catching a young man’s eye. And I shall teach her how to dance. Surely Paintrock has dances. Where else might young people meet?
The door squealed open and remained open. Beulah would let in the flies, but what did it matter now?
“Are you here, Ma?”
“Yes, dear. I’m in the sitting room.”
The girl entered and leaned against the wall. S
omewhere between the field and the porch, Beulah had untied her braid. Now her hair fell across one shoulder, limp and plain, the braid still half-formed, loosening its weave.
“I must teach you how to fix your hair,” Cora said briskly.
“Why? What’s the matter with braids?”
“Nothing, if you’re a farm girl.”
Beulah grinned. The spring sun had already dotted a few freckles on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
“You must wear your bonnet in the sun, too, Beulah.”
“I do, most days. I don’t like to get burned.”
“It’s not only sunburn of which you must beware. You ought to take more care with your complexion. Freckles aren’t fashionable.”
The girl looked around the empty farmhouse for a moment, then raised her brows. “Who’s to mind what’s fashionable and what’s not?”
“The boys up at Paintrock—that’s who.”
Beulah fixed Cora with a long, searching look. Then she said, slowly and with ponderous gravity, “Are we going to Paintrock anytime soon?”
Cora sighed and closed the lid of her box. There was no sense in trying to conceal her plans from Beulah. There never was any sense in trying to hide any truth from that girl. Cora stood. The rocker swung gently behind her, rumbling against the floor boards. “Yes,” she admitted. “I’ve made up my mind. We will all go to Paintrock just as soon as the ground has dried enough that we may take a full wagon on the road. I’ve thought it all out. Clyde will drive us, for his wagon is much larger than ours. It should be able to hold almost everything we will wish to bring. I shall pay Clyde for the service as soon as I’ve found a buyer.”
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 36
